#GIVE ME YOUR KERNELS OF KNOWLEDGE

[dogicrimsonofficial]

Hey, hey tumblr, this is your open invitation to infodump in this post. Obscure information, historical information, animal healthcare, bug mating cycles to 'there's actually another small planet behind pluto', big or small, important or not, work of fiction or real life, no topic is off-limits.

My only request is that your infodump is informal, or something we all can learn something from!

Go wild, be passionate, I will not judge what your interests are.

Ready, set, SHARE.

[jeanbie]

FANTASIZE ★ masterlist.

pairing: jake x reader

warnings: explicit sexual content, fem!human!reader, semi-public sex, piv sex, dirty talk, size kink, manhandling, breeding kink, cumming inside, glowy cum | wc: 16k | ♬

note: i've been promoted to: avatar writer. my first time writing for it (def not my last!) lemme know what u think ;-) also his smirk in the header....GET INSIDE ME

★ ⏤ fantasize | all the time (if you were mine)

⏤ It's official - Jake is sick and tired of Norm giving him shit. While he can't claim to know as much about Pandora as Norm does, there's still a few things Jake can afford to do to piss him off even more for the fun of it, and it just so happens that Norm's sister works as a scientist in the lab - which to Jake spells perfect revenge in its simplest form.

It’s official — Jake has had enough of Norm’s bitching and whining.

For the last two months, Jake has endured a lot, more than he ever asked for or wanted; whether it was Neytiri on his ass about becoming an Omatikaya and never missing a single beat of training for it, Grace nagging him about video logs, or even Norm giving him so much shit over every single thing he didn’t spend three years learning in simulations and classrooms — he’s sat and listened to all of it without complaint. 

Jake has never once fought back, never once raised his own grievances about how tedious and time-consuming everything actually is on one man’s shoulders, and yet it all keeps coming.

The worst thing is that he can understand all of it to an extent. There’s a necessary need for attentiveness when learning the ways of the Omatikaya, and the longer it takes, the worse his chances get with the rest of the clan. The video logs? They’re not that important, Jake thinks, but it keeps Grace off his back for the small kernel of time he actually spends in the real world and not inside of his avatar. 

But with Norm, Jake can’t seem to understand what is actually bothering him enough to be so goddamn bitter about every little thing.

Of course, he’ll never fit into Tom’s shoes, not in the way everybody expects him to. He didn’t spend three years of his life learning how to control an avatar or how to function on Pandora — every day is quite literally a learning experience, a practical education that neither a lab nor a stuck up prick like Norm can teach. 

And, while he’s on the subject, Jake actually thought Norm would be a decent ally, at least until he almost died and got saved — with reluctance — by the daughter of the Olo’eyktan and somehow ended up being thrust into learning their way of life. 

Nobody seems to remember the giant part of the story concerning how he almost got devoured by an oversized dog in the process.

Instead, Norm wants to bitch about how Jake knows nothing, and treats him like a genuine idiot. Jake might be a few years short of being educated on the Na’vi, but he’s not stupid. He can still do stuff, stuff that Norm can’t; but reasoning with the man is like trying to convince the Na’vi that the Sky People are actually friends and not foes, and it’s pretty obvious that that’s never going to happen.

When Norm begins his daily ritual of berating Jake on his lack-of knowledge regarding the Hallelujah Mountains that surround their shitty little containment, Jake’s willing to sit through it and take it like a champion. 

Norm starts weaving his conspiracies to the cluster of scientists about how Jake is a terrible candidate for joining the Omatikaya clan and that all he cares about is sucking up to the Chief’s daughter — not true, by the way, for Neytiri can only stomach being near Jake because she has to and on rare occasions, he can do something absurdly dumb to make her laugh — and Jake begins to mentally tap out of the debate, rolling his eyes to the side and sighing as he watches you duck your head through a low archway with a bowl of slop in your hands.

Jake watches you for around three seconds before the lightbulb flickers alight above his head.

And then he grins.

It’s hard to believe that you and Norm are related — Jake can’t find any similarities between the two of you. You’re incredibly compassionate and communicative, never letting Jake suffer in his silent struggle of stupidity, and not to mention you’re incredibly beautiful; whereas Norm is just… Norm. A bitter, angry, red-faced man who does a piss poor job at hiding his insatiable jealousy of how wasting your life in a classroom or behind a book actually means very little in the grand scheme of achieving your goals. 

Example A: Jake of the Jarhead clan, ex-military, future Omatikaya. Cross-reference to Norm: sad loser. Jake signs his name on the mental essay he’s compiling as Norm drones on about culture and ignorance and narrows his gaze on you as you close in on the group.

Jake’s actually always liked you. You’re a no nonsense kind of woman who loves science and the Na’vi, and, unlike your brother, you actually treat him like an equal. Even now, as you slip next to him and lean back against the low metal work-surface, you meet Jake’s gaze with an eye-roll and smile, and his grin only widens from it.

Oh, how he loves that you like him. Although you spend so much time engrossed in your work and documenting on paper whatever Jake recites from his daily activities within the clan, Jake happens to know that you like him, and in hindsight, it’s never been a secret. For the first time, Jake lets himself consider the possibility of that being just another reason for Norm to suddenly despise him, but the idea warms his stomach rather than churns it.

“I can totally see Jake ruining all of our chances at building bridges by just burning them all together,” Norm huffs, folding his arms and wrangling a dirty glare in his direction. Jake welcomes it with the same smile that’s been blooming over his face for the past two minutes, which worsens Norm’s mood. 

“I don’t see you building any bridges, either,” you say to Norm. “Jake’s been more valuable to this program than you have as of late.”

Norm bristles. “One of us has actually been doing research while the other is trying to seduce an Olo’eyktan’s daughter—”

“Jake’s doing field research, Norm,” Grace says, her eyes still glued to her microscope. “And he knows better than to seduce anybody when we haven’t properly studied the relations between Na’vi and avatars yet. And there are bigger issues at stake right now.”

“I can get results on that if you want me to,” Jake offers.

“No, Jake.”

Jake shrugs. While Norm continues his tirade against Jake’s rather noble endeavours with the Omatikaya, he turns his gaze back towards you and lets his mental clogs turn.

At this point, Jake thinks that even if you agreed with some of Norm’s points, it wouldn’t make any difference. There is absolutely nothing he can do to please Norm, and so maybe he should just stop trying. Then again… There’s something hideously funny in how worked up Norm gets when somebody jumps to his defence, particularly you.

And considering most of Norm’s insecurities come from seeds he planted all by himself without any concrete evidence to support most of the points, Jake knows that anything he does from here on out will drive Norm into a slow burning insanity.

“Is it because I’m in a wheelchair?” Jake asks suddenly.

Norm huffs. “Of course not. It’s because you don’t take any of this seriously. Everything is a game to you. All of us here have spent years building up to this assignment while you read a manual and called it a day.”

“What? I’m serious. I’m one of the best avatar drivers here,” Jake says smugly. Grace finally looks over with an irate look — something tells him he wasn’t supposed to tell everyone that she had told him that. 

Norm’s face turns a whole new shade of pink. 

“I’m also a quick learner. The Omatikaya are trusting me more and more each day, so while I go out there and find out valuable field research for this program—” Jake looks at you with a deliberately sweet look and you laugh quietly, “—you can stay here and look at plants and mud and cells.”

“You probably don’t even know what a cell is.”

“Sure I do. Where they lock up all the bad guys.”

Norm opens his mouth to say something more, probably missing the joke like he does every time, but this time Grace swirls in her chair and sighs loudly, looking between the two of them like they were children.

“Alright, ladies, you’ve measured your dicks at equal length. You’re both doing good work around here, so Norm, why don’t you just let Jake go back to doing his work with the Omatikaya and you can just get some rest. Jesus, you’re both making everyone miserable, it’s affecting my work ethic…”

“Yeah, sweet dreams, Norm,” Jake calls, and Norm gives him a filthy scowl before snatching his things up off the desk, holding them secretively to his chest as he stomps towards the back room lined with their bunks. 

Jake feels the dark and evil energy follow him out the room and then he finally looks around the lab in disbelief. 

“Jake, go, you’ll be late, don’t keep Neytiri waiting,” Grace reminds him, switching off the bulb to the microscope and stretching her arms as Trudy claps her hands and silently announces her retirement to the bunks after Norm. “Don’t forget to make a log when you get back. Don’t let him forget, will you, Spellman?”

Grace looks at you with a look that suggests no room for negotiation. It was an order. She collects her things, claps Jake on the shoulder and grabs a cigarette from the net by the archway and takes it with her towards her separated bedroom. 

When the door to her little cubicle rattles shut, Jake shakes his head with a quiet laugh and rolls himself forward, giving you room to assemble your own work station where he had just been.

“Staying up late tonight?” he asks you, taking a swig of water before pushing one of the buttons to the link unit, waiting as it whirs to life.

You settle your stuff down and walk towards him. “Yep. I actually do have some work on cells to finish up.”

Jake’s lips quirk. “Not your usual ballpark, is it?”

“No, but there’s not really a surplus of Na’vi around here to communicate with,” you say in reply, rummaging with the unit to help Jake into the gel pack mattress. Usually he dismisses the help, but when it’s you helping him get comfy, then he’ll stomach his pride and accept your kindness. He’s surprisingly light, as normal, and you frown. 

“Don’t forget about the real world, Jake, you gotta take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry, I got this,” he assures you. “You need anything while I’m out?”

Another thing that will shave a few years off Norm’s life — Jake bringing you things, extraordinary and otherwise unattainable when stranded in the mountains things for you to study and report. You hum thoughtfully at the offer, pushing his head down softly when he wriggles restlessly, a little to eager to get to whatever he’s doing in the forest tonight.

“If you happen to cross paths with a tsawksyul, a simple cutting would be appreciated,” you tell him, opting for something a little more simple than normal, considering Jake’s busy these days training. “If you don’t forget while you’re busy seducing daughters, of course.”

Jake’s grin returns, if not out of genuine amusement then just to see you smile in return and do the little head-tilt thing that Jake’s discovered he adores.

“Not my thing. More into scientists,” he tells you, watching in the final moments before you shut him in the pod at how you shake your head and turn yourself away from him.

There was no rejection. No refusal. Just a smile.

A smile that sets his plan into motion.

No wonder Norm is always in a terrible mood. You find that his notes on the cells found in the mossy undergrowth of the forest is as chaotic as it can possibly be, which has left you using Grace’s Bible on Pandora botany as a guide and squinting to find the connections between his barely legible notes.

It’s basic knowledge that when cells die and a genetic material begins to unfold, a charge of energy is released; this concept has been the fundamental structural point to Norm’s notes on the moss and how each step at night causes a ricochet of expanding light, but there has to be something more than everybody is missing. Even in Grace’s book, there’s not enough information regarding how it works; if it’s connected to Eywa, if it is a response to another organism, whether it breathes and lives as its own entity.

Alongside Norm’s notes, you very sparingly begin to make an analysis of the communicative features of Pandora plant life, and begin jotting a vocabulary to use in a later research assignment, when a sudden knock against the glass above your head makes you jump quite literally up and out of your seat.

The Hallelujah Mountains are so isolated from the rest of the human population on Pandora and used rarely by the Na’vi during the night, but you distinctly make out Jake’s looming form standing outside with a smile on his face and relax. His skin is a bioluminescent explosion of colour, and for a moment you’re struck dumb staring at him until he waves his hand as if beckoning you outside.

You throw a cautious look over your shoulder, but the lab is silent and still. With that in mind, you reach for one of the exo-packs and shrug on your cardigan hanging on the back of the chair you were just on and hesitantly begin to make your way outside.

Very sparingly have you been outside of Site 26 to explore, and never once on your own. Grace has drilled into you the strict importance of respecting the laboratory rules and curfew, and if you’re going to wander outside after hours in the name of research, then please, wake her up too. 

But you won’t be alone out there, not when Jake is waiting for you outside.

Jake drops to a squat in anticipation when the airlock doors to the lab force open with a wheezy breath, and he sees you cautiously step out and secure a button on your cardigan in place. The gesture almost makes him croon. He rarely sees you at night since he’s learned the value of getting rest in between his adventures in his avatar, but now he can’t believe what he’s been missing out on seeing past his bedtime.

You look tired, your hair out of place and messy, but he recognises your attempt to look more alert when you step towards him with a slight bounce.

“Hey, tìyawn,” he calls to you, as you stare up at him even whilst drawing near. Thanks to the crouch, you’re about eye-to-eye, and he watches your expression widen with wonder as you map out the illustrations of light across his nose and cheeks, before sweeping to his forehead, then his neck, and then his bare chest.

“Hey, yourself,” you laugh, finding his eyes again as they glow in the low light. The Pandora skies are littered with stars and balls of unimaginable white light, but even the surrounding forest gathering around the lab to protect it from the harsh dropping winds of the mountains are pulsing with purple light, every single shrub and leaf and plant glowing with life.

Jake stares at you for a moment before producing a gift from behind his leg. You take it from him with a wide and gasping smile.

“No way!”

“Way,” Jake says, watching you handle the flower with so much care that one might assume it would break with your touch. With the way Jake was swinging it around on his way up here, he’s actually shocked that it’s still in one piece, but something in the way you respond to everything Jake does or brings tells him that even if he’d brought a portion of it, you’d be just as pleased.

“Thanks,” you say, turning slightly as you tell him you’re going to put the tsawksyul in the lab for safe-keeping. But Jake reaches his arm out to trap you from leaving, cocking his head to the side with a soft smirk when you round back on him curiously.

“It’s not gonna die if you leave it out here, it’s a flower,” Jake tells you, jerking his head in another direction. “Wanna look around with me?”

You pause, and he can tell you’re genuinely conflicted. Grace said not to leave the vicinity under any circumstances out of respect for the Na’vi and the lab rules. But she also said not to go outside without her, and here you are.

“Grace will be mad if she finds out I’m gone,” you tell him slowly.

“Probably.”

“And Norm.”

Jake feels a rush of something at the mere mention of your brother, and his tail swishes against the rocks behind him. 

Jake leans closer to you. “Well, him I don’t care about.”

Mindful of the plant in your hand, you gently push Jake’s chest back until he rolls on his heels, unable to fight the smile on your own face.

“…Where will we be going? I can’t go far just in case Grace wakes up and comes looking for me.”

Jake tilts his head up to the sky and to the top of the mountain peak that houses the lab. From his own experience scouting up there, Jake knows there’s a small incubation of trees that offers a compelling view of the entire mountain range, as well as offering a minor collection of plants he thinks you’ll die over once you see.

But that just wouldn’t be as evil as what he originally had planned. He then rolls his head towards the small section of trees that border the back of the lab, close to where the bunks are, and he then looks back at you with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

“We’ll stay close,” Jake promises. 

You hesitate once again and guiltily look at the lab. It’s not like it’s going anywhere…

“Alright,” you sigh, looking back at Jake and watching his smile widen as if he’s just obtained a great victory. There’s no room in your stomach for suspicion to grow — it’s overrun with butterflies when Jake points his head in the direction of the snug tree line and holds out his finger for you. 

You stifle a laugh and reach to hold it, setting the tsawksyul on the ground tucked under the same window he just scared you from and join him on the slow walk to wherever he means to take you.

Being with Jake has always felt easy, but being with Jake’s avatar is practically uncharted territory. It’s a struggle to remember that it is actually the same man you like so badly back in the lab, the same guy who deliberately rams your ankles with his wheelchair just to watch the way you catch yourself as you fall, the same guy who you think uses you as a factor to piss off your brother but in a way that you find strangely attractive. 

Now, he’s an almost ten foot Na’vi leading you in the whimsical dark towards a cluster of trees, and you don’t know how to begin separating the feelings you have for Jake from the feeling of nerves you feel around his alter ego.

You can barely make out Jake’s face all the way above your head, not until he feels your stare and looks down at you beside him. There’s a similarity in his human expressions with his Na’vi ones, which is fortunate considering there was a time where you thought the avatar looked more like Tom than it did Jake. Now that they’re one in the same, and now that Jake is in front of you in his avatar form and the feelings you have for him are still lingering, you’re beginning to accept the likeness between the two of them. 

“What did you do today?” you ask him, referring to his ritualistic training with Neytiri.

Jake hums thoughtfully. “Nothing compared to Norm, I’m sure.”

At that, you laugh. “I’m seriously asking, Jake.”

“Alright… Neytiri has me reading the signals of the forest whenever we go hunting,” he explains sparingly, seeming not in the mood to talk training now that you’ve reached the lay of forest near the back of the lab. He surveys the setting and the space between the lab and the fringe of leaves and bushes and nods, as if satisfied but then pulls you deeper into the thrush of leaves.

“She says everything’s connected,” he continues. “She also says I’m a terrible shooter.”

“You’re missing your shots?” you tease. Jake turns back to you with a grin that you honestly walked into when you asked.

“Not all of ‘em.”

After the short walk, Jake is finally satisfied with the burrow of bushes and rocks that outline the small selection of forest behind the lab, and he looks up to once again gauge the distance and is pleased when the lab doesn’t look too far away. Jake hears you rustle and sit on one of the low rocks with your knees to your chest, and then drops to his usual squat in front of you, arms rested on his knees, gently fiddling with his fingers.

“How’re your cells?” he asks, but you’re so busy gazing at the forest around you and the stars above your heads that he fears you’re not even listening. Jake instead settles for watching you.

He knows he’s in over in his head when even his avatar likes you. Jake’s had nowhere near as much experience navigating his way around how to use this body than the other drivers, let alone time to understand the signals his body sends him or the feelings different things have to him, but he can tell the difference between being you friendly and not, even when he’s not totally familiar with how it all works. And on top of that, there are so many random variables to being Na’vi to get his head around that he never even thought of until Neytiri or Grace filled him in on what the hell was going on with his body at certain times of the month.

He’s stupid sometimes, true, but not totally naive. Jake recognises the tug in his chest as he looks at you — he feels the same thing when he’s in his human body. He’s no expert on Na’vi, never claimed to be, but he feels there must be something instinctive in the way he feels for you and the way his avatar senses it. And with Norm’s fresh-faced hatred in full flush whenever Jake makes that fact known, he’s not at all surprised that those feelings have suddenly become so full frontal now that he’s had enough of Norm’s bullshit.

“It’s amazing out here,” you say, to Jake but also to the wind as you completely crane your head up to look through the cracks in the branches and leaves. “Don’t you ever wish Earth had looked like this?”

“I haven’t really thought about Earth since I left,” he confesses, shuffling closer to you while you’re occupied with mapping out the stars in the sky.

“Not once?” You look down at him. If you’re taken aback by the sudden closeness between you, you hide it well. 

Jake shrugs. “Nothing I need is there.”

Fair enough. You stare at him for a moment and think about that before agreeing. 

“Me too.”

The branches above your heads sway in a gentle breeze and Jake watches you hug your cardigan around yourself before asking, “So, why’re we here? Did you wanna show me something?”

“What, the stars not enough for you?” Jake looks up to the sky.

You laugh quietly. “I’ll never get enough of them, actually. Beats the lab ceiling by a long shot. Looking at the stars through the window’s not the same… I wish I didn’t have to use this mask—” You throw him a playfully exasperated look, “—I wish I had an avatar.”

“Why don’t you?” Jake’s never asked, never thought to ask. But you’re the only scientist in his close collective of scientist ‘friends’ who doesn’t actually drive an avatar, and is instead limited to just studying everyone else's.

“It was never really my thing,” you explain, settling comfortably atop the rock and throwing the glances to the sky away to focus on him. Like the lab, they’re not going anywhere, and the ones tattooing Jake’s skin are far more interesting. “Okay, that’s a lie. I think the avatars are fascinating, just like the Na’vi, but sometimes you take what you’re given when you’re given it. Norm has always had to be better than I am, always one step ahead. Plus, our inheritance only stretched as far as to cover the contract costs of one avatar driver.” You laugh, “And Norm’s older.”

“Damn, so we just got stuck with Norm,” Jake comments, only to make you laugh again, which thankfully works. “I’d have a better time out here if it were you and not him.”

“He’s actually very insecure about that,” you tell him, watching his amusement grow without knowing the exact reasons for why. “He always goes on about how your avatar is much more built. I guess Tom was just more athletic and the avatar reflects it, I don’t think Norm’s used so much as an elliptical since high school… Anyway, he’s very vocal on how unfair the avatar program is in that regard.”

“You agree with him?”

Jake’s fingers ghost across your ankle.

“One: he’s my brother, and I’m not going to answer that question honestly. And two: let’s not forget who the avatar is modelled off. Tom was very handsome.”

“Growing up, I was always the pretty twin.”

You hum. “I couldn’t tell.”

Jake’s never ever considered the fact of you knowing his brother well before he died. He’s never had to think about it before, not until now, but he pushes the thought away and falls back into the thoughts of what he came here to do in the first place.

“You don’t think I’m handsome?”

He watches your grin widen. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

Jake creeps forward slightly, and this time you notice, moving your toes back further towards your bum on the rock while Jake continues his close creeping. 

“I think you’re a very pretty woman,” Jake murmurs. “Beautiful, even.”

“Norm’s not here to get mad at you for saying that,” you remind him.

“‘m not saying it for Norm to hear.”

You feel Jake’s hand sliding to wrap around your ankle and you shudder when he smooths his way up to your calf. You’ve never interacted with any Na’vi like this before, never felt their skin pushing against your own. With a glance down at his hand, you frown and work your way back up to his face, his eyes lit up in the dark.

“It’s not fair that you’re using your avatar against me right now,” you mutter, making him laugh through his nose and bring his body closer to the round edge of the rock. He considers it progress when you remain rooted in place once his hands run up the length of your legs to your waist.

You watch his nostrils flare slightly as he observes you, which only makes you feel more nervous and trapped here.

“All I’m doing is talking,” says Jake.

You scoff at him. “Does all your talking involve hands on the waist, Sully?”

He shrugs. “Only with really pretty people.”

Jake’s ears prick when you sigh and look back up at the stars. He doesn’t move his hands, but he senses your body tensing beneath his touch, smells the change in your body as he speaks. He’d love that part of being Na’vi a lot more if he knew what those changes meant exactly, and he can’t figure it out even as he stares at you intently.

His thumbs smooth from left to right, feeling the nub of your ribcage with every stroke over your tank top and tries to level his face into one of absolute neutrality when you look back down at him. 

“What are you doing, Jake?”

Not what he was expecting you to say, if he’s being honest.

“Nothing,” he says.

“You’re being weird,” you reply, narrowing your eyes suspiciously. It has the opposite effect, and you watch him struggle not to smile. His hairline raises when his brows do, and you fight the urge to roll your eyes when you figure him out, “Did you actually bring me out here just to flirt with me?”

He does nothing except look at you, as if the answer is painfully obvious and you’re stupid for not realising it sooner.

You sigh loudly. “Jake, I’m sorry that you didn’t get the memo like everybody else, but you didn’t need to lure me out the lab in your avatar if you wanted to get my attention.”

His thumb continues to move and his eyes drop slightly.

“I wouldn’t say I lured you out here,” Jake replies. You watch his eyes zero back in on yours and you fight your body against the urge to wrap up and hide from him. 

“You can’t be that stupid, I refuse to believe it,” you laugh disbelievingly, which makes him raise his brows questioningly. Even with a layer of plastic obstructing your face from his, Jake can’t get over how pretty you look. “You have to know that I like you even when you’re not a big blue alien.”

Jake’s grin widens, his fangs glinting in the moonlight. “I know. You’re really bad at hiding it.”

“Okay,” you say, feeling under your cardigan for his hands and attempting to wrestle them away, but he doesn’t budge. You laugh again, as if the whole thing is genuinely funny for you, “then you can always make your thoughts about that known when I see you in the lab. In person.”

“I’m not doing anything I wouldn’t in there if I had the chance,” Jake tells you, moving his hands but only to sandwich them between your tank and your skin. The feeling of his palms flat against your stomach makes you jump slightly and reach for his wrist. 

“Please. I see you every single day.”

“Yeah, and your brother, and Grace, and Trudy,” Jake points out. “I can’t get a second alone with you. What would you have me do, make a move with your brother breathing down my neck about it?”

“You could just be upfront. Save me from looking like an idiot.”

“Come on, baby, let’s be real.”

The smile he has on his face is unmoving, and you search every corner of it to find signs of his sincerity falling and find nothing. But something feels wrong.

You’ve spent close to two months in the long shadow drawn by everything else in Jake’s life, and considering Jake’s newfound role of future Omatikaya warrior, you feel that the time he spends in your company has become less and less. So now that Jake has decided to pick up on whatever signals you were sending him and respond to them, you assume it’s all in the name of good fun to piss off Norm.

Feeling Jake’s hands creeping up your body in the middle of the Hallelujah Mountains and with no older brother here to glare at either of you, you’re rethinking everything you thought you had figured out.

“I don’t get it,” you say finally. 

Jake just laughs quietly. “You thought I just rammed my wheelchair into your feet for fun?”

“You mean to tell me that was your way of showing interest?” you ask unconvincingly.

“…Nah. I liked watching you fall, though,” he grins. Jake picks himself up from his squat and looms over you like a shadow, watching you fall back onto your forearms as you stare up at him. He sets one knee between your legs and leans down slightly, breathing in deeply in a way that has you thinking he’s actually sniffing the air around you. 

“Honey, I’m all kinds of obsessed with you.”

You blink. “You certainly gave nothing away.”

“I bring you shit all the time.”

“I’m a scientist, I didn’t know you did that because you liked me. I thought it was just because I wanted better samples than Norm.”

“I mean, that definitely helped motivate me to find everything.”

“You never even told me you liked me.”

“Well, I’m telling you now.”

“Okay, well, tell me tomorrow when you’re awake and not all…big,” you frown. 

Jake chuckles. “You don’t like me now, or something?”

“I definitely never said that. I just want to hear human Jake Sully tell me how he feels without using his avatar to try and win me over.” 

Jake’s tail swishes behind him. “You prefer the dummy in the wheelchair?”

“I like your wheelchair,” you tell him quietly, running your hand up his arm as he pins you flat against the boulder with a hand on your stomach. 

“I don’t,” he murmurs. “I like being like this. I like being bigger than you. I like smelling how much you like me.”

All of a sudden, your legs swing shut around him and you look at him in disbelief.

“Freak.”

All he does is smile. 

“Come on, Jake, I actually don’t have time for this,” you say around a groan, trying to move against him but failing miserably. An exasperated smile falls on your face. “Really? What are you even trying to achieve? You’re seducing me with your avatar?”

His ears twitch and he angles his head to the side. “Yes?”

“Why am I getting the impression that all of this has something to do with Norm somehow?” you sigh in reply, but Jake notices the way you fall relaxed underneath him, and he has the feeling you’re in no real hurry to get anywhere else tonight. 

“Well, it might have something to do with it,” Jake confesses, his voice lower than it was before as he draws his nose close to you and takes a deep inhale. The feeling of his braid flicking down from his back and brushing against your thighs makes you shudder, not to mention the feeling of his snout against your collarbones. “Really, I just want to spend some time with my girl while I got the chance to.”

Whatever you want to say or have planned to say dies away when you feel Jake’s lips wander and press against your sternum. 

Sighing, you shift your hands to his arms that have you pinned down and carefully squeeze. “Good luck with that, Sully.”

He runs his tongue flat against your skin and hears you exhale through your nose, a noise of satisfaction muffled by your closed mouth, and all at once, Jake’s decision is final.

He is going to fuck Norm’s sister. 

And he’s going to rub salt on Norm’s wounds by doing it in the way that will piss him off the most.

Jake kisses his way down the length of your body, his hands moving around your figure like a sculptor until his hands find their way to your thighs. Though oversized and covering most of them, Jake’s hands circle around the width of your thighs and he strokes his thumbs across the inside skin of them, all while laughter bubbles in your chest.

All of this is just so absurd. If someone had told you this morning that Jake so much as liked you back, it would have taken some convincing, but if they had gone as far as to suggest he’s be attempting to seduce you in his avatar in a little chunk of forest behind the lab you pretty much live in, you would have laughed at the delusion of the thought. But now, there’s no denying the very tangible view of Jake’s Na’vi hands pressing down on your thighs, his eyes staring up over the slope of your body as you pick your head up to look down at him.

“This is crazy,” you gasp.

Jake’s teeth reveal themselves against the stretch of skin he was just pressing kisses onto, his smile widening as he speaks. “You don’t want to, baby?”

You weigh your options. It’s either leave and go back to the lab and hope that Jake follows through on his apparent feelings for you in the morning… Or you can relax and enjoy.

“Jake…” You pause for a moment. You want to enjoy it, and you feel the pool of desire deepen inside of you and know it’s a sensation Jake can most likely smell. 

He’s still your Jake, still the same guy you dote over when he remembers he has a life outside of being Na’vi. The only difference now is that he’s blue, and mobile, and double your size in every definition of the word. And suspiciously attractive, but you don’t know for certain if you think that because it’s Jake or because it’s actually true as a fact. But you just can’t help but wonder if Jake’s climaxing feud with Norm is the only reason he’s pinning you to a boulder in the forest and kissing your stomach. 

“You’re not just doing this to piss off Norm, are you?” you ask, feeling serious all of a sudden. The only way you know Jake notices is from the way his ears flatten against his head and his eyes grow round with concern. 

In the light, his tail flicks from side to side in the way you recognise most Na’vi do when they’re nervous, and you fight the urge to look away from him when he stays quiet for a second, thinking of what to say in a loud silence.

Of course he’s doing this because he knows it will piss Norm off if and when he finds out. As soon as Norm catches a stinking whiff of Jake on your body when he’s in his own avatar surveying the mountains, there will be nowhere for Jake to run or roll off to and avoid Norm’s volcanic rage. But he knows as well that this is a long time coming — that he’s been chasing circles around your feet for the fun of it, and now the chance has come for him to bring what he’s buried to the surface and shape it into something more.

Jake very carefully thinks of what to say. “Knowing that if I fuck you right now it will piss off your insanely annoying brother makes me want to do it more. But if the only reason I was fucking you was to piss him off, then I’d be doing it in front of him.”

Your brows raise. 

“Okay, that came out wrong,” Jake says quickly. “My point is… I go crazy thinking about you. And everything I think about doing to you can be made possible when I’m, as you said, all big.”

“But… Norm—”

Jake groans, all smiles. “Oh my god, can we please stop bringing up your brother for a sec? It’s a huge turn off.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any sexier, either,” you point out, “but I’m just thinking—”

“Don’t think,” Jake tells you. “This is the one time you don’t have to think about anything at all except for how you’d like me to take care of you.”

Jake returns his face to your stomach as you blink furiously, a flustered feeling creeping up over your body at the bluntness of his words. If you thought he was playing around, you’re officially convinced when his hands tighten around your thighs and he spreads them apart, pinning them down against the boulder he’s made your bed for the night. You inhale a deep breath when Jake’s thumbs dip underneath your shorts, bunched around your inner thighs.

“I suppose it would be like killing two birds with one stone…”

Jake laughs against your skin. “Jesus Christ, Spellman, quit talking so much. Who knew you were such a yapper?”

“Am not,” you protest.

You shudder when he plants another kiss on your abdomen, pings the fabric of your shorts back against your skin with a sharp sting and he grunts with a nod.

“Okay,” Jake agrees, his ears high and tail swishing playfully. “Now take off your cardigan.”

Still watching Jake on your forearms as he hooks his fingers around the waistline of your shorts in an effort to pull them down, you wrangle a sigh of protest and lift your lower body up for him, all whilst reaching for the buttons on the front of your cardigan. 

You breathe heavily as you mumble, “Do you really need to take off all my clothes, Sully?”

“One of us is halfway there, honey, and it’s not you,” replies Jake. His golden eyes watch with intent as he pulls the shorts down the expanse of your legs with your underwear in tow. As you shudder with the breeze fanning between your legs, Jake takes a big inhale and stares.

He barely moves an inch once the shorts and panties are in a bunch around your feet, but you busy yourself by sweeping a look at Jake’s own attire, or striking lack of. Between his legs hangs his tewng, a simple and sparsely intricate item of clothing that leaves little to imagination when it comes to what is growing between his thighs. 

It’s standard attire for the Omatikaya, but you’ve never seen it up close, and never on Jake himself. It hits you then that he’s still in his entire hunting gear, as if he finished up with Neytiri and brought himself here right away.

Jake’s thighs clench as he finally moves, readjusting his footing in his dropped squat; to him, this position has become as natural as breathing, but you stare at his thighs bulging and wonder how he’s not in agony from it alone.

Jake looks up at you after his allocated time spent analysing the spot growing wet between your legs and you gulp, feeling almost nervous. 

“Well, you’re gonna be an Omatikaya soon. One of the consequences is wearing your little g-string everywhere.”

His head leans to the side as his amusement grows. “It’s called a tewng, genius.”

That makes you laugh, and say in a melodic and sweet tone, “I know.”

But Jake bites back with the same sweet tone as you and says, “Then shut up,” and you comply. It’s the least you can do for him when he smooths his big hands back between your legs and up close to your cunt.

Pressing a kiss to the inside of your knee, Jake inches his hands further, relishing in a deep breath as he returns to staring at the spot just inches from his fingers. From his perspective, you are hideously tiny; given the obvious lack of research on Na’vi and human sexual relations, Jake isn’t totally sure you’ll be able to withstand what he wants to give you.

Worth a try, though.

Jake’s chest rises and falls as he stares in wonder at your pussy, the scent divinely pronounced, and he runs one of his fingers between your folds and up, collecting the juices on his finger as he rounds your clit in a rather observational manner. 

You bristle, your legs instinctively trying to close — all the good it does, as Jake pushes them back open. His eyes flicker back up to yours, as if assessing his next steps, before he lowers his mouth to your cunt and without doing you the kind service of looking away, stares at you as he spreads his tongue flat between your folds.

His actions earn him a strangled moan of pleasure, and his ears twitch in satisfaction. The feeling of his tongue against you is strangely addicting, rough and soft at the same time, warm and wet and enough for your hips to lift. 

“Jake…” You gasp, feeling your eyes close, half with the pleasure of it all and also sheer embarrassment. 

Like a predator watching its prey, Jake never looks away from your face and the way it twists, your jaw hanging open as he licks your cunt. With the size of his head alone, his tongue virtually covers every corner of your pussy with no difficulty, leaving you with no untouched itch, no ignored stretch of wet skin. 

You can’t even bear to look down at him again, and you toss your gaze up to the stars as they twinkle above, blinking, conspirators to your escapade. Biting down on your lip to stop yourself from moaning too loud, your hips slowly roll up and down as Jake sucks around your clit, his big hands working overtime to keep you from wriggling away entirely off the rock and to the ground.

“Oh, god…”

Between your legs is a flurry of warmth, a tingling feeling rippling down to your toes. After five dry years, it comes as no real shock that even someone’s tongue could be ripping this kind of response from you. 

“You good?” Jake murmurs.

“Mmh. Hot,” you rasp. It doesn’t help that there’s an exo-pack warming your face with every deep breath you take. Jake moves his mouth from your cunt momentarily as if trying to hear you, watching with curious eyes when you bite back another noise which stirs as he slides his finger towards your entrance. 

“This mask is really ruining my vibe right now,” you groan, your voice so throaty and strangled that Jake has to fight a smirk. He fails miserably.

“Take it off and hold your breath,” Jake replies; a laugh rumbles from his chest when you lift your head to scowl at him.

“It would frighten people if they knew how much of a genius you were.”

Jake hums, his eyes glistening as he cocks his head, “I’m incredibly humble.” Then he wastes no more time talking and sinks his finger into you.

He sinks in with plenty of ease, your wetness guiding his finger all the way in to the knuckle and you choke back a strangled sound; one of Jake’s fingers feels like two of your own, the stretch unfamiliar but not unwelcome after your dry spell of five cryo-stolen years. 

Jake grins widely and inches his tongue back between your legs, swiping it over your clit and forcing the moans out from hiding in your throat.

You turn your head to the side, sparing a glance at the distant laboratory. You can only hope you’re not loud enough to startle your sleeping colleagues and brother.

“Eyes down here, Spellman,” Jake mumbles, his voice vibrating across your pussy and pulling your eyes back towards him. Tears spring to your eyes as he looks up at you, working his fingers in and out of you slowly while matching his licks to the tempo.

His tongue is slightly rough and textured, each lick leaving you feeling almost ticklish. A rush of warmth pulls from your cunt up to your neck, and your thighs tremble around his head with a flushed squeeze, but Jake doesn’t seem to mind; he pulls your one leg further apart with his other hand and slips in a second finger, the stretch of your hole making your back arch with a half pained, half pleasured moan.

“Jake!” you gasp, your hips bucking up against his mouth, his fangs brushing across you. He has the nerve to laugh all of a sudden, pulling his mouth away after pressing a sloppy kiss to your clit. “Jesus, fuck, Jake—”

“Goddamn, you are a yapper,” Jake comments, and you glare at the almost human look of pure smugness on his face, his chin coated with saliva and juice. 

“Fuck you,” you huff, feeling the absence of his tongue immensely, despite his continuously moving fingers. Jake’s fingers are thicker than they looked from afar — it feels like you’re full already, but you’re not willing to confess that to him. He already looks far too proud with what he’s doing.

You suppose, now that you’re thinking about it, Jake’s had years to become familiar with a pussy; he seems to be back between your legs with a certain hunger for you, the taste of your juices sweeter than he initially expected. 

His fingers are coated in juice, slipping into you with no resistance and curling his fingers up to make your hips lift once more. He almost wants to make a comment to fluster you, to tell you how insanely good it feels for your cunt to be quivering around his fingers, welcoming him up there as if you’d prepared for them beforehand. Jake parts his fingers inside of you, stretching you out, his mouth comfortably attached to you.

His ears twitch when you let out a wobbly cry — actually, he’s not sure if you’re crying for real or not. His eyes follow your hand as it creeps down to the hood of your pussy, just above his nose, and he pulls his mouth away for a split second.

“No, no, go back,” you pant, and like a dog given a command, Jake pulls his soggy fingers out of your cunt and pushes his head back between your thighs, satisfied by your own pleasured sounds when he does.

Jake hooks his arm across your lower stomach, effectively pinning you to the sloping boulder while he uses his other hand to keep your legs wide apart. You forget all about modesty and self-control and open them as wide as you can for him to help, your hand stroking the top of Jake’s hair as he burrows his way back between the wet spot he was devouring. 

You suck in a tight and high-pitched breath when Jake’s tongue shifts from left to right over your clit, the feeling of his tongue strange and almost like a vibration. Your hips lift from the boulder again and shift up and down — Jake’s barely even trying, barely broken a sweat, but when he glances up at you he’s both amused and surprised by how twisted in pleasure you look. All he can see is the underneath of your jaw tilted to the sky, and one of your hands curling up around your tit under your tank top.

Jake guides his arm from trapping your abdomen up to push the bottom of your tank up above your wrist. There’s no way he’ll let you gatekeep the sight of your tits when he’s the one making you touch yourself in the first place. His eyes are wide with excitement when you fist the fabric of your tank and yank it up above your boobs, the curve of them bouncing with the quick movement of your hand. 

Jake groans into you, his tail curling up high. Jake’s tasted a lot of pussy in his life, but he doesn’t know what exactly you’ve done to taste so good to him. He momentarily convinces himself that it feels different because he’s in a whole other body — it must just be because he’s big and strange and he’s been fucking you in his mind for a while now that you somehow feel ten times better than anyone else he’s ever been with. 

The pool of warm juice between your legs leaves you incredibly soft and squishy, like a tìhawnuwll that he has to remind himself he can’t just sink his teeth into.

It could be because you’re Norm’s sister. Could be because you usually appear so big when he’s resorted to sitting down all day, but now you’re helplessly tiny underneath him, trapped by his arms and head. Or it could just be because he’s an idiot who quashes his feelings rather than gives in to them.

He blinks. Your hips are so high off the boulder that Jake has to bring his arm back down to hold you in place. The less you squirm, the more drawn out he can make it, but he’s acutely aware of the tremor in your legs, the impatient rutting against his lips, the painful hardness under his tewng.

“Sweet,” he grumbles. The word leaves you flustered, and the heat brewing like a bomb against his open mouth begins to rise through your body again. You forget to be quiet as you let out a high-pitched moan, feeling your toes curl in your boots and you desperately finger at your nipple, rolling and tugging on the hardened nub of flesh as Jake pins you tighter against the boulder. He laves his tongue down your cunt towards your entrance, the warm tip of it pushing to the tightened hole that Jake wants more than anything to squeeze himself inside.

“Mf — Jake, come on,” you whimper.

One of his thin brows raises. “You seduced yet?”

“Fuck off. Yes.”

You feel the rumble of his laughter against your pussy. Jake presses a kiss against it and then moves his mouth to the soft skin of your inner thigh. 

“I never let a woman go without making her cum,” Jake says, his voice muffled against your leg. He feels you quiver beneath him, and his grin widens. “You wanna at least cum first, right?”

“Please, Jake—”

A startled cry of pain rips from your throat when Jake gently sinks his teeth into your leg — Jake knows his own strength and pulls back before he can draw blood, glancing at the red outline of his teeth imprinted into your leg, a ridged ring of saliva in his wake. Your head is lifted entirely to gape at him, and he looks at you with a coy expression.

“Did you just bite me?”

He smirks. “Accident. Sorry.”

“Yeah right.” Your legs shift slightly around him, but Jake can smell the twisting agony of pleasure leaking out of you — he’s never been more thankful for his Na’vi body and its strange sense of smell than he is now, to be able to pick up on the need you try to hide from him, a scent he actually understands. Normally he can admire your determination, but right now, he’s more concerned with finding out how to break down your walls and unravel you the way he knows you’ve been wanting him to for the last two months.

He smooches the bite one more time, his ears pricking when you whimper out a sort of desperately small sound and say, “Come on, Jake. You got me out here, don’t torture me about it.”

“Me eating your pussy not enough for you?” he asks smugly. He knows it would be more than enough — call him conceited, but he’s sort of an expert on it by now.

You don’t say much, nothing worth noting, at least. Jake’s ears are tall as he lifts his head slightly, but his thumb continues to rub up and down your slit, carefully smoothing over your swollen clit almost sympathetically.

“Please,” you beg in such a small and desperate voice that Jake smiles at the sound. You see his eyes flutter, half-lidded, as he cocks his head to the side until his temple is against your knee. 

“Hm? You just wanna say please and get it over and done with?” Jake mutters. “You can’t take any more of my fingers?”

“Don’t be a prick,” you whimper. “You want it, too.”

You feel that unkind heat simmer over you again, but not for the reason you expect. Jake blinks at you lazily, like an unimpressed cat, and then you watch as his eyes curve into crescent moons, the slint of gold virtually glowing in the Pandoran night. Then, the fucker smiles again, looking so smug that you feel embarrassed somehow, caught under his gaze.

“Yeah, I do,” agrees Jake. “I’ve been wanting you a long time.”

“Then, come on,” you urge. Something excited claws at you, and you feel your heartbeat race when he lifts himself slightly. “Come on, big guy. You got me out here, you win.”

He swells with pride, pleased by what is leaving your mouth in a flustered flurry. 

“You think you can take me all by yourself?” he asks, his hands coming to rest on your knees as he turns his gaze back to the clenching hole between your legs. Jake looks almost thoughtful as he stares at you, as if analysing. “You could only just take two fingers.”

For such an intelligent woman, Jake finds himself amazed when you look anxious about that statement. What, do you really think he’ll just give up and go? Jake doesn’t care if it takes all night to get himself up your snatch, because no matter what, he’ll get himself in there.

He sniggers when your mouth flounders like a little fish, your tank sliding with the angle of your body back down over your tits, but then he tuts and reaches back to pull it up. In fact, he decides it’s better off, and he uses one finger to pull the whole thing up to your chin, and lets you suffer in an anxious string of actions — you tug the tank up over your head, eyes wide, lip pouting. 

“Wanna try?” Jake asks, if not to speed along the increasing agony of his hard cock tenting under his tewng then just to put you out of your misery. “Or should I go back for seconds?”

“Jake…” Your chest rises and falls as you gape at him. He went through all the trouble to get you here, and although you never expected to look at Jake’s avatar and feel a throb between your legs, you can’t even look at him without feeling overcome with the terrible, pressing desire to squeeze whatever weapon he has under his loincloth into your cunt. Jake watches your eyes look down at the darkness between his legs, to the pretty band of string tied around his middle, and then looks back at you with a sickeningly sweet expression.

“Aw, honey. You want me to fuck you?”

It takes an incredible amount of effort not to scowl at him. Jake is lucky he looks so attractive with your arousal around his lips, otherwise you’d be up off the boulder and marching back to the labs for being so unbelievably full of himself. 

But even though he’s double your size and consumed by a cocky smugness from being able bodied and towering over you, you can’t think of enough reasons to warrant your leave. The only things on your mind are how much it’ll hurt to get him inside you, and how good it’ll feel once he is.

“That’s why you brought me here, after all, isn’t it?” you murmur, your lips curved slightly when he bows his body over you, his hands flat against the boulder on either side of your waist. “You’ve been thinking of me, right? Oeyä sayrìp tsamsiyu — you must have thought about this every time you went and found me a flower, right?”

Jake’s smile turns wolfish. “Yap, yap, yap.”

You all but whine underneath him. It is so unbecoming of you to be so desperate for something that you resort to writhing like a brat, but with Jake just straddling over you without doing anything, you feel the eager feeling of want coiling in your lower stomach. Your hole clenches around the air, as if trying to feel for Jake’s fingers again, and you lift your hips up off the boulder as if to entice him.

He barely even looks down at you, which only infuriates you more. 

For a moment, you wonder if the only reason he lured you out here was to satiate a desire of his own; maybe he just wanted to prove that he still had what it took to make a woman beg for him — though he needn’t have tried so hard, considering you’d have writhed and whined for him just as much, if not more, had he just made it known that he knew about and returned your feelings sooner.

But having you touch him in an impossible silence in the shared bunks pales in comparison to now, to having you look so small and soft and inviting; for you to beg for him, to let yourself be ravaged by him in all of his strength. Why would he prefer to have you while he feels useless when he can make the most of the strong, brawny and big body his brother passed down to him?

Jake breathes deeply through his nose and chews on the inner skin under his lips. You watch in the dark as his tail coils, his ears flat, until he lowers his body down like he’s doing a press up and pushes his nose against your sternum. 

“You smell so pretty, baby girl,” Jake mutters, pressing a kiss against the skin sloping between your tits. Biting your lip does little to suppress the moan that spills out when Jake cups one of his hands around your breast, and you hold the back of his hand as he gently squeezes. 

The hanging cloth of his tewng brushes past your pussy and you jolt in surprise, just in time for Jake to bring his mouth down over your other boob. The sheer size of Jake dwarfs every feature of yours, but something about your tiny size only excites him more. 

With his lips wrapped around your tit, you try your hardest to muffle another moan at the feeling of his tongue toying around your nipple, desperately trying to find something to focus on that isn’t the absurdly good feeling of Jake’s mouth or the tewng brushing past your pussy every time Jake rocks his hips backwards and forwards.

You clench your hand over his, feeling your legs squirm around him as his sharp teeth scrape against the squishy curve of your breast. Fear should rip through you when you feel his teeth tighten around the top of your tit, but it doesn’t; instead, a rush of warm excitement burns you from the inside out when Jake’s cheeks hollow, sucking a purple blot into your skin.

“Hey—” you say cautiously, but the damage is already done. It’s as if Jake’s determined to make you the same shade as him; the mark he leaves is blooming and bright, and he looks all too proud of himself when he looks up in acknowledgement of your voice. His tail thrashes excitedly. 

“Leaving that so everyone can see what you were doing when they wake up,” Jake explains, licking a strip from the swelling bruise to your neck for good measure. “My dirty scientist.”

That is if you ever make it back to the lab in one piece. 

Feeling the pleasure spreading across your body, you’re half contemplating staying here on this rock forever, hoping that Norm or Grace never come back here looking for samples only to find your corpse. You’re overcome with a conflicting contrast of emotions — you suddenly feel so exposed, so unraveled, half guilty for encouraging Jake to shove his big blue fingers up your crotch, and even guiltier about the fact that you want more from him.

“Enough. Come on,” you huff, and Jake dips his attention back to the rutting of your hips, the glossy shine of your arousal. “While I’m wet.”

“You really think I’m gonna let you dry up before I can get inside you?” Jake asks, as if the idea is beneath you both. “Have some confidence in me, Spellman.”

“I do. Full confidence. So, come on, gimme.”

Jake grins; he leans his weight up on one knee and in the light, you can just about see the protruding point of his tewng and feel your desire pooling. It’s only when Jake undoes the string around his waist and frees what hides beneath that you start to feel your body tense unexpectedly; it is beyond you how Jake has managed to keep the spear he calls his cock hidden for so long, and even more unthinkable as to how it will fit inside of you. 

You stare at it with wide eyes. Meanwhile, Jake holds the base of it with his hand and assesses the space between your legs again. When he guides the tip to your folds and strokes himself up and down, you feel your heartbeat quicken and your legs turn like jelly.

“You like it?” he asks, ever so sweetly, as if it’s a new gift brought back for you to enjoy. In a way, it is a gift, something for you to sample. Jake’s body seems to vibrate with nothing short of delight at the speechless state his dick has left you in — and he hasn’t even put it in yet.

“Big, right?” he continues to ask, a smirk on his face.

All you can say is, “how do you walk around with that thing?”

He barks out a laugh, his head tilted to the stars as his smirk widens. Jake then pushes the tip against you again with his thumb, choking down his amused sniggers as he drags himself up and down your cunt, and more than anything, he wishes he could see your face better in the moonlight. Luckily, Jake’s spent hours staring at you in his wheelchair to be able to piece together the smudges of your features he can see in the reflection of light hanging over the front of your mask. And what he can’t see, he’ll hear, and what he’s not satisfied with not seeing he’ll seek from you again later.

“It’ll be a tight fit,” Jake thinks out loud, prodding the tip of his cock against your entrance and looking up at you once you whimper, “but I know you can take it.”

“I dunno… Looks kind of big—”

“You can fit it in,” he tells you confidently.

But now you’ve seen it, you’re slightly nervous. “What if I can’t—?”

“You were just begging me for it,” Jake says pointedly. “While I’m wet, you said.” Then, he leans forward so that the wide slope of his nose is pushed against the front of your mask. “I don’t care if it takes all night trying. I’ll help you fit it all in, okay?”

You breathe in sharply, feeling your hips grinding up against him. Jake tries to find sympathy for you; he supposes that if he were you and some ten foot Na’vi was trying to burrow his cock between his legs, he’d be apprehensive too. 

“Just…” you rasp, watching him desperately, and he waits kindly, though his tip is on the verge of being swallowed by your cunt. Your legs tremble when he smiles at you, one hand on his cock, the other flat against the boulder. “Just go slow, okay?”

The way he looks at you is as if you’ve just said something stupidly endearing. “Sure thing, Spellman.”

Jake does his best to keep up his presented facade of coolness, but you feel so warm and wet, his arm begins to shake as he supports his weight on the boulder, grunting when he aligns his cockhead with your hole and very slightly pushes in. Even though he only just had his fingers up there, he can feel your pussy resisting, and it’s only the tip. 

Your mouth hangs open with a pained whine, the stretch uncomfortable but in spite of it, you arch your back as if trying to feel more of him inside of you.

“Easy,” he chuckles, very slowly pushing more of himself into your pussy. The noises from your mouth grow louder, and something proud purrs in his chest. His tongue pushes against the inside of his lower lip as he smirks, teeth showing, as he makes an almost amused groan. You’re insanely tight, and unbelievably squishy and wet — and hey, it’s been five years for him, too.

“Yeah,” Jake groans, pushing his hips further and pulling out, each stroke gentle and tentative. He wants more than anything to go rough, to make you mewl and cry and curl up against him, but the tearful look on your face makes him reconsider. Each time he sinks in a little bit deeper, softening the resistance of your walls as they make room for him. 

It takes an incredible amount of self restraint to stop himself from shoving all of it in at once; you’re so tight, the tightest pussy he’s ever felt closing around his cock, and easily the best. Jake closes his eyes for a second, honing in on the squeezing clench around his cock and the unnerving, uncharacteristic silence leaving your gaping mouth. 

“Talk to me, Spellman,” Jake groans, inching deeper inside. His ears perk again when you cry as he sinks in deeper. “Say something.”

“You told me I talked too much,” you manage out, admirably trying your hardest to remain quiet despite the pushing twelve inches of Na’vi cock up your cunt. Jake’s barely even inside of you; more of his dick is out than it is stuffed inside. 

“I love hearing you talk,” replies Jake, even though he had just poked fun at your ability to talk someone’s ear off. Had he known it would swear you into silence now, he’d have never said anything. What Jake wants now most of all is to hear your voice again, hear your pleasure, your instructions, your pleas. 

Hearing you slip out a high pitched moan when he pushes more of his cock inside of you feels like a reward almost. 

“Could listen to you yap away all damn day,” he murmurs quietly, his eyes finding yours behind the glaze of the exo-pack. “I know you’ve always got something to say, so why’re you so quiet all of a sudden?” Jake’s grin brightens when you manage to suck in more of his length, “Talk to me, baby, tell me what you want, hm?”

“Just… Put it in,” you whimper, and his eyes widen excitedly. 

“You said to go slow.”

“I know what I said, but I need more.” Your eyes are so blown open he’d laugh if it didn’t look so goddamn sexy. “Please, Jake.”

“You sure?” he croons. 

“Mm. Please — come on, please—!”

Jake snaps his hips forward so quickly that more than half of dick disappears inside of you, and the primal noise that leaves your mouth takes Jake completely by surprise. 

“Fucking shit, mama,” Jake groans, his voice rasped as he bows his chest over yours, dropping to his forearm on the boulder as he adjusts to the warmth enveloping him. “Holy shit.”

You swallow a deep breath, your hands gripping tightly to Jake’s shoulders which forces his eyes to your face. He can make out the distinct shimmer of tears under your eyes, and he brushes his fingers across the side of your neck, tapping you to bring your eyes open and searching for him in the dark. 

“You with me?” he asks, chuckling slightly. “You good?”

“Oh my god,” you squeal, cunt clenching. “Wait—”

“Breathe,” Jake says quietly, pressing a kiss to the swollen bruise he sucked into your skin earlier. “You can do it, pretty girl.”

“Keep moving, it hurts when you just stay still.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he mutters, his hips falling back into a slow rhythm to keep you adjusted to his twitching cock. It’s almost disturbing how easily you’re taking him now he’s forced more of his length inside, how wet and responsive you seem to be as he sinks deeper into you.

At first, Jake goes slow, familiarising himself with every noise you give him, every twitch and shift in your body, every clench around him. You feel the smooth ridges of his cock kissing your insides, the sensation unfamiliar and strange but so fucking good. He snakes one hand under your back when you lift up off the boulder; his large palm is flat against the arch of your spine, his fingers curled around your hip. 

You look like a toy underneath him, something he could easily just hold with one hand and fuck himself up into.

His hips snap again, faster than he intended, and more of his dick disappears inside of you. You could easily take all of him if he took his time getting you to that point, but the warmth wrapping around him like a glove is so sinful that he can’t think of anything less appealing than going slow. He sucks in a deep breath through his teeth and squeezes your waist with his hand; one desperate little cry from your mouth later, and Jake forgives himself for having waited so long to get you in this position, to fuck you stupid. 

It’s been so long since Jake’s been able to fuck a woman like this, and for his first time since his accident to be with you, of all people — well, Jake could think of no greater victory, no better reward for all the shit he’s endured so far. 

He stares down at the gap between your legs, watching as his dick vanishes and reappears with every rock of his hips. You’re taking it so well, like a champion. Pride blooms in his chest — he’d expect nothing less from his woman.

Pulling your hips down slightly to meet him as he thrusts up, Jake shoulders the control and moans in a low tone, pushing until he feels your body seize underneath him. Then, he pulls back, falls back in, and gets himself comfortable.

The stretch no longer burns the way it did, but you feel as though you can barely breathe as Jake ruts his hips up. He’s so big in every definition of the word. He doesn’t seem to notice nor care about the deep indent of your fingernails in his shoulder; he seems entirely devoted to gaining momentum, creating his own pace with his ears flat against his bowed head.

“God… Jake,” you moan, feeling the slight point of the boulder against your shoulder blades and his hand squeezing your middle as you finally speak, after what feels like eons of silence to Jake.

He latches his gaze to the rise and fall of your breasts as he fucks you, his breathing heavy. “Oh, you like that?”

Ever so slightly, he hastens his pacing, eliciting a tearful sob from your mouth. “Mmf—”

“Is it everything you hoped for?”

His stomach churns when you laugh, albeit with a strangled kind of tone, and clench around his cock again.

“You’re so full of yourself.”

“So’re you,” he points out, lifting his chest slightly to glance down at your stomach. It should be criminal how turned on he feels by the sight of his own dick outlined in your lower tummy — it should be criminal how insanely good it feels knowing he’s fucking a part of you nobody else has before. You’ve lost all self control as you decide to let yourself be noisy, which Jake is all too pleased to hear.

Peering down at your hips, you marvel at the sight of Jake’s frightening length pushing up against your stomach. It looks just as weird as it feels. Jake hisses and runs a hand across the spot his dick is hitting.

“Feel that?” he asks. He knows you do. It’s a stupidly dumb question, but you whine at it all the same. “I told you it would fit. Look at you, taking it all, no problem.”

“Mhm. Feels good; so, so, so good, Jake…” Your body feels limp and tingly, and you let your head fall back so your gaze is pointed up at the sky. Even as you blink dazed up at them, they have the striking appearance of Jake’s skin, the dark blue wash of sky with littered balls of bright white light. The image of him is printed on your mind, and no matter where you look to avoid his gaze, you find him again.

Jake shifts. Keeping his dick sliding in and out of you with more of an upbeat rhythm than before, he bows his chest back over yours and brings his ears close to your ear.

“A perfect fit for my perfect girl,” he mutters. He becomes so reliant on his one hand on the boulder when he uses the other to hold your leg up around his waist, bringing forth an entirely new burn from the stretch of it. His breath is warm on your ear, making you shudder. “How long you been waiting for me, baby?”

You scoff disbelievingly, trying to think of something to say despite your mind being both full and empty at the same time. All you can think about is the building pressure in your tummy.

“Long,” you offer, snaking a hand up his neck to the back of his head. 

Jake licks his tongue across the arch of skin connecting your neck to your collar. “Thinking of me with your fingers up your cunt at night, huh?” His hand squeezes around your middle when you begin to shift with his thrusts further up the boulder. Even with your loud cries in his ear, Jake can hear the squelching wetness around his cock, the tightening spasms around his length bringing him closer to giving in to the dull ache in his own stomach. “Bet you wheelchair Jake Sully couldn’t make you feel like this. Next time you get off to the thought of him, I want you to think of what we’re doing right now, about who’s got you feeling this way.”

“How…how do you even know about that?” you gasp, half pleasured by his thrusting and half horrified by the revelation that Jake might have been privy to the fact you masturbated with him in mind when everyone went to bed at night.

Actually, he didn’t know. But he sniggers smugly that his teasing jeer turned out to be true. 

Jake presses a kiss to your collar and peppers a line of them up until he is thwarted by the mask covering your face. Peering down at your face hidden behind it, Jake gives you a sad pout and says, “I wanna go fast.”

“I…” you start, his hips already moving and you feel the heat simmering below again. Anymore from him, and you’ll be finished, cumming all over him. “I don’t think… I’ll — I’m gonna—”

“Then let’s get it done,” he says with as much finality and refine as he can muster before he picks himself back up, finding the energy he had before to pin you down against the boulder. You keep your leg wrapped around his waist as he sets one hand down over your tummy, the other on your shoulder, and then the real fun begins for him.

Jake isn’t ignorant to the twisting ache inside of him — like you, he knows he probably doesn’t have that much longer until he’s completely tuckered out and ready to fill you up. What can he say? It’s been a long time, and he doesn’t have the same kind of stamina as he used to. You’re tightening up around him in anticipation; it’s like being gripped in a vice. 

He pulls his hips back and then pistons himself back in with so much speed that you almost fly up off the boulder in surprise. Too fast, he thinks, so he gets accustomed to a regular fast pace and sticks to it loyally. In return, he’s rewarded with a litany of pretty sounds, your hands curling around his arms, desperately trying to hold on. 

“Yeah, oh yeah,” Jake groans, feeling your cunt fluttering around him as he fucks in and out, slipping in and out of your wetness as if he owns it. The hand that’s pressing your shoulder slips to your throat, and while he doesn’t squeeze, you claw your fingers around his and feel his grip tighten ever so slightly. 

“Fuck!” you squeal, clamping your eyes closed suddenly. “Shit—Jake, baby—”

He moans at that, really moans. A ringing rises in volume in his ears as his thrusts grow more rapid, relentlessly smacking his hips up until he slides all of his dick inside of you. 

God, you’re fucking perfect — he can’t name many women, if any at all, who could take a dick this size with as much ease as you are now. But the increasing pressure in your tummy is so overwhelming that you’re not even too aware of the size of what’s getting comfortable inside of you. All you know and understand is that in the next three seconds, you’ll be seeing white.

Jake’s name falls like a mantra from your lips, and he looks at you in surprise to see that you’ve very bravely opened your eyes to stare at him, although the tears lining your waterline and smeared down your cheeks make your stare look ten times more attractive to him. He almost wishes he hadn’t looked — his hips stagger slightly and he growls, the noise earning him another whiney moan from the undone woman beneath him, the woman he’s committed to filling with his cum and making his.

“I—!” You say nothing — you don’t even have to. Jake feels your cunt strangling his length like a goddamn fist, and by the buffering look of pure ecstasy on your face, he’s fairly certain all of those things mean you’re about to cum.

“Yeah, mama, cum for me,” Jake coaxes. “Lemme feel you.”

The warmth around him clenches, and all of a sudden, your body seizes with a jolt, your back arched so high off the boulder that it leaves him hitting entirely new angles inside of you, pushing your orgasm to a new level. 

For you, it feels like you’ve been blown up. Your entire body is consumed by a blazing heat, your legs going immediately limp as you cum around him. Jake’s eyes instantly shift to your quivering hips, to your cunt still swallowing him up, the white dribbles of cum leaking down the length of his cock. He watches the small cluster of glowing freckles decorating his dick disappear behind a rolling drop of your cum and his jaw goes slack.

“My girl,” he crows, his head bowing as he eagerly fucks into you a few more times, muttering the same thing as he does: “Oh, my girl, my pretty girl—”

The hand around your throat rips itself away only to squeeze into your hips, as though Jake intends to leave fingerprints there once he’s done. He grips you tightly and with a monumental and low, throaty moan, he snaps his hips one final time and feels a tug in his tummy.

You probably feel him cum before he does. Jake seems caught up in his thrusts while you register the unmissable burst of warmth inside of you, ropes of cum spilling out as if his sole intention were to breed you, stuff you full of his seed. 

In actual fact, Jake just wanted to fuck you silly, fill you with boat loads of cum, and bask in the evil satisfaction of watching Norm smell Jake all over you, claiming you as his. 

“Mm—fuck, Jake!” you rasp, squeezing your little hands around his wrists. The feeling is enough to bring him up to the surface he was drowning under, the ringing in his ears dulling as he catches his breath and opens his eyes, staring down at the embarrassingly wet mixture of cum and juice between your legs. 

He stays inside of you for a moment, his dick still hard and even more pronounced up your cunt than it was before, and it’s as if his eyes are unfocused in absolute awe as he observes the sight of you stretched open, locking him in place greedily. 

It sinks in that you managed to fit all of him in, that he just used his avatar to fuck you in the forest behind the lab. You. Norm’s sister. The object of his desire. The woman of his literal dreams.

Jake lets out a loud and heavy breath, a sigh of relief, and rubs his palms up and down your stomach gently. Despite having had him fucking you just seconds before, you feel a heat flush over your face when he looks up at your face, sweaty and tear-stained under the exo-pack, and he grins wolfishly.

“You’re incredible,” he laughs, which makes the act of looking at him feel ten times more rewarding. Your body warms with the praise: all you’ve wanted was for Jake to like you back, and now, to be full of his cum and knowing he thinks you’re incredible… You laugh with him. 

A few disbelieving laughs later, and Jake finally moves his hands under your thighs and slowly pulls himself out of you. The bump of each ridge along his length knocks past you, and Jake stifles a howl of laughter at the whiney, high-pitched moan you make as his cock pulls out of you with a slick, wet pop. He cranes his head slightly to watch his cum pool out of you and you pick yourself up on your forearms, looking for his dick between his legs to have a final peek, a good look at him covered in your cum and his…

Your eyes widen. “Your cum glows.”

Jake raises his eyebrows. “What? Scientist of Pandora didn’t know Na’vi cum glowed?”

“I haven’t exactly had a selection of Na’vi men or women to tell me that it did!” you reason, your eyes still marvelling curiously at the shiny soft blue stain over the hanging fruit between his legs. 

He hums, poking a finger against your folds and smirking when you flinch. “Hm. Put that in your research notes. Wanna take samples?”

“Fuck off,” you laugh, keeping your legs wide as you struggle to sit upright. The discomfort between your legs is suddenly making itself known, and already the cum around your pussy and thighs is drying, sticky and thick. “Jesus, Sully. Look at me.”

“I know,” grins Jake, his eyes soaking up the image of you. “You’re fucking sexy.”

You roll your eyes with a twisting smile. While Jake seems incredibly fascinated with the marks he has either left accidentally or on purpose over your body, you groan and roll your shoulders. Frankly, you wish Jake had just thrown you down on the grass and fucked you there — in hindsight, the boulder had been a bad idea and you know it will come to haunt you in the morning.

Lazily, and yet with a rush of shame and exhilaration, you glance back at the lab, sitting in the curve of moonlight and caged by bioluminescent flowers and shrubs, each glowing vibrant spectrums of cyan and purple and lime. 

“You’re the luckiest woman alive if nobody heard you yapping,” Jake says playfully, rising upright to stretch the agonised muscles of his legs. “You’re so noisy, honey.”

“I apologise for not thinking too much about the volume of my voice,” you drawl sarcastically, your eyes still glued to the glazed thick glass windows looking into the back of the lab. Anxiously, you glance at him, “Was I that loud?”

He gives you a tight, sympathetic smile. You frown.

“You weren’t quiet yourself, you know,” you grumble, feeling the pinch in your back ease slightly.

“Yep.” And he seems smug about that fact, for reasons beyond you, although you wager a guess as to why he seems proud all of a sudden.

As you shuffle awkwardly off the boulder, you wince as you lean for your shorts and panties, dropping a little look at the sliding dollop of cum slipping out of you. 

“You gotta keep it in there,” Jake says. 

“Jake, as soon as I stand up and walk around, it’s all gonna come pouring out anyway.”

His lip curls with disappointment as he watches his cum drip out of you onto the edge of the boulder, splatting on the wisps of grass around your ankles. It’s a good thing he’s full of copious reserves of cum to give back to you another time.

“Can’t wait for Norm to get a whiff of me,” Jake tells you, and you fight the urge to sigh and roll your eyes, because of course — of course that had been a motive for the gallon of glowing blue sperm Jake just squoze into you. “The look on his face when he figures out I’ve been breedin’ his little sister—”

“I have never been more thankful of the fact that Na’vi and humans can’t reproduce together. Hand on my heart, I mean that.”

You slide your shorts and panties back up your legs and reach for your thrown tank top. The inconspicuous smudges of green from the boulder across the back of it fill you with a puny drop of dread — you’ll just pray really hard to both God and Eywa that nobody pays it any mind. 

That and the bulbous bruise on your tit, the bite on your leg, the finger indents on your hips.

“I was doing that thing you were doing. Killing two birds with one stone,” Jake says as he searches the ground for his tewng. “Fucking you ‘cause I wanted to and fucking you because I know wanting you is gonna piss off your annoying big brother.”

You had said that, hadn’t you? And even though the entire scheme of Jake wanting to scorn your brother so badly that he has to use you as a human fuck-toy seems ludicrous, you can’t deny the very minuscule jolt of thrill it gives you. It would be fun to piss Norm off a little bit. He has been a total arse lately.

“Norm’s all you think about,” you tease. “You sure you don’t like him instead?”

“Shut up.”

Jake hands you your cardigan with an amused smile, his tail whipping to and fro happily. 

“Your coat, ma’am.”

“Love how you only have one thing to slip back into,” you point out as you take the cardigan from him, and he reaches for the tewng and chuckles. “You could’ve just lifted it up.”

“Could’ve, would’ve, didn’t,” he replies.

There’s an uncharacteristic silence between you both as you climb back into your clothes, and while Jake fiddles with his tewng with his tongue between his lips, you look back at the lab and sigh. 

Somewhere in that lab is the man you’ve been thinking of for two months — Jake in his human form, lying in a link unit as he takes control through another body. You wonder what he might think when he wakes up: will he come searching for you in the dark? Come kiss you, tell you how he feels?

Jake creeps up to you with an alarming light foot, and the feeling of his hand on top of your head makes you look up suddenly. 

“What’s on your mind?” he asks. 

“You,” you sigh, looking back at the lab. “Are you going to follow through with tonight when you’re back as yourself, or is this an avatar Jake exclusive?”

“Come on. You still want that loser in there?” Jake feels his heart tug — he doesn’t know if to feel offended that you’re still thinking of someone else, or flattered because that someone else is technically him, the real him, the version of him that Jake hates the most.

“You’re so mean to him,” you grumble. Then pause, and add, “To you. That’s literally still you in there. If anything, doesn’t that make me look a little bit obsessed?” Jake gently pushes your head as you fall into a slow walk in the direction of the remote lab. “Wow. Actually, I just realised that’s true.”

“Finding out that you liked me was the only reason I started spending more than five minutes at a time in the lab,” Jake tells you. 

“Who told you?”

You both accept a short silence as you stride past the wall that most of the bunks are built against, and you feel an anxious knot forming in your stomach when the clearing at the front of the lab expands into view. 

“I meant it when I said you were horrible at hiding your crush on me,” Jake reminds you. 

Right. 

The tsawksyul Jake found you is thankfully still where you left it, and you slip out of Jake’s touch to fetch it from under the window, but when you turn to him, his eyes are pulled back across the miles of suspended mountains.

“You have somewhere else to be?” you call.

His top lip curls into a half pout as he says, “Not now. But tomorrow I’ve got to do some hunting. If I make a clean kill, I start my iknimaya.”

“Impressive,” you comment, twirling the tsawksyul between your fingers. “You… Will you be gone long?”

Jake hesitates for a moment. Is he reading into it, or are you looking a little bit more crestfallen now you know he’ll be gone for a little while longer?

“Why, you wanna go again?” he asks with a laugh.

“Respectfully, I think my vagina is broken and I need to lie down,” you quip, making him laugh even more. “I was just…curious. If you’re gone too long, I’ll be asleep before you get back.”

Jake creeps towards you and drops to a painful crouch. He’s definitely going to feel the cry and protest in his legs in the morning from being haunched for so long. Still, he frames your face with his hands and takes a long look at your face.

“I’ll roll past your bed extra quietly,” he promises. 

You snort and push yourself away from him. “Safe travels, big guy. I’ll see you in the morning?”

Peering up at him, you breathe in the sight of him one last time as he nods once and rises to stand. The long shadow drawn by his lithe figure falls over you.

“Affirmative,” he states. You look up at him for a second and smile. Did it take having his cock in your stomach for you to realise how pretty he is like this, or have you known all along?

“Go,” you tell him, nodding towards the edge of the cliff before turning to the door. Over your shoulder, Jake scoffs a laugh and turns on his heels, his eyes scanning the mountain range as he approaches the edge. 

The bravery you had before died long ago and you quickly twist the air-lock to the door and force it open, your heart in your throat. You don’t look back at him, even when he looks back at you with an endearing smile on his face.

The lab is deathly silent when you slide back inside. You were half expecting someone to stir at the sound of the door sealing shut, but if anyone’s awake, they make no effort to show it. Tip-toeing to the small bathroom, you very hurriedly go about your business and wipe away the eternal flood of cum from between your legs. With the amount Jake just put inside you, you’re fairly confident that even a human with an average sense of smell could sniff him all over you.

The long stalk back to your bunk is made silently and carefully. Norm is fast asleep on the top bunk he unhappily shares with Jake, the aforementioned’s bunk empty and cold, the link unit whirring quietly. Just the sight and sound of it makes you unnaturally nervous, and you turn to speed towards your bottom bunk and peer at Trudy. She’s out like a light. 

The thin blanket is pulled to your chin once you settle in the sheets, and you refuse to accept that it’s cowardice you feel when the sound of the link unit slowly begins to fade and Jake hauls himself out with a pained groan. You remain very still as he fumbles for his chair, though you fight the urge to get up, help him and while you’re at it, kiss him until he can’t breathe.

You hope your acting has improved since your terrible attempts of hiding your crush and try to make it look as though you’re asleep, but the distinct sound of rolling wheels makes its way towards where you sleep; you steady your breaths so it looks like you’re out of it, and perhaps Jake will fall for it this time. 

Your stomach tightens when the wheels stop next to your bed, and you’re uncomfortably aware of the set of eyes staring at you curled up and facing the wall.

Jake’s hand brushes the back of your head gently, and you’re not sure if that means you’ve been caught, but then you feel Jake’s fingers brush a section of hair away from your neck and nearly sigh at the feeling of his mouth pressing a kiss to the nape of your neck. It is so sweet, so fond and gentle, and annoyingly quick. He pulls away and the sound of wheels roll towards his own bunk.

Every sound he makes feels like it’s right in your ear. 

You almost wish you’d rolled over and took his face into your hands. But Jake’s smooch against your nape feels like a stolen secret, something shared between only you two, something special. 

No matter, you think as you wriggle to get comfortable. He’ll be there in the morning. And it’ll be the man you’ve wanted the entire time who wants you back who receives all your stirring desires.

[bestworstcase]

What are your thoughts on the concept of destiny in rwby? With choice and knowledge being so important and Cinder believing in destiny. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it is what comes to mind, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

WHERES THAT POST

ahem.

“do you believe in destiny?”

look at that. the utter loathing, the absolute disgusted fury that contorts cinder’s face when pyrrha asks her this question. yes, cinder fall believes in destiny; she believes in it the way pyrrha nikos believes in monsters.

without you, i am nothing—but because of you, i am everything.

“i won’t have to run now.” / “that’s all you’ll ever do.”

this is what destiny means to her. a collar around her throat. a world where she’s meant to bow her head and endure years upon years of torture, abuse, slavery; her destiny is to be hurt and exploited and brutally punished when she fights back. that’s all you’ll ever do.

she takes that to heart.

destiny, in rwby, is a coercive idea, a mechanism of control. it’s very real—it’s the divine plan for the world, the day of judgment ozma has been asked to prepare for. “i will do what i must to maintain order,” says the god of light as he burns ozma alive. “yes,” answers cinder as she strikes pyrrha down. fate is the name of the tyrant condemning the world to annihilation for the sake of order.

what gets lost, i think, in many fan discussions of cinder is that her absolute belief in destiny is matched only by her absolute hatred of it; where pyrrha (like ozma) is guided by faith in destiny, cinder (like salem) is screaming bloody defiance of destiny all the way down.

fundamentally rwby is a story about choices—why do people do the things they do? what does it mean to do the right thing? why does evil exist? what drives us? how do we define ourselves? how do we define others?—and destiny, fatalism, what this idea represents in the narrative is rejection of choice. ozpin appeals to the notion of fate to explain his way of doing things:

“Make no mistake, there is a higher power guiding our actions. Call it Fate. Call it Destiny. Call it the gods. Or maybe it’s simply the randomness of existence. Whatever it is, I have to trust that we are here for a reason, and while my methods might be unorthodox, they haven’t failed me yet.”

and while there is a kernel of wisdom in this—his broader point is that life is uncontrollably chaotic and that one must therefore be able to improvise when things inevitably go awry—like the dreadful advice he gives ruby in V1, it’s distorted by his submission to The Way Things Are. why does he reject salem in the lost fable? “this isn’t what he asked of me.” not “this is wrong.” not “i don’t want this.”

“look how you’ve diminished. how you’ve lessened yourself.”—salem isn’t talking about his magic. she remembers the ozma who struck down her tyrannical, abusive father to rescue her simply because it was the right thing to do and she’s looking at him now—a man who has wasted lifetime after lifetime after lifetime trying in abject futility to enact the will of a tyrannical monster instead of doing what he wants or what he feels is right—and asking what happened to you?

rwby’s stance on destiny is this: it is a grave mistake to put your faith in destiny, to follow it blindly, to accept that it is the way things must be and will always be. everyone has a choice. choices matter. choice is everything. ozpin is more terrified of choice than any other quality, and it is the relic salem is most desperately fighting to claim. choice is everything and fate is its meaningless, inhuman and inhumane antithesis.

[tendermiasma]

Hello! I'm a recent graduate in illustration and wondered if you could share any insight on getting into the field? Really love your work and appreciate you sharing it with us!

Best!

Hi and congrats on graduating! Illustration isn't my field but I assume you mean you're looking to get into animation. I made a short post here about things to focus on based on what I do for work but truth be told, I came in an unconventional way (drew fanart and the director was in the right place at the right time to see it and give me a chance)-- not unheard of, but it wasn't something I prepared for or aligned my professional goals up for beforehand. I don't have a ton of knowledge in this area. But, there's still a kernel to be had in that if you spend time focusing on and putting out into the world exactly what you want to see instead of what you think you should be doing, your unique voice will shine through and that's valuable. It's also very important to be able to follow the set style of the show so I think both of these things are important for success.

I don't want to be a downer, but I'd be remiss not to say it's rough out there for animation right now. The industry overall is in contraction. I don't say it to to discourage you because it will cycle and you should absolutely pursue it if it's something you really want, but I also don't want you to think it's simply a you-problem if you're not having luck landing a job. It's completely normal and financially prudent to work another type of job to pay the bills while you build your portfolio and search for animation work. It may take a long time but that's the situation we're all faced with right now so take heart in that and make good choices.

Best of luck to you!!

[zealouswerewolfcollector]

Maiar Hate This Simple Trick

I wrote a sequel to @elentarial‘s Desperation and Defeat for @tolkienremix. Big thanks to @welcomingdisaster for beta! Please make sure to check out the original fic too (and the rest of fics in the collection!)

2234 words, T, background Celebrimbor/Narvi and Celeborn/Galadriel

On Ao3

Compilation of miscellaneous notes and letters sent between the high lords and ladies concerning a particular incident of note occurred in Ost-in-Edhil in the eleventh century of the Second Age.

From Prince Celeborn of Doriath to Lord Celebrimbor of Eregion

Dear Celebrimbor,

You might not be aware of it (I lay no blame on you for ignorance born from inexperience), but when you assumed the leadership of Eregion, you also took upon yourself the burden of responsibility for the safety and comfort of all its citizens. 

Regretfully, my safety and comfort were threatened when the Maia, who hails himself Annatar, chose to visit me uninvited to inquire of the whereabouts of my beloved wife and, most disturbingly, to complain about certain facets of your Dwarven colleague. (I have made my views of your association with that individual perfectly clear, so I shall not repeat myself here.)

Celebrimbor, mayhap the Noldor seek knowledge everywhere, but we, the Sindar, have certain reservations. Thanks to your Maiarin suitor, I now know more of Dwarven anatomy than I ever wanted or needed to know. 

I beseech you to keep this Annatar creature on a short leash if he ever returns (which I doubt as the Dwarf’s physique seems to have thoroughly intimidated him). Perhaps more importantly, I implore you to advise your Dwarven friend to dress modestly. I shudder to think of the response an unexpected encounter similar to what he had with Annatar might elicit in your Sindarin citizens.

I remain at your disposal if you ever need advice concerning governing the realm.

Yours in friendship,

Celeborn

Celebrimbor’s notes:

???

Ask Narvi

Could he not walk for a few minutes and speak to me?

Find out when and why Annatar left

 From Lady Galadriel in Lothlórien to her cousin 

Celebrimbor,

I will keep this brief. I am happy that the pretender has been ousted from Eregion. However, I am very unhappy that he had the gall to come to me with his lies. With all the ousting experience that you have, would it be so difficult to dissuade him? 

But perhaps I give you too much credit. The deceiver likes to add a kernel of truth to his lies to make himself seem more trustworthy, and from what he did not say, I reasoned that Narvi played a great part in his exile. I hope you understand that you should always keep Narvi by your side. Even when the time comes for him to pass to Aulë’s Halls, I strongly advise you to acquire another Dwarven companion after the appropriate mourning period.

Please convey my most cordial greetings to Narvi. Aside from my husband, he is what I miss most of all about Eregion. But if you believe you can come begging me to return now that the imposter is gone, I must disappoint you. I have left for good.

Keep Narvi away from Celeborn, but do try to visit him from time to time. He is lonely, and you are his kinsman, however distant.

Your cousin,

Galadriel

P.S. Celebrían sends her love.

Celebrimbor’s notes:

[a sketch of a ring]

 From Lady Galadriel to her beloved husband Celeborn, Prince of Doriath

Dearest,

How fare you alone, without your wife and your daughter? Enough time has passed for my wrath to abate and allow me to admit that I miss you. Oh, if only you were not stubborn as a Noldo* and joined us in Lothlórien! It is reminiscent of Doriath of old, or it could be one day if we both put our minds to it. Were you here, we could run bare and free as we did in our youth under Melian’s singing trees.

Do you remember, beloved, how I took your hand and asked you to show me the magical corners of your home? You wove a garland from the golden beech leaves in Neldoreth and put it over my hair. Your touch was as soft as the grass beneath my feet. In the cold waters of Esgalduin, we pledged our eternal love to each other, witnessed only by the nightingales and Eru himself.

In Lothlórien we may regain some of what we have lost. The song of the trees is different but no less sweet. When the mellyrn seeds grow into trees, we shall have something even Melian did not. If you close your eyes, do you see you and I walking under their bright leaves? Do you see yourself taking my hand and asking me to show you my best-loved part of the forest? I see it, beloved, I do.

[omitted two pages of descriptions of Lothlórien and three pages of intimate nature]

Incidentally, the detested Maia paid me a visit recently. I will not tire you by repeating what he said. It was the same old lies he had bored me with in Ost-in-Edhil. I am surprised he insisted yet again he was an apprentice of Aulë, knowing that I knew for certain he was lying. He seemed rattled, for the lack of a better word, as much as someone like him can be rattled. I am quite sure it was due to his expulsion from Eregion.

Dearest, I need to know exactly what happened, what affected him so, and how it can be turned against him and those of his ilk. I have already written to Celebrimbor, but it is highly unlikely he will write back or be aware of the details of the events that transpired. Thus, it falls to you to find out. Begin with Narvi the dwarf. If you are fortunate, it will end with him. I suspect he has played the greatest role in the pretender’s defeat.

Once more, I want to emphasize the importance of your task. I care not what you have to do. Even if you have to grovel before Narvi, do it. I need every detail. I know you find his dalliance with Celebrimbor offensive, but if you wish to have any chance for us to live as a husband and wife again, you will do this for me. If you are successful, I might even consider returning to Ost-in-Edhil with our daughter. I have not told her I am writing to you again. It upsets her greatly not to have you with us. I have no desire to remind her of it.

If you have any doubts, reread my letter, dearest. I know you will do what is best for our family. 

Your loving wife,

Galadriel

* Margin note from Celeborn։ the Noldor do not own the concept of stubbornness

 From Elrond, King’s herald, to Lord Celebrimbor in Ost-in-Edhil

My dear Celebrimbor,

Are you as surprised as I am to realize that ages have passed since our last meeting? I cannot lament my duties, and I know that you, too, bear yours gladly, but surely we should strive to find more time for those we hold dear. More and more frequently, I find myself wanting to turn to you for advice or for a simple conversation like the ones we used to have so long ago. I am not the only one who misses you for you have touched the hearts of many people before you moved East. 

[omitted five pages of detailed reports on mutual friends]

Dear Celebrimbor, please do not think this is the only reason I am writing to you, but I need your help with a matter that might prove greatly significant. I must begin with a story that will certainly sound very familiar to you. Several years ago, a Maia came to Lindon, claiming to have been in the training of Aulë and offering his aid and counsel. The King was tempted, as was I, and as I am sure anyone would be. However, soon I came to mistrust the Maia and his words for the promises he made seemed designed to gratify his listener and often changed depending on who he was talking to, but in such a way that the listener failed to notice. Moreover, I perceived he did not favor me much, which would not trouble me, as you certainly know, if he did not speak so sweetly to my face and then whisper to the King’s ear that I was contemplating usurping him.

Fortunately, this was what made the King reconsider accepting the Maia’s offer for Ereinion Gil-galad knows me better than I know myself and has never questioned my loyalty. The Maia was asked to leave Lindon, and we did not hear of him again until weeks ago when he reappeared in Lindon and flung himself, repentant, at the King’s feet. He swore he regretted his mistakes and had come to atone as well as reiterated his offer to help preserve the beauty, power and youth of the Eldar for ages to come. Presently, I received a letter from Lady Galadriel, cautioning me against trusting the Maia and recounting a compelling story about a Dwarven friend of yours, who is seemingly unperturbed by Maiarin wiles. I shall copy her letter here, so you can read it for yourself.

[omitted Galadriel’s letter]

My dear Celebrimbor, I fear the Maia has truly learned from his mistakes and shall henceforth be even more careful in his actions. Even if he does not sway the King, there are others he may influence, and if his intentions are verily as malicious as I suspect, we might be facing a disaster once he succeeds. Therefore, I ask you to share the tale of your Dwarven companion with me and the King, so we can know how to fight this evil. Please spare no details. Perhaps you may not agree or may think I am exaggerating, but finding out how to counteract a rogue Maia might be the most noteworthy discovery of our age.

The King and I shall await your response eagerly.

Forever your friend,

Elrond

Celebrimbor’s notes:

Ask Narvi

Ask Elrond to get to the point at least by the third page

[a sketch of a ring]

[a sketch of Narvi unclothed]

 From Celebrimbor to Narvi

My love, 

Celeborn has finally taken his leave. What a strange speech he gave! Unnecessarily belligerent too if I may say so. And how long! I could have worked instead or spent time with you. I must remedy the time missed. Consider this note an invitation to dinner. I am going to have it in the forge, so we can work as well as eat.  

Besides, I have a favor to ask of you. I have received several letters, all concerning the same matter. I suspect you are more knowledgeable about it than I am. Perhaps you could draft an answer and subtly remind my friends and kin how occupied with work you and I are.

However, I should ask you to explain to me first exactly what happened. The letters suggest an odd sequence of events, although amusing. But I should like to hear from your lips how you banished poor Annatar. 

Is it a long story? If so, perhaps you should not wait until dinner and come to see me immediately. I have truly missed you. All of you.

Your Shorty

 From High King Ereinion Gil-galad to his herald Elrond Peredhel

Greetings Elrond,

I hope you are well. I am puzzled. I have received a strange letter from Celebrimbor. It contains drawings and measurements detailing the anatomy of a Dwarf. Celebrimbor claims it can be used as a weapon. It was sent at your request. Care to explain? I am not interested in any genitals, including Dwarven. I have no idea why Celebrimbor thought it a good idea. I have little time for it. 

The letter is enclosed. Do what you will with it. Please keep me uninformed. 

Ereinion Gil-galad

High King of the Noldor

No notes left on the letter, but contemporaries speak of one of the loudest sighs ever uttered by Elrond Peredhel.

 From Narvi in Ost-in-Edhil to King Durin III

Esteemed Sovereign,

As per your request, I am sending my regular report on the happenings in the Elven realms. Not much has changed since my last letter. My collaboration with the elf is going smoothly. The work on the Doors is nearly complete. Some Elves here remain as conceited as they have been when it comes to Dwarves, but I never fail to answer them in kind. 

Celebrimbor has proven himself an excellent partner in all senses. With your permission, I would like to invite him to Khazad-dûm, so you can make sure of it yourself. I do hope he will not be too popular. I have no desire to spend my life fighting off competitors.

In related news, the sacrilegious villain I have written about in my previous letters is gone from this realm, hopefully for good. I did not want to take credit for it, but some elf-lords have realized it was my doing and are now clamoring for my advice.

My king, I find it necessary for you to know how to dispose of him too. If the elves continue denying this miscreant, he may appear before the doors of Khazad-dûm, trying to get into your good graces. Forgive my forwardness, my king, but in that case, I suggest you and your guards welcome him in the nude. I assure you the sight is guaranteed to make him flee to the shadows he has come from, never to return.

Your servant,

Narvi

[fruttymoment]

Whoa linux user

Do you have a guide on how to switch to it? I have zero coding knowledge (i think that's required) and I trust you with my life

I perfectly understand the "linux is scary and requires very big brain and coding its too hard to use!" thought coming from a Windows/Mac guy, i really do! But in the end, a linux distro is just a computer kernel that also has a desktop environment and just does what you want it to do like an operating system

Coding on linux is not required. Linux has so many distros at this point that designed to be beginner friendly, requiring "no knowledge but TO gain knowledge while using it"

The linux terminal is the thing that scares most of the users, but trust me once you get used to it you'll realize how efficent it is to operate your computer and do certain tasks from THE terminal instead! In the end, the cold looking white text with black background terminals are the REAL face of computers. Desktop environment is made so EVERYONE can use computers!

The terminal of gnu/linux uses the bash language. In a nutshell, it is pretty easy to learn basic commands actually!

Super beginner friendly linux distros are designed for people (YOUU) who has no experience whatsoever with linux! They are designed and engineered so you dont have to use the terminal much! For example, Linux Mint is the best distro you should start with. It looks and feels like Windows, even! And Mint does not require much terminal usage. That is also their mission, to make an linux distro friendly enough that no terminal usage is needed!

As easy as this sounds, i actually do not recommend staying this far away from the linux terminal. Please start with Linux Mint if you gonna, its just the best for beginners, but also please dont avoid the terminal much! The linux terminal is important to learn because it also teaches you how a computer really works, and certain operations are much more efficent to do via terminal anyway!

Push yourself to interact with the terminal, even. Learn very basic commands like "shutdown now" , and the "sudo" privilege and how it works (linux always asks your password while doing stuff and you also cant do muc without the sudo privileges!)

"sudo" is the command that gives you the REAL admin privileges to do ANYTHING. With your password and sudo, you can even delete your bootloader lol. Linux wont stop you

This means to be extremely careful while using sudo, though! You can do ANYTHING with sudo privileges, and that also contains accidently trashing your computer! Unlike Windows, that doesnt even let you uninstall Edge, linux has no boundries. Its like "we are gonna assume you know what you are doing."

Of course, friendly distros DO warn you on certain stuff, so dont worry too much!

So ye. U can use linux with no coding knowledge, but i dont recommend staying like that. After starting to use linux, you GOTTA let it teach you stuff!

And to the "switching to linux for the first time" part;

I recommend not deleting your main Windows, actually. For first time using linux i heavily recommend the "dual booting" , which simply means booting operating systems more than one in an computer! You can use BOTH linux and windows in thay way! Although, you need to shudown your pc if you want to switch between them and do it in the booting menu

This is because if something goes wrong, or you get very confused, just let Windows be ready in there. Only make the switch the moment when you feel you can operate linux with no issues and easily!

Dual booting basically slices your disk and creates partitions for operating systems. For example if you have an 512GB SSD, in dual booting you can slice it and make Windows use 256GB and Linux use 256GB too! Ofc u can change the numbers here (linux mimt will help u,.)

Before completely switching to linux; be aware that its a bit of a different world. Sure, very popular softwares exists in linux too but some softwares may not suppor linux. Adobe products dont support linux, for example! You can of course just emulate them with Wine software heh, but that would be a bit of a work!

Another problem will be certain online games. Online games does not like linux becuse how easy it is to manipulate the system, so they just either dont run on linux or they ban/kick you when you try to emulate it on linux

An example is Valorant. Valorant does not tun on linux!

And any online game that has a cheap anticheat system will be a problem!

With that being said, linux now supports every single game from Steam, with the Proton software. Just be careful about them online ones! If an online game natively supports linux (TF2, for example!) , it wont be a problem! Check the steam game's info thingy for it!

Oh and official Minecraft works in linux lol

Discord, Spotify etc. popular softwares also work on linux!

Linux in fact has an "app manager" software in their distros, making you install stuff with no terminal whatsoever! Think like Google Play Store but on le pc!

Anyways hehe thats it fo me bascallya! If u wanna switch to linux with no experience, start with the Linux Mint distro i say and explore it well! Tamper everything before fully installing it, dont worry about it! Linux is free. Linux does not care if you want to kill the entire system, even. Linux is freedom

Also please research the dual booting! You'll gonna be needing an 4GB+ USB for it, and a software like Rufus!

The site of Linux Mint has everything you need in detail, step by step ^^ good luck!

[trashquisitor-shirozora]

Full-on disclaimer for anyone who's never seen the disclaimers on my Star Wars fics - I never saw ROTS (I've tried, I've fucking tried, but retaining knowledge of TPM and AOTC to understand ROTS is impossible when my mind just wanders the fuck away during every attempt at a marathon PT watch), I only saw a handful of TCW episodes to study Satine and Mandalore, I never saw Rebels, I haven't seen TOTJ, and my non-OT/ST/Mandoverse/Andorverse/Kenobi/TBOBF/Solo knowledge comes from getting lost in the Wookeepedia, fandom osmosis, and several years playing SW Galaxy of Heroes.

The point is, I have half-baked knowledge and I am trying really hard and I can see the little kernels of interest and intrigue and "A ha! that's a Star Wars!" and my concluding thought for the 3rd episode of Ahsoka is, "FUCK YEAH, SPACE WHALES!!!"

Can someone just.... please explain the fuck to me what Dave is doing here with Ahsoka and Sabine? I don't know if it's the "Sabine thinks the best way to honor and also find Ezra is to become like him" or the whole "everyone has the Force Actually but you need talent, training, and some other fucking thing that sounds exactly like all the times I've been scolded for not trying hard enough thanks to my ADHD brain so that's fucking cool" bit. I don't know if it's that interview press tour thingy where Daisy told Domhnall that even Hux has the Force! Everyone has the Force! The Force is in all of us! We can all become the Jedi! I don't know if it's George's original idea that everyone can use the Force but not everyone does that eventually got changed to "a certain number of midichlorians in your blood gets you into the Jedi Temple". Or is it the whole "the Force is female" campaign? Is it Disney saying, "You can be a Jedi, too!" Are we Spider-man-ing the Jedi? Is that's what's going on? What the fuck is going on? Someone please tell me how we got from "the Force is in all living things and some people are able to sense and use the Force" to "the Force is in all living things and also everyone is capable of sensing and using the Force with the right amount of discipline and training and desire/'can do' attitude" because it feels like I'm being lied to. I'm being fucking bamboozled about what I know about Star Wars.

I don't even know what to say about the spacesuit. Just a lot of hysterical laughter maybe. Cool idea and I bet the concept designs were real fun but still. Hysterical laughter.

Slap some green hair on a kiddo and call him half-Twi'lek. OKAY THEN. Brilliant character design y'all got going. I guess you'd rather invest in the Volume than practical FX and makeup and shit?????

You know that feeling where you have all these thoughts and feelings and WORDS at the tip of your tongue but you lack the vocabulary or the fucking memory to hold that vocabulary and use it well? That's what I'm experiencing after watching Hera argue poorly with Mon and the Senators (they just formed the band and it's not going well, or so they say). This characterizing of bureaucracy, politicians, government is useless, clunky, stubborn, foolish, naive, soft, obstinate for no reason other than to hinder the rogueish hero, is such a tired, cheap trope. Haven't we learned enough from American copaganda shows? Haven't we learned from watching our hero cops and detectives bending and breaking rules to catch the bad guys while the Internal Affairs people are antagonists, rule-abiding busybodies who don't see that they're only getting in the way of our intrepid heroes catching the real bad guys?! Politics is messy and it is complicated and it is hard and it does have people who did sit on the sidelines during the war but to villainize them just because they didn't fight in the war, they didn't lose friends and family and Kanan, they won't give our general what she wants? Or do these senators already have history in the GFFA that I would've already known if I already watched some other TV shows or read the 'pedia religiously?

I thought the first 2 seasons of the Mando Show explored the post-OT galaxy pretty well. I liked how Din and Greef called the New Republic "a joke" and insinuated that they were unreliable and can't be counted upon to protect little Outer Rim worlds like Nevarro from Imperial remnants. It gave the impression of a baby Republic that is trying hard but struggling and their patrols are stretched so thin because of Mon's decision to demilitarize the Republic, and that's why they're such a non-presence out here in the Outer Rim. That's why Carson went out of his way to recruit Cara. She's been out here, she's done shit, she knows shit, she knows the lay of the land, she can be the eyes and ears that Carson and the New Republic can't be. You can build so fucking much out of these little interactions and conversations... but Dave & Jon chose to make things easy for themselves by characterizing the New Republic as incompetent, feckless, nonsensible, cruel, decadent, apathetic, uncaring, utterly useless to our very active rogueish heroes. They fast-tracked the New Republic's downfall to make it so much easier to prop up our heroes, and for what? To remind us that in the end it all doesn't fucking matter because Starkiller Base blows it all up anyway?

At least, at least, make it look like our heroes fucking tried to rebuild the galaxy after the Empire fell. At least make the New Republic fumbling and earnest but ultimately weighed down by so many voices demanding that they be prioritized in the rebuilding. Mon's government inherited a really fucking bad situation but at least have them reach halfway to something that she and Leia can be proud of before the infighting started and political factions started ripping down all that hard-fought and hard-won progress. Talk about the fucking whiplash from the despair and hope of Andor to whatever the fuck Mandalorian Season 3 showed us and whatever the fuck Ahsoka is continuing to show us.

Anyway.

I get that having a droid sidekick is the Cool Star Wars Thing To Do, but should Huyang really be treated as a sidekick and an expodumper? He really fucking should have gone to Ossus with Luke but nah, leave that fucking loser to his own business ignoring Ahsoka and Hera trying to stop a new war that nobody believes is actually going to happen. I mean, if you really think about it, did Hera really sell anything to these senators? It seems to me that all they see is a general who has only known war and will only ever see war around every corner, in every nook and cranny, under every bed. Of course they're going to be fucking skeptical and of course they're going to question her request for even more resources to find Ezra and maybe stop Thrawn, and the fucking answer, Hera Syndulla, is to not question if these people ever fought in the Rebellion and shame them for the sacrifices they did not make. This is such fucking cheapsass writing and it really sucks all the fun out of the episode.

Speaking of fun, how about them space whales! Bring them back, Felony. I want space whales and I want space cats. Give me purrgils and lothcats all day, every day.

I can't stop thinking about Disney's decision to give Ahsoka a primetime slot. I can't stop thinking about why that show got a primetime slot and not any of the other ones. Is it the numbers? Are they trying to catch a particular kind of crowd? What are the numbers, Disney? Why won't you show us the numbers? Where the fuck are the numbers, Disney? What are you afraid of? What are you hiding? What won't you tell your writers and your actors, Disney? What aren't you saying?

Anyway, space whales rule and I got other goddamn shit to do like keep writing my own ideas on a post-OT galaxy through fic.

P.S. The way Ray just fucking oozes charisma even if he was only there for like 2 minutes. And Diana remains fantastic. I love her brand of villainy even if I'm still baffled by her being a human Witch. What the fuck.

[literaticat]

A question relating to a picture book submission that always stumps me: “state why you are the right person to write this story.” I understand this if the pb is non-fiction, based on knowledge or events that only the author might have or have experienced. But for fiction, the honest answer, for me, would be “er…I’m the one who thought of it.” Do you have any suggestions for how to deal with this vexing question? Thanks, Jennifer.

I can't say as I've ever asked this question, so IDK if they are expecting something different, but I imagine what they are getting at is, IS this based on special knowledge or experience? Do you have a degree in this field? Are you from this other country you are writing about? Are you an expert in whatever? So this question would give you the opportunity to talk about any connections you might have with the material, that might not have come up in the query itself or felt awkward to put in a bio.

Perhaps it would help to re-frame the question as, what inspired you to write this?'

So let's say you've written a hilarious story filled with wordplay. Maybe your answer can be something like, "When I was a kid, I was obsessed with books like William Steig's CDB and Jon Agee's books of palindromes, which helped me see language in new ways and were hilarious. With THIS TITLE, I was aiming to create a similar feeling in the reader!"

You've written a story about an immigrant kid discovering *whatever* for the first time in their new land, "When I was a kid, my parents told me stories about their immigrant experience and I was fascinated by the idea of seeing my boring-seeming neighborhood for the first time with fresh eyes; that stayed with me and was a kernel of inspiration for THIS TITLE."

You've written a story about a kid discovering a gnome world. You like to hike around and look for mushrooms. "I'm an avid forager and amateur mycologist. The first time I noticed a patch of whatever-puff-mushrooms growing in a glade of bluebells, I thought it looked like a magical gnome city -- this story imagines that it really was."

You've written a story about FEELINGS or something: "I wrote this story for my own kids who, when they were toddlers, had a lot of BIG FEELINGS and sometimes didn't know where to put them."

You've written a story about a mole and a vole playing pickle-ball: "I'm obsessed with pickleball and so are my kids; we got a kick out of imagining animals getting into the mix!"

See?

[dravencore]

really quick and shitty nai of rice and ruin one shot GO

-

"Oh, it's you."

Nai glanced over, scowling at the clear displeasure in Wolfwood's voice. He didn't bother giving a response, just looked back at the rice paddy he was watching like a hawk.

"Thought Vash would be out here."

"You're up too early," Nai rested his chin on his hand and narrowed his eyes at a particular patch of grass. Wolfwood had no idea what he saw - it all looked the same to him. "He'll be back momentarily."

"So you're just watchin' the rice in the meantime?"

"Yes,"

"Sure that glare of yours isn't gonna kill the crop?"

Nai directed the full weight of his glare at Wolfwood, who held up his hands in surrender with a smirk that said he was just proven right.

When the sky started to turn pink with the sunrise, Nai stood from his perch and moved to the paddy. Wolfwood immediately stole his spot and watched as the god poked around the stalks that were just starting to shoot up.

"Careful with that," Wolfwood drawled.

In response Nai tore out the weeds he found with much more violence than was necessary.

As much as he didn't want to admit it to himself, tending to the rice was a soothing process. He found himself enjoying the feeling of mud beneath his feet and cool water lapping at his ankles.

Any sense of peace he might have found observing the nutrition level of the soil and calculating the ratios of the day's fertilizer was crushed to dust under the watchful eye of the human. Pretending that he didn't know what he was doing was impossible. The exact temperature of the water, the specific placement of every weed that managed to sprout, the knowledge that the rice was not developed to the degree that it should at this point of the season - all of it came as easily as breathing.

All of it was something a god of war should not know. He could swallow his pride and pretend that his brother gave him orders to follow instead of the other way around, but at this stage of growth. Not this early in the day where he needed to set everything up to minimize whatever damage Vash was going to cause during the day.

He needed to write notes, damn it.

All he could do for was wait for Vash to finally return home and distract the human long enough for him to make a comprehensive list of tasks for the day. To keep himself preoccupied, he started to mentally prepare it.

Fertilizer: Kernel, extra hemp; spring water; anything that will kill those damn weeds - at this point Nai sent a brief prayer that Vash was finally able to secure a decent amount of metallic sand from the demon fortress. Absolute worst case scenario, they had beans to spare.

Water: Keep depth to the ankles, open both gates at midday to keep the shoots from burning, but don't let it get too cold.

For the love of everything in heaven keep an eye on the ducks-

"Hey, Spikey," Wolfwood's voice broke Nai out of his thoughts and he sighed in relief at the arrival of his twin.

Nai displayed his relief by narrowing his eyes and hissing, "You're late."

"Yeah, good to see you, too," Vash rolled his eyes and dropped the pack of materials he gathered through the night. He sent a wary look towards Wolfwood and attempted to inconspicuously wipe away the viscous demon blood still clinging to his cheek, "How's the rice?"

I did everything you told me to do while you were gone, I swear.

"It's rice."

You may live. For now.

Nice.

For now. Get your human away from me.

"Hey, Wolfwood, wanna help me feed the ducks?"

"No," despite his answer, Wolfwood was already standing up, "but anything's better than watching Knives here fumble around in the mud."

Nai gave a very rude gesture, which only made the human smile back with all of his teeth.

"Aw, don't be like that, he's doing his best," Vash laughed and led him down the hill towards the pen.

Nai suspected that Vash enjoyed pretending that Nai didn't know what he was doing a little too much. If the to-do list he left behind was a bit too rigorous, well, that was between him and the rice.

[strawberryjamsara]

What was your fav chapter to write for dead end so far

I think it was the second Ryoko pov chapter. Making up a character for one who’s non existent initially seemed hard and I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to write her in but I’m so glad I did so because she’s a joy to write. Her hard headed constant pushing for the truth and push pull against Keiji, who doesn’t want to let another kid get involved in Asunaro and be lost again and her who wants to find her missing friends, and he’s trying to do right by her while also throwing himself into danger and telling her not to do the same is really a dynamic that writes itself. Having her become his new weird girl was the best choice I could make.

The second chapter from her pov really shows off their dynamic well. He tries to spy on Asunaro without her so she finds out when, buys a ticket, and makes herself known because he knows now she won’t quit and it’s better to be with her than leave her alone.

There’s also the homework and her talking about crime and he thinks she wants to hear reasons why the world is working that way, but she doesn’t, what she wants to hear is for him to be pissed that this stuff is just accepted, like how it was accepted that her friends were gone. She didn’t want the reason her friends left she wanted them back and she was angry they were gone, and Keiji just tries to explain with logic why the world works this way instead of showing emotion. A lot of stuff he does is masking emotions. All the reasons he gives for trying to help Sara have kernels of truth even before the end of the chapter but he’s so jokey and not showing his true face with them so how is Ryoko supposed to think of them as real answers?

Then the content of Ryoko mourning her friends and oh man. So much of the joy has been sucked out of her life. Even though she thinks the ripcord is a crappy ride, she still picked it first, because Joe loved it, but she has no real excuse to ride it for fun without him. Also a comment pointed out a Shin parallel with Sara and the scarf which I did not catch in writing but… AAAAAAAAH

Oh speaking of Sara! Let’s talk about that scene! And yeah she’s so worried for Ryoko. Ryoko isn’t protected by the deal, and by Sara’s knowledge should be at home not knowing a thing about Asunaro and her fate. She then finds out about Keiji, how he’s now familiar with Ryoko, and how he’s ‘not okay with the contract’ enough to be threatened and also with purple hair! So much has changed! And yet she cannot say a word she is thinking because she is stuck with her father right behind her dictating her every move. All she can really do is play a role while they talk around her, and maybe say something once in a while to try and piece things together. Keiji and Ryoko are there saying she’s her own person but she knows the truth in her head that she’s her fathers daughter and heiress of asunaro first and foremost. She doesn’t need a script, because she knows what her path in life is.

Anyways! This chapter made me ill!

[noeticprayer]

Holy Martyr Phanurius

Reading from the Synaxarion:

Little is known of the holy Martyr Phanurius, except that which is depicted concerning his martyrdom on his holy icon, which was discovered in the year 1500 among the ruins of an ancient church on Rhodes, when the Moslems ruled there. Thus he is called "the Newly Revealed." The faithful pray to Saint Phanurius especially to help them recover things that have been lost, and because he has answered their prayers so often, the custom has arisen of baking a Phaneropita ("Phanurius-Cake") as a thanks-offering.

Apolytikion of Martyr Phanurius in the Fourth Tone

A heavenly song of praise is brightly sung on the earth; * the hosts of the Angels keep an earthly festival now in splendor and radiant joy; * from on high, they praise with hymns the suff'rings and struggles; * and below, the Church doth laud the heavenly glory * thou foundest by thy contests and pains, O glorious Phanurius.

Kontakion of Martyr Phanurius in the Third Tone

From a vile captivity, thou didst deliver the Lord's priests, and, O godly-minded one, didst break their bonds by divine might; thou didst bravely shame the tyrants' audacious madness, giving joy unto the Angels, O thou Great Martyr. O Phanurius most glorious, we all revere thee as a true warrior of God.

Epistle Reading

The Reading is from St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 15:29-38

Brethren, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why am I in peril every hour? I protest, brethren, by my pride in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesos? If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Do not be deceived: "Bad company ruins good morals." Come to your right mind, and sin no more. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame. But some one will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

Gospel Reading

The Reading is from the Gospel According to Matthew 21:23-27

At that time, when Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" Jesus answered them, "I also will ask you a question; and if you tell me the answer, then I also will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?" And they argued with one another, "If we say, 'From heaven,' he will say to us, 'Why then did you not believe him?' But if we say, 'From men,' we are afraid of the multitude; for all hold that John was a prophet." So they answered Jesus, "We do not know." And he said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things."

[fox-bright]

You're absolutely right. The shit that goes on in herbal medicine is maddening to me.

I'm the child of a homeopath/herbalist, and I've been gardening for a couple of decades, and things have gotten so much worse in that time. Anything can be sold, and it's not being dealt with by the FDA because it sidles around needing to be regulated. Anything can be offered as a treatment--my local co-op grocery sells bags of "apricot nuts!" You know, the kernel from the stone fruit? As if they're a snack, and as if amygdalin is good for you (instead of breaking down into cyanide as your body processes it).

It's absolutely reasonable that people want to find ways to take matters into their own hands. We're in a very frightening time right now, and things are getting worse across a bunch of axes. Everything is more expensive and we can't trust so many of the people in power. But there's no such thing as Magical Woman Power Herbs, and there's no such thing as Secret Mystic Witch Knowledge, and behaving like there is is a good way to get someone killed.

There are herbs people used to take because it was less violent than being beaten into a miscarriage, and had a lower chance of giving you toxemia than forcing your cervix open did (back before we'd developed germ theory). But when herbal medicine WORKS, it's just called "medicine."

I'll take horehound if my lungs are particularly bad--but I'm still using my Albuterol inhaler.

I'll drink a bit of raspberry leaf tisane if my period is particularly awful--but guess what, ibuprofen and naproxen are generally much more effective.

And many, many herbal supplements and medicines have interactions with regulated medicines, some of those reactions are really dangerous.

If you need to procure an abortion, and it isn't legal in your state, there are groups that can help. There are ways to get mifepristone and misoprostol, which ARE compounded in specific dosages, metered, carefully tested--and aren't going to kill you.

Herbal abortifacients, when they work--which is not often--do so by putting your organs in danger. Your body goes "Well, fuck, do I want to keep the kidneys, or the fetus?" But there's no guarantee you get to keep the kidneys, either--and it is not infrequent that organ damage, even very severe organ damage, is done while still not inducing an abortion.

This meme is a MURDER ATTEMPT.

I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!

Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.

Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.

Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!

The person who made this meme is PURPOSEFULLY, ACTIVELY, trying to get desperate people killed!

[thorngrassrecords]

Chapter 1: First Encounters

Dreams and memories are like two rivers flowing parallel and near, waters and sediment from both ending up within the other. Often memories are altered to be more like dreams each time you recall them, things slowly being added until it is merely fiction around a small kernel of truth, with dreams often being influenced by memories and life itself. But this, thing, this journal seems to be able to show them in perfect detail, even if not of your life. Although I have a feeling something isn’t quite right, what I am shown does not seem connected to me, and over the 3 years I have had it, our first meeting keeps coming to mind, mainly it using Astora, my last name, as a title with its tone being that of an accusation. I am starting to think that perhaps I am not truly of that line, but of a different, but I do suppose I should introduce myself.

I am Edward Nakar Winter Astora, born and raised in my hometown of Juniper Grove, a quiet small town known for its junipers and gin, and for its concentration of super-natural entities, many of which are rather peaceful. For most of my life, writing has been my passion along with the study of how plants can be used in medicine. My life has been dominated by research into the supernatural beings of the second era, from the great beings of Cykarath, to the lowly ones of Sekna, where they are most concentrated. My town comes in second for how many of these beings exist here, and all of them are fascinating, from the Whistler Dyna to the forest spirits that surround us, they do not mind being studied, but encourage it.

But out of all my 45 years upon this planet, I have never seen something quite like this journal. Most super-naturals seem to not fully belong to this world, with few exceptions, they are always misty when viewed and always seem to be in some kind of pain. The only other supernatural I know of right off the top of my head that is of this world is The Whistler, but he himself has told me what he is, a human warped with body magic.

The journal is different however, being something clearly from this world, but seemingly so old that it knows as much as an author should about a world they are constructing. It talks about the past, shows different memories of past people who walked the earth, even as far back as the dark elves if you can believe that. But I suppose I should talk about what it has shown me instead of just rambling about what it may be.

The journal shows all kinds of memories, but if you wish to recall your own, you must give it access, otherwise all it can do is show you other people’s memories, but that is not all it can do, it can also show dreams, and even let you truly relive events or watch events from those long gone. Over the past three years, I have seen the rise and collapse of the Dark Elf empire, the massive changes in lands, the rise of the different magics, and even the reign of one Nykal White-mane, the Astora of Dominic, a brutal tyrant who seemed to take immense pleasure in harming those weaker than him. The paths it takes between them, a massive tunnel, colors warping past faster than one can perceive, a constant sense of floating coming from your core as your body becomes numb, and your mind more aware of everything around you, how little that is.

While you remain within that realm, you can at a moment's notice change what you are viewing, switching between different things held within it, it’s almost dreamlike. In fact, some of the knowledge shown may be dreams, as there are illogical things shown constantly, this, thing, seems to be drawing you into a dream world where you cannot change anything, not even the smallest things such as a few grains of sand. I wonder if I can change that.

As you exit, the same tunnel happens, and feeling returns rapidly, causing a bit of pain. The aftereffects of traveling into this realm are immense, nausea and weakness with blurred that lasts for around 4-6 weeks, but how much you can learn outweighs the side effects. I mean great knowledge, things that people want to know, want to be able to see. Yet most wouldn’t want to do it because of the effects. Yet someone has to be willing to do it, and I care not for body, only my mind.

[alder-thorngrass]

“River of Dream and Memories”

Chapter 1: First Encounters

Dreams and memories are like two rivers flowing parallel and near, waters and sediment from both ending up within the other. Often memories are altered to be more like dreams each time you recall them, things slowly being added until it is merely fiction around a small kernel of truth, with dreams often being influenced by memories and life itself. But this, thing, this journal seems to be able to show them in perfect detail, even if not of your life. Although I have a feeling something isn’t quite right, what I am shown does not seem connected to me, and over the 3 years I have had it, our first meeting keeps coming to mind, mainly it using Astora, my last name, as a title with its tone being that of an accusation. I am starting to think that perhaps I am not truly of that line, but of a different, but I do suppose I should introduce myself.

I am Edward Nakar Winter Astora, born and raised in my hometown of Juniper Grove, a quiet small town known for its junipers and gin, and for its concentration of super-natural entities, many of which are rather peaceful. For most of my life, writing has been my passion along with the study of how plants can be used in medicine. My life has been dominated by research into the supernatural beings of the second era, from the great beings of Cykarath, to the lowly ones of Sekna, where they are most concentrated. My small little comes in second for how many of these beings exist here, and all of them are fascinating, from the Whistler Dyna to the forest spirits that surround us, they do not mind being studied, but encourage it.

But out of all my 45 years upon this planet, I have never seen something quite like this journal. Most super-naturals seem to not fully belong to this world, with few exceptions, they are always misty when viewed and always seem to be in some kind of pain. The only other supernatural I know of right off the top of my head that is of this world is The Whistler, but he himself has told me what he is, a human warped with body magic.

The journal is different however, being something clearly from this world, but seemingly so old that it knows as much as an author should about a world they are constructing. It talks about the past, shows different memories of past people who walked the earth, even as far back as the dark elves if you can believe that. But I suppose I should talk about what it has shown me instead of just rambling about what it may be.

The journal shows all kinds of memories, but if you wish to recall your own, you must give it access, otherwise all it can do is show you other people’s memories, but that is not all it can do, it can also show dreams, and even let you truly relive events or watch events from those long gone. Over the past three years, I have seen the rise and collapse of the Dark Elf empire, the massive changes in lands, the rise of the different magics, and even the reign of one Nykal White-mane, the Astora of Dominic, a brutal tyrant who seemed to take immense pleasure in harming those weaker than him. The paths it takes between them, a massive tunnel, colors warping past faster than one can perceive, a constant sense of floating coming from your core as your body becomes numb, and your mind more aware of everything around you, how little that is.

While you remain within that realm, you can at a moment's notice change what you are viewing, switching between different things held within it, it’s almost dreamlike. In fact, some of the knowledge shown may be dreams, as there are illogical things shown constantly, this, thing, seems to be drawing you into a dream world where you cannot change anything, not even the smallest things such as a few grains of sand. I wonder if I can change that.

As you exit, the same tunnel happens, and feeling returns rapidly, causing a bit of pain. The aftereffects of traveling into this realm are immense, nausea and weakness with blurred that lasts for around 4-6 weeks, but how much you can learn outweighs the side effects. I mean great knowledge, things that people want to know, want to be able to see. Yet most wouldn’t want to do it because of the effects. Yet someone has to be willing to do it, and I care not for body, only my mind.

[imtheiliad]

I was gonna put this in the tags but this scene is like so high on the list of important for them to me, and how those nine words encapsulate everything they are.

Eddie is there cause he’s worried. Both for the results of the check-up, but also what would happen if he doesn’t give Buck a heads up.

The Eddie that is waiting there for him is the same Eddie that is waiting in the hospital room before the will reveal. He’s holding that kernel of knowledge that could shift bucks paradigm on himself. He’s reading where Buck is in that moment, knowing The Parents are upstairs. But he holds onto it because it clearly isn’t the right time, but it is the same spirit.

He’s also there to warn Buck, to give him some space to express something if needed in light of a harrowing experience and immediately jumping back into work, to say something to prepare Buck for who is waiting upstairs for him so it isn essentially a jump scare. Not just in a “hey your parents are here” but also in a “hey, you have people here. You don’t owe them anything” way, to say, “I have your back.”

Buck on the other hand, knows Eddie and how he’s thinking. He knows that Eddie is asking those questions and wants to relieve that pressure in Eddie’s headspace. Not only because he’s a fixer, but because he wants Eddie to know.

And that conversation could have been so much lengthier, but they only need those nine words to communicate such a wide breadth of emotion.

The eyes…that’s a story that is still being told.

i’m sorry but the “i had to do it” “i know you did” scene is INSANE. why does bobby literally hand buck off to eddie? why was eddie waiting there in the first place? why does buck feel like he has to explain himself to eddie? and why does eddie look at him with those EYES????? it’s NAUSEATING. like it’s absolutely unnecessary how much that scene reads like an established couple interacting im so

[pazodetrasalba]

Intuiting

Dear Caroline:

I know that it is only polite self-deprecation that could lead to your intuitions being described as bs. You are too smart for that. That doesn't mean they have to be correct, though. As an EA/Rationalist, you are well schooled in being skeptic of gut feeling.

Yes, it is obvious that optimizing for doing good is not the same as optimizing for personal happiness. I would object, though, to how you continue the argument, with rewiring yourself for the first. I guess the crux comes from my conception of an individual as possessing an unalienable right, nay, an obligation, to pursue individual flourishing (which subsumes life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but includes so much more), and to be unwilling to sacrifice at least a rather big kernel of this to anything else, including 'doing good'. I can see how your self-disciplining would lead to you being 'more utilitarian', but I don't quite see the 'more agentic' thing in turning yourself into a slave and machine for the churning of +EV, except perhaps in the way that you select 'selfless sacrifice to optimizing for doing good' as your choice of individual flourishing. Which is, I guess, an option as valid as any other (mine are more like 'massive learning', 'intellectual cultivation', 'radical truth seeking' and 'doing some above-the-mean good'), albeit a distasteful one for me.

As for those scenarios you were so optimistic about three years ago, I fear they've been subjected to a pretty tough bashing by the Reality Principle. You are still awesome; your job... well, right now it inspires awe, but not of the good kind; your life then would be, in my opinion, the worst of the three, and not because of 'society’s preconceived notions'. It seems like you were deeply unhappy and unfulfilled on the personal and sentimental sphere.

I can agree a bit more with what you say about trade-offs, even if avoiding calculations sounds like a very non-EA thing to me. In real life, and when you have to make quick decisions, you usually don't have the time and the luxury to make bullshit calculations to any extent, and ed up falling back on heuristics and intuitions. They are refined ones, I guess, the result of a previous context of actual rational calculations on similar situations, but it still sounds like the non-EA thing to do, unless you accept that a lot of the ultra-rationalist 'give the the (model's) numbers, I don't care about you feelings' doesn't really work in practice.

Yes, calculations and modeling take time which a crypto-trader doesn't have much time for, and enthusiasm by a knowledgable worker might supersede them. But you doing his or her's doing X means they will stop doing Y.

I don't quite see how this matches up with you last line of 'we shouldn’t give the sacrifices the benefit of believing in them'. Yes, you can push yourself to extremes in the short run, and we can probably do more things than we think possible, but it always comes with some sort of a price tag, sooner or later.

Quote:

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch