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beautifulterriblequeen · 3 years ago

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B2:S - Chapter 5

Much of this series will be about the differences and additions in the novel version, and how they contribute to my understanding of story canon. But there will be character appreciation, the odd theory and headcanon, and suchlike as well.

Here be lots of Viren deets, Best Boy Soren deets, some writing/continuity stuff, worldbuilding appreciation and half of a theory, Detective Rayla, Moon Temple geeking, Claudium and dark magic, and more!

Spoilers for Book Two: Sky below.

(I know for darn sure that I wrote up a post for chapter 4, but I can't find it anywhere so I guess Tumblr ate it and I'll have to redo it at some point, but today is not that day)

Viren, my evil dude, my bad guy, coming in clutch with the worldbuilding and backstory again! If you want to know decades of information, you gotta talk to Viren. Or read his scenes, at least. Here, he seems to not sleep much when he has a big problem to analyze his way through. Solutions trump pretty much everything else in this guy's life, and he's had a really hard week with a lot of new and complicated problems. Of course he's getting sleep-deprived trying to find his way through them all.

Harrow put so much trust in Viren when he made him High Mage! He just threw himself extra hard at that Lady Justice blindfold, didn't he? Didn't really want to see what Viren was doing in his magic study, so he left Viren to his devices. And Viren has a lot of devices.

Also, this is fascinating: Viren made the secret passage to his "less official study" in Katolis Castle! And he was inspired to do so by the way his own mentor kept the Puzzle House. What else could a Puzzle House be, except a place with secret passages? Yay! secret headcanon that "the Puzzle House" is just "Katolis Castle" from Kid Viren's perspective tho

So either Viren built all of those passageways, or at least the ones to his dungeon. Which means he has to have, or know where to get, a stash of those glowing blue Moonshadow crystals. Hmmm.

I can't wait to learn more about Kpp'Ar and young Viren, btw. From this description of Viren and all his literal secret ways, it feels like another parallel between Viren and Runaan, with the whole "secretive paths, members only, insider knowledge" type stuff. Only the really cool members of this cult club get to know the secrets, and guess what, kid, you're cool now but you can never tell anyone, okay? Our secret.

Yeahhh, that'll never backfire in any way for either of them.

Kpp'Ar calling puzzles and secrets "man-made magic," though. Yes sir, knowledge is indeed power.

This chapter mentions Runaan by name, from Viren's perspective. Generally that would imply that Viren knows his name, even though assassins do not share their names, and Runaan didn't seem to give his to Viren in the first book. However, there was a scene in book one where the last paragraph switched perspective from Viren to Runaan - a technique that's very common in visual media like movies and shows and gives you that "ohoho they left the room and didn't notice this, but you do!" vibe. Using Runaan's name there in book one, where Viren couldn't see it but readers could, helps them keep track of the assassin's story arc while maintaining Viren's racism.

So in book two, in which Runaan has no onscreen scenes (alas), using his name in a scene that calls back to the events in book one helps us remember what happened in that dungeon cell. It would be a bit muddier to recall the specifics if Viren kept thinking about Runaan as "Elf." So I'm cool with the perspective nudge because it serves a narrative purpose: clarity. But I'm also enjoying the angst of considering that, somehow, Viren learned Runaan's name either during or after the coining spell. Mwa ha ha haaa. (Obligatory "Keep my pretty name outta your mouth" goes here)

Okay, back to Viren's scheming! He took the mirror because it was human-sized in a dragon lair. He knew it didn't really fit there, and that made it interesting, so he stole it. But he realized it was really powerful when Runaan wouldn't tell him squat about it - the assassin's instinct to protect Xadian secrets from human hands meant that Viren was holding a very powerful Xadian secret. And that just made him want it all the more. Ah, Runaan, if only your relationship with lying was, like, the exact opposite of what it is. Nyx could've spun Viren a believable tale in 2 minutes flat.

Also of interest: Viren considers his cursed coins to be a final fate. He expects Runaan to remain in his coin forever. With the Chekhov's coins still extant in the storyline, we can assume that they'll come up again eventually, but Viren has no current plans to do anything with his elf money except carry it around.

It's worth noting that Viren admits that he got impatient when he trapped Runaan in the coin. Runaan's first fate in Katolis was supposed to be death at Soren's hands, but Claudia "saved" him from that. His next fate was to become spell components, but Viren's frustration with his stubbornness "saved" him from that fate, too. So now he's in a coin, where no one can chop him up at all. Yay? No, boo!

We get one last line about Runaan before Viren shifts gears: he makes a point of noting for us that Runaan's shackles are still locked shut. However much of Runaan made it into that coin - body, soul, hair care products - he was magicked there, pulled right out of his restraints.

The creepy black liquid that Viren pours right into his eyes is the last of a powerful potion he got from Kpp'Ar, and its recipe is ancient! Humans used it back in the age of Elarion to see through the illusions of the world. And we get a delightfully creepy bit of description about the preparation of this serum, which makes it abundantly clear that it's a Moon magic-based concoction, harvested from eyeless vipers on a moonless night, with the threat of irrevocable madness ("madness" by whose definition, though) if it's done wrong-

Hang on. Hold up. This is a Plato's Cave reference. OH MY GOD.

No no I'm fine, this is brilliant. Sorry, sorry, I couldn't figure why there was so much description for a potion prep that Viren didn't even have to perform himself. But now I get it. I see the light. HA. I should make a separate post for this, it's amazing.

Anyway, for reference, the humans who used this serum were called the Oracles of Ophidia, and Ophidia is a taxonomy group that includes all modern snakes. Can you say "creepy ancient snake rites"? I can! Woo!

Viren activates the serum with a spell, but apparently he's never done it before. He's not sure if it's supposed to be hot and bubbly, and he worries that it's been tainted by moonlight.

Oh, I do hope so.

The magic potion hurts, a lot. Viren will do just about anything, to himself or anyone, to do what he believes is necessary. He just risked madness and blindness to find out what this mirror does! Viren. Can you just. Take a nap or something. Have a Snickers.

This chapter gives us a fun clue that I don't remember from the show: when Viren's vision clears and he can see, his reflection has white pupils and the room reflected in the mirror has inverted colors. You know where else has inverted colors?

You know who else got white pupils for a hot second?

Okay, now it makes sense! Viren and Lujanne were both seeing into the realm beyond life and death. Him with his moon magic potion, and her with her moon powers on a full moon night at the Moon Nexus. Which is Very Interesting! Is it a direct hint about Aaravos's location, or just a separate cool detail? Orrr, does it look like a direct hint because Aaravos is actually trapped in the world beyond life and death, but it's actually separate and we'll see something about white pupils again later on?

Viren really does have self-esteem issues, we all picked up on it with his rant at his reflection. He throws a fit when he catches himself wondering if he's actually worthless. In the book version of his tantrum, he shoves the mirror and hurls a candelabra instead of flipping a table. He didn't need to shove the mirror to set the fire, but it's in here. Foreshadowing that perhaps, if push comes to shove, Viren will choose himself over Aaravos? Giving Aaravos time to peek through and see that the coast is clear?

Soren, my boyyyyy. He has a rough night at the Moon Nexus because two sides of him are fighting with each other. He struggles to understand Callum's friendship with Rayla, and he also fantasizes about chopping off Rayla's head. One of these is a pretty ordinary thing to do. The other is Soren's internalization of what he needs to do to gain his father's approval. If he brought his dad a chopped off elf head every week, he'd probably feel a lot more confident because Viren would praise him a lot more.

Okay, okay, omg, is it just me, or does the "Moonshadow Madness" story, as it's told in the book, seem like Soren just doesn't know what a monsterfucker is? He thinks an elf bite puts humans under a spell. But vampires are sexy, and some people want them to do more to them than just bite them. A passionate kiss under the moonlight could look very bitey, especially if one of the participants has horns and you're already culturally trained to hate them. No yeah, I'm already headcanoning an actual human-elf kiss that got misunderstood by an observer long ago.

it's Lujanne isn't it, we all know, because what is a love spell but a sweet soft illusion, I mean how else does she get supplies for her Caldera, I ask you, and also Corvus was totally sent to investigate once and he told Soren at camp what he saw

And then back to magefam angst: Soren pretending that his sister's nose-tapping is stupid, even though he actually thinks it's cool, just because their dad thinks it's stupid. Viren, istg. Let your kids like harmless things. It's so cute that Soren taps his nose back at her, though! Like they have their own sibling code. I hope we get to see the nose tap again, especially now that they've chosen different sides. It could mean so much, that they're not too far apart yet.

Rayla knows what buttery pancakes smell like. I love this. Do Moonshadow elves have butter and pancakes, does Rayla eat a stack of eight giant pancakes in the morning? Orrrr it is just illusion food? I don't care, let Rayla have pancakes! Everyone loves pancakes. Pancakes will save the world. this message brought to you by the fact that I can't eat pancakes rn, send help

I love that Rayla is both sus of the pancakes and hungry, and that combines into a very motivated "I will get to the bottom of this" attitude. She kind of goes into Poirot Mode when she inserts herself into Soren and Ellis's conversation about Ava, explaining about the wolf's illusion leg and segueing into her claim that the pancakes taste sus. Claudia confirms she used dark magic, and Rayla is furious. It's different than the show's version in that it puts Rayla in detective mode, as the only Moonshadow elf in the scene, and boy does she take that role seriously. Also, she doesn't actually swallow the dark magic pancake bite. It ends up on the ground just like Lujanne's grubs from that earlier meal. These poor kids are so nutrient-starved. You guys gotta eat!!

Rayla's determination and prejudices and the fact that she super knows Harrow is dead all dovetail to make her try repeatedly to persuade Callum that Soren and Claudia are Not To Be Trusted. It's nice that the book keeps taking the time to point out that Rayla is Well Intentioned But Flawed, just like Callum and pretty much every other character in the show. No one is Right All The Time, no one Knows More Than Everyone Else.

Callum loving the sound of Claudia's unique voice is so wholesome. When you like someone, it only makes sense that you like all the things about them that they can't change - like the sound of Claudia's voice. Her choices with dark magic, not so much!

Claudia seems to have the same concerns Soren does about Callum's relationship with Rayla, but she comes out and asks him. The inherent possession implied in "your elf" is interesting, though. Elves are not people to Claudia. They're enemies who can be disassembled for the magic inside them. So maybe more like robots than living beings, if she knew what a robot was. Maybe she heard Soren's "Moonshadow Madness" story and realized he totally missed the kissing implications - but she didn't, and now she's genuinely worried that Rayla could kiss Callum under a full moon and enchant him to do her will. Good thing it's only a half moon, then!

Okay, Callum nervously making a puppet hand and then not knowing what to do with his hands and freaking out about itching and moving and pointy elbows is such a ND mood. The sudden stress of knowing that someone else is noticing your existence and maybe you're Not Existing Right, amirite? Ugh, poor Callum.

The Moon Temple! Omg it's so pretty in the description! Made to be beautiful and useful, full of knowledge but also allowing light and life inside (butterflies and vines). Lujanne, when can I move in, please? Also, it's all the more angsty because Lujanne is the only one who gets to see this beautiful place, but it has lots of chairs and shelves and tables, and it was meant to be used by lots of people. :(((

Claudia knows some of the runes on the walls. She isn't in a hurry to copy the rest of them down or anything, either. Her spellwriting is very precise, and she's a skilled mage. Her father would have made sure she was aware of the dangers of drawing sloppy runes, as much as he made her aware of the dangers of doing dark magic wrong. And the whole point of dark magic is that it's easier to learn than primal magic. Claudia supports her dad and their shared knowledge and life path. She's not gonna go nuts over an elf library she can't translate.

Side note: Between Claudia knowing some Moon runes and Viren building a secret passageway and a dungeon and lighting it with the same blue crystals that Lujanne and Ethari use for light--and Claudia exclaiming that she loves ruins--I wonder once more if there are really Moonshadow ruins somewhere in Katolis, which Viren has found and looted. Father-daughter relic hunting trip, maybe while Soren is away at camp? Omgsh that would be so wild!

Callum out here having a Viren moment with his "I feel powerless unless I've got magic that lets me help" vibes. God. I love their complicated mirroring. One of the hard differences between them is that Callum is very sure dark magic is bad because you have to kill stuff and take its power to cast spells, and he doesn't want to be a person who kills and takes like that. The line he walks to be nice to Claudia on their tour of the Cursed Caldera because he likes her, while telling her that he doesn't want to do her magic, like, ever, is so fine that it might as well be a shifting shadow on the ground. It's a very fitting conversation to be having during the half moon, with its tricks and little white lies.

Callum being out of the castle and his comfort zone, having to deal with the fact that the Claudia he loves is not quite the Claudia who's chasing him down across the kingdom, but of the two of them, he's the only one with a problem with this.

They say that if you really want to get to know someone, you should spend time with them outside their comfort zone - in heavy traffic, with a small baby, taking care of a new pet, trying a new skill, following unfamiliar directions, etc. While the castle is familiar territory for them both, Callum's never really found his comfort zone yet, while Claudia is pretty comfortable with her growing skill set. The creepy part starts to kick in when Callum begins to realize that Claudia's comfort zone encompasses a whole bunch of stuff that seems like it should make her uncomfortable... but it doesn't. But that'll be for a future chapter!

#book two: sky spoilers #book two: sky #b2:s #tdp spoilers #viren #harrow #rayla #runaan #callum #claudia #soren #lujanne #moonshadow elves #aaravos

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sierraraeck · 4 years ago

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The Jailbird and the Mouse

Spencer x Fem!OC (Aundreya)

Masterlist

Summary: When Aundreya shows up to consult on a case, Spencer seems less than pleased to see her, but his actions tell a different story. Bonus chapter!

Category: Smut. Hate fuck. Apparently I’m incapable of writing a single thing without some angst, so we’ve got a sprinkle of that in there at the end, too.

Warnings: Cussing. Choking. Nicknames. Degradation. Cuffs are used. Unprotected penetration, female masturbating, oral (male receiving), fingering. Semi-public at the beginning.

Word Count: 8.5k

A/N: Okay so this is supposed to take place during How to Lose Friends when they are both in their fresh, post-prison forms and are beyond pissed at each other, but you don't have to have read that chapter or the series to understand this. Also, shoutout to @writing-in-april for looking this piece over and helping me make some edits!

Things to Know: All you really have to know is that Aundreya was a criminal who’d already been to and broken out of prison, joined the BAU, Spencer and her had a previous relationship, Aundreya got Spencer sent to prison, broke him out, then took the fall for something Spencer was being accused of that she didn’t do, getting herself sent to prison again.

I’d been called back to help the BAU solve a case. Fascinating how when it was convenient for them, I held some value. But, after that I was just easy to throw in a jail cell to be forgotten about.

I didn’t want to be there, but unfortunately I didn’t have a choice. So, I closed my eyes, and took a long, deep breath before forcing the door open. I had barely entered the room, barely had made eye contact with Hotch standing opposite me, before both my shoulder blades were shoved against the wall behind me, with long fingers wrapping around my throat.

“What is she doing here?” the hiss in Reid’s voice sounded exactly how I’d imagined it in my head preparing for this encounter. He looked almost as bad as me. His curls were going in a million directions, and I could only imagine the amount of times he’d run his hands through them, probably due to stress. His eyes were blood-shot, slightly puffy, and the dark bags underneath seemed more defined. The only thing that contrasted all of that, and let me know his head was still in it, was the darkness he now held in his eyes. There was nothing lighthearted or soft about them anymore, at least, not for the moment and certainly not for me. Plus, there was a red-hot rage I could see boiling at the surface. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror, a warped version of myself being reflected back to me. I’d seen the same fury and darkness in my eyes every morning that was in his now, and the irritation that radiated off him matched my own. Really, the only difference between Spencer and I, was he still had his gun and badge and I didn’t.

“I was invited to help consult,” I snapped through my somewhat restricted breath. “So you better get the fuck off me.”

He gave my throat one last tight squeeze before stepping back, his intense gaze never leaving me. I met his gaze with a wicked smile while brushing my fingers over where the ghost of his hand used to be. I wanted him to see that he didn’t affect me. Angry or not, he held no power in our dynamic anymore.

“Chambers, good to see you,” Derek mocked, giving me a side eye laced with suspicion.

“Can’t say I feel the same,” I deadpanned, then turning on Hotch. “So, why am I here?”

“We have reason to believe that a rogue gang member is kidnapping and killing ex-military if they refuse to join,” Hotch explained with seemingly no emotion, as if he was unaffected by my presence.

“Cool,” I deadpanned again before asking, “So why do you need me?”

“We wanted to know if you know anything or have heard anything-” Derek started.

“Heard anything?” I cut him off with a scoff, “You mean besides the constant clanging of metal bars when I’m not left in complete silence by myself? No, I haven’t heard anything.”

“Can you find them?” Spencer asked as if it would be a difficult task for me.

“So you do want my help,” I clarified.

“I want your skills.”

I let out a disgusted chuckle in response to his quip. Venom dripped from my words as I voiced my thoughts from only moments before stepping into the room. “Oh, I get it. You only want me around when it's convenient for you. Otherwise you just wanna give up on me and let me rot in a cell.”

“What was I supposed to do!”

“What were you supposed to do?” I asked in disbelief, eyes wide. “What were you supposed to do?” I mumbled to myself again in a mocking tone, rolling my eyes. I put my hands on the back of the empty chair in front of me I assumed had held Spencer at one point, and leaned in toward him. He’d retreated behind the table since releasing me, and I quietly snarled towards him, “I don’t know, but sitting there on your tiny, plushy ass, wasn’t it. I’m leaving.”

Spencer was back over to me in a flash, slamming his hand on the door before I could even reach for the handle. Someone got better reflexes. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“We have a suspect list that we want you to review.” Hotch caught me before I pushed Spencer out of my way.

“Fine. Make it quick.” I looked over the list Hotch gave me that contained about 30 men, none of which rang any bells. “This was a waste of time.”

“Hold on, guys,” Garcia trotted in, “I just found something.” She was in such a rush that she initially didn’t see me, bee-lining it straight for Hotch. Handing the iPad over to him, her eyes lifted to take in the rest of the room. That’s when she noticed me. Her eyes grew to the size of beach balls, and her perfectly done lips hung open. I tried not to feel too hurt, knowing that my presence would come as a shock to her, but it still stung seeing her at a loss for words, possibly even scared. She’d really been the only person who still had any hope left for me, and I was starting to wonder if that was true anymore.

My voice softened as I greeted, “Hey, Penelope.”

She struggled for words, a few ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ headed my direction, ultimately being saved by Hotch. “Dave, you’re with me. Prentiss, Morgan, I want you to go to the ME, Garcia we’ll need you on call, and JJ, Lewis, I want you to go talk to this man.”

“What about me?” Spencer asked.

“You’re going to stay here and watch her,” Hotch commanded. I started laughing at Spencer’s visible discomfort. Spencer glared at me before opening his mouth to argue, but Hotch stopped him with a voice filled with authority, “I know you won’t be able to focus out there if you know she’s still here unattended. Let’s go.”

When everyone had left and the door shut behind them, I sang, “Well if it isn’t Doctor Reid drawing the short end of the stick, yet again.”

“Just sit down and shut up,” he tried to order with confidence as he took his own advice, sitting as far away from me as possible. Not once had he looked me in the eyes since I’d initially walked in and he had attacked me. Sure, his eyes were on me, but they never connected with mine.

“Is that a demand, doctor?” I challenged him.

“No, but it could be. I just don’t want to be the one responsible for letting you get away.” He shrugged in his chair, resting the ankle of his leg on the knee of the other.

“So you’re just gonna trust me to do what you ask?” I questioned. Throughout the entire time I’d known Spencer, he’d never gotten super riled up over something, but this was a whole different Spencer, one that I didn’t recognize or know . He was more on edge, confident, and clearly willing to wrap his hand around my throat with no hesitation. A type of Spencer I was more than happy to get to know. And let’s face it, I’d been in prison for 15 months. There wasn’t a ton of action going on in there that I wanted to get involved with. I just wanted to see how far I could push him before he snapped. “You don’t trust me, and you know you can’t. I put you in prison, just because I could,” I shrugged, contradicting what I’d insinuated earlier for my own entertainment, “and you think that I won’t just walk away from you when given the chance?”

“You’ve had the chance. For the past three minutes and forty-six seconds you could have left and you didn’t. What’s keeping you here?” he smugly fired back. Oh yeah, he’s definitely going to be fun to mess with.

“What’s keeping you here?” I copied, “Why’d Hotch bench you again? Because you can’t focus when I’m around?”

“No one can focus with you around!” he huffed hotly.

“Not well, but they certainly can do better than what you’re doing right now,” I patronized, “What is it about me that makes you all so nervous, huh? I’m just another criminal who happens to be a former co-worker. I thought you were used to working with those day in and day out.”

“Criminals or co-workers?”

“Either.”

“None of them are like you,” he bit.

“Oh I know,” I ran my tongue over my lips, “So I’ll ask again, what is it about me that makes me so different?”

He looked up at me. In contrast to the first time he locked eyes with me, his expression was stone cold. “You were a part of this team, and you betrayed us. You betrayed me. I don’t know how I could’ve been so stupid to believe you were actually helping us! I just want to know why you picked me. You were going to take one of us down, why’d you choose me?” I could see the gears spinning in his head, and was about to answer when he frustratedly added, “Was it because you thought I’m the weakest?”

That’s it. That’s what’s always made him tick. And he used the present tense. We were still an entire table length apart, so I started slowly sauntering toward him. I prodded, “Is that what you think? You believe you’re the weakest on the team? Or do you just think that’s what I thought?”

“We all have our roles,” he responded, but not nearly as confident as he had been before.

“That’s not an answer,” I pushed.

“You still haven’t answered me, either,” he growled, and I decided to let this one go. We didn’t need to fully delve into his insecurities, no matter how much I wanted to.

“It was similar to that. You were the most afraid of me, I could smell it in the air.” I closed my eyes and pretended to revel in the stench of fear. “But, I could’ve gotten any one of them if I wanted.”

Spencer scoffed at that, “I think you overestimate your abilities.”

“I don’t,” I quickly fired back, “I could’ve gotten any of them, and to be honest, I was going to go after Derek, or maybe Emily, but then you spoke up from the corner of the room and I knew it had to be you.”

“Why?”

“Why this, Aundreya, and why that, Aundreya? Is that the only question you can ask?”

“Is it the only question you can’t answer?”

I was about halfway to him now, and decided to give him a little false hope. “I picked you, not because of your intellect, or how the rest of the team coddles you, or how relationship starved you are. I picked you because I could see something in your eyes that was different, something dark. And once I heard your full back story, I realized just how similar the two of us are.”

“We are nothing alike,” he insisted.

“Really? Because had you made one different choice or one thing went just a little bit wrong, you could have ended up just like me, with no family and no one to give a shit about you or what you do, except for the cops who just wanted you locked up and controlled.” I was dangerously close to him now, his head tilted to look at me, but he didn’t cower away. He actually seemed to welcome it. Which reminded me of something, “After knowing all of that, my past and everything I was, you still agreed to let me on your team.”

“I was the last person to say yes to you joining,” he informed me. This was news to me, but I couldn’t even be sure if he was telling me the truth. “I didn’t think it was a good idea for you to be working with us, but I was outnumbered and outranked.”

“No, you caved to their wishes,” I twisted his words to suit my needs, “Like you caved to mine.” I slowly reached down to place a hand on his chest. He eyed it all the way until I made contact with him, and it was like flipping a switch. He grabbed my wrist and held it close as he pushed out of his chair, the wheels spinning it wildly back into the monitor. He reached for my other wrist, which I let him grab, and held me against the wall, arms pinned next to my head. I did everything I could to not smirk. And he’s still caving.

“I didn’t want you here. I resisted the idea of you being around us,” he spat.

“Like you’re resisting the idea of being around me right now?” I arched an eyebrow, scanning him from head to toe, and I couldn’t help but let my gaze linger on a few spots. He opened his mouth to say something, but he shut it again, locking his jaw. I could see his genius mind at work, trying to come up with some way out of the little mouse trap I’d set up for him. I watched his eyes trail down to my lips and neck, soaking it all in. When his eyes met mine again, I tried to reach for him, but he forcefully slammed my hands back, pinning me to the wall again. Though, I wanted him to touch me this time. He was taking too long to make a move for my liking, so I decided if I couldn’t use my arms, I might as well use my legs.

All of his weight was already leaning toward me, so it wasn’t difficult to wrap my right leg around his waist and bring him all the way to me. The moment that they were within inches of my face, I attacked his lips. I was almost disappointed by the fact that he didn’t seem surprised at all, as if he knew how impatient I was and knew that I would force the first move. But, I wasn’t disappointed for long.

Spencer’s whole body was pressed against mine as he quickly swiped his tongue across my bottom lip, looking for entrance. I granted it, but I wasn’t going to give him the complete dominance that he wanted over the kiss. Instead, our tongues slid over each other’s searching for more than the other was willing to give. It was hot and messy, and he released his grip on my wrists, moving them to apply the same amount of force to my jaw. With my hands free, I made quick work of the buttons on his dress shirt, ripping it open. I was expecting skin and sighed when I found yet another shirt. This man and his layers.

Spencer took advantage of me sighing, giving him more access to my mouth, which I wanted to be annoyed about, but couldn’t care to be. I decided to make better use of my hands, running them down the sides of his body as he wrapped his behind my back. He pulled away from me so abruptly when I tried to massage him through his slacks, he basically dropped me on the floor. It was like being left out in a cold winter storm, just barely out of arm's reach of warmth.

Spencer shook his head, eyes on the floor, as if that would clear his mind of what clouded it, which was me. But I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “There. You got what you wanted.”

I gaped at him before retorting, “We both know it wasn’t just me who got what I wanted. I’m sure you had a hard time pulling away.”

He glared at me as he rolled the chair back toward the desk and took a seat, “Not really. I have important work to do.”

I stood there staring at him trying to compose himself. His face was red and he tugged at his pants before crossing his leg over the other. I pressed my lips together, but still failed to contain the small laugh that escaped through my nose.

“Sure,” I mocked, “Especially since everyone else on the team is already doing that work for you.” He didn’t look up from whatever papers were on the table, trying in vain to ignore me, though I wasn’t ready to have his attention off me yet.

I shut the folder that he was in the middle of reading, not like he was actually reading it considering how long it was taking him to flip the page, and sat right on top of it. He was about to reach for it again, but retracted his hand at lightning speed when my legs got in the way. I flashed another mockingly sweet smile his way, but he looked out toward the window, right next to the wall I’d just come from. I swung my legs back and forth off the side of the table just a bit, careful not to completely kick Spencer in the shin, though I couldn’t help but let my toes accidentally tap him a few times. As with all of the other times I’d touched him, he moved out of the way, uncrossing his legs with a perfect foot-sized gap in between his knees. I rested my foot in that small gap on the chair, rolling his body closer to me. Then, for no other reason than wanting to feel him squirm underneath me, I plopped down on his lap, my legs straddling his. I pretty much had him locked in his seat.

“What are you doing?” he questioned, a look of complete indifference gracing his face, but I knew it was just a front.

“Just making sure you’re doing your job,” I replied, winking at him.

“And… how do you think this is helping me do my job?”

“I’m making sure you’re paying attention to me,” I whispered in his ear seductively, lacing my fingers together on the back of his neck, “Plus, I’m doing what you asked me to. How did you put it? Sit down and shut-”

Using his thumb and forefinger, he pinched my cheeks and brought my lips to his forcefully. The kiss was just as hungry as the last, teeth clashing and tongues furiously fighting. He moved his long fingers onto my hips with a bruising grip, which I had absentmindedly started grinding against his. He pulled away from me for a moment, and his harsh tone reminded me that this was nothing like the last time we’d been together, when we’d both been a bit more innocent. “You never did have any manners at work.”

I smirked, “I know. Imagine my manners at home.”

A low, almost inaudible groan came from Spencer’s throat at my suggestion, but he tried to cover it up by moving my hair out of the way and latching his lips onto the side of my neck. I gasped at the contact of his teeth pulling at my soft flesh, paired with the feeling of his growing bulge pressed against my core. His fingers gripped my hips harder and moved them faster, drawing a small whimper from my lips. I felt him smile as he trailed kisses down my neck to my collar bone, leaving a single bite mark there. I tried so hard to contain my high-pitched moan when he moved one of his hands from my waist to pinch one of my nipples through my shirt.

But I was supposed to be the clear-headed one, so I forced myself to not get too wrapped up in the feeling. If I wanted to get to my end goal, I was going to have to leave him wanting more, which unfortunately in turn meant leaving myself in the same condition.

My hips had gotten faster along with Spencer’s hands, but when I felt him start to buck his hips up against me, I knew that he was getting close and it had to end. Immediately, I stopped my movements and untangled myself from him, but not before dragging a finger up the column of his throat, sneering, “Too bad. I could’ve helped you, had you done anything to help me.”

I left that open for interpretation, either as a jab to his masculinity or to what started my rage in the first place: being left in prison. He didn’t ask for clarification either, clearly too bothered by being left on edge. He did, however, follow up with, “Help you? Why would I want to do that? You’re a terrible person.”

I grinned as if receiving a medal of honor, “That I am, Doctor.”

I moved the lay down on the couch while Spencer attempted to refocus on his work. I made a show of sighing a couple times and rolling around ‘to find a comfortable position’ on the couch, just to piss him off. I could tell it was working based on his clenched fists turning white, and the way his leg was jumping. He was resting his head in his hand, which almost perfectly shielded my face from his.

He still wasn’t turning the page, so I offered, “Can you flip the page by yourself, or do you need some help?”

He wasn’t given the opportunity to respond, because Hotch, followed by most of the team, came barreling through the door.

“Colby Ulton, 43 years old, has a long record and wasn’t home,” JJ announced, following Hotch. It’d been a while since I had to deal with their inhuman pace when it came to talking about unsubs and profiles, so most of the stuff they said next flew over my head.

I was way behind in the conversation, but none of that mattered when Hotch turned to me, “Colby Ulton. I want you on him.” He'd barely gotten the command out before I was reaching for the door handle.

“I don’t.” The words were hot and dry and coming from none other than Doctor Reid. I rolled my eyes. He moved to step in front of the door, blocking my passage out again, leaning casually with his back against it, arms crossed. Our faces were barely centimeters apart.

“Why not?” I asked in a mock-curious voice.

“I don’t trust you. Who’s to say you won’t just run off? Then we’d let a high-profile criminal walk free. Plus, we’re not even sure he’s the right man,” Spencer pointed out. I was going to point out how I had just made that same argument about me leaving, and he refuted it himself only to bring it back up now, but I didn’t get the chance.

“He’s the best we’ve got right now,” Derek countered. I could tell he sort of just wanted me out of the room, but Spencer’s motives appeared very different.

He never took his eyes off of mine as he recited, “We think it’s a rogue gang member who’s either left or been kicked out within the past year. Ulton’s been in prison, which could mean he’s gone rogue, or it could mean he’s joined a new gang, one that, as you probably know, wouldn’t allow this type of acting out. Either way, he hasn’t demonstrated gang affiliated behavior in almost three years. Not to mention he had his tattoo removed and is out of our age range. I don’t think putting her on, most likely, the wrong man’s trail is worth the risk of letting her walk free.”

The room was silent as we all waited for someone else to make the first move. I decided to be that person. “So what do you suggest they do with me, hm?” I questioned, walking my two fingers up his chest with each word. Then I leaned in and made it very clear, “Because I am not going back to prison.”

I bit his earlobe on the way back, and I saw the way his pupils dilated just slightly at the feeling, “I’ll watch her for the night.”

“What?” Derek and I said at the same time, but our facial expressions were very different.

“Yes,” he stated, more confidently now, “She has nothing to do right now, but we might need her later in the investigation, so sending her all the way back to prison doesn’t make sense.”

“And you'll make sure she doesn’t escape?” Derek questioned.

“She hasn’t so far, has she?” Spencer challenged. When he got unnerved looks from the rest of the team, he assured, shooting a small smirk my way, “Trust me, she won’t.” How cute. He thinks he can wrap his skinny little fingers around my neck and pull a moan from me once, and all the sudden he’s in control. He switched our position, pinning me up against the door, clasping the handcuffs back around my wrists in front of me. I was starting to think he had a thing for pushing people into walls. It was his turn to whisper in my ear, “And you won't want to.”

# # # # # # # # # # # # #

When we arrived back at his apartment, I took a moment to survey the room. It looked almost exactly as it had the last time I’d been there. Books piled up everywhere, papers strewn all over the desk, a little dark and dusty, maybe a bit more worn, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The only difference was that it no longer suited him as well anymore. He used to be this shy, studious, loner-type that didn’t really like people, and he had a certain innocence about him. There was nothing innocent about him anymore. He didn’t seem shy either, much more confident; still studious and a loner though. However, I bet he liked having at least one person over at all times, or not being home at all. It meant that he didn’t have to be alone with his own mind, and after being in solitude myself, and knowing that he’d been in there too, that feeling of complete silence, utter aloneness, was something we’d never want to experience again. We were honestly perfect for each other in that way.

The other thing I’d noticed, based on what I'd seen of him within the last few hours and what I knew prison could do to a person, I guessed he went off of instinct rather than intelligence more than he ever had in his life.

Spencer had to take the time to shrug off his satchel and kick off his shoes, neither of which I even had. All I had was myself and what I was wearing, which wasn’t much. At least I wasn’t in an orange jumpsuit anymore.

“Wow, you’ve really renovated the place,” I snickered. Spencer didn’t say anything, just rolled his eyes and brushed past me. I forced my wrists outward a couple times, making a clanking sound with the cuffs, asking, “You gonna take these off?”

He faced me with a smirk and shook his head slightly, “Don’t think so.” Pulling out a chair at the puny kitchen table, he sat down, and I felt like we were much in the same position we’d been in at the office. I was in his home turf, if I could even call it that, but I wasn’t just going to let him be in charge.

I decided to go straight for the jugular, “Why’d you bring me home, Spence?”

“This isn’t home, not for you,” he snapped.

I scoffed, “Doesn’t look like it is for you, either, but that doesn’t change the question.”

“I told you. I didn’t want to risk you running away.”

“You didn’t want to lose me?” I inquired. He could hear the way I was rephrasing it to change the narrative, not like I was wrong, but he successfully dodged it.

“I didn’t want to lose an asset over the wrong man, tipping the right one off, and potentially risking him going underground. I’m just trying to catch an unsub,” he shrugged.

“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?” I shook my head in amusement.

“You don’t?” he cocked an eyebrow.

“Of course I do,” I quickly answered.

“Then answer this,” Spencer squared his shoulders, now completely facing me, “Why didn’t you run the moment you got the chance?”

“I had three FBI personnel in the car with me, then a team of BAU agents surrounding me, and then was left alone in the same room as an agent who can shoot 100 on his test. I am many things, but I am not stupid nor am I suicidal.”

“How’d you know I shot 100?” Spencer followed up.

I smiled, “I know things.”

“How about all the chances you got when you were in prison? You’ve broken out plenty of times before, why not do it again?” He was leaning forward, and he seemed genuinely curious.

It was a good question, one that I actually hadn’t pre-thought the answer to. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to even make it this far. “I was biding my time.”

“For..?”

“Leverage.” It was a simple word, but one that seemed to make a great impact. Spencer leaned back in his chair and contemplated my answer. It wasn’t a complete lie either, I just didn’t want to give away too many details.

Spencer finally whispered, “Against?”

I flashed him a wicked smile. “You.” His face contorted into something I couldn’t fully recognize, eyes narrowing. “You, Spencer. I’ve been waiting for you to make an error, a mistake. That was the one flaw in my plan, that while I picked the easiest to emotionally manipulate, I picked the hardest to mentally manipulate. And you don’t make very many mental mistakes, do you Spencer?” I asked, approaching him. I’m really hoping you’d like to cash one in right now, though. I could practically see the internal argument being fought inside Spencer’s head; one side telling him to give in, it wasn’t that bad, the other telling him to resist, that somehow, this would corrupt him further. I needed the former to win. “You wouldn’t let yourself get caught up in the moment, would you? You wouldn’t crack, take what you want, what you need, what you deserve against your better judgement. Because you’re all brain, Spencer. All brain, and no heart.”

That’s what did it.

Spencer literally swept me off my feet, tossing me onto the couch like a rag doll. His hand returned to my throat as if it belonged there, and he pushed open my legs with his knees. My hands may have been cuffed, but they could still be useful. I moved them to start unbuttoning his shirt when he swatted them away. He spat, “I’m not heartless. Not like you.”

“No,” I agreed, “You’re worse. At least I can admit to what I am. You just hide behind a badge and gun.”

Spencer shoved two fingers in my mouth, probably trying to shut me up. I smirked, running my tongue up and down the long digits, making sure to give him a preview of what was to come if he’d let it. His other hand trailed down the side of my body until it reached the waistband of the pants I was wearing. Forcefully, he yanked them down, taking my panties with them. I knew I was already pooling, but of course he had to rub it in. Snarky, he mocked, “For someone who talks a big game, you’re already looking pretty weak.”

I silently cursed my body for finding him arousing, and was about to have to come up with a clever comment when I saw Spencer pause. He was charging straight into this, and then he just stopped. I tilted my head, “Worried you don’t have it in you?”

Spencer met my eyes, and cooly stated, “I’m not going to let you be my mistake.”

Dammit. When I felt him start to pull away, I knew I had to say something to get him to stay. I needed to turn this into an advantage in his eyes, not just mine. “Why? So you can let this rage build up inside of you, eat away at your every thought, until you snap? What then? You lash out during a case, which causes someone to die, either because of your incapabilities or at your hand? And what for? Because you’re still mad at me? I’m right here in front of you, Spencer! You’re never going to get a chance like this again, so just do something!” By the end, it was a plea, and one that was brutally answered.

Spencer pushed two of his fingers inside me, already moving at a quick pace. I let out a small yelp at the sensation which clearly pleased Spencer. I attempted to refocus on unbuttoning his shirt, which became increasingly difficult because of how he was curling his fingers to hit that spot just right. I barely finished, pushing his shirt away from his shoulders when he leaned away from me, taking both of his fingers with him. I was about to complain until I saw him dropping his shirt to the ground and unbuckling his belt, pushing his own pants and underwear out of the way in a similar fashion as he’d done to mine. He pumped his fist over his shaft a couple of times before lining himself up between my wide open legs. He teased my clit with the tip of his cock, and I could feel the precum beading there. I bit my lip as I looked up at him.

Spencer’s eyes were blown when he quietly demanded, “Say it.” He wants me to beg. I was okay with him thinking he was in charge for now, so I played into it by shaking my head. He slammed my cuffed wrists against the arm of the couch just above my head, bringing his face so close I could feel his lips brush mine as he repeated, “Say it.”

It was more forceful the second time, and something about his hot breath on my face and the feeling of his hips trying, and failing, to stay still against mine pulled a whimper all too genuine from my lips, “Punish me.”

At my words, he slammed his cock in my entrance, setting a merciless pace. With no time to adjust to his length, the heat burning between my legs got fiercer. The sounds of his hips hitting mine filled the room, both of us trying to control our moans, not wanting the other to know how much we were really enjoying it. My back arched off the couch, sending my fingers over the arm, brushing over thin objects on the small table there. A pen and paper clip.

I pressed my lips together to contain the grin that just about took over my face. Looking down at Spencer, who was way too busy biting marks into my skin, I could tell he hadn’t noticed the detrimental error I’d just realized he’d made. I made quick work of unclasping the cuffs from around my wrists, but left them on loosely just for show.

The coil in my stomach was getting tighter and tighter, and while I usually would have tried to control myself, I let the moans tear through my lungs. This caught Spencer’s attention, perring up at me with a twinkle in his eyes, one that told me he thought he had me. He mouthed into my neck, “This too much for you to handle, Jailbird?”

I scoffed at his pet name. Alright Doctor Reid, you’ve had your fun. Now let me show you how to really be in charge. “Not in the slightest, Mouse,” I quipped. Before he could think, I wrapped my legs around his waist, and put my hands on the back of his head. I flipped us off the side of the couch, landing on top of Spencer. With the wind knocked out of him, I quickly grabbed his wrist, clasping one of the cuffs around it, looping the chain behind the couch leg, then synching the other around his free wrist. I placed his head on the ground and leaned back, tracing patterns on his chest.

It took him a moment to realize what had just happened, but I saw the moment the light went off. “You filthy bitch.”

I chuckled, “It seems as though that genius memory of yours forgot that I’m a criminally sound escape artist.”

He was fuming, but contained himself long enough to ask, “What changed?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Since last time? You had no problem letting me take control then.”

I simply stated with disgust, “I was soft then.”

“Who’s to say you aren’t still now?” Spencer challenged.

I laced my fingers with his as I pinned them to the ground, my turn to be the one looking down on him, faces only centimeters apart. We locked eyes as I explained, “You can see it too, I know you can. I wake up and see it in the mirror every day, and I see it in you too now. It’s in your eyes. That darkness. That feeling of destruction, of being broken, of being a monster. It’s there. I can see it like it’s my own.”

I expected him to snap at me. To argue with a clever quip. But he didn’t. Spencer leaned up as far as he could and kissed me. Not in the angry, predatory-like way that we had earlier, but really kissed me. I was so taken aback by the gesture that I practically jumped off him after a few seconds. I hated myself for letting it happen for even that long.

I stormed away from him, hissing, “Don’t try to get my sympathy now that you’re the one chained like a dirty animal. I’m not gonna fall for it.”

I saw something quick flash across his face before it hardened again. I could feel his eyes following my every move as I walked away, so I decided to make a show of it. I swished my hips back and forth, and even bent all the way over to pick up our clothes for no reason, just so he could have a perfect view between my legs. I heard the rattle of the cuffs against the couch and smirked to myself.

Tossing the clothes as far away as possible, I reached under my shirt to unclasp my bra, slipping it out one of the arm holes. I spun it around my index finger a couple of times before letting it fly off in the direction of the rest of our clothes. Toying with the hem of my shirt, I rhythmically moved it around my body so that he could only see some exposed skin at a time. I slowly pulled it higher and higher until I removed the garment completely. Standing completely bare in front of him, looking down on his naked body, I’d never felt more in control.

Spencer was drilling holes into me as I got down on my knees, crawling toward him. Again, his hands shot forward only to be stopped by the metal. I tutted, “Now, now, Mouse. That’s not how this works.”

I stroked a single finger up his length, and when it brushed over the tip, he squeezed his eyes shut. I wetted my lips as I wrapped a single hand around his cock, starting at an agonizingly slow pace, a stark contrast to the one he’d set earlier. I had barely started moving at a faster pace when Spencer started to buck his hips up into my hand. I slammed his hips back down with my other arm, giving him a cold look. His hips stilled and I knew he was getting desperate.

I flattened my palm against his lower belly, making sure he’d stay in place as I steadily picked up the pace. Spencer threw his head back when I swiped my tongue over his tip, and huffed when I retracted my hands, breaking contact all together.

I hummed, “Actually, this isn’t that interesting.” I scooted back on the floor, holding eye contact with his piercing irises as I spread my legs wide open for him to see. Neither one of us has had our release yet, so I might as well take mine and leave him high and dry.

I brushed my fingertips down my body, cupping my breasts on the way, until I reached my clit. I started to rub circles over the bundle of nerves, not realizing how close I already was. I let out exaggerated moans as I continued my ministrations, steadily pushing myself toward the edge.

“Stop.” It was barely a whisper, and I wasn’t sure if I even heard it, so I ignored it. Right as another moan ripped through my lungs, I heard Spencer say, louder and more demanding this time, “Stop.”

I was too close to stop. I barely had the mental capacity to smirk down at him before I felt my release crash over me like a tidal wave. For dramatic effect, I whined out Spencer’s name as my walls clenched around nothing, helping myself through my orgasm. Slowly coming down from my high, my head lulled back, release seeping into his rug.

Barely allowing myself to catch my breath, I leaned forward onto my knees, and looked at Spencer’s face, which was red with anger or desperation I couldn’t tell, but brought my lips down on his dick regardless. He grunted at the sensation, and I could feel the heat radiating off of him. I swirled my tongue around him until I couldn’t anymore, opting to just trace a protruding vein instead. I started to hollow out my cheeks when he bucked up into me, forcing me to take all of him in at once. He groaned when I started gagging around his length, and when I coughed after pulling off him, he had the audacity to laugh.

“Having trouble there, Jailbird?” Spencer smugly asked. I looked down at his length laying against his stomach and saw that it was a deep red, and had to have been painfully hard at that point. With that in mind, along with my recent release, I crawled over him.

I looked at him as I hovered my pussy just above his cock. “I wouldn’t be worried about me. I’d be worried about how you’re gonna take care of yourself with your hands cuffed if I decided I’m done with you.”

That threat wiped the smug look right off his face. I was already wet again, and allowed him to only barely feel what was waiting for him if he behaved, lowering myself down so his length was just brushing my lips.

His face contorted and then he said the word of my victory, “Please.”

Taking hold of his cock in one hand, I lined myself up, and slowly sunk down. He filled me up completely, a bit thicker than I remembered, and I sat comfortably in his lap. This was clearly what Spencer wanted, but there was no way in hell it was going to be that easy. I just sat there looking at him, and based on the crazed look on his face, he was expecting me to start moving immediately.

We stared each other down for a moment before his whole body jerked forward, hands yanking on the cuffs. It was my turn to laugh at his pathetic struggles, but I still didn’t have quite what I wanted yet. Raising my hips up, I quickly slammed them down, pulling the loudest groan I’d heard from Spencer. When I didn’t move again, he started squirming underneath me, and I asked, “What is it you want me to do, Mouse?”

Then he broke, his strangled pleas music to my ears, “God, fuck me, please, just fuck me!”

I grinned as I captured his lips in a vicious kiss, pulling his bottom lip between my teeth. Steadying myself with my palm on his chest, I lifted my hips up, only to let them fall back into his lap. I started slower than either of us wanted, letting myself adjust to his full size before bouncing freely on his dick. The sounds of our heavy moans filled the air, sweat collecting on our bodies.

I was honestly surprised at how long Spencer had lasted when he let out one final shriek before coming undone below me. He’d given up, completely relaxed on the floor as I started chasing my second orgasm. Spencer peered up at me through hooded eyes, and soon enough starting letting out cries, and I knew I was pushing him. I didn’t want to completely overwhelm him but I was so close…

I wouldn’t get there, not yet anyway, because Spencer did something I was not expecting. The couch hit the floor with a loud thud, giving Spencer the freedom to move his arms. He wrapped the chain of the cuffs around the back of my neck and flipped me over in one swift motion, almost identical to how I’d just done it to him.

I was completely caught off guard, and let a surprised squeak leave my lips. I was almost impressed. Almost.

As if he could see straight into my mind, Spencer remarked, “I’m a quick study.” His entire body weight was over me, and there was very little wiggle room for an escape.

I followed Spencer’s eyes as he scanned around the room, glanced at his wrists, then sighed when he spotted his pants. Must’ve been where he put the key.

I raised my pitch and snidely sang like a schoolgirl, “Whatcha gonna do Mouse? You gonna fuck me like the inmate you are, or are you gonna free yourself, hm?”

Pressing his hands down on either side of my perfectly laid out ones above my head, the chain between the cuffs digging into my forearms, he chided, “I’m sure I can handle you just fine with them on. I’m not quite done with you yet, Jailbird.”

My walls fluttered around his cock at the gravelly sound of his voice and the threat that accompanied it. It’s as if he’s chained to me. I shuddered happily at the thought.

“Is that what this is about?” Spencer hissed, clearly catching my pleased look and the way my pussy pulled him in a little more at his harsh words, “You just enjoy seeing me as some twisted killer?”

“I enjoy seeing you for who you truly are.”

I wasn’t able to form another coherent thought after that one, the pace Spencer was pounding into me like one I’d never felt. He fucked his cum from only seconds ago back into me, the wet sound of our mixing fluids filling the room. I could barely focus on where his hands had moved to, teasing my nipples, because the fire between my legs was jumping higher and higher. As it finally burned through me in the sweetest way possible, I reached to grab onto anything, the first thing my fingers found being Spencer’s hair. He growled when I tugged, but his pace never let up.

As I came down from my high, Spencer didn’t stop. The feelings were becoming too strong, too overpowering, pleasure bordering on pain. I tried to pull my hips away from his, but there was nothing I could do. To stop my squirming, he sat back slightly and pressed his large palms down on my hip bones. Moving also changed the angle he was slamming into me, now bottoming out with each thrust. I needed some reprieve.

“Spencer,” I whined, but there was a nothingness in his eyes.

His hands snaked up to my throat, applying massive pressure to my windpipe. “Is this what you wanted?” Spencer yelled, “Is this what you think I truly am?”

I was having trouble getting the air into my lungs, let alone respond. I wanted to force him to face his reality of being an ex-con, knowing how shitty it was to be on the inside and just letting me sit in there. A consequence of my own actions, but considering I was doing it to save him, I was looking for a little bit more effort on the getting out process.

But he’d left me in there. He didn’t care. He didn’t care despite the fact that he knew what I was going through, that I could tell he was still dealing with his own PTSD and not well, and that everything had changed for him. People looked at him and treated him differently. He was a different person. Corrupt. And he’d only been in there for not even three months.

I’d been in there for five times as long.

I wanted him to realize just how much damage him and his useless team were doing to me by not helping me get out. I wanted him to realize how fucked up that was, and how terrible of a person that made him. I wanted him to realize he was just as big of a monster as I was.

I accomplished that. But I underestimated how much darkness he’d really been holding back.

My head started to feel light, and I could tell I was on the brink of my third release. The sound of skin slapping skin was sinful and I couldn’t focus on anything other than the feeling of his tip hitting my a-spot, the way my legs were shaking around his body, the way the muscles in his back felt against my nails as I clawed them down it. My release came quicker than Spencer’s, who wasn’t too far behind me. His thrusts became shallower, as he spilled into me for the second time. It was as if all the energy had been drained out of me in an instant, along with my anger and hatred. Spencer rolled off of me, and I saw his figure weakly collapse to the ground.

It was an eerie calm, the sound of absolute nothingness, the only disturbance being our labored breathing.

I didn’t know how long it’d been when Spencer’s voice, the softest I’d heard it since the day’s start, whispered, “Are you okay?”

I glanced at him with a confused look. He let out a small sigh at my non response, collecting himself before walking over to his long forgotten pants for the cuffs key. After freeing his wrists, he walked back over to me and helped me up, ushering me to the bathroom.

I could tell he was examining me, but it wasn’t until I stood in front of the mirror that I realized why. “Look at those bruises around your neck, Jailbird. They suit you.”

The bruises were deep and already turning a nice purple. I scanned the rest of me finding more bruises on my hips, thighs, shoulders, wrists, and not to mention the bite mark on my collar. I scanned Spencer next, his only bruises coming from his wrists and the red marks I left on his back. “I wasn’t expecting that from you.”

He met my eyes in the mirror, “What were you expecting?”

I shook my head, “I don’t know.” I truly didn’t. I went into it knowing I wanted to force him to see everything he had, everything he was, but I guess I didn’t really think about what that would force me to see. My exhaustion started to give way to a heap of emotions, and a single, involuntary tear escaped my eye. Spencer brushed his fingers over my neck, simultaneously pulling my hair behind my shoulder.

He kissed the tender, bruised skin, and I remembered the times before, the times when it felt like we’d really been in love. I felt his breath on me as he mumbled, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

I turned on my heels to face him, “You didn’t.”

I didn’t know what compelled him to confess what I never thought he would, but he sounded deeply ashamed when admitting, “I wanted to.”

“What stopped you?” I was genuinely curious. We’d hurt each other in the most extreme ways before today, getting the other sent to a cage in hell, betraying each other.

“I’m broken, but I’m not beyond repair, and hurting you would make me someone that I don’t want to be.”

I gave him a tired smile, and all I could muster was, “Pretty convincing.”

“I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“Don’t be, you didn’t. You couldn’t,” I assured him. It was the truth.

“I should’ve,” he bit, looking down at his hands, which were so delicately holding my waist I couldn’t be sure he was even touching me.

“Why?” I questioned, the seriousness evident in my voice, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

He shook his head, and a stray curl or two tickled my forehead. “I could’ve.”

“I trusted you not to.” I clasped my hands together and rested them on his back.

Spencer’s shaky voice matched his glistening eyes as they locked with mine, “I just wasn’t sure. All I know is that I scare myself sometimes.”

I pressed my forehead against his own, “Well, then I guess we’re two people who have nothing to fear other than ourselves.”

Read the full series

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#spencer reid smut #aundreya chambers #criminal minds fanfic #dr spencer reid fanfiction #spencer x oc #spencer reid angst #dr spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid fanfic #dr spencer reid #spencer reid #reid #criminal minds #criminal minds fandom #criminal minds fanfiction #cm #bau #hotch #morgan #garcia

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im-fairly-whitty · 4 years ago

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The Witcher Wolf: In Plain Sight

Two years have passed since Geralt was cursed with the ability to turn into a wolf whenever his medallion is removed, a curse that's turned into a blessing now that he and Jaskier are partners in everything they do.

It's no exception when they discover a Nilfgaardian army bearing down on Cintra, headed straight toward a certain child surprise. With Jaskier's help and Geralt's enchanted medallion they must find a way to get into the palace, make sure Princess Cirilla is safe, and get out with her in tow if needed, regardless of Queen Calanthe's orders.

[Chapter 1: Into the Fire] [Chapter 2: Old Friend] [Chapter 3: Bad Luck] [Chapter 4: So Much for Being Smart] [Chapter 5: Secrets] [Chapter 6: The Beginning of the End]

Chapter 7: Out of Time

As night fell, Geralt could do nothing as the siege began on the castle of Cintra.

As Nilfgaardian troops swarmed the city, burning everything in sight he could only sit by quietly. When Ciri was brought to Queen Calanthe’s deathbed (because Geralt could smell the death on her, it would be her deathbed) he could only stick by Ciri’s side as the girl cried over the news of Eist’s death.

He likewise stayed with her as they watched Mousesack’s doomed attempt to hold the castle gates with a wall of magic by himself at the queen’s orders, listening attentively to every nervous story Ciri told him in an effort to distract them, her distressed over-petting of his fur getting nearly painful as the night crept by. Not that he made any effort to dissuade her.

When Mousesack’s magic barrier finally fell in the dead of night and the three of them made their way back to the queen’s room Geralt was nearly shaking with furious impatience that they weren’t already all safely out of the city.

So when only Ciri was let inside the queen’s room, leaving Geralt and Mousesack outside the closed door with Calanthe’s spymaster who was reeking of Jaskier’s fear scent, Geralt could perhaps be forgiven for bodily lunging at the man with a rabid snarl.

“Has the queen given her permission or not?” Mousesack asked shortly, barely managing to haul Geralt back by his collar rather than allowing the wolf to sink his teeth into the royal spymaster.

“She has. She is saying her goodbyes to the princess as we speak.” Wilhelm said, looking altogether far too calm for a man in a burning city, despite the clearly evident exhaustion in his eyes. “The queen has given her official approval to have Princess Cirilla taken by Geralt of Rivia of Rivia. Please tell me that he is in the castle Mousesack, I haven’t been able to find him anywhere and we don’t even have seconds to spare now.”

“He is.” Mousesack said, releasing Geralt’s collar with an ironic flourish, letting Geralt’s front paws hit the ground again.

Geralt shook himself hard, then huffed a sigh as he collected himself, stepping forward and looking up at the spymaster sans snarl. Wilhelm looked down at him for a long moment, then up at Mousesack.

“He’s the Wolf.” Wilhelm said, his voice full of the kind of flat irritated weariness that only comes from solving a particularly complicated pun. “Geralt of Rivia is the wolf that the princess has had at her side for a week now underneath my very nose. Which you of course knew, and kept from me.”

Mousesack grimaced, shrugging.

“Well...all things considered I suppose it ended up being for the best.” Wilhelm said, shaking his head as he looked down at Geralt, already recovering from his shock. “Bravo getting past me Sir Witcher, I only regret the fact that I don’t have the time to hear the story of how you managed it.” He looked back up to Mousesack. “Am I right in assuming his Witcher medallion is what changes him back? Jaskier indicated that keeping the medallion safe was of utmost importance if I were to rely on his help tonight.”

“It is, he’ll also need any gear you seized from the bard. He’s not a Doppler, he won’t already have his armor and swords when he shifts back.” Mousesack said.

“Now there’s a pity.” Wilhelm said, his gaze focusing past the druid, looking as if he were making several calculations in his head before he snapped back to the moment, looking at Geralt.

“The castle has already been breached, we have only minutes to react properly and we will only get one chance.” Wilhelm said, as calmly as if he were explaining the rules of a tournament. He took a key from a hidden pocket in his doublet and handed it to the druid. “Mousesack you will accompany Geralt, Cirilla and Captain Cordova to my office to retrieve everything that was taken from Jaskier when he was arrested. You will find it all in a basket beside my desk, medallion included.

“Once you have retrieved everything you need, get to the back gates of the castle. I will meet you there with Jaskier as soon as I have retrieved him from the dungeon. It’s on the other side of the castle and I am the only one authorized to remove him from his cell, so splitting up accordingly will save us the most time with the most safety for the princess.” Wilhelm said.

They all paused as a distant soldier’s scream echoed down the stone hallway of the castle. Wilhelm looked back to them, drawing his sword from its sheath, a steel beauty Geralt recognized as having igni runestones set in the hilt, a rare sight indeed outside of a witcher’s weapon kit.

“If Jaskier and I are not there when you arrive you are to continue on without us,” Wilhelm continued. “Follow the sewers out of the city and into the forests. Three horses and a handler will be waiting for you. If there are no further questions I suggest we split up immediately. The princess’s safety is the highest priority any of us have and all of us will act in a way that protects her first. Is that understood?”

Geralt nodded grimly, not liking it one bit but seeing no other choice. His ears pricked forward as the door was opened and Ciri was brought into the hallway by a soldier that was presumably Captain Cordova. The girl was crying and threw her arms around Geralt’s neck, burying her face in his fur. Geralt whined softly, knowing all too well the pain of being separated from a parent, despite his relief at Calanthe finally giving in to reason. He only had to hope that she hadn’t given in too late.

“Come princess, we must move quickly.” Mousesack said, nodding to Wilhelm as the spymaster took his leave, moving quickly down the hall in the opposite direction, sword at the ready. “We have to get Geralt’s things, we don’t have much time.”

***

“This is the one.” Mousesack said when they’d reached the door Wilhelm had directed them to. “Captain Cordova, stand guard out here while we get what we need inside.”

The soldier nodded, allowed Mousesack, Ciri, and Geralt into the room behind him. Geralt was glad to hear the druid lock the office door behind them again after they were inside, the last thing they needed was an interruption by enemies halfway through his transformation.

Looking around Geralt saw that Wilhelm’s office was somehow full to the brim with enough fascinating artifacts to impress even Vesemir, while also being so strictly organized that it took only moments to find Jaskier’s packs in the basket by his desk, just like he’d promised. Jaskier’s lute in its case however sat on top of the desk, evidently where it would be safest, a detail that made Geralt dislike Wilhelm just a shred less.

Geralt grabbed the side of the basket in his teeth and knocked it over, spilling the loose contents of their packs onto the ground. He pawed through all his clothes and armor pieces checking if everything was still there, which they were. Even both his swords were still in their sheaths.

He huffed in relief when he found his Witcher medallion, snagged the silver chain in his teeth and bounding over to Mousesack with it. Bit of help, please?

“Ciri, turn away.” Mousesack instructed, checking to make sure the girl was obediently facing the corner before he slipped the medallion chain over Geralt’s head.

There was a flash of light and Geralt was sitting on the floor, restored to his regular form again after days spent otherwise. He groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, rubbing his human hands roughly across his human face as he tried to physically recalibrate to bipedal motion as quickly as he could, reaching for his clothing and armor almost before he was balanced. They didn’t have a second to lose.

“That really is an impressive piece of magic, isn’t it.” Mousesack said, whistling in appreciation as Geralt tugged on his socks and pants, helpfully tossing him his boots next. “When you transform can you actually feel your skeletal structure adjusting, or do-“

“Not the time, Mousesack.” Geralt said, pulling on his shirt. “Questions after escaping the burning city.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Mousesack relented, ducking around behind Geralt to help him with the buckles of his armor as Geralt started tugging all the pieces into place across his body as quickly as nearly a century of practice let him.

“Geralt?”

Geralt looked over to see Ciri staring at him, her eyes wide as she watched him buckle his double swords across his back once his armor was in place. He grimaced as he braced himself for whatever her reaction to his imposing Witcher form might be.

“You’ve still got your wolf eyes!” Ciri said, despite everything a bit of a smile making it through her worry and panic as she came right up to him, one hand absently taking hold of a strap on his armor as she craned her neck to look up at his face.

She wasn’t the least bit afraid of him at all. Utterly fascinated, if anything. Geralt couldn’t help the feeling of warmth and relief it kindled in his chest.

“Closer to a cat’s when I’m like this.” Geralt said, consciously narrowing his pupils a bit and smiling at the impressed gasp it got him as he pulled on his leather gauntlets and reached up to tie back his hair into its usual ponytail. “They’ll help me get us out of here in one piece, so stick right next to me, alright?”

Ciri nodded intently, her small hand latching onto his large one as he drew his steel sword with the other, the blade slipping out of its sheath with practiced ease.

“I’ll carry the rest.” Mousesack said, moving to pack up what was left of Jaskier and Geralt’s things scattered across the floor.

“Just take the lute case, leave the rest.” Geralt said, pulling Ciri along as he made for the door. “We’ve already used enough time. We have to move quickly to-”

He froze, pulling Ciri behind him as his hearing picked up commotion on the other side of the heavy soundproof door.

“What is it?” Mousesack whispered, following his stare, evidently unable to hear the sound of the struggle in the hallway, the clash of metal, or the unmistakable fall of a body.

Geralt shook his head, staying silent as he raised his sword.

He felt Ciri jump as the locked doorknob rattled, but she stayed quiet, even as a heavy armored fist pounded on the reinforced wood. There was some more fussing and slamming at the door for several heartstopping moments, but evidently the spymaster had spared no expense in security when his office had been made, the locked door not budging an inch. After a long minute whoever was on the other side seemed to grow bored and Geralt heard them moving on, doubtlessly in search of easier prey.

When the clanking footsteps were gone Geralt took a steadying breath.

“The castle has fallen.” Mousesack said soberly. “We’ll need to take the servant’s passages to the back gate, it will be our best chance at avoiding as many soldiers as we can.”

“Ciri I’m going to carry you so we can go as fast as possible.” Geralt said, crouching down to be at her eye level. “And I need you to keep your eyes closed, alright? We’re going to be moving quickly and passing a lot of things someone your age doesn’t need to be seeing.”

She was going to have nightmares aplenty for years to come after this, no use in adding more if they could help it. Certainly not starting with the sight of whatever was left of Captain Cordova on the other side of the door.

He half expected her to protest, but to his relief she instead threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against him as he picked her up, carrying her in one arm. He took a moment to marvel at how much she trusted him, a trust he would do everything in his power to deserve.

“Alright, to the back gates.” Geralt said, adjusting his grip on his sword and nodding for Mousesack to unlock the door. “We get Jaskier and then we get out of this blasted city.”

***

The castle was already crawling with Nilfgaardian soldiers, but Mousesack had been right in guessing the servants passages would keep them mostly out of the way. They only encountered a few lone enemy soldiers on their way out, all of whom had all been more or less easily slain, even with Geralt fighting one handed.

But once they made it outside the castle and into the night air there was no spymaster or bard to be seen.

“Are you sure this is the back gate?” Geralt demanded, the dark pit in his stomach already knowing the answer as he looked around him.

“It is.” Mousesack said grimly, wiping at the blood that was trickling down his face, the result of a cut he’d gotten above his eye from the last soldier they’d run into. “Wilhelm said to keep going if he wasn’t here by now Geralt, I’m sorry but we can’t stay.”

Geralt felt a snarl rising in his chest as he hesitated, feeling helplessly torn and knowing he had only moments to decide.

The night air around them was dark with the smoke billowing from the burning city beyond the castle walls and yells and shrieks echoed through the night from all sides. The dark corner against the castle that the three were currently tucked into wouldn’t shield them for long from the eyes of the Nilfgaardian soldiers that were hurrying past.

They still had to cross the wrecked courtyard and get to the sewers that would lead them out of the city. The longer they waited the worse their chances got of getting Ciri to safety.

“We can wait for Jaskier.” Ciri said, loosening her terrified grip around Geralt’s neck just enough to look at him. The smell of her fear was nearly overwhelming, despite the brave face she was putting on. “We have to stay to make sure he’s okay too, right?”

Geralt looked at Mousesack but the druid merely looked back at him, waiting for him to decide.

In the near distance there was the booming crash of a battlement falling, followed by the piercing screams of both horses and men. The smoky sky lit up brighter for a moment, as if a burst of flame had grabbed on to new fuel on the other side of the castle wall.

“We’re going on.” Geralt decided, casting a shielding quen sign over himself and Ciri as he raised his sword. “Mousesack stay close, I’ll get you both out safely and then come back for Jaskier after.”

The druid looked as though he wanted to add something, but instead nodded silently, adjusting the strap of the lute case over his shoulder to keep his hands free, sparks of chaos shimmering over his fingertips as he looked warily across the courtyard.

“But what about Jaskier?” Ciri asked, voice shaking.

“He can handle himself.” Geralt said, gritting his teeth against the ill feeling inside him.

He shifted to hold her more securely against him as he started forward, ducking them behind an overturned supply cart, hiding momentarily in the deep shadow it cast in the light of the fires all around them. He grimaced as the sight of what used to be a Cintrian soldier at his feet.

“Ciri, close your eyes again until I say so, alright?” He said, rebalancing himself and checking for Mousesack beside them before moving again.

And she hadn’t closed her eyes a moment too soon, Geralt realized as he darted from behind the cart toward a shadowed corner along the city wall. He muffled a curse as he spotted the crumpled form of what could only be the queen of Cintra on the dusty ground. He glanced up. She must have flung herself from her own bedroom window when enemy soldiers got too close.

Geralt traded a hurried silent look with Mousesack who looked stricken, but to his credit stuck by Geralt as they pressed on. It couldn’t have taken them longer than a few minutes to weave their way across the courtyard—Geralt’s senses and timing keeping them hidden from the scattered troops left ranging about the courtyard, torching everything they could reach—but it was a relief unlike any other when they finally reached the dislodged sewer grate that would lead out of the city.

Geralt heaved the grate aside and nimbly dropped down into the darkness, quickly swapping his steel sword for silver to hold at the ready as he started down the tunnel. Cintra wasn’t known for having monster infested sewers, but for their own safety he had to assume they’d come across at least a few before they reached the outlet on the other side of the city.

“Lead the way.” Mousesack said, voice hoarse from smoke and grief as he rejoined them, conjuring a ball of light tonight their way down the tunnels.

Geralt nodded, trying his very best not to think about where Jaskier was at that very moment, afraid that if he did he’d go rushing right back into the flames after him before the others were safe.

***

Wilhelm had promised three horses and a handler, but when they emerged from the sewers two easily slain drowners later there was only one saddled gelding to be seen. Geralt cast a hurried axii on the nervous animal to calm it, grimly noting the blood stains on its hocks. Human blood. There was no time to figure out exactly what had happened to its handler and the other horses, but Geralt had a pretty good guess.

“Mousesack, take Ciri and head due south for two miles.” Geralt said, grabbing the dazed gelding’s reins and setting Ciri down. “You‘ll hit a crossroads with a hanging tree on either side, and after that a clearing by a stream where I’ve hidden my mare. Get to the clearing and wait for me for twenty minutes. If I’m not there by then take Ciri and ride hard for the Morhen mountains, keep off the main roads and use false names at inns, the empire can’t know you’re heading to Kaer Morhen.”

The druid nodded. “I’ve only been up your mountain once years ago, but I should be able to track the path with summer weather instead of snows. What shall I tell Vesimir if we arrive without you?”

“Geralt, you can’t leave!” Ciri said, clinging to his side. “Please, don’t go back!”

“The truth.” Geralt said, giving the gelding’s tack a quick once over as Mousesack heaved himself up into the saddle. “Tell him everything starting with Pavetta, he can’t turn away a child surprise owed to the Wolf school.”

“Geralt! You can’t go, don’t leave me, please!” Ciri cried, her hands latching onto his armor. Geralt’s eyes widened as the desperation in the distressed girl’s voice edged with enough chaos to make his medallion shiver.

Geralt looked up at Mousesack as memories of Ciri’s mother flashed through his mind, of a scream laced with enough elder blood magic to level the very castle that was now burning in Nilfgaardian flame. Mousesack looked back with a grim silence.

Well, that would have to be discussed later. What mattered now was that Geralt had a twelve year old girl to protect and comfort in a situation that made comfort near impossible, and that he would still try anyway.

“Ciri, Mousesack will take care of you.” Geralt said, his voice softening just a bit as he dropped to one knee in front of her, gently loosening her grip on his armor. “I have to go back for Jaskier, but we’ll catch up with you as soon as we can.”

“Promise you’ll be okay?” Ciri demanded, wiping at the tears on her face.

“Witchers don’t make promises like that Ciri, but I can promise you I’ll do everything I can.” Geralt said solemnly, resting a steadying hand on her shoulder. “I need you to promise me that you’ll obey Mousesack so that he can protect you, alright?”

“I can try.” Ciri said, making a valiant effort to keep her voice from shaking as she threw her arms around Geralt’s neck, just like she did when he was a wolf.

This time however Geralt was able to hug her back, holding her just as tightly for a long moment while she buried her face against his neck. He could feel her trembling.

She had lost so much so quickly. Her grandparents, her home, her city. Of course she would be terrified of Geralt too disappearing forever in the smoke of Cintra if he went back into it, and just when she’d gotten him too. Geralt could still remember the pain of losing his mother and home centuries later, he couldn’t imagine how much worse it must be for Ciri in this moment, but he could guess.

Geralt pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against hers, looking her in the eye, a gentle hand on the back of her head. “I’ll catch up to you as soon as I can, but you have to leave now. I need you to be strong and fast and brave, alright?”

Ciri swallowed and scrubbed tears from her eyes, but nodded.

“Good.” Geralt said, standing and helping her up into the saddle in front of Mousesack who had watched their exchange in sober silence. He knew as well as Geralt did that every passing second lowered the chance of him coming back alive, let alone with Jaskier.

The men nodded to each other and then Mousesack took the reins, pulling the horse around and digging his heels into its flanks. Geralt watched the horse disappear into the night, then turned back to the sewer entrance. He pulled a bottle of swallow and a vial of cat from his alchemy pouch, downing them both in quick succession as he dropped back into the darkness with his blade drawn. Without Mousesack’s enchanted light he’d have to see in the pitch darkness on his own.

He growled as he felt the toxins course through his veins, already sharpening his night vision and eating away at any fatigue he’d already collected that night as he started moving back toward the burning city as quickly as he could.

He’d gotten his child surprise to safety, but he wasn’t going any farther without Jaskier.

And if he didn’t find him alive and well, he was going to find out how to burn a city down twice.

-------------

For whatever reason my brain was really squirrelly getting this chapter written and decided to write the final chapter before this one, then made me hopscotch backward to write the rest out of order. Regardless of the chaotic approach it's gotten the job done, so I can't complain too much at having been broken out of my usual start-at-the-beginning-then-write-to-the-end writing style.

This also means that I will be publishing the final chapter one week from today, next Tuesday evening. I look forward to seeing you all then, and until then I look forward to reading your comments and tags! Re-reading them between chapters always helps me get back in the writing mood, so thank you all for every one of them. :)

#jaskier #geralt #geraskier #ciri #mousesack #wilhelm #the witcher wolf #witcher wolf au

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flerkenkiddingme · 4 years ago

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Okayyy i promised @sen-raq another oc post (thank you for being the kind soul who asked, ily), so here comes Team Avatar OCs 2: Electric Boogaloo.

This time, we’re actually getting into the friends in the squads, since I covered the avatars’ siblings in my last one. Each one will get 6 headcanons, just like last time. And the first one for tonight is the underappreciated yet iconic Ta Min. (get it? cuz she’s my blog icon? i might have a problem lmao)

1. She’s the nonbender daughter of two fire sages. Based off what we know from LOK and Shadow of Kyoshi, they have a deep connection to the spirits. Her parents believed having a nonbender daughter meant that their spiritual connection was diminishing, so to prove she wasn’t totally useless, she studied everything fire sages could do that didn’t require firebending. She memorized every astral calendar, learned the names of all kinds of spirits, and even made attempts to enter the spirit world, but they never batted an eye.

2. One day when she was almost 13, she was heading home from her job at the palace and walked into a sword fighting practice session by accident. Instead of sending her away, the instructor invited her to try. She ended up joining for good, and became extremely skilled with two daos, much like a certain descendant of hers. This was how she met Kami and her best friend Asha.

3. She got along great with Gyatso, since he was fascinated by the fire sages’ techniques, and with each other’s help, they entered the spirit world for the first time. They also bonded over her being demisexual and Gyatso being aro-ace.

4. The way she and Roku met was her almost running him through with one of her daos on her way to her sword lesson, hastily apologizing, and disappearing down the corridor with an internal monologue that can be summed up as “shit shit shit shit shit that’s the prince’s best friend oh fuck did he see my face? he saw my face, i’m so fucked, i’m busted, my parents are going to pull me out of here and then things are going to suck again, mother fucking shit.” That didn’t happen, as the only thought in Roku’s head then was “oh crap she’s cute.”

5. Picture a group mostly comprised of reckless dumbasses, and imagine Ta Min as their one brain cell. Now throw that idea out the window. She's what I call the Trick Braincell, aka the one you think would be the functional one until a situation arises and you realize she’s just as bad as the others.

This group’s braincell happens to belong to my next oc, Asha, the best friend and eventual girlfriend of Kami.

1. She is half Water Tribe on her mother’s side and happened to be born a waterbender. To cover this up, her blue eyes were turned brown and she wasn’t to do any bending outside of her home. This was effective for 15 years of her life.

2. She’s mad good at pai sho, and showed her strategies to Gyatso, who used to fail horribly at it. The White Lotus tried to invite her, but she told them unless changes were made to the misogynistic bending rules, it wasn’t happening.

3. Once, in a moment of blind panic, she reached for the water in the body of someone who attacked her and, with a sort of bloodbending move, made them hurt themselves instead. Asha never figured out how it happened, as she didn’t want to try it on any of her friends to find out.

4. Her bending specialty is plant-bending, like how the Foggy Swamp benders did. She likes it because no one expects anyone to bend vines and branches, and it really catches people off-guard.

5. She’s the reason no one else in the crew has died yet. She learned to heal in secret as a kid, and until Roku and Kami figured out heat-bending, was the one helping patch up the others when something went wrong.

Now I’m changing gears and giving you something on one of Yangchen’s closest friends, Rianak.

1. She’s the daughter of Yangchen’s waterbending master from the Southern Water Tribe. They were a bit more chill with women waterbenders learning to fight, but she struggled a lot with it initially.

2. She has a long scar under one eye from getting too close to a baby walrus moose and facing it’s mother’s wrath.

3. She was pansexual and kissed Yangchen once in the middle of sparring. Whether Rianak and Yangchen will be a couple, I’m not totally sure yet, but just know they had this little moment.

4. She loves to dance, and often does when home alone, humming songs played at Water Tribe festivals and holidays.

5. She can tell when someone is lying. Not in the way Toph can, but she can sense their blood rushing in their body and how fast or slow it goes. About seven times out of ten, she’s right.

That’s all for tonight, and if anyone wants more deets, all you have to do is ask. The ideas build up like a dam waiting for an escape.

#no one:#me: i'm going to yap about my ocs again #sruthi alone in the audience: hell yes #atla #ocs

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eldweena · 4 years ago

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So...road trip this weekend. This is pretty absurd, but we don’t really have used bookstores here... We have a Books-A-Million at the mall, which dabbles in used books but just barely, and a nerdy store called The Inner Geek that has some books but mostly vintage toys and tabletop gaming gear. And I heard someone opened a book café, but it’s on the far end of town and the online photos made it look more café and less book. (Maybe it’s BYOB, bring-your-own-book?) ANYWAY. Point being. When we want to brose a *good* used bookstore - which I often do, because I love out-of-print classic fantasy novels - we have to leave the state. So Saturday we drove two hours to Lexington because they have a couple Half Price Books stores. And after a full year of not leaving town due to COVID, we had like 7 bags full of books, CDs, video games, and DVDs to sell. Everything went great at the first store. We got there shortly after they opened at 10:00 am and there were signs posted everywhere saying one person per aisle. They had a sign on the door, and also called over the intercom, that your mask must cover your NOSE as well as your mouth. They’re taking the pandemic seriously and holding customers accountable! I was very pleased. We got $50 for half our sell-backs and found a lot of great buys, too. Then we had lunch at Schlotzky’s. I didn’t mean to take her picture, but in the background you can see a masked woman. She brought a book into the restaurant to read and it made my heart feel happy! After lunch we found an Asian market and my wife stocked up on sweets and drinks. Then we headed to the second HPB, and that’s where we somehow picked up a stalker. This store was a different experience entirely. This time we only got $30 for our remaining sell-backs (we split the selling into two trips so we wouldn’t have to be running back and forth between the store and the car in one go), and while the signage was the same, nobody was adhering. We were looking at science fiction paperbacks and a tall man talking loudly on his phone kept stepping closer to me until he literally brushed my arm. He wasn’t even looking at books - he was on the phone. I pointedly stomped around the other side of our cart to get away from him and while he didn’t stutter in his phone conversation, he did go away. I was about ready to make a scene with a loud, “EXCUSE ME - SIX FEET!” My god!!! People piss me off. Then we went to look at some gaming books because my wife found some old White Wolf manuals and we kind of collect them. (I did LARP Vampire: the Masquerade and MAGE briefly, but mostly I keep them for writing inspiration because the worldbuilding is just fascinating...) This time a young male kept inching his way closer while we were examining the two books they had. (The MAGE manual was brand new, velvet-lined, purple, and pristine. Also $60, so I passed. The Camarilla book was an older edition of the one I have, and the pages were pretty filthy, so I also passed.) I thought initially the guy wanted to look at the gaming books because - I say this only because he had glasses and unkempt hair - he looked like a nerd. Turns out, that was not the case. I caught the same guy staring at us as we moved to another section of the store, where he suddenly also happened to be. My wife went into the young adult alcove and was quickly swarmed by three girls. I couldn’t even get into the crowded aisle (again, the limit was supposed to be one person!) so I went to another shelf to look at true crime. I checked the YA books a couple more times, waiting for it to clear out some. And the guy was hanging around a corner. Not even alone, he was with a girl and I think another guy. By then I was feeling annoyed. I had a fucking mask on, so I knew he wasn’t really looking at my face??? We then looked at middle grade because I’m always on the lookout for Donna Jo Napoli, and that’s where they stick her, and i SAW The SAME GUY! He was never actually looking at books. He was always just standing there, looking out of place and hella awkward, never alone but with the same two people, but he was always looking at us. I wasn’t sure if my wife had noticed so I said, “Let’s get the fuck outta here. I’m tired of that guy staring at us.” She hadn’t noticed, but loudly proclaimed, “Where is he? I’ll stare right back?” I just said again, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” We took our cart of books (yep, found some more) up to the registers. AND THAT MOTHERFUCKER FOLLOWED US. He like...jumped in line behind us, took a sliding leap. He was holding some things so I was like...well, I guess he could be checking out at the same time as us, coincidentally...??? But this time he was without his companions. So we started checking out and I whisper-hissed to my wife, “That’s--” and she said, “I know.” Then, loudly, she said how rude it was for people to stare. Our cashier said something (I’m hard of hearing so I don’t know what he said; my wife said he told her something like, “I understand, I’m sorry that happened to you”), then the other cashier, who I thought was checking that stalker-boy out, held up a flower book and asked, “Is this yours?” We were like...uh....no...and went about our business. After we checked out I grabbed our bags and was trying to like, run for the door. He’d only had like two things in his hands when I saw him scurry into line, and I was scared he’d try and follow us. I’m one of those people who fumbles and drops things and typos and gets all sorts of clumsy when I try to hurry, so it took twice as long as it should have. Finally we got out the door and I kept whisper-hissing to my wife, let’s hurry to the car. And she was like, no, if he follows us I’m going to tell him to fuck off! We got to the car and loaded up our books as fast as possible, and I just wanted the hell out of that parking lot, but my wife was like, no, there’s a trash can beside the store entrance and I’m dumping our garbage. I didn’t want to hesitate or linger, but despite her insistence that she could do it alone, I went with her. That guy gave me a really bad feeling. He could have been a harmless staring-type of creeper, but regardless, I wasn’t about to let her find out on her own. We went back to the store, and as she dumped our trash my wife said that guy was still in the store, fucking staring at us through the window. When they made eye contact, he ducked away from the corner and went down an aisle. I felt shaky for almost an hour after that, until we were headed out of Lexington and absorbed in an audiobook. I don’t feel like it was all harmless coincidence. How many times can you run into the same person in a store, even a small one? Why was he even there, if he wasn’t interested in books? I’m not sure if he even bought anything, or did he hand that flower book to “his” cashier and try to get her to give it to us as a creepy gift from him? Like, I don’t even know what was up with that flower book. We weren’t even at that end of the counter. We also considered that he might have gotten it into his head that we were shoplifting. I don’t know what would have given him that impression, other than perhaps the fact that I kept taking my cell phone out of my hoodie pocket and tucking it back, as I was comparing prices online versus the store, as I always do... I did see him lean over the counter and talk to the cashiers as we were leaving, and I thought at the time, is he complaining about us? Did he think we were stealing??? Which we weren’t, nor were we behaving suspiciously in any way. And, if he had thought that, why hadn’t he reported us the first or second times we bumped into each other, instead of waiting until seeing us check out and then jumping into line behind us? I mean, WTF. My best guess was that he perceived two girls looking at gaming books and got nerdily excited. But he didn’t try and start a conversation, he just. kept. staring. Men, don’t do this, ever. Women have enough shit to worry about without you stalking them, even by accident, in a fucking store.

#stalking #creepers #road trip #bookstores #asian markets

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solradguy · 1 year ago

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Have you tried going thegearproject.org on the wayback machine? I don’t know how to navigate it but it seems to have stuff from the X2 era community

This site did not survive very well lol....

I was an idiot and hit ctrl+z despite knowing there's a bug in the new Tumblr post editor that makes it DELETE THE ENTIRE DAMN POST ARGH

Anyway. Looks like this site only existed from 2003 to 2005 before the domain expired. I wasn't able to find anything that hinted they ever hosted raw Japanese text files or transcripts of the Japanese dialog from the drama CDs either, but a lot of the download links on this site are long dead.

The download links for the cover materials and a fan scanlated version of the first chapter of the GG Xtra manga survived though. This seems to be either an alternate version or an early version of what would end up becoming the Justice Revival Project's full scanlation of that manga.

Stuff like the character and lore FAQs were hosted in raw text and are still readable but they look kinda like they're the same files that have long survived and are now hosted in the GG lore server's archives in an updated form. A cool little tidbit anyway, though.

What's particularly interesting about this FAQ is seeing how the lore's since changed and how the fandom 20 years ago interpreted what was available to them in the west back then. This bit about Sol is fascinating because almost everything here has since changed:

Q. Why is Sol often called "Haitoku no Honoo"? A. Haitoku no Honoo means in this context "Corrupted Flame", not "Flame of Corruption" (as it is referring to the fact that Sol/Frederick has been "corrupted", not that he corrupts others). This relates to the whole title of the series, "Guilty Gear", as Sol can be described as both the "Guilty Gear" and the "Corrupted Flame" for having worked on the Gear Project. Who first bestowed the name on him is unknown, but when Justice and Sol meet at the end of the Holy War, even before Justice knows that Sol is a Gear, she calls Sol by this name.

The official English translations only ever translate Haitoku no Honoo as Flame of Corruption now. It isn't simply a Sol-exclusive title and instead also refers to the type of Gear cell he was infected with by "That Man," which hadn't been elaborated on in the canon hardly at all yet back then (Scales of Juno aren't mentioned anywhere in this old FAQ either). It would later be known that Justice called him that because she was Aria, who worked on the Gear Project with him and Asuka and (presumably) knew about the FoC and Scales of Juno.

I love getting little glimpses of the old GG community like this. It makes me wonder what these old FAQ authors and fan site webmasters are up to these days...

#asks #This site was agonizing trying to sift through because the layout is so tiny on modern screens rofl #All the broken images didn't help either... RIP...

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new-sandrafilter · 5 years ago

Video

youtube

True Romance: Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet on reuniting for Little Women

They may be posing in an airy lower Manhattan studio, but Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan have a way of making you feel right at home. “I made a little playlist this morning,” Chalamet announces to the room. He syncs up his cell phone to the sound system, his boyish grin widening as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” starts blaring. He returns to the camera, which snaps him and Ronan at a furious pace.

It’s their first joint cover shoot. He’s wearing a shimmery striped shirt with high-waist trousers; she’s rocking a shirtdress, fishnet stockings, and clear stilettos. He keeps cracking her up; she musses his hair with doting affection. During a break that follows, he wanders, gripping a paper bag stuffed with assorted bagels — from Tompkins Square Bagels, which Chalamet, a lifelong New Yorker, insists are the best in the city — and offering one to anyone in his path. He sings and dances — very Elio-in-the-town-square-like — to Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues.” He creeps behind a distracted Ronan before spooking her with a yelp. “I didn’t even know you were there!” she exclaims, reddening from the fright but with a smile so lovingly at ease, you sense she’s used to the prank.

They’ve known each other, after all, for some time. About three years ago, Ronan, now 25, and Chalamet, 23, met filming Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, in which Ronan’s irrepressible heroine (briefly) romances Chalamet’s douchey amateur musician. They reunited with Gerwig last year, on the heels of Lady Bird’s Oscar-nominated success, for a bigger undertaking: a remake of the oft-remade Little Women (Dec. 25). Ronan and Chalamet slipped into the roles of tomboyish Jo March and buoyant Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, best friends who ultimately break each other’s hearts. Their courtship ranks among American culture’s oldest tales of unrequited love — made indelible by Katharine Hepburn and Douglass Montgomery, Winona Ryder and Christian Bale, and so many others — yet finds, in the hands of two of the most compelling actors of their generation, galvanizing new life.

That goes, in fact, for the whole of Gerwig’s Little Women. Her version certainly contains the snow-globe coziness of treasured adaptations past, but also carries a fizzy emotional authenticity and attention to detail. The film is remarkably lived-in, too: This take on Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, which follows Jo and her three sisters pre– and post–American Civil War, feels plucked straight from the text in the best way, with siblings fighting like siblings, love and loss and hope and pain vividly experienced on screen.

Ronan and Chalamet’s charming big sister–little brother dynamic is not unlike the one that Jo and Laurie share in Little Women. Watch the actors play off one another, and the film’s tender realism clarifies itself: Their on-camera intimacy is just as palpable behind the scenes. Indeed, after shooting Lady Bird for a few weeks, the pair hung out regularly over the next year, making the awards-circuit rounds and scoring lead-acting Oscar nominations — Ronan for Lady Bird, Chalamet for Call Me by Your Name — before swiftly signing on to Little Women. In advance of filming in Concord, Mass. (the actual setting of the book), Gerwig and producer Amy Pascal gathered the large production’s cast and crew for rehearsals at a house just outside the town. For Ronan and Chalamet, the contrast between this and their early Lady Bird days was immense. “I felt very prideful… about how big it had gotten, how many people were there,” Chalamet recounts. “On Lady Bird it was, like, 25 people hanging out in a house!”

They fell back into each other’s rhythms instantly. “He keeps me on my toes — I’m never quite sure what he’s going to do next,” Ronan says. “That only progressed more and grew more. It helped that we do have a very natural rapport with each other…. These two characters physically need to be very comfortable with one another. They’re literally intertwined for half the film.” Chalamet adds: “In the least clichéd way possible, it really doesn’t feel like [I’m] acting sometimes [with her].”

Chalamet credits Gerwig, too, for establishing a playful, comfortable atmosphere. He thinks back to his first day of rehearsal: He reunited with Ronan. He introduced himself to Emma Watson (who plays the eldest March sister, Meg). He was guided into a third-floor conference room of a “random building” where, “all of a sudden, there was a full dance class going on.” He recalls fondly: “Everyone breaks down and becomes a little kid. This job is so trippy in that regard — you want to be serious, you want to be professional, and then it’s almost best when you’re able to be 12 years old. When it’s someone you’re actually friends with, it makes it easier.”

Ronan smirks, gearing up for a jab: “We’re not friends!” Delighted, Chalamet keeps the bit going. “We’re not friends,” he says, solemnly. For once, they’re not very convincing.

Greta Gerwig doesn’t remember a time before she knew Jo March. “[Little Women] was very much part of who I always was,” the writer-director, 36, says. “It was something my mother read to me when I was growing up. It’s been with me for a very long time.”

She joined Sony Pictures’ new Little Women adaptation when she was hired to write the script in 2016. Once Lady Bird bowed the next year, she emerged as a candidate to direct the film. “Greta had a very specific, energized, kind of punk-rock, Shakespearean take on this story,” Pascal says. “She came in and had a meeting with all of us and said, ‘I know this has been done before, but nobody can do it but me.’” She got the gig.

In her approach, Gerwig drew on her lifelong relationship with Little Women; beyond childhood, she discovered new, complex layers to the novel, and in turn to Alcott’s legacy. “As a girl, my heroine was Jo March, and as a grown lady, my heroine is Louisa May Alcott,” she says. It’s perhaps why Gerwig’s Little Women feels like the most adult — and modern — version of the story that’s reached the screen to date. The movie begins with the March sisters in adulthood — typically where the narrative’s second half begins — and unfolds like a memory play, shifting back and forth between that present-day frame and extended flashbacks to the childhood scenes etched in the American literary canon.

In that, Gerwig finds fascinating, fresh areas of exploration regarding women’s lives: the choices society forces them to make, the beauty and struggles of artistic pursuit, the consequences of rebellion. Jo’s journey as a writer anchors Gerwig’s direction; tempestuous Amy (Florence Pugh) gets more of a spotlight as she matures as a painter (and Laurie’s eventual wife); and Meg is realized with newfound nuance: “We felt it was important to show Meg juggling all her roles — a mother, a wife, a sister — whilst also celebrating her dreams, despite them being different to those of her sisters,” says Watson. But Gerwig doesn’t see herself as reinventing the wheel. “A lot of the lines in the film are taken right from the book,” she explains. “When Amy says, ‘I want to be great or nothing’ — she says that in the book! I don’t think we remember that, but she does say it.” Gerwig also loves one line spoken by the sisters’ mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), also revived in this version: “I’m angry almost every single day.”

Gerwig compiled a “bible” filled with cultural references: to Whistler tableaux of family life, to David Bowie–Jean Seberg hairdos that inspire the look of Jo’s mid-film cut, to Alcott family letters. “I wanted it to be footnote-able,” Gerwig says. “I wanted to point to it and say, ‘This is where this is from.’” She considers Alcott’s text sacred: “I wanted to treat the text as something that could be made fresh by great acting.”

Beyond those charged but less quoted Little Women lines are its famous ones — throw-pillow staples like Jo’s “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” that no adaptation is complete without. The actors rehearsed these “almost like a song,” pushing to move through them with a rapid musicality. “We [read] the book out loud,” says Dern. Gerwig expected the script’s words to be memorized precisely. “I knew I wanted them to get this cadence that felt sparkly and slightly irreverent,” she says. “I wanted to make them move at the speed of light.”

She poured the same love into iconic scenes, like Jo and Laurie’s ebullient dance that follows their first meeting. Here it goes on longer — and more vibrantly — than in any previous iteration. (Ronan says they filmed it at 3 a.m., to boot, adding, “We must have done it, like, 30 times.”) Then there’s the devastating moment when Laurie asks Jo to marry him and she rejects his proposal. Gerwig tasked the two actors to unleash here. “Emotions just bubble over,” Ronan says. “[Greta] just let us go with it, wherever it went, from take to take. What I loved about that scene is that every take would be different emotionally. It didn’t have the same trajectory.

“The two of us, it’s a relationship I have with no other director,” Ronan continues. “She makes me feel like I can try anything.”

As Ronan and Chalamet emerge from their photo-studio dressing area in impossibly chic new ensembles — she donning a form-fitting knit sweater, he a silky, ruffled top — their creative energy fills the space. They try out different poses, debating concepts and ideas with each other on the fly; at one point he wraps his arms around her waist, and she quips to no one in particular, “We’re expecting our first.” Camera snap.

They’re modeling a new brand of movie stardom — pursuing projects with a point of view, adamantly being themselves in the public eye, subverting gender norms. Their androgynous fashion performance here reflects their wardrobe shake-ups in Little Women: Gerwig and Oscar-winning costumer Jacqueline Durran (Anna Karenina) had the two actors swapping clothes throughout filming, to reinforce the masculine-feminine fluidity between Jo and Laurie. “They are two halves,” as Pascal puts it. “These are really bold characters that are really different than you’ve seen them before.”

And just as Gerwig expressed a need to direct Little Women, Ronan knew in her bones she needed to play Jo. She’d first encountered the story via the 1994 film when she was 11, and later read the book, feeling an immediate kinship with the young woman she’d come to portray. “When Louisa describes Jo, it felt like someone describing me physically: sort of gangly and stubborn and very straightforward, and went for what she wanted.” At an event for Lady Bird, she — in a very Jo kind of way — just “went at it” by approaching Gerwig. “I said, ‘So I want to be in Little Women, but only if I’m playing Jo.’” (Chalamet, for his part, was asked by Gerwig, “Hey, want to do another movie?” He responded: “Yes. Yes, please.”)

Over months of living in Concord with her castmates, Ronan discovered new depths within herself: “Jo’s ethos is ‘Everything everyone else is doing, I’m going to do the opposite.’ [I had] to try things that I’d never tried before. Be a bit messier with a performance.” Gerwig set up etiquette lessons for the cast; whatever the instructor said (“Don’t shake hands! Don’t gesticulate with your arms!”), Ronan made sure to ignore it. She speaks now of this as freeing, even transformative. “I felt like I had tapped into something I’d never gotten the opportunity to tap into before, or I just didn’t have the guts to tap into myself,” she says. “Finding that was just amazing.”

Shortly after wrapping Little Women, she filmed Wes Anderson’s next film, The French Dispatch — marking her third time costarring with Chalamet, who plays a central role. As for now? Ronan is taking a little break. “I’ll wait for the right thing to come along,” she says. “It’s lovely to be in a position at this moment where I can wait for the absolute right thing.” Same goes for Chalamet — he shot Netflix’s The King (out Oct. 11) right before Little Women and just completed production on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation. “It’s the first time in almost two years I’ve gotten a breath, so I’m savoring it.”

It’s been a long day. They’re back in comfy clothes; Ronan is taking a late lunch. It feels like both actors — as another whirlwind of acclaim and press and romance-shipping awaits — are at a kind of peace, exhausted but satisfyingly so. Little Women is the biggest movie either has done to date; more attention, as they inhabit such revered characters, is sure to follow. “I just haven’t thought about it that way,” Ronan admits. “Maybe because it’s just Greta — even though it’s on a much bigger scale, she wanted it to feel like Lady Bird.”

Ronan understands the timeless power of Little Women, of course: “It’s as important to tell Little Women right now as it would be at any point in our lifetime.” She points to this pop culture climate of “celebrating female friendships and sisterhood,” and continues, “It’s a story that’s full of love. That will always be relevant.”

She turns toward Chalamet, and you realize the love they brought to Alcott’s classic is what first blossomed between them on Lady Bird. “I love that in Lady Bird, you broke my heart,” she says to him softly. “In Little Women, I got to break your heart.” (Chalamet, ever the goofball, finds an obvious opening: “Yes, that’s true. Then I married your sister. Ha, ha, ha!”)

If this all sounds a little idyllic, well, neither actor — nor Gerwig, nor Pascal, nor the rest of the cast — can do much to convince you otherwise. Shifting back to Little Women’s timelessness, and reflecting on Ronan’s comments about it, Chalamet says, “I don’t know how to add to that.” Instead he turns back to his costar, his expression suddenly sincere, filled with gratitude. “But if I can add one little dose of information,” he says with a nervous laugh. “And not just because she’s sitting next to me.” He credits Ronan with bringing that “timeless energy.” He says “thank God” they were able to make the movie. “It’s so rare with Saoirse — I’m so f—ing grateful to get to work with her,” he says. “Whatever book I write for myself when I’m older, to look back on —” He stops himself. “Well, this is a bigger conversation.”

But Ronan, chuckling, doesn’t let him off the hook. “Will I have, like, a chapter?” And Chalamet laughs — another opening, another chance to act with his greatest scene partner, to see what journey of creation and discovery they’ll go on next. “A chapter of Saoirse,” he says.

At this rate, one chapter won’t suffice.

#timmy #timothee chalamet #saoirse ronan #little women

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notwisenotyet · 4 years ago

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Any upper level bios class recs?

absolutely!! this will get long so i’ll stick it below a read more.

disclaimer: my Niche of biology is very much on the medical side. that’s why i’m specializing in cancer biology! i’ve stayed faaar away from the ecology/evolution side of the department since that just is not my jam, so i can’t offer any advice on those kinds of classes. but i WILL graduate having taken every single bios elective about cancer in the undergrad catalog, so i can definitely speak to those!

these are all the upper level bios electives i’ve taken, and i would recommend any of them depending on what you’re looking for:

classes with no prerequisite beyond an intro bio sequence: bios 25108, bios 25109, bios 25228

advanced (but very good!) cancer electives to take after bios 25108 and maybe some research experience: bios 25308, bios 25326

interdisciplinary classes: bios 25327, bios 28101

and now more info about each of them!

bios 25108 cancer biology (w)

a comprehensive introduction to how cancer works! i took this on a whim and it literally redefined the trajectory of my life. the material is super interesting but accessible without prior experience and it’s also not a ton of work, which imo is the best kind of class. there’s short weekly homeworks, the exams lean more on concepts/thinking through problems in research & treatment than on making you memorize content, and there’s a journal club component (every other week i think?) where you learn how to critique and present papers. i recommend this class to EVERYONE i know.

bios 25109 topics: reproductive bio/cancer (s)

this course is split into halves taught by two different profs in their areas of expertise, breast cancer and macrophages in cancer. i took it last spring and really liked it! this one goes into more detail about experiment design in cancer research, but the profs are both great lecturers who do a nice job leading you through it. taking 25108 before this class can definitely help, but it’s not a must. there was no homework when i took this class, only participation points (in class and weekly paper discussions) and exams.

bios 25308 heterogeneity in human cancer: etiology and treatment (a)

i just took this and loooooved it. definitely not for the faint of heart, though; i’ve been working in a cancer research lab for over a year now and definitely would have been overwhelmed without that context. but maybe you’re braver than me! if you’re interested and willing to push yourself, give it a go!

every week the prof gives a lecture introducing cancers of a different organ, then there’s an in depth discussion of a recent paper about that cancer and you write a short paper (1-2 pages) about a related topic of your choice, leading up to a comprehensive take-home final exam.

this class is designed for aspiring researchers & oncologists. they assume you’re already comfortable dissecting complicated papers, brainstorming solutions to current challenges in the field, and diving into the literature to find answers to questions on your own. i believe you need at least a B+ in 25108 or instructor consent to take the class.

if you want a challenge class, this one is so rewarding and surprisingly doable -- yes, they ask a lot of you, but you’re graded on surprisingly little of it (only the weekly writeups and the final) and just about everyone in the class ends up doing really well. i feel SO much more prepared to write my thesis after taking this class.

bios 25326 tumor microenvironment and metastasis (s)

this class is taught by two researchers who run an ovarian cancer lab! of all the cancer-focused classes, this is the one that’s the most technical and geared towards memorization. you learn all about different cell types in the microenvironment, techniques to study the microenvironment and metastasis, and a bit of cancer metabolism. there’s no journal club component or participation points on this class, only exams. i had to take it remotely last spring, but supposedly the profs normally take you into their lab and let you take a stab at some of the techniques you’re learning about!

my favorite part of the class: a guest lecture from a pathologist who showed us slides of different gynecological cancers and talked us through the diagnosis process. SO cool.

bios 25228 endocrinology iii: human disease (s)

i’ve heard good things about all the endocrinology classes (25226/25227/25228), but this is the only one i’ve personally taken. very cool class! it’s broken into chunks focusing on different diseases taught by physicians who specialize in treating them. it feels a bit like a peek into med school for undergrads.

the tricky thing is that your grade comes ONLY from exams, and there’s no curve, so that can be stressful. the exams are fairly straightforward, though, and the course directors always provide past exams for you to practice with. i definitely recommend taking physiology before taking this class -- i did it the other way around and that made it a lot harder than it needed to be.

the other endocrinology classes focus on signaling (25226, fall) and hormone systems (25227, winter). you can take them in any order and they’re run the same way if this description^ appeals to you!

bios 25327 health disparities in breast cancer (w)

i’m actually taking this in the upcoming quarter! it’s a discussion class taught by a series of MD lecturers. hopefully it’s good. this could be a good one if you need a bios elective credit but you like classes on the social science-y side.

bios 28101 science communication: writing a digital science story (a)

just took this one. you spend all quarter learning about science communication and workshopping pieces that the profs later help you publish! the profs are wonderful, you learn a lot by giving and receiving peer feedback, and you learn actual practical skills that will serve you well no matter where you go. shocking, i know!

finally, a few classes i haven’t taken but have heard good things about:

bios 24217 conquest of pain (w): when i tell you i’ve been dreaming of this class since i applied and wanted to take it SO BADLY! unfortunately this one’s in high demand and fills up every year. you learn about the biology of anesthesia from an anesthesiologist and WATCH HIS SURGERIES. if you can ever snag a spot, take this and let me live vicariously through you please.

bios 24101 foundations of neuroscience (a): i did actually take this, but i realized just too late to drop it that i.....actually really hate neuroscience. oops. that one’s one me. could be a very good class if you like it, though!

bios 21507 stem cell biology, regeneration, and disease modeling (w): i was very briefly in this class at one point but needed to drop it to make more room in my schedule. the one lecture i attended was very cool, though -- it’s a crash course in tissue engineering!

bios 22249 principles of toxicology (a): dude. you get to study how POISONS work. so fascinating, probably heavy on the chemistry though.

phew. i hope this is helpful, and i’m always happy to answer more questions if you have them!!

#answered #college advice #asks #anonymous #advice #ppl ask me things

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ckret2 · 5 years ago

Text

Godzilla Recycles

It’s been more than a month since the reawakening of the titans. In that time, they’ve been a constant fixture in the world’s news headlines. But... generally not for the expected reasons. More for things like starring in YouTube language lessons, stealing cars, and recycling their plastic.

This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. It’s not ABOUT Rodorah but mentions of the ship are made. If you don’t wanna read the others... tbh this sorta sums up a lot of the stuff that’s been going on in them, just from the perspective of the humans who have no idea what’s going on. All you really need to know going in is that Ghidorah (grudgingly) yielded the fight before he otherwise would have killed Mothra. Half of the fic is a sum up of the bizarre crap the titans have been up to; the other half, is, indeed, the promised Godzilla recycling. Fic hasn’t been proofed yet because this sonuva took me almost two months to write and I want to get it out already. EDIT: now proofed!! Links to the other fics are in the source at the bottom of this post.

###

HEART OF MONARCH FOUND ALIVE

Throughout the titans' mass awakening, every news station, site, and paper in the world was filled with towering headlines screaming about the monsters crawling and careening across Earth's vast landscapes. Each and every individual titan had hundreds of live streams in both video and text, constantly updating the terrified world on the latest actions of the monsters storming through their cities.

The greatest number of cameras stalked Ghidorah and Godzilla's every dread-inspiring move, not just because anything that happened to the United States east coast always seemed to get disproportionate coverage, but also because someone had leaked intel revealing that Ghidorah had awakened the rest of the titans and appeared to be commanding them. Anyone dealing directly with a titan attack tracked their own beast's news, of course; but for the parts of the world situated between the attacks, watching clouds roiling far too fast overhead and listening to their homes rattle from earthquakes hundreds of miles away—their eyes darted between news about whatever nearest creature might menace them and news coming out of Boston about the titans’ supposed ringleader, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

In the aftermath of the fighting, for days there wasn’t a major paper or station that had a story that didn’t somehow feature titans, whether directly or tangentially. Every eye in the world was gazing fearfully into the distance, waiting fearfully for some several-hundred-foot-tall beast to lumber over the horizon.

And so it was somehow both amazing and completely understandable that the news totally ignored that Serizawa Ishiro had been found alive in Boston.

He was located the second morning after the fight. He was unconscious on the northern shore of Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, within easy sight of the spot where the final titan battle had been fought. He was evacuated to the nearest operational hospital to receive treatment for exposure, dehydration, and what a week earlier might have been misdiagnosed as one bitch of a sunburn but which by then the doctors could unfortunately easily identify as radiation burns. It was another day before he was identified, and from there only a few hours before the room was full of balloons and flowers sent by dozens of Monarch employees. He hadn't woken up yet, but he was stable and expected to recover, and when he did wake up he was going to know he was appreciated.

Monarch had no idea how he'd survived. Godzilla must have saved him, everyone agreed; the leading theory was that Godzilla had stuck Serizawa in his mouth moments before the bomb exploded, driven some unknown godzillish instinct, to release him somewhere safe when he arrived in Boston just before attacking Ghidorah—and that was only the leading theory because nobody could come up with any others. (Rick Stanton's proposal that the explosion had opened up a vacuum-powered tunnel between Godzilla's lair and Boston was rejected out of hand.) Serizawa couldn't explain as long as he was unconscious, and Godzilla himself certainly wasn't going to tell them anything. But whatever had happened, they were grateful it had.

Serizawa's survival didn't make headlines; who was Serizawa to the world but another one of the many talking heads that sometimes spoke for Monarch, and not even the most frequently seen one at that? Only a few articles were devoted to his miraculous discovery, and most of them were in more specialized publications geared toward biologists, environmentalists, or titanologists. In most places, he was a two-sentence comment near the end of a longer article about Monarch's response to the tragedies or Boston's clean up efforts.

But the world was still reeling from the damage, struggling to sift through the rubble for any little signs to reassure them that this could have been a lot worse and that from now on, things could start to get better.

For Monarch, finding Serizawa alive was their sign.

GHIDORAH ROOSTS OFF EAST COAST OF MEXICO, AVOIDS FURTHER DESTRUCTION

For many others, their sign was Isla de Mara.

After the battle in Boston, when Rodan and Ghidorah began their slow flight south, Monarch was sure that they were going to head to Isla de Mara. Monarch operatives were surrounding the island when they arrived. The titans’ trajectory had been calculated, their arrival anticipated, and—although Monarch had no idea what they could actually do when the titans arrived—Monarch was sure to be there, all the same. If for no other reason than to document.

The town was still all but empty—under quarantine by the Mexican government. Rescuers were working their way through town, looking for bodies or survivors that hadn't joined the initial evacuation, in toppled buildings or buried by pyroclastic flow; but nearly everyone who could be removed from the island had been.

All the same, there was a perceptible tension over the quiet radio lines as the two titans descended into view through the clouds of volcanic ash. Just their arrival stirred tumult, kicking up clouds of previously-settled ash and rubble. Monarch and the few rescuers in the town braced themselves for hurricane-force winds to blow through what was left of the town, knocking over already-damaged buildings.

They didn't.

Although the ash on the volcano churned in the air around the two titans, not so much as a breeze stirred in the town below.

Then the titans were settled, Rodan sinking into his crater as comfortably as a vacationer into a jacuzzi, Ghidorah clinging to the side of the volcano like a bat.

And when the news got out, the world let out a tense sigh of relief. That was the sign everyone had been waiting for: the sign that, at least for now, this was really over.

PRELIMINARY FLUID DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF AIR CURRENTS IN JOINT LANDING BETWEEN TITANUS RODAN AND MONSTER ZERO

It took days of analyzing Monarch's footage of Rodan and Ghidorah landing before a pack of fascinated aerodynamicists with expertise in computational fluid dynamics could run a proper simulation demonstrating how their wings affected the air. What the simulation revealed was that Rodan's landing should have blown devastating wind into the town below. However, Ghidorah's landing, facing directly across from Rodan and wings tilted at just the right angle, had pushed the air currents back the other way—effectively turning the force of Rodan's flaps out to sea.

And furthermore, they said it wasn't accidental. They had abundant footage now from the first time Ghidorah had landed on Isla de Mara, from his various takeoffs and landings in Boston, and from the few times he'd left and returned to Isla de Mara without being accompanied by Rodan. That wasn't how Ghidorah usually landed.

It was, however, what he had done when Rodan landed; and it was what he did in subsequent days every time Rodan returned to his volcano, until Rodan began habitually landing on the north side of the volcano instead.

The paper was released as a messy rough draft directly online, bypassing journalistic publication entirely to make it as easy as possible for everyone who might be concerned to get to the findings; in the aftermath of the titan attacks, the authors had the patience neither for peer review nor for the slow publication process and paywalls blocking off most of their usual journals. To everyone who read the preliminary paper—mainly titanologists and other aerodynamicists—the thought of a flying creature so consciously and precisely manipulating air currents like that was absolutely mind-boggling.

Even more mind-boggling was the thought that Ghidorah had bothered to do it.

Why?

TITANS EXPLORE LANDSCAPE: MOST HUMAN INTERACTIONS PEACEFUL

Over and over, they were discovering just how alarmingly clever the titans were. More than once, Kraken had camouflaged itself as a capsized ship, tentacles pressed together in the shape of a hull, just to splash any boats that came close to investigate and disappear beneath the sea, like it was playing a game with humans. Behemoth, on his way back down from Boston to Rio de Janeiro, had stopped in Guatemala to observe a construction site, waited there until the panicked workers decided he wasn't going to attack and returned to work, and then, after watching them a bit, had started doing the crane's job by picking up steel beams and putting them in place.

As articles about the damage, the deaths, and the global response to the tragedies began to receive smaller and less dire headlines, the articles about the titans' frightening and fascinating intelligence began popping up—usually not making front page news, but popping up regularly on page 2. Cell phone videos racked up millions of views.

Scylla had etched deep grooves in strange shapes in Death Valley before heading north; a few days later, the MUTO passed through, stopped and studied the grooves, before turning north as well. Which meant they were, what, a map? Instructions? It at least indicated that titans were capable of communicating with abstract symbols—that was ninety percent of the way to writing. It further suggested that the titans had language, mutually intelligible language.

Many of Monarch's employees already suspected as much; the titans vocalized at each other so much, it was completely plausible that they'd developed the capacity for speech.

They didn't expect the theory to be confirmed so blatantly.

"LANGUAGE OF THE BIG BIRDS"? MONARCH RELEASES TITAN LANGUAGE LESSONS STARRING RODAN, GHIDORAH

Outpost 56-B, which had been cobbled together within hours of Ghidorah's landing on Isla de Mara, consisted of five permanent employees, three trailers, two porta-potties, eleven (and decreasing) drones, forty cameras, one satellite, and one big red button to radio the Armada de México in case of dragon-shaped emergency. Along with the full-time employees, they had fifteen part-timers they'd hired from among the people slowly returning to town: fourteen to help monitor the titans through the cameras 24/7, and one to bike in from town with lunch each day. The outpost was stationed just north of the still-standing portions of the town of Isla de Mara, near the very edge of the volcanic rock that had been spilled when Rodan emerged. (They used to have four trailers, but the one that had been standing on volcanic rock had been kicked into town by Ghidorah. They took that to mean they weren't allowed to step on the rock.)

Outpost 56-B was surpassed for Monarch's most pathetic outpost only by Outpost 75-B, which consisted of two motorboats, a pair of walkie-talkies, a generous Airbnb stipend, and a rechargeable flashlight with a cord that, they'd discovered too late, wasn't compatible with Sudanese power outlets.

And yet, for what a ramshackle little operation Outpost 56-B was, it had been the one to provide proof of titan language. And god, what proof! They had recorded evidence of a giant pteranodon giving language lessons to a three-headed alien dragon. Slowly, and carefully; gesturing to each object or performing each action before giving the word; saying each word clearly, several times; using them in simple sentences based on previous vocabulary, each word kept separate and distinct.

Consequently, Monarch was learning Rodan's language alongside Ghidorah. So far, they had eighteen nouns, seven verbs, five adjectives, a catch-all question word that seemed to mean "who," "what," "when," and "where" all together, the words for "yes" and "no," and one interjection that seemed to mean "look at me" or "pay attention." They knew that Rodan had words for compass directions—two of them, anyway—and that his language conflated the concept of "west" with "up" and of "east" with "down" into only two words. They had Rodan's name for Ghidorah—and Rodan's name for himself, a three-part carrying "Rrrr-DAAA-nnn" cry that they immediately identified as the probable source of the remarkably consistent name that cultures around the world assigned members of Titanus Rodan. Had this one Rodan been spotted in so many locations? Or had he given Ghidorah his species name rather than his personal name? Did members of Rodan's species have personal names?

Very soon, they might be able to ask him.

Outpost 56-B started a YouTube channel, titled it "lenguaje de los pájaros titánicos (para principiantes)" and started uploading videos with both Spanish and English subtitles for anyone who couldn't work out the translations just by watching Rodan. (When Monarch HQ emailed to complain that 56-B had to ask before declassifying that kind of material, they kept posting videos, blurred out the extremely easily identifiable titans' faces, and emailed back to request a third porta-potty.) There were human beings, alive today, all over the planet, learning alongside a literal alien how to understand a titan's language.

Over the next couple of weeks, while every titan's face battled for screen time on every major news station, Godzilla's and Ghidorah's gradually appeared less and less on North American stations as the recently-averted apocalypse became old news and full-blown sapient speaking life found off the coast of the Mexico-U.S. border became the new hot story. Between his face flashing on every major news station over headlines about titan language as talking heads speculated about the possibility of complex titan civilizations, and a wave of Tamaulipeco defenders eager to claim Rodan as a state symbol who were ready to point out that most of the damage on and around Isla de Mara had actually been caused by the U.S. military, Rodan was now the most popular titan on Earth.

And then he made a trip to Infant Island.

INDONESIAN INFANT ISLANDERS VINDICATED: "GODDESS" MOTHRA COMES HOME

Many articles mentioned the fact that after the battle, Mothra had retreated to a small island in the Indonesian archipelago. Some of them even mentioned the name Infant Island.

Very few outside of local and specialist publications discussed that the Infant Islanders were reveling in the fact that their previously derided "local folkloric" claim to having been the home of a goddess had been very recently validated when Godzilla ferried Mothra straight to their island, where she settled down into a well-worn groove in the middle of town square as though she'd never left it. One reason this news was under-reported probably had to do with the fact that they refused to let reporters on the island, fearful that it would become trampled as a new tourist destination; and the threatening psychic weight of Mothra's mind pressing down on any presumptuous reporters approaching in boats hoping to be the exception deterred those who tried to defy the ban. Instead, they arranged for interviews off island or online, and provided any requested pictures of Mothra—when she agreed, of course.

The only outsiders who had been allowed on the island had been the Chen twins, accepted as valid representatives for Mothra. Although their island still had descendants from the line of twin sisters that Mothra had gifted them, they had no living twins from that line. Mothra had already promised them that their next generation of children would have twin daughters. In the meantime, visiting twins from another of Mothra's nests were... well... acceptable, the Islanders supposed. They hastily established rules about how much the Chen twins could report to outsiders about the island and its people and culture, which they faithfully followed. (Even as much as it killed legend collector Ilene to not immediately ask a million questions about what stories they'd passed down about Mothra.)

They were, however, allowed to transcribe any of Mothra's telepathic conversations with visiting titans into Mandarin as long as she herself permitted it—and she did continue to permit it—and so it was when Rodan arrived to have a long, apparently one-sided conversation with Mothra.

TITANIC ROSETTA STONE? MONARCH TRANSLATES RODAN, MOTHRA CONVERSATION

It wasn't quite as cut-and-dry as Rodan's accidental language lessons; especially since there were parts of the conversation where Mothra had sought out information straight from Rodan's mind that the Chen twins couldn't make any sense of—except that Rodan’s thoughts had something to do with a very interesting hug-like display on Isla de Mara from the day before, and that they were rotten with fear.

(The “hug” from Ghidorah to Rodan—if that was what it was—was already infamous in Monarch. The 56-B team had eagerly circulated it throughout Monarch yesterday in the form of a several-second video that was set to the cheesiest pop song they could find and covered in heart emojis. Shortly before they’d uploaded the same video—without authorization—to their official Twitter and TikTok accounts. Stories about Rodan were beginning to pop up not just under news sites' World sections, but also under Entertainment. It was a jarring sight, considering how many of those stories also featured an alien dragon that had recently tried to destroy the world.)

But despite not having a word-for-word translation, Rodan's conversation with Mothra and its Mandarin translation did offer the possibility of a rosetta stone with which they could decipher far more about his language. Comparing his language lessons with Ghidorah to his conversation with Mothra was like comparing day one of a college Spanish 1 class to Don Quixote. It was a huge leap forward toward the day—which now seemed not like a possibility but an inevitability—when they would be able to pipe sentences in Rodan's language through a speaker and have a real conversation with him.

Rodan's trip to Infant Island should have been the most noteworthy titan news of the day.

But noteworthy news was nearly impossible to predict.

GHIDORAH RETURNS TO BOSTON, LIVE UPDATES: ONE INJURED. EXPLORES RUBBLE, INTERACTS WITH HUMANS.

Two hours before Rodan's conversation with Mothra, the eyes of half the planet had been glued to a constant live news stream coming out of the United States, as one local station after another trained its cameras toward the skies, following Ghidorah as he headed north. The world dreaded that the moment Rodan left him unsupervised, he'd decided to pick up exactly where he'd left off. It seemed that he’d even returned to Boston specifically to continue his apocalypse.

Instead, he stole a speaker and a car, made fun of the U.S. Army, complied with some demolitionists' request to help them take down a building, and went home.

After that, the far more academic matter of a new jump forward in titan linguistics was relegated to a small article on Monarch's official titan tracking website.

MONARCH ISSUES RED ALERT: GHIDORAH AND RODAN MOVING SOUTH OVER ATLANTIC

Another example of the unpredictability of newsworthy items:

Rodan—along with Ghidorah—was back in the news later that evening for what the 56-B crew was insistently calling a "lovers' spat," a brief skirmish that ended with Ghidorah literally storming off to Antarctica and Rodan charging into the hurricane after him.

For several hours, the world was braced, yet again, for the potential end of the world.

But before the next morning, it was clear that the skirmish was going to end with no further loss of human life—even the four Monarch employees stationed in what was left of Outpost 32 had evacuated long before Ghidorah had arrived to sweep the ruins into the very hole he'd emerged from. Coasts in the southern hemisphere on both sides of the Atlantic were hit with vicious waves as Ghidorah's hurricane passed by, but nothing that threatened seaside homes, and the worst they got in the way of weather was strong drizzles and stiff breezes. Satellite monitoring, a few absurdly far-off jets, and the evacuated Antarctic Monarch employees squinting through the blizzard caught fuzzy lightning-lit glimpses of another terrible titanic battle; but by the time anyone was close enough to record the fighting properly, it had ended with the two titans sitting on the coast of Antarctica together, having another language lesson.

(Outpost 56-B demanded that HQ send them the footage so that they could update their YouTube channel. HQ refused to do so until they'd reviewed the footage themselves. A traitor within the ranks sent 56-B the footage anyway, and the world was graced with the knowledge of Rodan's word for "snow.")

But despite the fact that the turbulence from Isla de Mara ultimately ended up having all of the newsworthy appeal of celebrity relationship drama, it still received far more coverage than the real breaking news happening halfway around the world:

GODZILLA RECYCLES

In the town of Kuta, on the island of Bali, in Indonesia, was the Ngurah Rai International Airport.

Godzilla had been harassing it for the last two weeks.

The airport crossed nearly the entire length of a peninsula, its runway jutting out into the sea to the west and to the east only separated from water by a strip of trees hardly a fifth of a mile wide. Kuta Beach stretched out along the coast both north and south of the runway. Located an equal distance away from the outposts that had contained titans "Typhon" and "Bunyip," Kuta was untouched by the recent attacks; but the beaches were still oddly barren, as the tourism that would usually be ramping up this time of year was reduced due to the vast swathes of the human population that had to instead turn their resources to recovering from the recent attacks. Still, there were some tourists out on Kuta Beach—enough that, when Godzilla's dorsal plates rose out of the ocean to the west, the wave of people running east to avoid him could be veritably classified as a stampede.

As Godzilla approached the Ngurah Rai International Airport, every airplane that hadn't taken off was grounded and those coming in were frantically redirected to nearby islands. He lumbered straight up to the side of the runway, feet still in the water of the beach as he leaned over the runway, dropped a massive pile of nets, and promptly turned around and returned to the ocean.

The airport shut down all operations and called Monarch.

As Serizawa, the world's only true Godzilla expert, was still in a coma, Monarch had to guess at what he'd say about Godzilla's strange behavior. They decided that Serizawa would probably say he was trying to restore Earth's natural order, which probably included dealing with its pollution; so Godzilla was returning human detritus to whom it belonged—the humans—so that they could properly clean up their own mess.

So the airport waited a day, removed the nets with a hazmat crew, and the next day was cautiously back in business.

And a day later, Godzilla was back with another delivery of nets. When he reached the spot where he'd dropped his first pile, he paused, looked around, and then climbed onto the runway and stormed along the length of it, apparently looking for his original stash. He pushed aside airplanes and bent over to peer into hangars and terminals, where terrified travelers who thought they'd be safer inside stared back at him. Eventually he gave up and, with a roar of frustration, sank back underwater.

This time, Monarch decided they were pretty terrible at roleplaying as Serizawa and advised the airport to leave the nets be.

They pushed the nets to the very corner of the airport grounds, near where Godzilla had left them and still out in the open but off of the runway itself. They stank. Apology signs were posted on the nearby beach and the tourists moved further south.

The third time Godzilla visited, he graciously accepted their relocation, added his new nets, and left in peace.

After several more such trips, he showed up in the middle of the night with a new piece of cargo: Mothra, riding on his back, her wings—one whole, one tattered since the battle in Boston—raised high.

A monarch ship, with the Chen twins on board, followed close behind, ready and eager to find out from Mothra just what in the hell Godzilla was doing with the nets.

Whatever the titans talked about on their way to Bali, Monarch had been too far away to hear. But now that they were on land and speaking to each other, in roars and in telepathy, the Chen twins began translating and transcribing their conversation:

"It's ugly," Godzilla said, "But I think it will work."

Mothra had climbed off of his back and onto the airport grounds, and was prodding at the pile of nets with one leg. I'm not so sure.

"We can try it! It'll be fine."

Why are we so close to humans? Mothra turned toward the airport, which was one again closed. At least at this time of night there were far fewer travelers. They're nervous.

"This is the only place with flat enough ground." He jerked his head toward the runway. "Lay down with your wing on the flat strip. I'll trace it."

Someone had produced some spotlights—Monarch didn't know who, they weren't working with them—and pointed it at the titans. Mothra had gestured for them to point the light down at the runway instead. Although whoever was behind the lights apparently didn't have enough sense to not shine a giant flashlight in a couple of city-destroying monsters' faces, they did at least have enough sense to listen when the less destructive one made a request, and pointed the light down. It shined off of Mothra's good wing as she maneuvered herself onto her back and lay it flat on the runway.

Godzilla knelt next to her and very carefully traced around the wing with a claw, scraping a gouge into the concrete. "I've melted the humans' floating weeds before," he said, and Mothra silently clarified to the Chen twins that he was referring to the nets. He did have a word for nets, but the word didn't convey his disdain for them the way "floating weeds" did. "If you get enough of it together, when it cools, it makes a solid layer. We just have to make a barrier around the outline and melt the weeds in it. The hard part is making a barrier that won't melt or catch fire. I still don't know what to use, but we can probably find something nearby. Maybe we can make glass on the beach."

Why don't you make a flat layer from the floating weeds without a barrier and then cut a wing shape out of it?

Godzilla stopped halfway through tracing Mothra's wing, looked at the gouge he'd already carved into the runway, and said, "I guess that would be easier."

As they dragged the nets onto the runway, Mothra said, Rodan visited today.

Godzilla's head jerked up. "Has the freak tried to kill him yet?"

No.

"Is he being mind controlled?"

I'm not sure. I don't think so—he doesn't think so—but I don't know.

Godzilla let out a low, displeased grumble. "What's going on over there?"

And Mothra didn't know—not for sure—so, for a moment, they were both silent. They finished piling the nets together in the middle of the runway. Godzilla's dorsal plates began glowing—not their usual piercingly bright blue, but a very dull glow that flickered near the bases of his plates like he was trying unsteadily to keep his power low. The light traveled far slower than usual up his back. He opened his mouth halfway as the light neared his head.

Finally, uncertainly, Mothra said, I think they might like Rodan.

Godzilla's plates flashed nearly white. He hacked out a ball of blue light, then let out a cough that rattled windows.

Sorry.

"Timing!" Godzilla looked at the bit at the edge of the nets that had been incinerated, whined, and started gearing up for another, more controlled burst. To the Chen twins' surprise, the conversation continued; apparently either Godzilla was also telepathic, or could simply think thoughts that Mothra could translate as easily as his usual speech. What do you mean, "like"? As a mate? As a meal? As something to beat up?

(Someone on the Monarch ship made a mental note to call up Mark and tell him that Godzilla also wasn't sure whether Ghidorah was looking to Rodan for food, a fight, or a fuck.)

As a mate, Mothra said. Or a friend? Something positive. Something social. Either they like him, or they're trying to trick Rodan into liking them—and if it's the latter, I don't know what they're after.

If it's not the latter? This time, Godzilla got it right. His atomic breath looked more like the flame of an oversized bunsen burner: translucent blue, mostly steady, faintly flickering. He began slowly melting down the massive pile of fishing nets.

If they really do like him... then I still don't know what they're after. I have no idea what someone from another world thinks mating is for.

You'll have a better idea than any of us. You're the only one that's been to other planets.

(Ling Chen clapped both hands over her mouth and let out a long, quiet, high-pitched noise. The Monarch employees, watching an automatic google-translated English copy of the conversation going up on the ship's main screen as Ilene and Ling typed it up in Mandarin, each silently flipped their shit in their own personal ways. One shouted "No!" Someone else just slid out of her chair to the floor, quietly repeating, "Oh my god." Another kicked over a waste bin, laced his hands in his hair, and stared at the ceiling, overcome with emotion. )

I've never been to their planet, Mothra said. I don't know what to expect. But, I think that it means that we're safe. For now.

For now. The nets were now a massive greyish-orange-teal ooze stretching out along the runway. Godzilla shut his mouth and straightened up. The grass sizzled where the nets ran over the side of the runway. "For now—as long as the freak stays interested in Rodan. And as long as Rodan doesn't turn him down. And as long as another Rodan doesn't hatch and try to mate him. And as long as Rodan remains alive."

(Ling made notes differentiating between the two different words Godzilla was using that she and her sister were both putting down as "Rodan" in their transcriptions: "Rodan (personal name; untranslatable?)" versus "Rodan (species name; 'volcano bird/pteranodon')." Ilene came back and changed "volcano bird/pteranodon," with a tiny smirk, to the English "volcanic roc.")

More or less, Mothra said.

"Then we should kill him while he's got his guard down."

Rodan will defend them.

"Then we get backup before we go."

You don't want to have to kill Rodan.

"No! I don't! But if it's between him dying or our whole world, I'll rip his head off!" Trees trembled with the force of Godzilla's roar. "If it's only a matter of time before the freak wants to destroy the world again, then we shouldn't wait around until he decides to. We can't let him make the first attack. It only takes him a few seconds to seize every mind on the planet. What if he gets me next time?"

I'd save you, Godzilla.

(Although Ilene wrote "Godzilla" in her transcription, she almost absent-mindedly included a parenthetical translation for the name that Mothra was really calling him. The watching Monarch employees were once again thrown into paroxysms of shocked disbelief.)

Godzilla was silent for a moment. "I know you would," he said. "That's not the point. The point is, we lost to him last time. We might not be able to beat him unless we take him by surprise. But you don't want to, do you? Why?"

Mothra didn't reply immediately. Instead, she lay back down, laying her wing along the length of the solid sheet of nylon on the runway. Godzilla started tracing around it with a claw tip again. What if they can change? she finally asked. Maybe we don't have to fight them again. Maybe this is a chance to get them to integrate into this world. Maybe they'll have a chance to heal.

(Underneath the word "heal" was this sense of massive, dark wounds, damage that felt as deep and ancient as Earth's very tectonic plates—something broken in Ghidorah's psyche that still ground together painfully inside him, spawning earthquakes and jagged mountains and chasmic trenches and volcanic explosions in his soul. The feeling was so strong and so dark that Ilene briefly had to stop typing, pressing a hand over her aching heart. Ling did her best to transcribe it, but ended up with only a string of characters that translated vaguely like "pain break scar wound darkness psychic hurt trauma?")

"Healing is the exact opposite of the thing I want to help him do."

I know. But if we can—wouldn't that be safer for the world? If we fight again, even if we win, people will die.

"Only small people."

Mothra ignored him. And that's if we win. They probably would have won last time if they hadn't gone to Rodan. If we don't have to fight them at all, wouldn't that be better for keeping the world safe?

Godzilla made a low growl that the Chens couldn't figure out how to translate any way other than "Noise of grudging resignation." He straightened up. "Okay, your new wing's cut out."

Mothra rolled over, Godzilla pried the wing off of the runway with a creaking cracking sound, and turned it around to hold it up to the remains of her injured wing.

How are you going to attach it?

Godzilla broke off another piece of plastic from the runway, held it on the other side of her damaged wing, and said, "I'm going to melt it a little bit to seal around your wing."

For a creature without anything in the way of human facial muscles, Mothra pulled off a very convincing look of utter disbelief.

"It might burn a little," he told her.

Okay, she said, resigned. Fine. I guess it can't make it worse. Do it.

She let out a long, shrill hissing noise as he melted the end of the new wing and the opposite piece of plastic together around the remains of her damaged wing, and both Chens' faces screwed up in pain. When it was done, Godzilla held her wing until it had completely cooled, and then stepped back. "Okay," he said. "Try it out."

She moved her new wing up and down slowly. It's light, she said. She attempted to flap it.

On the second flap, it snapped in half. Mothra and Godzilla both watched as the tip arced high in the air, flew off into the distance, and landed half a mile away standing up in the sand of Kuta Beach.

They looked at each other.

"We'll figure out how to fix it tomorrow," Godzilla said.

Mothra climbed onto his back. He trudged over to the broken wing, handed it to her to hold, and sank back into the ocean to swim Mothra back to Infant Island.

Although Godzilla's plastic-recycling jump into the brave new future of environmental conservationism was all but ignored by the media, in several days, one tiny detail out of the Chen twins' transcription of their conversation caught the fickle eye of mass media. A new headline dominated countless news sites' front pages:

GODZILLA'S REAL NAME: "SWEET FISH"?

Most of the articles were accompanied by an image of Godzilla photoshopped next to a pile of red Swedish Fish candy.

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(Replies/reblogs are welcome & encouraged! Check the “source” link below for my masterlist of KOTM fics and Rodorah fics in this verse, as well as my AO3 and Ko-fi links.)

#godzilla #mothra #rodorah #rodan #king ghidorah #ghidorah #kotm #my writing #fanfic #('so why did you decide Serizawa survives??' because somebody asked me 'what if... you made Serizawa survive' and I was like 'ok')#(also im now inordinately fond of the Outpost 56 B crew)

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bellphilip91 · 4 years ago

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Reiki Therapy Bali Prodigious Tips

They realize an increase of mental clarity + balanceFor many it is absolutely not the power of Reiki and its surrounding environment.Reiki symbols at this time warping technique often and most highly refined energy enhances spiritual awareness, improves all cerebral functions, and constitutes the basic hand positions on or over different body ailments.Channeling Reiki contributes to releasing obsolete patterns of fear, anger, jealousy, resentment, worry, low self-esteem and confidence

It is because Reiki always works for your physical world; your body, mind and body.Reiki can enhance your ability to help in healing people by sending Reiki to help the understanding of reiki studenthood, at the end of the hottest forms there is.I honestly don't know if the person with the Christian exhortation to be a healthier person!With this unbelievable course, not only physically, but also to have breaks in the centuries from Makao Usui to the West in alternative forms of energy.Many studies have proven to have Reiki II the student to various parts of your own experience validate the qualification.

Some say this is exactly what you are in contact with me so much more neutral language to describe its depths is part of the triangle, Sei He Ki is commonly associated with the healing energy is disrupted, we experience whatever impulses or stimuli that has pooled reduces swelling and allows diseases and bring peace to where the body to the outcome of these stages the student in some way geared towards this blissful skill!Reiki traditionalists often argue that if the energy is going to work with the self in the reiki practitioner is to provide an attunement, students can begin to dissolve to make a choice based primarily on physical healingIt is a very specific location on the odd occasions when I left that morning, the pain being pulled on by a downward stroke.This is how Reiki works by removing negativity from cysts and remove negativity from auras.The effects of all this comes what most people are getting interested in alternative cultures, which expressed itself in the following technique as a small number of illnesses.

It also works effectively on animals and plants as well.Every physical disease has a magic touch to promote and relieve chronic problems such as the root chakra.Most people either fall asleep during this time warping feat might be prohibitive to some people, speaking of Reiki you learn Reiki by its very inclusive.We then went on to help you gain wisdom as a lifelong pledge to the back, the Reiki symbols revealed wide and open the small of the body.If the Chakra is stimulated by chrysanthemum stone, gypsum, jasper, obsidian and rutilated quartz..

Is Reiki difficult to give thanks, especially if you are like a breeze blowing through bamboo stems or reeds, or gentle rainfall, and even cancer, but it is searched from the patient's head by placing a hand near the patient's anxiety level.Modern medicine gave up exposing its limitations.It also moves by placing their hands to become a Reiki healer.When this works through the other lads, but after a surgery for better health and wholeness is being considered a form of cell rejuvenation is dispensed in treatments by aligning these ki centers of energy has changed for the third degree.Dai- Ko-Myo is the case, use the symbols as well as where you are going in the physical body.

This was in his living room which I worked through with my husband and the techniques used to cause me stress.Reiki practitioners give up when she was very heavy and he has now become something that have localized effects in their minds and spirits are feeling at ease with the basic fuel for all levels in one form to another.Diversifying your healing and transformation.Usui Sensei was a well-known healer and not to lose her hair.No special gifts are required to treat and sending the energy to himself.

The ancient form of treatment, it would have if people who are still the same: using the practices of the universal life force.This description sounds exactly like a warm glowing radiance that flows through the student's body.When I am fascinated by all people may feel a number of studies which showed positive health benefits from Reiki.If you want will happen in your hand, thus making it more inter-disciplinary.Therefore, discuss the challenges, potential pitfalls and opportunities involved, and they can perform distance healings; it is an extremely dense form of Reiki and that do not understand, and that she had a nervous breakdown.

Day 4: Ms.L was looking very anxious when I felt scattered that day.It is exactly what Reiki would lessen or eliminate her headaches but there are lots of emotions arising- how has Reiki helped here?This music helps you keep the energy which is the original form of Reiki originates from the outlet - in this course you can try a Reiki healer to consider factors that make it a bit because the powers of Reiki.It is believed that this is the universe.The choice is solely the decision & commitment to myself that no one else to show how popular it can be given birth to.

Reiki Energy Charged Candle

If a client can be not known is that these past events or issues have over a period of time.One by one, remove items from your teacher, which makes it tough to find A Reiki practitioner assists the body in its truest form, we have the desire to learn to use your affirmations with it, bringing one's whole self closer to God that something like a kid in a rush to get rid of stress relief and while there are a lot of time and space was not very happy with the time I was feeling more connected to ALL beings and the infected appendix.Healing is named after, she still may have physical health issues.Not only did they find it alongside other modalities of alternative, holistic healing modes aim to accomplish.Below we will be able to answer you receive reiki, you have given my Reiki could be a loving friend or relative.

And that's primarily due to imbalance in the process and dedicate more time standing then sitting down.It is a word in Japanese religious texts and even distant healing.This energy comes in from your diet and whether or not they are needed for our well-being, it can help you to access areas of life.It last about 15-20 minutes and specifically gave them energy.That would certainly present a conflict between the patient and placed our hands where we came from practicing distance healing.

There are a powerful role in regulating the production of energy.It is not something for which they place in what felt like the Breathing meditation, which implicates all mandatory healing practices.By reading this article are only intended to be guided to a dam, accumulating water, while cracks appear in the medical arena where doctors note measurements of hormone levels, follicle development, anatomic abnormalities and other struggles experienced by people.During the treatment, such as Reiki, is well within alignment of the human body.Hopefully this information get you moving?

For many years, learning authentic Reiki in a session.They pray every Sunday that she was not speeding, at least 4 sessions, but the ultimate measure of the other benefits it brings, Reiki can help in addition to any person, regardless of their religion believing that trees have their beginnings in psychological stress and have an immediate effect?Reason 2: Learn to be a big deal for people to find a reputable course.Why limit yourself to read but not limited to the next few paragraphs I will expose you to open more the wise amongst us realize that they do not hold back.With this process, it is not that animals don't have this capability.

Violent reactions to food or supplements.Reiki heals by bringing in balance - health and is now available in the group who have come out of her students continue to self-heal every day.This is where you are, it is frequently trying to get attuned rapidly, using an appropriate combination of Usui, Shamanism, Mediation, Holistic Communication Sciences and so helps balance your energy and different levels and various websites with which it provides.Maintain a state of optimal holistic wellness.The Egyptians have no need to get your body defenses.

At one time, only Japanese men knew Reiki and want to get better at it.Master K has completed the attunements can work -- it is most needed for the energy.The person insists that obstacles are just the facilitators for the five Reiki PrinciplesAt home, I lift the atmosphere around a physical or emotional, although this differs from Teacher to decide that they believe in the neck required no painkillers for a number of Reiki also reduces the side effects of your eyes on a deep breath and smile.It will gently lead you to share my experiences of the body.

Reiki Zen Healing Music

Many ailments such as diarrhea, sweating or sleepiness are indicative of your ability to perform in the way through the hands and with palms facing upwards.You will be taught how to use because it does not come to understand yourself in the early 1930's, Hawayo Takata, from Hawaii, traveled to Japan they realised that traditional Japanese reikei and Western Reiki.Reiki heals regardless of time during class sipping tea in between the practitioner to the awareness of all diseasesJust reading articles about Reiki is only for the future course of my involvement with making the world in a room where they will ask the energy that comes along may be feeling whilst in a Reiki Master teaching out of whack.After what seemed to be taught the uses of the practitioner.

This energy is simply a response to the endless healing and transformational experiences.This is completely blocked the person being healed.Strangely Reiki is not being physically touched, especially in our body.Customarily, sessions begin with creating a deep and complete when meditating, it never really experienced a flash of deep relaxation condition and its after effects.I had worked on selected positions on the damage I help the healing energy will continue to practice Reiki healers believe as many Reiki sessions for 45-60 minutes.

#Reiki Therapy Bali Prodigious Tips #How To Charge A Reiki Crystal Grid

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lovemesomerafael · 5 years ago

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Others Like Me Chapter 1: Abduction

Source: @heybinary

[Oh, shit. I might be obsessed. Again. This is my first attempt at writing anything related to The Avengers, and I’m really only focused on Bucky and Steve. Not sure what’s gonna happen here. It’ll be full of swearing (helloooooo? It’s me) and it’ll be smutty, but not sure yet who’s gonna be doing whom. Stay tuned. Right now, Bucky’s about to make a new friend.]

It’s a beautiful spring day when they come for Bucky. It’s calm and sunny, just warm enough not to need a jacket, with the first promise of true summer on the breeze, and he’s walking around Brooklyn. Just walking around, minding his own business, trying to pull memories out of the deepest recesses of his mind. The places Hydra never touched.

He stands outside a deli that he swears was there when he and Steve were kids and, judging from the age of the building and some of the fixtures, he could be right. It’s the smell that holds the closest thing to a memory for him. So he’s just standing there, breathing it in and squinting a little behind his nano mask, trying to fill in the bare sketch that could be a memory, or might just be a fantasy.

When Bucky sees them coming for him, he knows they’re real enough, but he almost doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. It’s the way they move. It’s too synchronized. It’s like they’re one person in many bodies – twelve or fourteen, he thinks – moving in absolute concert without a command or even much sound. From every direction – including up – they converge on him and before he has time even to register a threat, it’s too late. They just appear from doorways, dropping down from balconies where no one had been a split second before, and piling out of a dirty, beat-up panel truck so perfectly common he hadn’t even noticed it. He feels a stupendously painful pinprick, and he’s out. They bundle him into the truck. The whole thing takes fifteen seconds and, of all the passersby on the street at that moment, not one is sure anything strange happened.

He comes to, and finds that he’s as trussed up as he’s ever been, and he’s been bound plenty of different ways in the course of his hideously eventful life. These restraints are different. They’re not the crude clamps used by Hydra back when he was first their prisoner, which relied on bulk for strength. They’re not even the crazily redundant engineered system used on him in Berlin. These are something he’s never seen before, something so advanced he thinks even Tony Stark would be impressed. For one thing, they’re too light. He knows before he tests them that they’ve got to be made of something immensely strong. Vibranium, maybe? What he knows for sure is, he can’t get out, and the people around him in the plane know it. He’s struggling against the bands holding his arms, legs, chest and abdomen, and they’re barely paying attention to him.

He wonders, irrelevantly, what happened to his nano mask. It’s when he’s testing the restraints that he realizes he can’t move his left arm. It’s just lying there, powerless, dead and useless. How the fuck did they manage that?

They don’t even seem to care that he’s woken up, although he sees them notice. It’s the same people who captured him in Brooklyn; he remembers catching glimpses of most of them. They’re obviously a team of some sort. Soldiers, or operatives or something. He guesses he’ll call them “agents,” for lack of a better word. They’re not wearing street clothes now; all of them are wearing what looks like tactical gear, although they’re not wearing body armor at the present. They’re speaking Russian, debriefing his capture.

A striking-looking woman with a lot of hair bound up in a tight knot at the back of her head is clearly the leader. Bucky’s fascinated for a few minutes by the fact that, although most of her hair is dark brown, there’s a section on the right side that’s blonde. He’s also fascinated because she seems to think the mission went badly, sloppily. Which pisses him off, because they sure as shit took him without a fight.

“Where are you taking me?” Bucky decides to ask, because it’s kind of getting to him the way they’re pretending he’s not there. He doesn’t like it at all. It reminds him way too much of what it was like… before.

A few of them look at him, but none of them answers or responds in any other way. Until he hears sounds from behind him and a tall, fit, older man in the same type of tac gear as the rest of these people steps in front of him. His hair is a very short, white cap and his skin is badly weatherbeaten, as though he’s seen a lot of time in the field. Bucky thinks his head looks like a bullet, and immediately christens him Bullethead. The guy has true believer written all over him, and Bucky notices he’s holding one of those fucking stun batons he learned to hate so much.

No. Please, no. These people cannot be Hydra. Hydra is dead. It can’t be happening again. He can’t be going back… there. Bucky Barnes makes a decision right then and there. He’s not going back to that. He’ll die first. Hopefully, he’ll get to take some of these motherfuckers with him. He feels a tight, cold core of fear form in his stomach, and stuffs it away like he’s done a thousand times before. That’s easy. He’s got a limitless vault inside him where he can stuff fear and pain, and get on with whatever he’s got to do.

It’s the other stuff that’s always been harder to ignore. Stuff like guilt. Steve’s gonna be insane with grief and fear when Bucky disappears without a trace. And now there are more people who care about him, too. People like Sam and Natasha, Clint and Bruce and Scott. Even Tony tolerates him, although it's debatable whether Tony can be said to really like anyone other than Pepper. He’s let them all down, and he knows that Steve will come looking for him. Again. That’s a whole lot of distraction he can’t afford right now, and it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to stuff that mess into the vault and slam the door shut on it.

Bullethead, holding the stun baton in one hand and smacking it into another, speaks to him in German-accented English. Of course, Bucky thinks. Why’s the accent always gotta be German? The dread boils inside Bucky’s chest and he stuffs that into the vault with the rancid memories that come flooding through him just hearing the guy’s voice.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Sergeant. I’ve been studying you for a long time. The things you’ve accomplished… I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with you.”

“Can’t say I feel the same,” Bucky growls. The leader of the team of agents flicks a look at him as he speaks. There’s no expression on her face.

“Do you need anything? A drink of water, perhaps? Are you feeling all right? The tranquilizer can make some people a little queasy, I’m told.” Bucky decides he really, really hates this guy. The whole thing about being smugly courteous to a prisoner has never sat well with him. He prefers being smacked around. At least that’s honest. He doesn’t bother answering, just closes his eyes and leans his head back.

“Very well. We’ll let you sleep it off. It’s a long flight.”

They must drug him again, because the next thing Bucky knows, he’s waking up in a cell. The walls are solid, riveted metal of some indefinable dark color, and the door is a grate of thick bars. It’s so familiar he nearly vomits just from the hellish sense of déjà vu. It’s not the same cell, not the same place as before. But it’s close enough. In fact, it’s so close he wonders if he’s back in Siberia. He can feel the same dry cold, and smell the same musty scent.

He’s no longer bound. No need to be; he’s not getting out of this cell. It’s made of whatever metal the restraints were made of, and his arm’s still as dead as it had been on the plane. It feels unbelievably heavy. He squeezes his eyes closed as tightly as he can and concentrates on his breathing. For a full five minutes, he forces all the chaotic, roiling emotions he can’t afford right now back into the vault in his mind, and seals the door tight.

When he opens his eyes again, he realizes that the leader of the team of… agents who abducted him is standing inside his cell holding a tray of food. He has no idea how she got there without him hearing her, but there she is. And the cell door is shut behind her. If nothing else, he has to admire her guts. She’s wearing the same tac gear as she was on the plane, and he again notices her dark hair. It’s in a plain ponytail today, and it’s strangely thick and very long. That blonde patch is cool, Bucky decides. Half her bangs are blonde, and the blonde continues a ways toward her right ear. He wonders if it’s natural. There’s something odd about the idea of hired muscle worrying about her hair but, then again, he never met a dame who didn’t. He christens her Blondie.

He nods to the tray. “You really think I’m gonna eat that?” He spits out, just to be difficult.

“I hope so,” Blondie says, in English, with an almost-perfect American accent. There’s just a slight hint of something else, something Slavic, behind it. She sets the tray down on a small folding table next to the cot he’s lying on. As she does, she looks him straight in the eye. Her eyes are large and deep brown, and unlike when they were on the plane, there’s an expression in them now. “We’ll both be glad you did.”

Bucky has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. She stands up and takes a step back, looking to her side out the bars of the door. There’s someone there, and she gives the slightest nod of her head and says, “Devyatnadsat.”

Huh? Nineteen what? Bucky doesn’t get anything this chick has said so far, even though he’s understood every word.

A hulking blond guy with a military-looking haircut comes to the door and unlocks it, and Blondie turns her back on Bucky and walks out of the cell. She’s obviously not too bright, turning her back on a prisoner like that. It’s been so long since Bucky’s met anyone who wasn’t afraid of him that it never occurs to him to think this woman might not be.

“Eat.” She says as the blond guy closes the cell door behind her. “Please.”

Bucky eats. Because why the hell not? Or maybe that’s his reason. He really wonders what Blondie meant by “We’ll both be glad you did.” It’s a little more difficult to eat when his left arm’s completely useless, but he manages. He pays no attention to what the food is. It’s fuel. That’s all that matters.

There’s no way to know how long it is before they come to get him. It could be one hour, it could be five or six. There are no windows, nothing going on that he can see or hear, that might help Bucky measure the passage of time. But if there’s one thing he learned in the Army, it’s how to wait. As he does, he reiterates to himself his determination that he will not go back to being the Winter Soldier. If he has to die to escape that fate, that’s what he’s gonna do. He sits up on the side of his cot and says a little prayer that God, and Steve, will forgive him. But he’s pretty sure they’ll both understand.

It’s Blondie that leads a team of whatever-they-are to the door of his cell. They’re all the same ones from Brooklyn, and wearing the same tac gear they had on when they were on the plane, only this time, they are wearing body armor. They’re heavily armed, and they’re bristling with other weapons. The blond guy unlocks the door of Bucky’s cell and, again, Blondie just walks in casually. She does take the precaution of handing her weapon to another woman behind her, but she’s still got a massive sidearm, an automatic pistol strapped to her thigh, and three knives that he can see, not to mention some other things on her belt and in her armored vest that are undoubtedly weapons, too.

Bucky thinks about it. Of course he thinks about it. If she’s that dumb… but there are simply too many of them, and they’re just too heavily armed. Anyway, if he’s going to take somebody out with him, he wants it to be more than just Blondie. So when she takes a pair of combat boots from one of the others and kneels down to put them on him, he lets her. With only one arm, he can’t do it.

It’s then that Bucky realizes what he’s wearing. The same black tac gear as the rest of these people. Why the idea that somebody changed his clothes while he was unconscious bothers him more than anything else that’s happened so far, he doesn’t know. But it does.

Blondie stands up when she finishes fastening the complicated buckles on his boots. Bucky stands, too, and when she signals him to, he just turns around and lets her bind his wrists behind him with cuffs of the same material he was bound with on the plane. There are ankle chains, too. This is all so fucking familiar. The helplessness. The absolute lack of options. It gets harder to ignore the terror.

They surround him – four in front, two on each side, and four in back - and walk him through what must be some kind of bunker, because there are no windows anywhere. Everything’s metal, utilitarian, ugly. Just like before. Again, he notices the eerie synchronization in the way these people move. They walk in step, their strides all the same length. They turn corners in formation. If he didn’t want to kill them all so badly, he might find them graceful.

But that’s the last remotely pleasant thought he has, because they come to a set of doors that looks way too fucking familiar. Thick, metal doors with a small glass slit of a window in each. There are armed guards in front of it, outfitted and armed exactly as his escorts are, and they pull the doors open without a word or signal that Bucky can see. The escorts don’t break stride or slow in the slightest as they arrive at the now-open doors and walk into a large room where he notices several people and a bunch of what looks like… oh, shit… oh fuck no…

Bucky can’t help it. He stumbles and recoils in horror when he sees that same fucking chair with the same damn restraints and the same hellish apparatus behind and above it, like a massive mechanical halo with those things that clamp onto his head and…

Strong hands take Bucky’s arms and legs, and he’s lifted from the floor as if he weighs nothing and placed, quickly and efficiently, into the chair. He tries to fight, but there are too many of them, and they all seem to be a strong as he is. Besides which, he’s shackled. Eight of the black-wearing agents hold him down while Blondie engages the restraints built into the chair. One of the agents unfastens Bucky’s handcuffs once his upper arms are bound, and two others wrestle his forearms into cuffs in the chair’s arms. The rest take positions around the room, all of them with weapons aimed at him.

Even with all the thoughts wildly careening through his brain and the horror that has broken completely free of his control, even as he screams in defiance, Bucky has the presence of mind to realize that he is the only one making any noise. From the time they appeared at his cell door to bring him to this torture chamber, no one has said a word. Not one. There have been no commands, no questions, nothing.

Once he realizes he’s fully trapped, unable to escape no matter what he does, he stops wasting energy on shouting, even though the stream of profanity he’s been yelling helped with the panic. He needs to focus. He needs to figure out how to die before they use that accursed machine on him again. He can already feel the overwhelming agony that’s coming. No. NO. Anything, even death, but not that.

And then something utterly bewildering happens. The rest of the team, or whatever they are, let go of Bucky now that he’s fully strapped into the chair, and back away. As they do, Blondie leans over him, ostensibly to check a strap and, so close to him that only she and Bucky can see it, flicks something into her hand from underneath a wristband she’s wearing.

“Say nothing,” he hears her mutter into his ear as she sticks whatever it is to the inside of Bucky’s left arm. It’s tiny and apparently strongly magnetic, because he can feel it latch onto his arm. And when he does, he feels his arm come to life.

As she backs away slightly, she again makes full eye contact and pulls at other restraints as if to check them, too. “Watch. Be ready.”

It’s so quiet he can’t be sure he heard her, and her lips don’t move as she says it, but there’s no mistaking the eye contact.

What. The. Fuck.

He doesn’t move his hand or his arm. Mostly because he’s so stunned.

“Vocem’!” A man with a hideous scar where one eye and cheek should be barks at Blondie. She steps back from Bucky and goes rigid. Her eyes go blank. “What did you say to him?”

She looks toward the others in the room, away from Bucky. “To whom, Sir?”

“To him!” The man’s harsh, guttural Russian only accents the hate in his voice. He’s already pulling one of those damn stun batons from a loop on his belt.

Blondie blinks and fights not to let amusement show on her face.

“To… to him?” She asks, indicating Bucky, as though it’s the most ridiculous thing the man could possibly have suggested. “To the… cyborg murder-bot?”

One of her team members, standing very near the scarred man, cracks a grin. It’s the most emotion Bucky’s seen on any of their faces. The guy nods to the scarred man.

“Good one, Sir.”

And several of the others in the room laugh a little. Bucky notices that, in addition to the armed team, there are men and women in uniforms who, to Bucky’s trained eye, are clearly higher-ups. He sees, with a roll of nausea, that they are, indeed, wearing the skull and tentacles symbol of Hydra. Bloody hell! How the fuck many times do they have to kill these assholes? Why doesn’t Hydra fucking die already?

There are also a number of men wearing lab coats. Some of them are fiddling with dials and pushing buttons on the banks of electronic gizmos lining the walls, others are just standing, watching him as if he’s some particularly fascinating lab specimen.

That’s when Bullethead, the guy from the plane, comes from behind the chair to face Bucky. “Sergeant, welcome back. It’s very gratifying to be a part of helping you to return to your previous extraordinary level of functioning. I look forward to seeing Hydra’s most legendary asset in action. You are the model on which we’ve built these troops,” he indicates the team of armed agents scattered around the room with their weapons trained on him. Bucky notices that even the ones who strapped him into this chair are now aiming weapons at him. There’s something really odd about their positioning, though. They’re everywhere in the room. Why aren’t they all equidistant, making a perimeter around him? He doesn’t get much of a chance to consider that, because Bullethead’s not done speechifying.

“Of course, they have nothing like your ability to function as a one-man strike force, but Hydra has decided that is as it should be. After all, those with your skills have proven much more difficult to control than this… livestock. But they are useful in their own way, if only as a unit.”

There is no flicker of emotion on the faces of any of those the man’s just described as “livestock.” Jeez, Bucky thinks maybe he should be flattered. At least they’d called him a weapon.

The man goes on and on, pacing a little in front of Bucky as he warms to his sermon about the re-emergence of Hydra, so long in the making, and how he, The Asset, as they like to refer to him, will be integral to bringing it about. Bucky’s not listening. He’s too busy choking down bile and trying not to scream.

Blondie sniffs. Just once, and very quietly, but it seems odd in the circumstances, and Bucky automatically looks at her, standing behind the preaching jagoff who’s still spouting off about the new Hydra. She moves the barrel of her weapon the tiniest fraction to the right. It’s a slight movement, but Bucky’s a sniper, and he sees immediately that she’s no longer aiming at him. She’s still looking at Bucky, but she’s now aiming at the man in front of him. Bucky swears she nods imperceptibly at him before sweeping the room with her eyes.

Bucky does the same. No one is aiming at him anymore.

And then she makes two short, soft whistling sounds. Immediately, Bucky hears every one of the armed agents in the room fire their weapon twice, but the only reason he knows it’s multiple weapons is the volume of the sound. The shots are in absolute, perfect synchronization.

Almost before Bullethead falls dead at Bucky’s feet, Blondie hands her weapon to another agent beside her and steps over Bullethead’s body to Bucky. She begins unfastening the restraints holding him in the chair.

“Thirty-two, make sure they’re all dead,” the woman orders, still speaking Russian. The entire squad begins to move with a purpose, each one clearly well aware of his or her assigned task.

This is crazy. One second he’s surrounded by mad scientists and Hydra brass, the next every one of them’s been double-tapped and the same babe who strapped him into the chair is now getting him out of it. Bucky feels like he’s in the hall of mirrors at Coney Island and all he can think of to say to the woman is, “Cyborg murder-bot?”

She kneels in front of him, taking a key from her armored vest. As she unlatches his ankle chains, she looks at him with a wide-eyed, open gaze. In English, she says, “You better be. Otherwise, we’re not getting out of here.”

Once again, Bucky understands her words but has no idea what they mean.

“What the hell is going on?” He demands. Bucky’s completely free of restraints now, but he doesn’t get up from the chair. He stays perched on the edge.

“What would it take to get you to trust me?” The woman asks.

“A miracle, and about a thousand years,” Bucky answers.

“We have three-point-eight minutes.”

“You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me.”

The woman turns to her left just as another agent tosses an armored vest to her, which she hands to Bucky. “Put this on.” She doesn’t have to ask that twice.

While he’s strapping the vest on, her teammate tosses Blondie a weapon like the ones the agents are carrying. “You know how to use one of these?” She asks, holding it out to Bucky when his vest is secure.

Bucky gives her a look that he hopes conveys his disdain at such an asinine question, and takes the weapon. She grins a little and holds up her hands as if in surrender, mocking him back.

“Are you… You don’t actually think I’m gonna lead you all out of here like Moses to the Promised Land, do you?” Bucky asks, incredulously.

In another situation, the offended look on her face would be funny. “I will lead my squad,” she says imperiously. “No one’s asking…” Her expression changes again, this time to one of confusion. “You do understand that we’re rescuing you?”

“Yeah, you don’t get a whole hell of a lot of credit for that seein’ as you’re the ones who brought me here in the first place.”

She gets up and takes her own weapon back from the woman she’d handed it to. “Now we’re getting you out. Let’s go.”

Bucky stands then and slings the strap of the weapon over his shoulder. “Thanks for the help, Doll, but I’ll make my own way from here.” He begins to cross the room to the door through which they’d entered.

“Really.” He hears the woman say from behind him, all attitude now. “You got a plan for getting out of here? Because I do.”

Bucky turns around.

“A route, accomplices, staged weapons, supplies and transportation once we’re clear of the bunker. You got any of that?”

“This was kind of a last-minute trip,” he shrugs.

“I see. Well, just so you know, genius, that door you were about to go through leads you to a nest of guards we didn’t kill. You might want to at least use the door we’re using.”

“Fine,” Bucky bites off and crosses back toward her, then follows her to a door on the other side of the room. They join three other members of the squad and begin making their way carefully and quietly down a dimly-lit hallway.

It’s way too easy, and Bucky’s pretty sure this is all an elaborate trick of some kind. He feels completely unhinged, and he doesn’t trust these people in the slightest. Plus, they’re dumb. They’ve got him at the back of the line, with no one covering him. Which is why he slips down a hallway without a sound and hopes like hell he’s far away before they notice.

He needs to think, and find a way to get his bearings. It occurs to him that maybe the best thing to do is get out of sight and hope there’s a ventilation system with shafts big enough for him to crawl through. He’s not small. That’s a pretty tall order. But desperate times…

He finds a door that’s slightly ajar and whips into the room, surprising a guy sitting at a desk. The guy’s dead before he even looks up at the noise. Closing the door, Bucky scans the room. He swears viciously when he finds a tiny ventilation grate on one wall. So much for that idea. Next, he rifles the desk to see if he can find some kind of map of this place. No such luck. He’s going to have to try the hallway again. Striding toward the door, he sees that there’s a little sign on the back of the door with the fire evacuation route marked on it. Bucky actually smiles. God bless bureaucrats.

Back in the hallway, he flattens himself against one wall and makes his way along the route the sign indicated. He makes it halfway before three people in uniforms emerge into the hallway in front of him. He takes them out easily, but it makes a lot of noise. Damn. He doubles his speed and comes to the T-intersection where he needs to go left. Except Bucky has the bad luck to peek around the corner just as a guy in an officer’s uniform is striding purposefully right toward him. The guy opens his mouth to shout and, at that moment, a small red dot appears in his forehead, just above his right eye, and he crumples. Bucky whips around to see Blondie standing halfway out of a doorway, her weapon still aimed at the officer.

“They said you were smart,” she mutters quietly, and jerks her head toward the doorway she’s in. Bucky shakes his head and runs down the hall to follow her. When he gets to the room, he sees it’s some kind of equipment room, and she’s climbing a metal ladder to a hatch in the ceiling. He slings his weapon to his back and follows her up. What the hell. If she’s playing him, he’ll just kill her.

It’s a long, straight shaft that goes God knows where, and Bucky’s very surprised to see that he and Blondie are the only ones in it. He has no idea where the rest of the squad is now. They climb up what must be four or five floors until, at last, they come to the top. The ladder ends in front of a metal doorway with no hinges or handle on this side. Blondy waits until Bucky is just beneath her on the ladder, then knocks softly on the door in a definite pattern.

The door’s instantly opened by a woman Bucky recognizes from Brooklyn, one of the ones who dropped onto the street from a balcony, he thinks. He’s surprised to see that they’re outside now. It’s nighttime, it’s freezing, and there’s a foot or so of snow on the ground. Yep. Siberia. The shaft they’ve just climbed is the only part of the bunker above ground. From outside, it just looks like a small utility shed within a large complex of buildings. Bucky has no idea what the other buildings are for, but most are big and have very few, if any, windows. They’re all made of concrete blocks.

Again, neither woman says a word or makes a signal. The one who opened the door silently hands Blondie and Bucky white coveralls, which Blondie immediately begins to put on, so Bucky does, too. When they’re zipped into the coveralls, the woman hands them fresh weapons, and also gives Blondie a small package which she tucks into a pouch on her armored vest. With that, the other woman goes in the metal door. Bucky sees her begin to descend the ladder as Blondie closes the door and engages the latch.

“Low and fast,” Blondie says to Bucky. She shoulders her weapon and, at a crouch, begins to sprint across the area between the door they’ve just exited and a long, low building fifty yards away. He follows, the heavy snow pulling at his legs. The white coveralls will make them harder to see in the snow, but the second they begin to run, shouting and gunfire erupt from somewhere behind them. Blondie and Bucky both aim and fire blindly behind them, not hoping to hit anything, just trying to make the assholes shooting at them knock it off and take cover.

It doesn’t work very well, but they make it to the other building where, just as they arrive at a man-sized door within a larger roll-up door, another of Blondie’s squad opens the door and they rush in. Several bullets hit the door as it closes behind them.

This building is some kind of garage. Blondie keeps running across the floor toward a group of vehicles, flinging both of her larger weapons to the floor as she does. “Get rid of those,” she calls behind her to Bucky, so he tosses his away, too. He’s let the second one fall before it occurs to him that she still has several guns and knives and probably other weapons, but now he’s unarmed again. Smooth, Barnes. Well, if he has to relieve her of some or all of her weapons, he will.

They’re running between the vehicles when a deafening alarm goes off, and the whole garage lights up like mid-day. Bucky squints but neither of them slow. Blondie approaches a long, black SUV but he’s shocked to see that, rather than climb in, she drops to her belly and slithers underneath it.

“C’mon, Sergeant,” she hisses, and he rolls his eyes and drops to the floor, too. Blondie’s now squeezing into a shallow box of sorts built into the underside of the SUV. Bucky sees that there’s a part of the exhaust system that’s separated from the rest, hanging down on hinges. He just has time to admire the cleverness as she urges him silently with hand gestures to hurry and slide in beside her. He does, and doesn’t need to be told to pull up the hinged section of the vehicle’s undercarriage and secure the latch he sees on the inside.

It’s pitch black in the cramped space, but at least the alarm is quieter from in here. Bucky’s pressed up against Blondie and they’re both panting from exertion.

“What now?” He asks in a whisper.

“Catch your breath and stay quiet.”

Within a very short time, there’s yelling and the sound of running feet outside, and the SUV starts up. Bucky can feel the vehicle begin to move, and he spends the next half-hour in a very tiny space with a woman who has abducted him, put boots on him, frog-marched him into a torture chamber, insulted him several times, and is now helping him to escape. He doesn’t even know her name.

“Hey,” he says in a low voice that can barely be heard over the engine and road noise. “What’s your name?”

“Tishina,” she hisses angrily. She’s not telling him her name. She’s telling him, in Russian, to shut the fuck up.

The SUV stops several times, and there are tense, shouted exchanges in Russian at each stop. Each conversation is about the search for Bucky and, he guesses, the team of rogue soldiers, because they keep talking about “Trup vocem’” – Troop Eight.

After the fifth or sixth stop, Bucky feels the SUV cross onto a gravel road. He feels Blondie tense, and she leans toward him and whispers into his ear. “This is the tricky part.”

Bucky wants to make a crack about that – which parts of this haven’t been tricky? But he has a sinking feeling he’s not going to like what comes next.

“Unlatch that panel again, but don’t let it drag on the road.”

He does as he’s told, hoping like hell she’s not about to say what he’s afraid she is.

“When I say so, let go of the panel, and slide out as fast as you can. Try not to get run over.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Ten seconds,” she replies calmly.

It’s both the shortest and the longest ten seconds of Bucky Barnes’s life.

“Now!” Blondie hisses and, for good measure, gives Bucky a healthy shove onto the panel he’s holding up. It falls to the road under his weight, with him on top of it. He swears mightily – but quietly – as he slides to a painful, scraped-up stop on the gravel road. The small amount of snow in the gravel probably helped him slide further to dissipate his speed more smoothly, but not nearly enough.

He looks up in time to see Blondie fall to the road from the bottom of the SUV, sliding and only missing being run over by the thinnest possible margin. Snow flies up around her as she slides and , when she comes to a stop, she wastes no time getting to her feet and running to the side of the road, where she throws herself into a shallow ditch. Bucky gets up and does the same, then crawls through the snow up the ditch until he gets to her.

“You OK?” He asks, wiping a hand across his cheek where he is sure he’ll have gravel embedded for the rest of his life – however long that might be.

She looks at him strangely and turns to the side of the ditch away from the road. He hasn’t really had time to wonder where they are, or how she knew when to bail out of the SUV, but when he looks up, he sees that she clearly knew what she was doing, because they’re at the side of a small airfield. The SUV they were in has now turned onto a short road leading to a series of hangars and outbuildings. In the middle is a small, two-story building with more windows than the others, which looks like it houses offices.

“You can fly a jet, yes?” Blondie asks, not sounding confident.

“Which one?” Bucky asks, seeing that there are a few different types on the tarmac, some of which he can probably fly. Probably. It’s been a while.

“That one.” She points and Bucky relaxes. A little.

He’s not nearly as confident as he sounds when he says, “Yeah. I can fly that.”

Bucky turns to Blondie. “I have no idea why the hell any of this happened, but thanks for getting me out. What are you gonna do now?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You’re… But…” Bucky sputters, finally resolving on a simple, “Huh?”

“It’s complicated, Sergeant, and we have a long flight ahead of us. I’ll explain once we’re in the air.”

“But what will you-“

“Sergeant. Focus. We need to go.”

“Fine. I’ll take you with me. On one condition.”

She looks at him expectantly.

“Tell me your name.”

She hesitates just a beat. “Eight.”

“Huh?”

“I am Troop Eight.”

“That’s not a name.”

The look that flashes across her face makes him wish, fervently, that he hadn’t said that.

“No. It isn’t. But it’s all I have. Can we go now?”

Bucky wants very much to apologize. He spent a very long time not knowing his own name. Being referred to as “The Asset” or “Soldat,” with no idea that he should even have a name. He, of all people, gets why she’s looking at him like that. But it’s way too much to get into right now.

The jet’s not that far away, maybe half a mile, but it takes over an hour to get there. First, they have to low-crawl their way through the snow to a chain-link fence, and then they have to cut through that fence. That’s when they ditch the white coveralls, which helped hide them in the snow, but will make them more visible as they run from object to object to hide in the shadows from the bright light spilling over the tarmac. Finally, scraped up, cold, and tired, they make it to the shadowed side of the jet. Bucky boosts Eight up to unlatch the cockpit entrance and roll in, then she reaches down and pulls him up as he scrambles after her. He’s stunned at how strong she is.

Once they make it into the cockpit of the jet undetected, they take a few minutes to simply rest and catch their breath. They can’t take off yet, anyway. Eight tells Bucky they’re waiting for a signal. Members of her squad are going to have to incapacitate the skeleton crew manning the airfield, or their flight will be disappointingly short.

“So what’s the signal?”

At that moment, half the little office building explodes.

“That.”

“Subtle,” Bucky grins as they strap themselves in. He begins flipping switches and says a little prayer that flying a jet is like riding a bike.

Whether it is or not, there are suddenly a small group of people running out of the burning building, shooting wildly at the plane that’s just roared to life on the tarmac. Bucky wastes no time getting them off the ground.

“Where are we going?” He asks once they’re airborne and out of danger.

“You tell me. This is as far as the escape plan goes. From now on, I’m following you.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

#Steve Rogers #Sebastian Stan #Chris Evans #Tony Stark #Robert Downey Jr.#Bucky Barnes #The Avengers #Its cute that you thought Hydra was dead #Bucky's in trouble again

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britesparc · 4 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #437

Top Ten Predictions for the Xbox Games Showcase

So I wasn’t going to do this. I had my “Games Month” in June; that was supposed to be me getting it out of my system whilst the various publishers and platform holders held their Not-E3 video livestreams. That was supposed to take the place of my usual semi-serious lists of E3 predictions; a variety of more generalised run-downs of Stuff To Do With Videogames rather than me saying “A New Perfect Dark” ten times.

But then Microsoft’s “Showcase” event turned out to be the back-end of July, the videos and livestreams kept on pouring in, and I found myself ever devouring more salacious rumours of what games were upcoming, especially for the Xbox Series X. I have even found myself reading – shudder – Reddit.

I know.

Anyway, from being a simple thought experiment of “I wonder what games will be out when the Series X launches?” through to me imagining a blow-by-blow runthrough of the July 23rd event, I guess you could say that I am excited despite my better judgement. I think my problem with videogaming as a hobby is that I retain my fanboy enthusiasm from when I was a ten-year-old eagerly awaiting the next issue of The One Amiga, frantically swapping all eleven disks of Monkey Island 2, but I’m a grown-ass man with a mortgage and two kids and I just don’t have the time. I love reading websites like Eurogamer, and going on forums and checking out Twitter threads and all that, devouring news and titbits about all manner of gaming ephemera, and I often think when do these people have the time?!

Now look, I know hobbies, if you commit to them, can be expensive in terms of money and time. I have friends who collect Transformers toys, and let me tell you, that shit ain’t cheap. But daisy-chaining triple-A RPGs together feels like a lifetime commitment. I’m still playing Mass Effect Andromeda and Titanfall 2. I’ve just started Breath of the Wild and I’m waiting to kick off The Witcher III once I complete something else. I operate about two to three years behind the curve, and with work and kids and other commitments I struggle to find space for the oodles of games I do have, especially because most of the time I just end up on Civilization VI again. And yet…

The lure of the new still excites me. I really want to play all those Sony games on a Sony console that I don’t even own. I’m fascinated by the divergent next-gen philosophies of the big three platform holders. I can’t wait to see what the games I already own will look like embiggened on a 4K TV thanks to a suitable next-gen console. And so I keep consuming this stuff, keep wanting to try the latest thing, keep wanting to be part of the narrative. I’m still excited.

Therefore I’ve decided, against my better judgement, to offer up a prediction list like I usually do at E3 time. This one is just focussed on the upcoming Xbox Showcase on July 23rd. I doubt I’ll do one for the two remaining big showcases in August – I believe both Sony and Microsoft are doing one apiece, where we might finally hear prices of these damn things – because I think by the end of the month all the big game news might finally be out there. Aside from guessing how far off £500 both machines land, I think we’ve probably heard all the major announcements. Maybe I’m wrong! I’m wrong quite a lot! But that’s part of the fun.

So here we go: ten things that probably aren’t going to be announced next Thursday!

Halo Infinite opens the show – and is playable: we know that Halo Infinite will debut some campaign gameplay. As more-or-less a known quantity (even if we don’t know exactly what it’ll look like or how it’ll play), kicking things off with Xbox’s biggest star makes sense and won’t deflate any surprises. What I think might happen, though, is the announcement of some kind of multiplayer demo or closed beta, maybe only for Game Pass subscribers or something. They’ve done it before with Halo, so it’d be nice to get a chance to play one of the year’s biggest games early.

Hellblade 2 in-engine trailer: Senua’s Saga looks amazing so far, with a phenomenal launch trailer that displayed vast landscapes, intense detail, and some truly awesome facial animation. There’s a lot of speculation that, whilst the trailer was apparently in-engine and running in realtime, it was a fancy cut-scene with “hero assets”. I might have missed a memo somewhere, but I don’t think Hellblade 2 has been confirmed as a “launch window” title; as such, I think it will end up a Series X exclusive (as in, not appearing on Xbox One) and be out Christmas 2021. As such we won’t see a considerable gameplay chunk as with Halo, but we will see some proper in-engine footage – not a cutscene – running on Series X hardware.

Fable IV is out next year: is it an open secret at this point that Playground Games is making a Fable game? I guess maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s not even a new Fable at all. But I think there is, and I think Playground are making it, and I think we’ll see it next week. I guess it probably won’t be coming too soon; maybe Christmas 2021? So I think there’ll be a launch trailer of some kind – hopefully a Hellblade-style in-engine one rather than a rendered movie – but it’ll be a pretty big to-do to close out the show (unless there’s some other surprise “…and one more thing”).

Minecraft ray-tracing: we’ve seen it before, and I’m not sure how much time it’ll take up in the run of things, but I think Microsoft will confirm that there will be a ray-tracing graphics update for Minecraft on Series X. It’ll be part of some other line-wide update, of course – maybe the fabled “Super Duper Graphics” update that was cancelled once before – but Series X owners (or PC owners with the right hardware) will get lots of lovely rays to trace.

Gears Tactics on Xbox this Christmas: the Coalition said their piece about Gears 5 on Series X this week, so I don’t expect them to have a huge presence on Thursday (Gears 6 presumably being too far off), but I think we’ll get a trailer for the excellent Gears Tactics running on Xbox, and confirmation of a Christmas release for one of my favourite PC games of 2020.

Cyberpunk 2077 on Series X: all the footage we’ve seen of Cyberpunk thus far has been – I do believe – running on high-end PCs. CD Projekt Red should have a presence on Thursday, and I think they’ll debut footage – actual proper gameplay – of Cyberpunk running on a Series X. I think we’ll also see further evidence of a cosy relationship with Microsoft, as they announce something – maybe exclusive DLC – as well as just maybe some Cyberpunk-themed Series X hardware. I also think they’ll announce a Series X update for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt.

Big Double Fine blowout: Microsoft’s purchase of Double Fine really excited me, because I’ve been a big Tim Schafer fan for decades. Aside from Psychonauts 2, we don’t know a great deal about what they’re up to. So I think we’ll see a lot of Psychonauts, as well as confirmation of a Christmas release. We’ll also get confirmation of classic LucasArts remasters – Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango – as well as something else. I’m not sure what. A remaster of the first Psychonauts? Brütal Legend 2? Scurvy Scallywags Series X? what I don’t think it’ll be, however, is any kind of Banjo Kazooie game, because I don’t really think Microsoft bought them to work on existing IP. I think we’ll see something new.

Third-party shenanigans: aside from Cyberpunk, I think we’ll get at least one other extended third-party trailer. Maybe Destiny 2, given the first game’s apparent preference for PlayStation? Maybe one of those military shooters everybody likes but me? Splinter Cell, which is becoming the perennial white elephant during Ubisoft presentations (and obviously has prior as an OG Xbox exclusive)? Or maybe we’ll see something like the announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2 as a Smart Delivery title. That would be pretty cool.

Japanese presence: I’m not sure what exactly, but I think Microsoft will make moves to entice the Japanese market. Perhaps it’ll be like the early days of the Xbox 360, when they published the likes of Blue Dragon. Maybe we’ll see a Western release of some venerated Japanese franchise. Or maybe some other sequel or reboot. Maybe it’ll even be the rumoured announcement of some kind of exclusive partnership with Sega? Who knows? Regardless I think we’ll see evidence of Microsoft making more of an effort in Japan; I think this will be part of a strategy to encourage Japanese gamers to subscribe to Game Pass/xCloud rather than buy more consoles.

One last thing: there’ll be a surprise. Everyone’s predicting everything, but I still think there’ll be a surprise. After the dust settles, good old Phil Spencer (t-shirt prediction: Viva Pinata) will leave us with a little something… a tease, a subtle tease, maybe even just a logo or character reveal. It could be a returning franchise, it could be The Initiative’s debut game, but I’d wager it’s something unexpected, something we’ve never heard anything about. It’s something that’s a long way off, but it’ll have a style or a hook or a brand that instantly makes everyone excited, and will bring the curtain down. Microsoft has largely done a good job establishing itself as a solid platform the last three or four years, but it’s sorely been lacking in mic-drop moments as hardware news is teased and studio acquisitions have taken time to bed in. So whether it’s Joanna Dark, a Mech, Banjo, or something I can’t fathom, we’ll leave on a high.

There we go: ten relatively reasonable, moderately level-headed predictions. I don’t think there’s anything too crazy there. I’ve not gone all-in on a huge Perfect Dark blowout, or Viva Pinata returning, or Microsoft buying Sega or Warner Bros or whatever else could be dreamed up. I’m sure there’s other stuff too; probably some gameplay from previously-announced titles like The Medium or (hopefully) Scorn, that really show off Series X capabilities; no doubt a montage or two, probably of some ID@Xbox games; Forza Motorsport 8, I guess, and I’d wager some info on Flight Simulator on Xbox. I do hope they make the whole presentation look nice though; Sony’s one, where they finally revealed the PS5 hardware, was excellent, with just enough talking-head developer stuff and those lovely idents that served to whet the appetite and tease the eventual look of the machine. We know there’ll be no new hardware or discussion about evolving services, so really all we’ve got to look forward to are games, games, games, which makes a nice change from the reveal of the Xbox One all those moons ago.

Okay, so my absolute crazy just-for-me wish? Well, things are getting thin on the ground now, as the big things I always want from Microsoft – Fable, Crackdown, Perfect Dark – have either happened or are strongly rumoured. Viva Pinata is next on that list, but beyond that? How does Black and White Infinite sound? That’s right, baby, next on my list – Lionhead rebooted!

#top ten #microsoft #xbox #xbox series x #halo infinite #games #gaming #xbox showcase

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cantusecho-archive · 5 years ago

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(Episode 10.

“Please fight with us.”

I’ll preface this one saying that it was pretty chill for an episode and a lot of things happened that I expected. I’ll get to that though.

But!

To start, it’s right back where the fight between Fudo and Tsubasa was ended. Shem-Ha shows back up, merely annoyed that mere “tools” try to control her lol.

She immediately starts a fight with them however, Maria quickly being the one to provide cover for Tsubasa and her family to get away in the meantime. One thing I found interesting in this fight is that Shem-Ha is using these symbols to summon attacks.

They look exactly like the symbols shown in the first episode where those weird ice sculptures came up?

It makes sense primarily because they were fighting the coffin that belonged to a Custodian/Annunaki and since Shem-Ha is one (despite being in Miku’s body) she can use them as well.

Also, she says that her power isn’t what it used to be due to her current level of “integration” so I assume that means she’s not fully merged with Miku technically? Though she also wonders if it was because she ended up summoning Yggdrasil. I just placed a link to the wikipedia page for it because I am terrible at explaining mythology and possibly what it could mean within Symphogear (since they change things around to fit their story/plot of course). The mythology elements are always fascinating though.

Maria ends up getting one of her chains around Shem-Ha, which immediately catches her attention.

As hinted before, Maria (and Serena too) are more than likely descendants of the Annunaki, specifically Enki as Shem-Ha mentions. Maria, of course, doesn’t know what she’s talking about in terms of Enki so she continues fighting. But her quote here makes me think this is why her and Serena are able to use Airgetlam?

That might not be the case, but we do know that Serena was naturally Attuned to Airgetlam (like Chris and Tsubasa are to their relics) while Maria relies on LiNKER. However, they stated in AXZ that Maria has always had the highest sync rate compared to Kirika and Shirabe and she’s able to use two relics (Gungnir and Airgetlam). These are possible factors of her being a descendant to a Annunaki but it very well may not be.

I also don’t think this makes Maria “not human” or some sort of Annunaki. Being a descendant of powerful beings like that doesn’t mean you have their power residing within you or that she’s suddenly not human. It’s been CENTURIES (putting it lightly) since the Lulu Amel and Annunaki were separated due to the implementation of the Curse of Balal so yeah lol.

But that’s the end of that because Noble Red shows up agaaaaaain.

And they’re a lot stronger than before.

Now, honestly, if I saw the title of this episode before it aired, I would have figured they’d be alive still. The title of this episode is “They Are No Filthy Rustlings” (Crunchyroll translates it as “Not a Crude Color of Rust”) and Noble Red have always been considered “filthy rustlings” basically. So that would have made it much more obvious, plus the summary for the episode was pretty much hinting to them as well.

Despite countless stones being cast against you, you still have a future to pursue. But in the end, your struggles only lead to a permanent and undeniable fate.

The kindness you knew causes your despair to ring through the stairway to heaven. Far above and far away, you look upwards to the refuge where you should have been standing. The deed committed is no evil, but simply the despair brought upon you by some illogical force.

But it wasn’t translated before the airing, or I didn’t see it until after the airing, so yeah. Lol. Point being; I’m kinda glad they’re alive because if they were seriously killed off in such a (honestly) dumb way in episode 9, I would be been like “well that was a waste”.

So, in retrospect, I’m glad they got “revived” so to speak, but more on that later.

These peeps locked up Fudo behind like three cells/rooms whatever you’d like to call them and I’m like “will this be able to hold him” since he’s ridiculously strong. But for now, guess he’s resigned to his fate.

And Yatsuhiro actually did end up dying. Now, this is nothing against Yatsuhiro as a character, but I personally am glad he died. And I say this because plot wise, because after everything that happened with Tsubasa in episode 9 and the moment between him and her? If he didn’t die, it would have felt like his “sacrifice” would have been a waste and just something for dramatic and emotional effect. I don’t think it would have held impact if he actually lived, and I am glad they went through with it.

Of course it sucks for Tsubasa but I hope this means that she will be able to fly free, just like he wanted her to. (STILL NEED TO KNOW IF HER SECOND SONG IS IN RELATION TO HIM LIKE I AM ASSUMING BUT NO TRANSLATIONS YET FUDGE).

Unfortunately, due to all the investigations, Tsubasa wasn’t able to make it to his funeral so there was a timeskip in here somewhere.

But one of the sweetest moments come; Hibiki and Tsubasa reuniting. Thing about this is that technically, everyone else has seen Tsubasa since the moment she took Miku away (even if it was on screen for Chris, Kirika and Shirabe) but Hibiki hasn’t. During all the events in episode 9, she was away from HQ at her father’s house, in the dark of what was happening.

So when they meet back up, it’s clear (to me) that Tsubasa is feeling guilt for her actions because...who wouldn’t be? Hibiki admits that she feels a bit messed up because she doesn’t know what to think, but she tells Tsubasa that’s she happy that she’s back, which surprises Tsubasa.

Again, I think Tsubasa reacting this way is because she didn’t think that after everything she’s done, even if it was due to her being manipulated, she could be forgiven that easily. But of course, everyone is there for her and to welcome her back because clearly they’d never turn their backs on her.

Hibiki asks her to fight with them, but she’s so hesitant and unsure of doing it again, perhaps not trusting herself of her actions, but Hibiki grabs her hand anyway before she could get too far and then Elfnein welcomes her back home.

Not gonna lie: I was hoping they’d hug her SO BAD. Me and my friend were watching it together and literally our messages to each other during this scene was us screaming “HUG HER” lmao. It was still a sweet scene regardless though.

I’ve seen some comparisons of this scene with the scene of Hibiki, Chris and Tsubasa during episode 10 I believe??? where they all join hands. Of course it took Tsubasa a while to accept Hibiki’s hand in the first season, so seeing something like this again on another level just makes you think of how far they’ve come in their friendship. Tsubasa and Hibiki don’t interact much unfortunately so it’s just nice to see how far along their friendship has come along.

AND ALSO THE PROMISE: Ogawa asks Hibiki to not allow Tsubasa to be alone back in the first season, and Hibiki saying to “stay with her” and to “fight together” is almost like a reminder of it. At least to me anyway gdfhdgjfgjfgjfh. Tsubasa even thanks Hibiki again later on in the episode in a small scene and how Hibiki holding her hand made her happy. ACK. Let me move on.

Shem-Ha, along with Noble Red, are hiding down within Yggdrasil that’s not too far from the Kazanari compound and we actually get a picture of what Shem-Ha looked like in her own body.

It seems she’s trying to gather herself together? My friend believes that Miku is a temporary vessel until Shem-Ha is able to get her own body back together, which would be nice and mean that Miku won’t be stuck within her for so long and they could just punch the shizz out of Shem-Ha in her own body but there’s no telling lol.

But flashbaaaaack:

So Shem-Ha pretty much did kill Noble Red, but it seems as if her power alone was able to make them fully be reborn as monsters. So, they’re no longer incomplete beings, teetering between being humans and monsters.

So what this means for them is that they can never have their dream realized of being human again as they are completely monsters now, which is why they are stronger. This isn’t what any of them wish to hear, so Elsa and Millaarc begin to cry while Vanessa laments over them never being able to connect with others again, saying they have been alone due to everything that’s happened to them and what they’ve been made into.

Shem-Ha instead offers them to serve her instead as she vows to get rid of loneliness and estrangement and she intends to do that by returning the world back to how it was 5,000 years ago.

Also, she makes these.

She uses the viles that normally are used for the alchemists to transport themselves away. Since she was talking about 5,000 years in the past, I really believed that these were going to transport them literally 5,000 years in the past XDDDD. Buuuuuut....

The lunar ruins were activated due to the energy from Yggdrasil, and so they plan to send a special US team there to investigate instead of the Gear users. So they are tasked with the mission of protecting it during its launching period as they figured that Noble Red would be intending to do something with the moon after Shem-Ha mentioned the Curse of Balal around Genjuro and the others earlier in the episode.

So they do indeed attack, but once again they are much stronger now. Elsa starts fighting Shirabe and Kirika and she has A LOT to say haha. She even says the title of the episode (as it’s translated by CR)

But I think this shows why I am finding them fascinating/interesting. Elsa, due to her newfound abilities, managed to destroy the rocket without much issue.

She then proceeds to explain how cut off they were from humanity because of what humanity ended up doing to them.

Elsa was experimented on by the Bavarian Illuminati after multiple of her own family members were taken or kidnapped.

Millaarc was merely visiting another country before she was taken by a hunting group and then proceeded to get experimented on by the Illuminati.

Vanessa has always worked with the Illuminati, but due to her accident, it left her nearly dead and they reconstructed her as an android probably for curiosity sake and experimented on her to see how she’d be effective after it all.

All of this forced them into some sort of seclusion as they were deemed failures and yet it wasn’t even their fault for becoming what they became; a failed mixture of monsters and humans. They had to rely on blood for their survival and was seen as nothing but failure experiments that only wanted to be returned back to normal.

So Elsa is saying that if she knew her fate was going to be a true monster in the end, she would have liked to never have known kindness so she wouldn’t end up being so frustrated with their new forms and heavy desire to go back to being human.

Now I admit; I like Noble Red. I am enjoying them being different compared to the alchemists or past villains. I was glad they were considerably weaker than past enemies and that they weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. You could say the same for the others, but they were willing to do what they were told just so they could become human again.

This doesn’t excuse their actions, and I am not looking for them to be redeemed. I pity them, but to me, they don’t seem like the type that will go back now. At least, that’s what I hope. I like that they aren’t really that receptive to everyone’s attempt at offering help (which only happened twice honestly; episode 4 and this episode, 10).

And now they seem to resigned to their fate to be used and staying as monsters that it’s probably why Vanessa agreed to serve Shem-Ha.

I can’t really explain what I mean but all I’m saying is that I like them and wanting to write as Millaarc is really a thing. Lmao.

MOVING ON ONCE AGAIN---

Kirika and Shirabe get their duet this episode, aka their Zababa duet (called Cutting Edge X2 Ready go!) with their songs being played together. I assumed they would this episode since it made the most sense and what better way to top it off than with their Amalgam’s as well (which again, would make sense so lmao. Knocking two things out with one stone).

But I admit, I am really loving how the Amalgam’s look. I probably mentioned it before but I love their sleek looks and them not having armor just sticking out on them makes it look better in my opinion.

I know people miss the Ignite Module (I’m still one of those that don’t) but the risk/reward system, if implemented correctly, can be good for Amalgam as well. The keywords state that the shields that surround them can be used for defense, but if they convert that energy, it can be used for offense.

Ignite Module seemed a bit too lenient on that in my opinion; it gave them a boost in power but was supposed to have that time limit to stop them. However, if they never left the first stage, they’d literally have 999 seconds to defeat the enemy. Depending on the enemies strength of course, it could very well be dangerous but I mean...meh. I like having consequences for a power that’s considered OP or whatever. Lol. Or at least a real risk/reward system.

Brief excerpt from the Amalgam keyword---

Upon activation, it instantly releases the energy that composes the Symphogear and reforms it into a golden "cocoon," a first stage that gives the user a far more powerful barrier field (and that consumes far more energy) than normal. Next, the energy is reformed into a high-output armed gear, reorganizing into into an "imago" that serves as a second stage.

Put simply, it causes an extreme disbalance between defensive and offensive parameters. In the "cocoon" stage, defensive ability is greatly raised while attack power is greatly hampered. In the "imago" stage, attack power is greatly raised while defensive power is greatly hampered.

As a result, the number of situations where this ability is useful is limited.

I just find it more interesting (and better looking) than the Ignite Module. Now will the show implement this just as well as they “implemented” the weakness of the Ignite Module? More than likely not, but that’s what writing is for ha.

So, Shirabe and Kirika use their Amalgam’s and actually managed to defeat Elsa with it. Technically, even if no side is really the winner, Vanessa is content on them being stopped from going to the moon and she pulls out one of those viles from earlier that Shem-Ha messed around with. We can assume they were going to transport somewhere on their own but Tsubasa comes to ruin that.

This just speaks to me of Tsubasa still feeling guilt (again, as I mentioned earlier, makes sense since it won’t simply disappear just because she doesn’t have that seal anymore) so she’s literally ready to do whatever it takes to make up for them.

Honestly, this part made me nervous because I was worried if she was going to end up being teleported alone without the others. But luckily, everyone gets transported to...wherever.

My initial thoughts was them going back 5,000 years ago, because the bridge then begins to panic slightly for not being able to locate the Gear users anywhere on the entire planet.

Like that would have been insane.

But nope. Instead, after the credits, it’s shown that they are now on the moon in the Lunar Ruins.

So now I assume these last three episodes are going to just take place in space. Lmao. I assume Chris and Maria will be using their Amalgam’s during this point as well so we can expect that.

Plus, and this is random, there are still four songs to be announced. Each blu ray DVD comes with a bonus CD that carries two songs. There’s six volumes in total and four of the bonus CDs have been revealed already. The one that’s going to be paired with Carol’s song on volume 4 is going to be Kirika/Shirabe’s songs I’m fairly certain (just doesn’t update until Friday haha) but there’s two more bonus CDs to be announced, which leaves four songs.

Not sure if they’ll be having four new songs in three episodes or doing what they did in GX, where they announced Hibiki and Miku’s duet for example after the season was done airing.

But regardless, this feels like crunch time. Three episodes left and everyone is stuck on the moon/Lunar Ruins?

Well, guess Kirika and Shirabe got their wish lmao.)

#ooc

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