#I have a few more ideas - more for expansion packs later!

[zevrra]

—come here, darlin’.

synopsis: You could make plenty of bad choices on your own but throw a little alcohol in the mix and you might just make a really, really bad(good) decision. Everyone knew Joel but you would like to know him a little more on a personal scale.

tags: 21(+), mdni, slight nsfw, some suggestive content, tw for mention of alcohol/drinking, tw for being drunk, joel miller x fem!reader, 1k words, one-night stand, short & sweet

creator notes: part 2 is out now!

You had no idea how long he had been watching you but you certainly could feel his gaze now. It crawls over your body like a summer’s heat; from your neck to your shoulders, down your back, your legs and back up. Not that you minded his hungry gaze. To be honest, you had also been watching him, watching how every muscle strained beneath that cotton shirt of his, staring hungrily at the smooth expanse of skin displayed due to the first button of his shirt coming undone.

Both of you were drunk by now, had to be, so if something were to happen later you could easily blame everything on the alcohol. Ordering another drink wasn’t one of your brightest ideas, but you did it anyway, needed a little more confidence for what you hoped was going to happen tonight.

The bar was packed. Live music rattled so loudly you could feel the vibrations under your feet, feel the tune of the music beat to your pulse. It was thrilling, stimulating the alcohol in your system to make some pretty bad decisions. But you don’t have too, not when Joel Miller is leaning on the bar beside you with a whiskey in his hands and a drunk red streak across his face. Alcohol was rarely served but tonight was someone’s birthday or another so you took every opportunity to drink anything and everything in sight. And somehow, in your drunken stupor, you had managed to snag Joel into some light conversation. You talked, laughed, drank, brushed hands, laughed some more, until you were both five or so drinks in.

That’s when his eyes started to do the talking.

He didn’t have to say out loud what he wanted, and you assumed he wouldn’t. Alcohol or not, you would've guessed he’d probably never take the opportunity to ask you to go home with him, would just quietly stare and watch you with that hungry gaze of his until you both parted for the night and he’d regret it in the morning.

You wouldn’t let him leave tonight though.

“Joel,” You hum softly as you lean closer to him, appearing to be reaching for a napkin to close the distance between you two. Getting closer to him so no one else could hear you speak. “Let’s leave.”

Joel takes a sip of his whiskey, swirling the liquid around in his glass as he debates what to do. It was a pretty terrible idea; a man twice your age? A well respected man within the community who knew everyone and everyone knew him, who was fooling around? Not to mention he had not been intimate with anyone for a very long time…

Definitely a bad idea.

“My place. Leave a few minutes after I do.” Joel finally responds in a hushed tone, speaking directly into your ear. His words were slurred but that didn’t lessen the shiver of excitement that ran down your spine. He shoots back his whiskey then, all in one go, before he pushes himself up off the bar. His steps are slightly sluggish but he manages to make his way towards the door. And you watch out of the corner of your eye as he goes. While he says his goodbyes to the usual people you see hanging around with him; you play with the edge of the napkin you had reached for moments ago.

Hearing the door open and close upon Joel’s exit, you do as he instructs. Waiting for a few, agonizingly long minutes before setting your now finished drink down. Saying your own goodbyes to the few people you knew, claiming to be turning in for the night, before you exit the bar in Joel’s cooling footsteps. Yet, instead of going home and to bed like you should, you make your way to Joel’s place instead.

It’s a bit of a blur when his house comes into view. The small white mailbox greets you before you enter his property, following the front porch light as it illuminates like a beacon in the pitch black darkness of night. You’re not but two steps from his front door when the wooden door swings wide open Joel opens the door before you even get the chance to knock. And before you can utter a word of greeting, he drags you inside, flicking off the porch light in the process.

He smells heavily of liquor and the fresh scent of firewood as he takes you into his grasp, one hand falling onto your waist while the other settles on your neck. Gently, he turns your chin up to meet his lips, forcing you backwards until your back meets the front door as he kisses you.

Instinctively, your arms wrap around his broad shoulders, pulling him closer as you stand slightly up onto your tippy toes to get a better reach. You taste the liquor on his tongue. Can feel the burn of the whiskey on your lips. He tasted just as intoxicating as the real thing. While he kisses a little sloppier than you expected, you could blame the alcohol for that. Regardless, the kiss is hot and heavy. It churns a roaring fire inside your stomach and makes you far nerdier for him than alcohol could ever.

He breaks the kiss then, brushing his beard along your jaw as he moves to kissing at your throat. He groans against your skin as he inhales your scent. The hand on your waist moves to push under the shirt you’re wearing and you eagerly take it off for him. Once the fabric is above your head it’s tossed to the ground, long forgotten. Joel’s hand now runs over your torso— up from your waist and across your stomach, sending shivers up and down your entire body. He moves a rough palm across your bra, causing you to gasp. Eagerly he presses his lips once again at the base of your throat before moving to capture your lips. Where he pours in every ounce of passion and lust he can manage before suddenly breaking away. And it leaves you chasing after him, wanting, yearning for more of his taste.

“Ya sure about this?” Joel whispers against your lips, practically kissing you with every word he speaks. “I’m not exactly a young man anymore.” He adds shyly. It makes you want him even more if that was possible at this point.

You chuckle, licking the taste of him off your lips. Instead of responding right away, you move your hands across the front of his chest now, reaching to slowly start unbuttoning the green shirt he wears. God he looked so good in that shirt, but you knew he’d look better without it at all. “I want you, right here, right now Joel.” You respond finally in an attempt to settle his mind.

And that’s all he needs to hear.

[askagamedev]

There’s a lot of noise online about live service games being detrimental to the quality of games, such as initial launches being bug ridden and with incomplete features. Is there any truth to this last statement? And are the spending patterns reflecting the idea that people are dissatisfied with this model of monetization?

I think that it is true that initial launches are indeed more bug ridden today than they were before day 1 patches were possible, but the reason for this is much less nefarious than most are imagining. I was already working in games before that big change happened and I saw what happened from the inside.

Before we could patch, producers would cut content and features much more mercilessly because we lacked the time to finish that content properly and still pass certification. We couldn't ever modify or add stuff to the disc or cartridge, so we had to make sure that what went out was the most stable thing we could. Stability was more important than scope, so we'd see stuff get cut near the end all the time. There were a lot of features and content that players never saw because we couldn't get them polished and stable before the game had to ship. If we were lucky we managed to save some of it for expansion packs but most of it never saw the light of day. The last few weeks of the project were mostly wasted sitting around and waiting because we couldn't ever risk making any changes that weren't addressing cert-blocking bugs and we would mostly wait around to find out if cert had gone through.

Back then, the burned and duplicated disk sent to retailers was the final pencils-down-step-away moment. The gold master is what got used to duplicate all of the discs and we couldn't make a new one. Further, all of those duplicated disks out in the wild would forever hold the "final" version of the game, bugs and all. The only way a new version was possible was another print run, and that only occurred in very rare cases where the entire first print run sold out and there was enough demand to print a second run... and the publisher felt it was worth going through certification a second time.

With the advent of internet-connected game consoles and networks, we got the ability to push out post-launch patches including day 1 content updates. With the ability to patch came the potential to finish some of that nearly-complete content that we used to have to cut for stability purposes. Instead of focusing on stability, we could actually push fixes later and fit more content into our releases. This meant that we could also shift people to work on post-launch content, rather than simply sitting around and doing nothing while waiting for cert results. We could fix bugs and work on new content and features during that time and we could leverage all the expertise and experience we had earned in the years of development up to that point.

To summarize - in the olden days, we had to cut a lot more content and features that were close to being finished because we needed to go pencils-down for certification. Today, we can continue working on content that would have been cut because we can patch fixes into the game. This results in overall buggier content and features on average at launch but it also results in significantly more content and features on average at launch than before.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[thus-spoke-lo]

Compliments to the Chef // slimeball linecook!Sanji x f!reader // NSFW/18+ [feat. special guest appearances by fuckboy fwb!Ace and taxi driver!Zoro]

Written for @bastardblvd's Slimeball Collab

Summary: A few nights pass after the sordid events of A Ride for a Ride, and you're working another late night shift at Franky's Flapjack Shack with Sanji, that damned pervert cook. Sanji manages to piss off your only remaining customer for the night, leaving the two of you alone in the restaurant. Soon, things start to heat up in the kitchen--and not just because that one oven door won't close all the way. CW: afab!reader [no pronouns used to address reader]; dubcon elements; slight praise kink/body worship; vaginal fingering; oral sex [f receiving]; brief degradation. WC: 3.7k

“Goddamit Sanji!”

Sanji glances up from his sink full of dishes to see you in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand pressed firmly into your hip, the other gripping a plate. “You called, ma chérie?”

“Oh would you cut it with the ‘ma chérie’ shit, you’re not even French.”

“Hey, I am too!”

“I know you’re from Canada, asshole. And anyway, you got another plate of eggs back.” You toss the dish of half-eaten breakfast across the counter towards him, as a piece of bacon flops to the floor and bits of hashbrown scatter.

“So?” he scoffs, raising one curly eyebrow, a smirk forming on his lips.

“So, he said they tasted like cigarette ash.” You cross your arms over your chest and stare at him unflinchingly. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

He shrugs as he reaches in his pocket and pulls out his pack of cigarettes. “He wanted his eggs over hard. That’s disrespectful to the ingredients…so I may have added some extra seasoning.”

“Sanji!”

“Fine, fine, I’ll make him another plate,” he mumbles as he lights the cigarette that dangles precariously between his moving lips. “On one condition.”

“And what’s that?” You’re not sure why you even bothered to ask—you know the answer will be some degree of unsavory.

“Just give me a little kiss.” He moves towards you, snaking a hand around your waist as he blows a ring of smoke in the air. “Just one.”

“I’ll tell him we’re out of eggs,” you grumble as you slap his hand away and huff back into the dining room to explain your unexpected dairy shortage.

*****

“Thanks a lot, asshole!” you shout as you swing the kitchen door open a while later, finding Sanji standing just inside with his phone in his hand, looking guilty as he hastily shoves it in his pocket. “Dude left without paying. So now we gotta explain why we’re short—again—and I don’t even get a tip.”

Sanji opens his mouth to speak, but is quickly shushed as you press your index finger to his lips.

“And I do not want to hear any ‘tip’ comments, you pervert.”

“Oh come on,” he grumbles as he tries to kiss your hand, “do you really think so little of me, my sweet?”

“…Yes.”

“Look, my dear, as someone who went to culinary school, I just can’t allow an injustice to be committed against food that way.”

You sigh and your head lolls back of its own accord as you stare up at the ceiling, counting the missing tiles. “Sanji, do we have to do this?”

“Ma chérie, I trained under the finest Michelin-starred chefs.” He takes a long drag off his cigarette and closes his eyes, becoming instantly lost in the vast expanse of his own bullshit. “When I worked in the kitchen of Chef Zeff, now that was where I learned to appreciate the simplicity of an omelet, none of this fried-egg-and-cheap-meat nonsense that we do here.”

He’s talking.

And he’s still talking.

And he’s still fucking talking, his words sounding more and more like the annoying hum of a florescent lightbulb. As you stand there and watch his lips move, his cigarette bobbing up and down, you start to wonder if maybe kissing him wouldn’t be such a bad idea as long as it would shut him up for a little while. He is a pervert, and a creep, and a bit of an egomaniac, but he’s also easy on the eyes, all sparkling blue eyes and soft blonde hair that was always falling in his face. And those hands of his—those long, slender fingers that you knew had to be capable of more than cracking eggs and gripping the hilt of a chef’s knife. Maybe he just needs to get laid to calm down and stop acting like he’s the greatest gift to the cooking world—although it would probably would be best to silence him if he has his mouth on your—

A sudden vibration in your pocket thankfully distracts you from your meanderings. You lean against the counter and take it out, chewing your lip as you see the notification on the screen:

BAD IDEA sent a photo

You already know what you’re going to find but you swipe it open anyway, and to no surprise, you see a text bubble that simply reads “wyd?” followed by a picture of himself—your forever-friends-with-benefits Ace is freshly out of the shower, strands of his black hair clinging to his chiseled jaw, rivulets of water dripping down his muscled body. A towel is hanging precariously from his lean hips, low enough that you can see the delicious v-shape carved into his lower torso, the one that practically leads you like a treasure map down to the long, thick column of a cock that you know hides just under that towel. 

I’m at work, you furiously text back, a warmth beginning to pool between your legs.

[BAD IDEA]: when u off?

[YOU]: couple more hours

[BAD IDEA]: k, text when ur on ur way. i’ll be up.

[YOU]: I bet you will be.

[BAD IDEA]: wanna see?

Before you can even place your thumbs on the keyboard to respond, a perfectly-lit photo of his rock-hard cock appears on your screen, his large hand gripping it at the base. You inhale sharply at the sight, already counting the minutes until the end of your shift.

“So whose dick is that?” a jealousy-laden voice suddenly utters in your ear, whispers of smoke drifting up your nostrils.

“Fuck!” Your phone flies across the room and lands face-down on the wet, tiled floor. “None of your goddamned business!”

“Let me guess,” he says as he walks around in front of you, his eyes never leaving yours for even a moment, “some fuck buddy of yours?”

“Sanji, let it go.”

“Why? No need to be embarrassed, my sweet. Someone as gorgeous and utterly desirable as you deserves to have all their needs met.” He pauses to take a drag and cocks his head, a slight smirk settling in the corner of his mouth. “And he does meet your needs…right?”

You glance down at your shoes as a montage of encounters runs through your mind, typically ending with Ace rolling off you and falling immediately to sleep. “Usually.”

“Usually?”

“Well, I mean, sometimes,” you say, swaying your head a little as you try to count the orgasms he’s given you on purpose. “Like, it’s just not a big deal, you know?”

“My darling.” Sanji bends down to stub his cigarette out on the tile floor and walks towards you, leaning his body into yours as he places one hand behind you on the counter. “Don’t you think you deserve better than that?”

“Well sure…” you trail off as his body comes closer and closer to yours and you can feel the fire of longing radiating off him, almost creating its own atmosphere around the two of you.

He bites his lower lip, dragging it through his teeth, as his gaze flits between your eyes and your mouth. He leans in slowly, his lips almost brushing yours, and you don’t stop him—you don’t even so much as turn your head and you wait for the faint beginnings of a kiss, when he veers away just before making contact, instead letting his cheek graze yours as he moves to whisper in your ear.

“Your pleasure should always come first, you know,” he murmurs as one leg slowly slots between your knees, pushing them apart slightly. “You shouldn’t accept anything less than that.”

“Let me guess. Next you’ll tell me you’re the kind of man who would make sure I’m always taken care of, right? Is that where this is going?”

“Why don’t you tell me where it’s going, ma chérie.”

“A-alright, stop being a fuckin’ perv, Sanji.” You place your hands on his surprisingly firm chest and push him away, feeling at once annoyed and deeply, unsettlingly aroused.

He makes no attempts to stop you, just snorts a quiet laugh as he watches you storm out of the kitchen and into the dining area, and you roll your eyes at the fact he’s probably getting off on your tempestuousness. You stand behind the counter, hoping and wishing that someone would wander in, freshly drunk from the bar a few blocks down, begging for a hot coffee so at least you’d have something to occupy your body and mind for a while. Instead, the room remains empty and cold, accentuated by the low mechanical whirring of the ice maker behind you and the tinny rhythm of the royalty-free music playing softly over the one good speaker at the cash register. 

As the ice maker roars to life and noisily drops perfect little cubes into the bin, you sense a warm presence behind you, and a hand settles on your shoulder, gripping you gently. Long fingers reach up to brush your jaw, soft fingertips moving up to caress the apple of your cheek. 

“We’re all alone, huh?” Sanji’s voice lacks its usual repulsive air of desperation, replaced by a honeyed sweetness and a whiskey-smooth confidence you only heard when he talked about his cooking.

Without thinking too much about it, you reach up and place your hand on his, stroking the tops of his fingers, surprised by the silkiness of his pale skin. “But Sanji, we’re open.”

“I don’t think anyone would mind if we closed up to take a break. Do you?” He leans forward, brushing your hair away from your neck, and warm lips meet your chilled skin, sending a shiver through your core. The tip of his tongue traces along the delicate flesh of your neck, and he leaves a trail of gentle kisses back down the path he made.

“We are—ah—entitled to a meal break, I suppose.”

“I certainly know I’m hungry,” he groans into your shoulder as he nips at you through your shirt. “Why don’t you go wait in the kitchen for me, beautiful, and I’ll lock up?”

You nod, unable to readily conjure up any affirmative response and force it out of your mouth as you find yourself suddenly set adrift in a sea of passion. You meander into the kitchen and lean back against a metal worktable, gripping it tightly, wondering what in the hell is wrong with you—how it is that this curly-browed cook, in all his usual shamelessness, was suddenly able to enchant you, place you under some wicked spell of sexual depravity that has your heart racing and your core pulsing as you anxiously wait for him to return.

You glance out the small window in the kitchen door and see the lights in the restaurant dim slightly. The door swings open a moment later and Sanji’s gaze immediately settles on you, never leaving once as he crosses the kitchen to where you stand nervously against the counter. His hands settle at your waist as though they’ve always been meant to be there. “Shall we pick up where we left off, lovely?”

“Sanji, wait I—I need to be clear,” you stammer as you gingerly place your hands on his shoulders, feeling a little wave of pleasure roll through you as you notice how sinewy he feels under his stiff button-up shirt. “If we—if we do this…it doesn’t mean anything, okay? Not a damned thing.”

He leaves a soft, patronizing kiss on your forehead. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, darling.”

Without any further exchange, Sanji claims your mouth with a fierce urgency, feeding from the sweetness of your lips as though he was trying to absorb your very essence into his cells. His tongue gently pushes past your lips and dances and curls with yours, lingering flavors of nicotine and black tea filling your mouth, as his hands move up from your waist and push under your shirt, his palms exploring the soft expanse of your form.

“You’re so warm,” he moans into your mouth, “so perfect. I could do this forever.”

He intoxicates you with more long, drugging kisses before finally pulling away, a frenzied look of desire glimmering in his icy eyes. There is something in his gaze, in his touch, in his in effortlessly sensual kisses that has you ready to let him defile you right here in the worn-down kitchen, to bend over and let him take you right in the walk-in freezer, to have him utterly ruin you among the containers of pre-made spaghetti sauce and expired salmon.

He lowers his hands back down your body and tugs at the waistband of your khakis. “Take these off for me, my sweet?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” you mumble through your delirium as you quickly unbutton and unzip, struggling with unsteady hands as you find yourself unable pull them off over your shoes.

“Here, let me help you, darling.” Sanji lowers himself to the floor and strips the cheap trousers off your body, a quiet gasp leaving his lips as his gaze scans the length of your exposed legs. “Fuck, you’re more beautiful than I ever dreamed.”

His hands settle on your thighs and slowly slide up, moving outwards to grip the plush curves of your hips. He carefully slips a finger under the waistband of your panties on either side and unhurriedly slides them down—he seems to know he doesn’t require your permission anymore, as you silently urge him to finish undressing you. You’re far too hazy already, starting to lose yourself to the debauched atmosphere in the warm, quiet kitchen, to notice him quickly slip your underwear into his pants pocket.

He stands and helps you up on the metal prep table, and you feel it move slightly under your weight as he settles you. He plies you with more sweet kisses, more meditations on your exquisite beauty, as his hand slides between your legs. Sanji lets out a whimper of pleasure as he glides his fingers along your slit, and you become shamefully aware of just how soaked you’ve become from your little tryst.

“Oh my darling, my beautiful, incredible darling,” he whispers as he gently begins to press against your entrance. “You feel like silk—like the softest flower petals.”

His long fingers slide inside you, and a sigh leaves your lips; his name drifts in the air between little gasps and moans. It feels so perfectly wrong to let him fuck you with those slender fingers, to use him for the pleasure you were so often denied, but the look of absolute euphoria on his face tells you he is more than willing to provide you whatever it was that your desired.

“You’re so wet for me, it’s incredible,” he groans as he slowly pumps in and out of you, watching you with a sordid fascination, enjoying every furrow of your brow and every heave of your chest as you begin to breathe in short, sharp gasps. He moves his wrist a little faster, crooking his fingers up to stroke that bundle of nerves inside you. “Does that feel nice, my sweet? Is this what you needed?”

“S-so good, Sanji,” you stutter as little waves of pleasure drift through your lower half, your muscles twitching with every thrust of his arm, and a warm tension begins to build deep within. “S’perfect.”

“Mm, I think I can do better, though,” he grins as he kisses you again, his teeth dragging against your lower lip. “May I taste you, my darling?”

“Please?” The word comes out in a whimper, and you don’t even mind how pathetic you must sound—you just need his mouth on you this instant.

“With great pleasure, beautiful.” Sanji languidly pumps his fingers in and out of your dripping cunt a little longer before he finally withdraws. He fishes a cigarette out of his pocket, touching his slick-coated fingertips to the end of it before placing it his mouth, getting the taste of you on his lips for the first time. He sighs as he lights it, taking a long, slow drag from the cigarette before carefully handing it to you. “Here, my sweet—hold this for me.”

“Sanji, I’m—I’m not thinking straight,” you shakily respond, carefully taking the cigarette from him and grasping it between trembling fingers. “I don’t wanna end up burning myself.”

“Don’t worry, darling,” he assures you as drops to his knees in front of you, “you’re going to cum on my tongue long before that’s out.”

He kisses up your leg, starting at your knee and moving up the plush inside of your thigh, until he reaches his paradise. He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply, a guttural groan rumbling in his ribcage as he fills his lungs with your scent.

“You smell even better up close like this,” he murmurs against your cunt as he kisses and sucks at your swollen lips. “This is like heaven, darling, and I never want to leave.”

His soft fingertips part you, and he licks one long, low stripe up your cunt before fucking you with his tongue, moaning as he darts it in and out of your pulsing hole, collecting your slick on it and greedily swallowing. “I want to drink every last drop of you, darling, you taste sweeter than honey.”

Your eyes flutter shut as he moves up to your aching, needy clit, and he laps and sucks at it, the tip of his tongue swirling over you, as he revels in every little moan and gasp, your noises of delight only spurring him on further to devour your pussy with the hunger of a starving man. Every flick of his tongue sends little bolts of lightning down your thighs, and you feel yourself slowly but surely losing control of yourself to this perverted menace of a man, who showers you with a kind of reverence that you’ve never felt before. You grip a handful of his blonde hair between the fingers of your free hand and press yourself into his mouth as your climax takes you by surprise, a feeling of heated bliss hitting you hard and fast, your body tensing and coiling, then releasing with a shuddering explosion. You cry out as he continues to bury his face in your pulsing cunt, his tongue never ceasing its movements over your throbbing clit as wave after wave of pleasure engulfs you, and your keens and wails of ecstasy are so loud, so powerful, that you don’t even notice the squeak of the kitchen door swinging open.

“Hey! Anyone back here?”

“What the fuck?” you stammer as you see a familiar man appear before you, and you hurriedly stub out Sanji’s still-lit cigarette that you hold between your shaking fingers. The local cab driver, Zoro, is standing in the kitchen, hands on his hips, bulging biceps threatening to pop the stitching on his shirtsleeves, his mouth slightly agape at the sight before him.

“How did you get in here?” Sanji shouts as he stands up from between your thighs, and quickly tries to cover your exposed cunt with a soggy dishtowel. “We’re closed right now!”

“Says ‘24 hours’ on the sign. By the way, I think your door’s messed up, had a helluva time gettin’ it open.” He pauses as his eye settles on you and he studies your face; after a moment, a lecherous grin begins to make its way across his lips. “Hey…I know you.”

“How the hell do you know my precious flower, moss-head?” Sanji takes a step towards him, his chin still glistening with your juices and his saliva.

“Uh, how do you guys know each other, exactly…?” you ask quietly, though your question is promptly ignored.

“Your ‘precious flower’ got a ride home from me the other night.” Zoro licks his lips and winks his good eye at you, as his gaze drifts towards your mostly-exposed lower half. “Gave me a helluva ride, too.”

“Zoro, shut up!” you hiss.

“Is that true?” Sanji wipes his mouth on his sleeve as he turns to you, a horrorstruck expression on his face, and he takes a step towards the table. “Did you—did you fuck this creep?”

“Sure did,” Zoro answers for you, moving in front of you to block Sanji from reaching you. “We had a little exchange of goods and services in the back of my cab, if you know what I mean.”

“In his cab?” His voice is nearly a screech now, his whole body shaking as he stares at you incredulously. “Really? His fucking cab?”

“Sanji, it’s none of your damned business!” you shout around Zoro’s side. “You’re not my boyfriend!”

“Yeah,” Zoro nods, “you heard the slut, stay out of it.”

“Zoro!”

“How dare you speak to my sweet darling that way,” Sanji seethes through gritted teeth as he moves closer to the cabbie. “I’m gonna beat the shit out of you!”

Zoro steps forward, pressing his forehead against Sanji’s, grinning wildly. “I’d like to see you try, curly-browed idiot. I can speak to that little whore however I want.”

“Out back,” Sanji spits as he sinks his index finger into Zoro’s chest. “Right now.”

“Fine!”

“Hey—try not to get lost on the way out.”

“I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass, cook!”

Zoro stomps after Sanji as the heavy door to the alley slams open, the handle leaving a deep dent in the drywall behind it, and you watch, dumbfounded, as it slowly drifts shut behind them and their curse-filled tirades begin to fade into the cold night.

“Holy fuckin’ shit,” you mutter as you hop down from the counter. You nearly topple over as you pull your pants back on, simultaneously scrambling for your phone, frantically fumbling for the video call button while you zip up your khakis.

“Mmm, hey. What’s up, baby?” Ace answers in darkness after a few rings, and a light clicks on beside him as he situates his camera on his chiseled face—even in the middle of the night, he looks devastatingly handsome. “It’s late, ain’t it?”

“Hey Ace, you got a minute?”

“Oh shit, you comin’ over?” He lazily pans his phone down his body, past his washboard abs, stopping once you have a view of his half-hard cock that lays against his steely thigh. “I can be ready whenever you are.”

“I’ll be by in a little bit,” you huff as you jog towards the back door, already hearing the subdued sounds of shouting and scuffling in the alley. “You gotta see this shit first.”

[eemcintyre]

Good Morning (Tom Cruise)

TW- none. Less than none.

Summary- Trying to make up for how busy he's been lately, Tom takes your daughter off your hands for the morning and obv cuteness ensues.

I stumbled randomly upon this picture on ye olde Pinterest and was immediately overtaken by my creative whims. I'm always a sucker for dad!Tom, and if you are too, then hopefully this will be an enjoyable read.

Children were the only thing that could have made Tom Cruise’s life more action-packed than it already was. He had discovered this firsthand a couple of years ago, when his and Y/N’s daughter, Indie, was born. Even though they had gotten past the initial stages of sleepless nights and teething by this point, Indie was now four and getting to the age where she needed a lot more stimulation and activity.

Over the last several days, Tom had practically lived in his home office. Due to an abundance of conference calls and other business negotiations, he was sorry to admit that he’d hardly been able to spend time with Y/N or his daughter. Though Y/N understood his obligations, he could tell that she was pretty exhausted. Even during breaks from her job, taking care of Indie on her own could be a lot to handle. Unsurprisingly, she had been born with her father’s daring, as well as his seemingly boundless energy, which was a deadly combination in a four-year-old.

But, this weekend, Tom had made certain that his schedule was clear. It was early Saturday morning, and he had decided to take Indie off of Y/N’s hands for a while so that she could sleep late. Being as quiet as possible, he jotted down a note explaining where they had gone. Placing the note on Y/N’s bedside table and pressing a soft kiss to her head, he took Indie out for a morning on the town. Strapping her into her car seat and cranking up some blues rock, they set off in the cherry-red Buick Roadmaster that he liked to break out on weekends.

Tom was pleased with how the morning had gone. First, they’d made a foray into one of the local parks where, between chasing her down when she tried to run off, Indie enjoyed being pushed on the swings and going down the tunnel slides. Then, after she had burned off a sufficient amount of energy, they ventured downtown for some breakfast items to take home. Gripping her little hand in his, Tom and Indie wandered the sun-drenched sidewalks past various brightly painted storefronts with lettering on the windows. Their main objective was to stop at a combination café and bakery where he and Y/N were known as regulars.

Nearing the counter, Tom had Indie in his arms so that she could see the full expanse of available pastries in the display case.

“Alright, darlin, what looks good?”

“Wan’ that one,” Indie replied, pointing to the iced donuts covered in rainbow sprinkles.

“And what do we say?” Tom glanced at her meaningfully.

“Please, can I have that one?”

“Yes ma’am, you may,” he grinned at Indie as the employee tending the counter approached.

“Mr. Cruise, hi there, what’ll it be this morning?”

“Hey, how are ya? The usual for my wife and I, and one of those rainbow donuts for the little lady,” he replied, glancing at Indie and bouncing her in his arms.

“You’ve got it. I’ll have the donut right out for you and those drinks will be done in a moment.”

“Thanks.”

A few minutes later, they exited the café and continued on their journey while Indie munched on her donut. Her attention was soon captured by a flower stand outside one of the buildings, and with icing smudged across her fingers and face, she pulled away from Tom and ran toward it.

“Hey, sweetheart, c’mere,” he sighed as he quickly caught up with her. Kneeling so that he was at her level, he attempted to clean some of the icing off of her face and hands. “You look like a wild woman.” He shook his head, and she giggled.

As Indie admired the bouquets, sticking her face in to smell them, Tom thought it would be a fun idea to get some for Y/N. 

“Why don’t you pick out some flowers for Mom?” he suggested. “Which ones do you think she would like?”

Indie was quickly drawn to one of the bouquets with pink and purple flowers in it. It was a wildflower mix of cosmos, chamomile, hyacinth, lavender, and a single large sunflower.

“All right, good choice,” he nodded.

After they had paid, they made their way back to where his car was parked.

“Daddy, can I please hold them? Pleeeeeeaaaase,” Indie insisted, making grabby hands up at the flowers as he carried them. 

“Okay, but you have to be careful, sweetheart,” he cautioned her, watching out of the corner of his eye as they walked to make sure that the bouquet didn’t end up scraped and scattered across the sidewalk. Thankfully, it made it to the car intact.

They returned home in the Roadmaster, this time with Indie’s choice of The Wiggles playing. The second she was freed from the confines of the car seat, she was eager to run inside and pounce on Y/N.

“Ok, now Mom might still be asleep…” Tom warned her, placing a hand on her shoulder as they entered the house.

“Hello?” Just then, Y/N’s drowsy voice sounded from the kitchen.

“Mama!” Indie exclaimed, catapulting herself in that direction. Y/N, who was wearing a baggy, vintage university sweatshirt and pajama shorts, kneeled down to scoop her into a hug. Tom grinned at them from the kitchen entryway, and Y/N greeted him, glancing at the bouquet and tray of cups he held, her face lighting up.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked, standing up and reaching toward the cups, recognizing the café logo. “Mm, love you.” She bestowed a peck on Tom’s cheek. “What’s this?” she focused in on the flowers.

“Indie picked them out for you,” he gestured to their daughter, who was already becoming preoccupied by the cat and how she might go about picking him up.

“Thank you, honey,” Y/N said, playfully tousling Indie’s hair.

“She did a nice job. She already has your artistic sensibilities,” Tom chuckled. “Or at least your obsession with pink.”

“Then I’m doing something right,” Y/N laughed.

“She thinks my cars are ugly and told me I should get a ‘Barbie pink’ one.”

Y/N shook from laughter. “Y’know, this kid has a lot of good ideas.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

[tw1l1te]

The Final Promise₊˚✩⊹

Chapter 5

Linked Universe x reader

Warnings: Mentions of traumatic pasts, fluff, angst, mental health

₊˚✩⊹

“You and I both know I’d make such a sexy Link,” you said, “Green is my color, you said so yourself!” 

Wars groaned “Of course you remember that of all the things I’ve said.”

You turned to Four and Legend, who were walking a few feet behind you two, loudly whispering “I think he’s too embarrassed to admit I look better in green than him.” 

Both of them nodded exaggeratingly. Wars just groaned. You cackled loudly. Both of you knew it was all fun and games, needing some humor to lighten up the journeys you've been through.

Keeping up with him, you looked out onto the expanse of Hyrule, slowly transitioning from green grassy fields to dry, sandy earth. You almost didn’t notice it by how slow it was, but you felt a shift in the wind. You looked at the others, seeing if they also picked it up, but you seemed to be the only one. The air felt heavy and threatening, like a predator was hunting you. Watching you.

“Stop.” you say, mostly to yourself, but the others hear you as well. 

Hyrule jogs back to you, “What’s going on? You ok?” you concentrate on a blade of grass, putting your finger up to your lips to listen. The air is thick with tension, you could probably cut it with the Master Sword.

“Portal’s opened up.” you say, looking past Hyrule to the group, eyeing Time to try and read his face. He looks at you for a moment, an emotion that you can’t read written across his face, but he seems to snap out of it. He nods.

You pull out your phone, still the same battery percentage as when you first landed in Hyrule, the charge not depleting despite the fact you’ve been using it continuously. Flipping to your homescreen, you start walking forward, the group following behind you. You took out your phone to detect which direction the portal is located. The screen gets all fuzzy and distorted when it gets close to the portal, so it acts as a compass in a way.

You only needed to use this tactic when the portal didn’t popup in your line of sight, which seemed like the case right now. 

“Careful sunshine, there’s usually monsters near portals.” Wars mumbled, his hands firmly gripping the hilt of his sword, knuckles going white from how hard he was holding it. Pointing it towards the hill in front of you, your phone finally starts distorting, the response you were looking for. You slip your phone into your pack, pointing toward the hill wordlessly.

Reaching the peak of the hill, you see the purple and black colored portal in the sandy expanse of Gerudo Valley. The group resumes walking toward it, but you hesitate. Time and Wars turn back around to look at you, noticing your hesitation. They can see the internal battle happening behind your eyes.

“I’m so fucking close, Time. It’s literally a day or two walk away for us. I-fuck I can’t do this.” you say, eyes starting to sting. 

The others stay put while Time makes his way to you, slow, careful steps. Kneeling slightly in front of you, he sighs.

“I’m sorry, Y/n. Truly, I am. I wish there was some way I could help, but I can’t. We have to go through the portal, but I promise you, whichever Hyrule we land in, we’ll keep searching for you.” he says, a stern look on his face. His words do little to ease your anxieties, but you know that there’s, objectively, nothing you can do. With a nod, both of you walk through the portal, the rest of the group following close behind.

~

You hear voices around you before you can open your eyes. Sensing the voices didn’t hold any worry or danger, you relaxed for a few more seconds before you inevitably had to get up.

“We’re here, Y/n.” Four says, brushing the hair out of your face, no doubt getting tangled through the shifting of realities. You’d have to deal with it later.

You groan, every inch of your body sore. You look at Four, “Any idea of who’s Hyrule we’re in?”

Four ponders before answering, “Well, it’s definitely not mine, but Time says it might be his, but is unsure because we’re in the middle of a field right now. Probably Hyrule Field if I had to guess.”

Time addresses the group, adjusting his gauntlets “I’m suspecting we’re in my Hyrule, based on the terrain and layout. If we head North, I have an old friend we can lodge with for a few days.”

“Malon?” you ask.

“...Yes. She took over the ranch a few years ago, so there shouldn’t be any issues with beds or room.” he answers, partially forgetting that you knew almost every Hyrule and its people. It should have worried him, but he was glad you were excited to explore Hyrule regardless of your seemingly endless knowledge of it.

While walking on the dirt path, you, Wind, and Hyrule talk about the different Hyrules, mentioning how despite being the same land with minor shifts of architecture and layout, it still felt starkly different.

“I’m still so confused on how your land is mapped out, Y/n. You’re saying you have… cities? As in Castle Town, right?” Hyrule asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, I guess yeah. But way bigger and taller. Think Castle Town but like 100 times the size.” you say.

Hyrule’s mouth drops open.

“Holy goddesses, that’s huge! How do you not get lost? I got lost in Wars’ Castle Town for at least two hours last time we were there, and it was a nightmare figuring out how to get back to the inn.”

You chuckled, remembering the frantic Hyrule entering the inn, hours after he was meant to return.

“It’s harder if it’s a new city I’ve never been to. I used to live in the city when I went to school, so I had to walk in it everyday. I eventually memorized and knew how to get around. If you guys ever land there, I’ll show you around.” you said, looking outward onto the path in front of you.

You can see the ranch in the distance, a small stream of smoke coming out from the chimney.

“Seems like she’s home, Old man.” Wars said, gesturing at the house. Time nodded in response.

“For the love of goddesses, please behave. I’m lucky enough as it is that she lets me bring you lot here.” Time says, groaning slightly.

“Aye aye, captain!” Wind shouts, earning another groan from him. You smiled at Wind, him shooting you a toothy grin. 

~

“It’s about time you boys came around! Come in, come in! You must be hungry and exhausted.” Malon exclaims, ushering you in. “And Y/n! So glad to see you again, it's been what, 5 months now?” 

“Wow, its been that long Mal? Damn, time does really have a way with catching up to you. How have you been?” you ask, leaning against the kitchen counter. 

“Ah, y’know, same old thing every day. Link’s been keepin’ ya on your toes, huh?” she teases, nodding his head at him, “Fairy boy can’t sit still, can he?” she muses. 

Looking back at Time, you see him standing awkwardly. You chuckle, “He does, but he takes care of us. He’s good to us, all of us.” You smile at him, him sending you a small smile in thanks, refocusing on something the group was talking about. 

Now that you’re focused on him, you realize you and him didn’t discuss what that kiss was a few nights ago. It’s been nagging you, gnawing at your brain. You needed to talk with him, but… you were nervous. You’re experiencing the beginnings of a school girl crush again, a feeling you didn’t think you’d feel again after…. them. You were scared shitless. 

You’d talk to him. Tonight.

₊˚✩⊹

[v3nusxsky]

heyyy I was wondering if you could write smut for Larissa??? where the reader is a 7’1 vampire teacher and Larissa is absolutely smitten with the reader. I would like Larissa to be a sub bc honestly sub Larissa hits different but could you include a strap on (reader giving) face sitting from Larissa 0_o, marking and blood drinking?? You really don’t have to do this but I would love it even if you just did vanilla tysmmm

Little bloodsucker 18+

*Authors note~ I thought this was a super good idea. And I'm obsessed with the idea of vampire r rn as well as a/b/o universe*

Trigger warnings~ vamp r dom r sub strap on (l receiving) face sitting (r receiving) marking and blood drinking body worship

Prompt~see ask^^^^^^^

✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿

Larissa was drawn to you the moment you applied for the teaching position of creature anatomy. When the seven foot one vampire walked into her office she  immediately felt weak at her knees. Your eyes darkened to a raven black, drawn to Larissa and her scent. Her scent called to you like an unmated vampire would experience when they are around their soulmate. It was uncommon but not impossible to mate with other species of outcast and you knew you were a unique case as soon as she opened her gorgeous mouth.

A few months later, you couldn't handle being around her no more, the need to mark her, to taste her blood that practically called for you was so overwhelming for you. Larissa wasn't fairing much better either, she desperately wanted you to be in her bed, to fuck her senseless. Most nights she imagined it was you pounding into her sensitive cunt, forcing her violently over the edge into pools of  bliss, your fangs sinking into the expanse of her beautiful neck.

It was another night for Larissa Weems that would be extremely lonely night, where she constantly fought to bring herself to orgasm with your name on her lips. However, you needed to speak to the blonde about a course trip you were planning. However, you stopped in your tracks when you heard a breathily mewl of your name coming from Larissa's office. You decided to forgo knocking and slipped into the room to find Larissa Weems sat with her legs up on her desk as a vibrator worked on teasing her pearly clit. "Woah!" You gasped causing Larissa to drop the vibrator and flush bright red. "I um I oh god I'm so sorry" she whimpered. "No no no it's okay, do you want some help?"

You really couldn't control it anymore, her arousal making her scent that much stronger. You were there in an instant, gripping her chin and guiding her lips to yours. You kissed her passionately before your fangs popped down startling you. "Oh god! I'm so sorry Larissa" you murmured, "I just you smell so good and you call to me."

Poor Larissa didn't know what happened but your vampire strength allowed you to scoop Larissa up and carry her to her adjoining bedroom. "What? Darling you don't have to-" she murmured only to be shut off by your lips, "let me help you darling." Her hips rocked upwards to show her need and want for you. It was crazy how fast you could strip yourself and Larissa's clothing off, the blonde women soon found herself sat on your face.

Your tongue rapidly fucking up into her fluttering hole as Larissa withered and whined above you, drenching your face in her arousal. You were relentless and your inhuman speed allowed Larissa to approach that wanted edge so much quicker than she normally would. You didn't stop until the blonde was screaming for you as she came. Your face smothered in her orgasm as she panted her way back down from the high.

"Oh fuck, darling you're so good at that" she whimpered as her eyes found the strap you adorned. Packing made you feel more confident and comfortable in your body. Turns out now it would be useful. "Larissa? Do you have lube" you mumbled quickly following her directions to add a generous amount to the shaft. "Do you want it darling?" The blonde immediately became doe eyed and nodded as if she were a nodding dog.

"Hands and knees baby" you purred causing Larissa to instantly follow the command. "Such an obedient think for me, a good girl hmm" you mused before a teasing smack landed on her right ass cheek, which Larissa moaned at the praise. "Please, please fuck me, I've wanted you for so long, please want you to mark me make me yours" Larissa babbled as you teased her soaked slit with the faux cock head. "Okay imma fuck you stupid sweet toy."

You definitely knew what you were doing with the strap on, your thrusts hitting that very spot that drove Larissa mad, her hips bucking backwards to meet your thrusts, you got frustrated with not being able to see Larissa's face so you expertly flipped the blonde on her back.

Larissa's tits were on display and you couldn't help but bring your mouth to each boob. You showered both of her fleshy mounds with equal attention, never slowing your thrusts as you worked the blonde to another high. "Mark me, make me yours, please please feed" she mewled causing you to lose all composure and bring your fangs to her expanse of her neck bitting down hard enough to make Larissa as yours and suck some of her blood up. You couldn't help but feel the waves of pleasure feeding off her created, while her thrusts became less precise. "Oh fuck darling cum please, I'm yours, your mate. Please oh god I'm gonna" Larissa mewled as you both feel over the edge, blood still draining from the woman's neck.

Immediately, you slipped from the woman's pulsating hole and began to search the room for some water and something to snack on. Finding a little granola bar and some bottled water you encouraged the woman to eat and drink something while you used your venom to soothe and close the two fang holes, you knew they'd scar but you also knew you'd be tied to Larissa now for life, something that would definitely not be horrible.

Word count~ 1051

[drpeppertummy]

i havent gone into the provolone family tree on this blog but does anyone remember my bestie lemon. his sister pimientos present-day descentant penne is like. a Cartoon Movie Scientist who dabbles in made up bullshit

[unintentional belly expansion, tummyache, hint of burst teasing]

Penne looked down at the new batch of her latest project, exhaustedly rubbing her face. Scattered across the tray before her were dozens of bright orange pills. They were small and simple, indistinguishable from any other pill in the medicine cabinet. These, however, were unlike anything Penne had stashed away above the bathroom sink. They weren't a remedy for pain or sniffles or allergies. No, these little orange capsules were created to solve an entirely different problem: hunger.

The project had begun a few months ago after another long, hyperfocused night at the lab. It wasn't any different from any other night at the lab; Penne was notorious for going entire busy nights without eating. She was simply too busy and too absorbed in her work to step away. That night, however, the idea had crossed her mind that it would be so much easier if she could simply pull a meal out of her pocket and toss it back without interrupting her work. She'd thought about that, and then she'd thought about how many people such a creation might potentially benefit, and then she'd set off to work. Without a snack break, of course.

After several trial runs with increasing success, Penne thought she might finally have something close to a finished product. She felt confident that they were safe to test on herself; she'd worked out any alarming kinks a handful of attempts ago, and the most recent batches had been perfectly harmless, albeit not particularly filling. Now, as she looked down at the tray of little orange pills, her exhausted, work-fried brain began a debate with itself.

It's a new batch, her brain said. We should just start with one.

The formula is barely any different from the last, it argued.

But it could be different enough.

It shouldn't be. We barely altered the density of it.

It would be dangerous and idiotic to start with two. What if it's too much?

But if one isn't enough--and I doubt it will be--we'll have to wait even longer to try it with two.

Patience is a virtue. Whatever happened to lab safety?

Fuck it. We're trying two.

Penne picked up two of the little orange capsules, hesitated for a moment, and then, with a quick swig of water, she swallowed them. She sat still for a moment, holding her breath as she waited for something to happen. For a few moments, nothing did. Then, slowly, she felt her empty stomach begin to fill up as the capsules released their expanding mass of nutrients. Gradually, her hunger faded, and it wasn't long before she felt full. And then very full. And then stuffed. Her heart fluttered nervously in her chest as her normally concave belly began to puff out round and firm. Shit, she thought.

The growth didn't seem to be slowing. Her stomach continued to distend, pushing out hard as the mass inside it expanded. She was well beyond stuffed now, and her belly felt painfully tight as it bloated up even more, pressing out against her baggy shirt. Her belt, snug around her normally narrow waist, creaked as the pressure beneath it grew. Frantically, she reached down and undid it. Moments later, her expanding belly forced the button of her pants open.

An ungraceful cry of panicked discomfort escaped Penne as her stomach stretched rapidly, and her back arched as her belly pushed out further and further. She felt the air that had been trapped in her stomach begin to bubble up toward her throat, and she forced up a burp in a desperate attempt to release some of the pressure building inside her. It didn't help. She clutched her stomach, gasping with panic. It was rock hard, packed tightly with the ever-expanding nutritional mass.

As her stomach began to reach its absolute limit, Penne shut her eyes, bracing herself for the worst. By some miracle, though, the expansion slowed, and, mercifully, it finally stopped. She remained frozen for a moment, holding her breath, and then, when she was sure it was over, she let herself relax. She couldn't relax too much, though; her belly was so tightly distended she could barely move. It ached terribly. She let out a pained moan, cautiously rubbing her taut, top-heavy belly.

She was almost afraid to look down at herself, but she did. Her belly jutted out shockingly beneath her ribs. Her shirt, which had been loose and wrinkled only five minutes earlier, was now pulled smoothly over the painful bulge of her bloated stomach. With barely a pinch of spare fat to speak of on her lanky frame, her belly had absolutely no give left to it.

Carefully, she tried to stand, but her overstuffed stomach cramped sharply, and she quickly dropped back down into her chair with a pitiful moan. Her stomach, hugging the enormous mass of not-quite-food for dear life, let out a strained gurgle. She sat there, belly sticking out absurdly, hoping nobody came along and saw her. I told you so, her brain scolded. Groaning, she let her head fall back and closed her eyes, resigning herself to a long night of digestion.

[roboticutie]

It's a side-mission that I don't think many end up doing, at least from the lack of talking about it I see, but still. The figurines. If you succeed a check in the pawn shop, you can take a figurine of a headless soldier on a horse. If you've done that, when you inspect the stained glass Dolores Dei you can get the task to give her any and all figurines you can find. Perhaps you can one day. Even when you get this task, though, it feels odd- it confuses your Logic because Dei has long since passed, but... Maybe you can give her these gifts somehow? You can find another figurine in the unplayable Wirral expansion pack (I only found it bc I didn't know you couldn't play Wirral w Kim). There are only these 2, according to the wiki, and I have not found more.

This task is another moment where the writers really manage to emulate that feeling of not only loss, but lost-ness that you get a few times in the game. When I did this task I thought it would be something extraordinary, maybe vaguely supernatural as there are a few things confirmed to be unexplainable happening with and around Harry, y'know? I had hope and intrigue and didn't even realize how strange and rare it must be to get this task on accident bc after typing it out I realized the starting parameters were VERY specific and easy to miss, actually. And I was so excited to find who to give it to, maybe a lost shrine, or someone reaching through a spot of pale and time, maybe when I found 3 or 5 I could lay them at her shattered feet and look behind the glass, something odd and unexplainable.

Then I met her in the dream. And just before it ended I was reminded that I'm supposed to give Dei the figurines. And that's when it dawned on me what Harry had forgotten, and I knew what he'd done to his memory of Dora by combining the two, and... It was so sobering and desolate. It felt the same way the end of a party feels, when you're the last to leave. The balloons are still up, but there's streamers on the floor, crumbs on the plates, bowls of snacks emptied, walls that held and echoed laughter are silent. The after image of something amazing, left only with the memory and the knowledge that that moment will never, ever happen the same way again.

You fulfill this task by giving all found figurines to Dora in the final dream.

And it does nothing. It doesn't work. Nothing will work. She would have liked them once, but like Dei, that Dora is dead. She died years ago and the Dora that remains is far, far away now.

Just like when I had no idea the carriage was Harry's until Kim spelled it out for us 2 hours later after chatting and whistling and relaxing; the figurines made what Harry was feeling and going through dawn on me so personally. I can't explain it in words well enough. I was so disappointed the figurines weren't some greater purpose, I was sad this was all we were holding onto them for, I was disappointed in Harry for trying to use trinkets to win her back, I was upset that they didn't do anything good, she didn't even want them; and I knew that's what Harry felt in that moment, too.

It's a level of "Show, don't tell," that not many writers set themselves up to be able to achieve. Even in this game there are only a handful of moments that are able to put you into Harry's headspace so precisely, and all of them are very specific and rely heavily on context given or lost on the player. It's impressive. I think about those figurines a lot.

[burstingwithbellies]

As requested:

I stand before you, pen and clipboard in hand. "And how are we feeling today?"

I am met with a moan of... pain? Pleasure? A mixture thereof? Like the lowing of a cow, though at this point such a comparison is way too generous. Nonetheless, I jot down my findings and begin my routine checkup.

At your current size, it takes a whole minute of straight walking to circumnavigate your body, or more precisely your belly. It's a colossal thing, a literal mound of flesh that I could crawl atop of. And every square inch is packed with babies, hundreds of them according to the latest ultrasound. Layers and layers of children overlapping one another. There are babies deep inside you that have never known the caress of an outside hand; only the hands and feet of their many siblings in every conceivable direction, all competing for a little more personal space.

As such, your belly is never still. Your flesh, impossibly taut as it may seem at a glance, is always subtly writhing, undulating like the sea. You certainly have enough amniotic fluid sloshing about inside to masquerade as one. As a matter of fact, I write down that idea: *Record audio of amniotic fluid, test against actual ocean noise, ask subjects to discern the two.*

I continue my rounds, looking up and down the expanse of your belly for anything concerning, noting places where new stretch marks and bruises have formed for later lotion and oil application. In the last few months, we've gone through lifetime supplies of both, which is only appropriate, on second thought. You're creating many, many lives within you. I squeeze your protruding belly button--long lost to you--as I pass by it, but the sensation might be lost on you, when you're constantly contending with the squirming of your brood.

After several minutes, my evaluation is complete and I meet you again, face to face. "Looks like you've grown a few more inches since yesterday," I cheerfully inform you. Again, you moan piteously, not even making eye contact. Understandably so. You're so pregnant that it occupies your every waking thought. I'm barely a presence to you. Which suits me just fine. I mark the time, document my intention, then I click my pen closed and set the whole thing aside on a nearby table.

The rest of your body is elevated off the ground, so I must climb a few steps to reach the platform we’ve built around you. Out in front of you, there is a recess for each of your titanic breasts, which have similarly swelled to titanic proportions in order to feed the legion growing inside you. You started producing milk six weeks ago, and since then we’ve had industrial-strength siphons attached to your breasts, pumping around the clock so it doesn’t painfully build up. Even so, you produce almost as quickly as we’re able to safely extract. Every drop we manage to wring out of you is bottled and placed in cold storage, as there won’t be enough time in the day for you to breastfeed every one of your babies. In this regard, and others, you have exceeded our wildest projections. You’re too good at this.

I slip behind you, comfortably settling on the same seat you are. There is ample space, which your body seems to have taken as a challenge. Your ass cheeks are huge and pillowy, a natural consequence of how many calories you’re forced to consume to fuel this impossible pregnancy and the sedentary lifestyle said pregnancy enforces. Needless to say, you’ve grown quite fat. Your ass cheeks alone, huge and pillowy, threaten to engulf my form as I spread them apart to reach my objective: your quivering, constantly dripping pussy. You may be barely cognizant of your surroundings, but your body immediately recognizes mine.. Your hips instinctually align with mine for easier docking. “Such an obedient pet,” I whisper into your ear as I press my cock inside you, grunting with some effort since you’re so tight and swollen. My hands glide across your tender skin, raising goosebumps with just the tips of my fingers. "Your whole body is so sensitive." Your moaning increases in pitch. "Perhaps some part of you recognizes that I am taking advantage of you. But what can you do about it? Your brain is mush, all scrambled from being a baby factory. And to think, you volunteered for this. A post grad student hoping to pay off his debt. How could you have known we would turn you into this," I squeeze some of your flesh. "A fat guinea pig is what you are. Nothing but a pair of tits and a womb. You're not even a person anymore, you're property-a piece of equipment, hardware, in our mission to push the limits of human potential. Hundreds of babies are growing inside you. So who's going to notice one or two more?" That is when I begin to fuck you in earnest, causing your fat to quiver and ripple with each thrust of mine. Pathetic sounds tumble out of your mouth every time I push, but you can't possibly form the words telling me to stop. You haven't burst yet, but that's always a concern at the very back of your mind. You're much too pregnant already, surely you cannot stomach even one more baby, the next one will surely be the one to break the camel's back (or water, in this case). But that exact thought has run through your mind before, every time I've fucked you over the course of this pregnancy, every morning after evaluation, and though your body complains every time, skin creaking in protest as it's forced to expand further... I can't recall a single drop of my seed ever escaping your pussy. Truly, your reproductive system is insatiable.

I check the watch on my wrist, and register surprise. "Evaluation took longer today. Guess I'll have to speed things up. But don't worry, I'll have you screaming by the end of this like always~"

My children. The brood. The populace in my gut. Yet another baby plumps up my stuffed gut. My stomach cries at the new addition to the batch. I become more distended, breaking a new record for the new hour.

I can’t stop the cycle. I’ve lost everything to you. My dignity, my humanity, my body, my mind, my freedom. But I’ve accepted it to some degree.

Throughout all the trauma inflicted on my womb and pangs of pain of being such an overburdened papa, I do still find pleasure. My body has been receptive to all the arduous challenges you have tasked upon me and parting my legs was always the easiest part.

Taking in your cock is natural, of course, your seed is the consequence and pregnancy would have been inevitable. But the sheer number of occupants…?

Well, I almost can’t blame anyone else for this predicament other than myself. At one point, I could have refused. But I just kept taking you on and giving into this pleasure and this hedonism that is so deep within me.

Now, there’s really nowhere else I can turn to… but you.

I can hardly remember the outside world or who I was before. It wouldn’t matter now; it’s not like I can return. I’m serving a new purpose. I’ve become something bigger than that what I was before. Both literally and figuratively.

I can’t quit. No, not until I pop or when all these babies eventually pass out of me.

Or when you eventually grow tired of me, which I highly doubt would ever happen. Many things escape my hollow mind, but I knew as much that I was your plow horse; your cum disposal. Not your life-size doll, but what is yours and bigger than life.

And I’m disposed to you. You’re my mine as much as I am yours but perhaps, this “relationship” is still less than mutual. My pussy aches whenever you are around. You have sown my appetite and it becomes fiercer with each encounter I have with you.

Satisfy me, even though it hurts.

[machiroads]

fic recs :D?

Here u go:

shinsou hitoshi expansion pack by treasuredplanet A series of short one-shots about Shinsou's mentorship under Aizawa, all utterly delightful. Shinsou's voice is captured perfectly.

Aizawa's Girldad Era My Beloved by HalloweenClown A different series of short one-shots from Eri's perspective about how the teachers of UA (Aizawa especially) love her very much and she learns how to cope with her traumatic childhood. So sweet you'll need to brush your teeth afterwards.

A Few Disasters Short by Robbirdthe8th 35k, canon-divergent / post-canon, erasermic. Celebrity musician Present Mic develops an unlikely crush on the eccentric owner of a cat cafe because the man has no idea who he is. I just really enjoy Aizawa living under a proverbial rock, and also he adopts Shinsou and Eri in this one as a bonus.

be my fictional obsession (my newest daydream) by YetAnotherGhost 15k, erasermic. Teen Mic inadvertently admits to be dating Aizawa in an attempt to defend him against bullies. Fake dating ensues. One of the funniest things I've ever read.

All Rights Reserved by NeonPistachio 10k, erasermic. Aizawa comes across a forum thread of people looking for Eraserhead merch. When Mic unwittingly comes across Aizawa trying to DIY it, he volunteers to help. So so cute.

Stray by Kyurilin 55k and counting, college AU, erasercloudmic. Fate brings the three dumbigos together at a party. They hit it off and drunkenly get matching tattoos And Then It Gets Worse. When a chance to reunite presents itself, Mic and Shirakumo jump on the opportunity, but the third wheel chooses to remain incognito. This fic is truly an emotional roller coaster, and a hidden gem

Blood Orange by Jemsauce 550k, modern AU, erasermight. A brutal car crash tears two families apart, but a twist of fate brings single fathers Aizawa and All Might together five years later. The slowest of slow burn. An emotional deep dive into survivor's guilt and allowing yourself to be happy.

You Want it Darker by Ms_Chunks 530k, erasermic. When a serial killer with a brainwashing quirk is discovered, Aizawa enlists the help of Shinsou to get him access to the latter's father, who is in prison for a streak of murders of the same nature. They end up biting off more than they can chew. Mostly focused on Aizawa and Shinsou's relationship, a strong cast of background characters, thriling from start to finish. I am currently reading this for the fourth time, send help

This is just a smattering of stuff I've enjoyed recently, my AO3 bookmarks have more stuff I've enjoyed over the years from a variety of series.

[darklydeliciousdesires]

Moonlight Eternal - A Vampire!Graf Von Baphomet/Reader One Shot Story.

And here we are, guys. The next instalment for the Vampire Soirée! I feel sad that I already know so few people will likely read it, but to those few, I do hope you enjoy it :)

Words - 3,725

Warnings - Smut and adult content below the cut, minors DNI!

The band’s statement told of a tragedy, borne of their vocalist's struggles with sobriety, a drug problem that had almost taken his life from him. That man, as far as any fans of the band knew, was now in jail awaiting trial on drug possession charges.  

Except he wasn’t. Because he was dead. 

However, that didn’t mean he was gone.  

The road that cuts through the vast expanse of the Sabaduri Forest winds narrowly, the trees all burdened with a heavy white canopy from the downpour of snow the area has suffered. It might be a little perilous to negotiate a car through, the road sleety and slippery, but your end goal is worth it. 

He’s worth it. Just about. 

Pulling up where the escarpment trails down to the side of the road, you check your watch. 4:17pm. You’d better walk quickly, while you still have the light. Getting out of the car, you race to the rear to pull out your heavy winter coat, the one that’s a touch too thick to drive in comfortably, swinging your rucksack over your shoulders and locking the doors.  

It’s roughly a half hour walk through the forest to reach him, the path quite familiar to you now. He came out here in early August, four months prior. Still though, you look for the little markers he put on the trees that lead the way to his small cabin, right out in the middle of nowhere. A place he can’t be easily found was exactly what he needed, but it isn’t to say it’s what he wanted. 

A baby vampire living within such a densely packed city as Tbilisi, though? Not a good idea. They’re too wild, much too unpredictable to be around that many sources of food, their urges feral as they tackle the ever-consuming craving for blood. That’s where you come in.  

Contrary to what one may think, vampires need not drain somebody in their entirety for an adequate feed, but they will if their greed cannot be held in check. Four junkies within the squat a very newly turned Graf ripped through in a hunger binge sadly found that out to their detriment. Half a pint daily will sustain them just fine, of which you can source fairly easily in your job as a nurse. You have access to the blood bank, and enough savvy to delete computer records of the more common types of blood being indexed, save anyone noticing four pints going missing per week.  

You hope he has the foresight to actually light a fire upon his waking, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t. It’s a human necessity, one he no longer has any need for, being dead. Trudging through the snow, you’re glad that once you leave again later, it’ll be as simple as hopping onto his back and having him zoom at his rapid speed back through the forest to return you to your car. The snow is coming up to your knees, sticking to your jeans, leaving your lower legs feeling a little numb.  

The further in you trudge, the darker it becomes, the sun fading as the density of the forest thickens, pulling a small torch from your pocket to light your path. You almost faint on the spot when it illuminates the eyes of a deer in the distance, the small, flighty animal scampering away at speed. There’ll be none of them around the closer you get to the cabin, for they know not to wander too close. By instinct, they’ll never encroach upon the habitat of a greater predator.  

Another ten minutes pass, your tired legs working hard through the deluged, white terrain before you finally see the cabin come into view, a golden light illuminating the small windows, smoke billowing from the chimney. Thank goodness he did have a little foresight into your human needs. 

You hesitate at the door for a second, gathering yourself with a deep breath. “It’s me,” you speak upon entering, Graf appearing in front of you in a nanosecond. “How are you?” 

“Hungry.” His face, it’s so much blanker, more passive than he was as a human. He used to pull a myriad of stupid faces that made you laugh, but they seem to have been all but lost to the stoic demeanour of the tall vampire who stands before you, taking the blood bags out of your rucksack and handing them over. “Thank you.”  

With no electricity in the cabin, he stores them in the snow, drinking half of one back before moving to bury them outside where they’ll freeze and keep from spoiling, his form appearing again sitting in the armchair by the fire. He extends a hand towards the small sofa. “Come and warm up, tell me about your day.” 

It seems so magnanimous, so casual, but the surface of the facade between you both conceals something much more brooding beneath, there in the depths where you dare not look for too long. Not that you can really tear your thoughts away from it.  

“Boring, really.”  

He roots his fingers into his hair, leaning against the palm of his hand. “No disgusting or hilarious stories for me from the medical word? Pity. I always like hearing them.” 

Indeed, you would go to his apartment after work and regale him with plenty of fodder from your working day, like all the patients admitted with foreign bodies stuck within certain orifices – and the accompanying bullshit story that went along with them, save their blushes at telling the truth over how an action figure had become lodged in their rectum, to give but one example. He’d laugh and laugh, and you’d share wine and smoke weed. 

“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you? How it used to be when you’d tell me about your day.”  

You can still see him there in your mind, who he once was, your lovely David. Few actually called him that, most referring to him by his stage name. Graf and David were to very different people. Only Graf remains. Of course, that side of him would be the one to literally sink his teeth into vampirism. David? He’s dead. 

“It can still be that, if you let it.” 

His words rouse you, a flicker of a smile lighting his face, and for a second, you see him again. Touching a hand to your neck on instinct, though, you remember. “It can’t, because you’re not you any longer.”  

Blinking, you’re startled at him suddenly appearing before you, crouched at your feet, resting his hands on your knees. “I am. I am still me. Just different.” 

“No.” Your bottom lip wobbles, shaking your head. “You’re a monster.”  

There it is. An undeniable truth, even to him. And that’s what agitates him the most. “I’ve told you over and over again, how sorry I am. Why won’t you believe me?” 

Oh, how you want to believe him. How you wish with every moral fibre of your being that you truly could take his apology and move away from it, from the horror of watching your best friend advance on you, pin you against a wall, and sink his teeth into your neck. You told him no, you cried, you screamed, but he didn’t stop. The only reason he let you go was because you burned his face with your silver bracelet, forcing agony upon him in order to release you from his deathly clutches.  

“Because you aren’t you any longer!” A lump swells thickly in your throat, your eyes filling with tears. “David is dead. I don’t know who you are. Well, I do, but I always liked David more than I did Graf.”  

He reaches for your face, your tears trickling over his cold skin, thumb gently stroking against your cheek. “I’m still David. If I wasn’t, I’d have stayed in the city, slaughtering those who silently asked for their death.” He scoffs quietly, head inclining slightly. “The trail of dead junkies would far exceed four, if there wasn’t a little bit of David left in whoever the fuck I am now.” He kisses the tip of your nose, thumb still stroking fondly. “I’m so, so sorry I hurt you. There isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do to mend that, to take it back.” 

You remain silent, your hand covering where his rests on your face, feeling him pull you near, resting his forehead to yours. “I still love you. I always did, and I always will. Even when you’re long gone, and I’m still here. I know it isn’t an excuse, but it takes some getting used to, being a vampire. I have nobody to teach me how to be one either. I’m so fucking lonely up here. Your visits are the only thing that comes close to anything resembling happiness for me.” 

True, he is all alone in his fledgling vampirism, the one who made him long gone. Neither of you have any idea why she made him and absconded. All he had with her was a few days to learn the very basics of his new self, how to deal with his nature being vastly different to that of a human. It wasn’t enough. He was too young to be left to fend for himself, and he still is now, only four months on.  

Pulling back, you kiss his forehead, folding your arms around him, finally hearing and seeing the friend you’ve missed, the one you assumed died when his body did. He pulls you down off the sofa until you’re sat on his thighs astride him, his cuddles just as tight and lovely as they always were. Only one half of him is warm, though, the side of him being heated by the fire, the other stone cold. 

“I wish you hadn’t done it,” you speak, stroking his head. 

“So do I,” he sighs, arms tightening more. “I attacked the one person who didn’t abandon me. My shame is great, this I promise.” 

Leaning back a little, you shake your head. “No, no that isn’t what I mean. Well, that too, but what I meant is that I wish you didn’t have to be what you are now.”  

“So do I.” He saw it as his last hope, though. He could ingest all of the drugs on earth now and they wouldn’t affect him. Flakka only serves as a hallucinogenic stimulant if the person who is snorting it is still alive. Vampires? They can’t achieve a high. It’s rendered his status as a habitual user just as dead as he is.  

Oh, such irony. He died to prevent his death.  

“What’s it like? I don’t think I’ve asked you before, what it feels like to be a vampire.” 

Lying back, he takes you with him to the soft, thick fur rug upon the floor, placing you nearest to the fire. “Weird,” he begins, widening his eyes a touch. Yes, there it is again. A little more David. “It’s everything and nothing all at once. I can sense everything on the kind of level that would blow your mind. What I feel though, inside, it’s muted. Dead. Because that’s what I am.”  

You frown, turning onto your side and propping your head upon your folded arm. “Explain." 

Where on earth to begin? It’s still something he's becoming accustomed to himself. "I’ll try. Okay, for example, I can tell you ate honey on toast before you left, despite the fact you’ve been eating mints along the drive up here, like you always do. I can tell that the bees who made it were happy, too. Hives all in a row in a meadow, buzzing around in the sunshine. I can also smell that you went to that vile, smelly shop at some point today, too. Your clothes, they reek of it.” He crinkles his nose, mouth down turning. “Disgusting, hippie bullshit.” 

You point a finger at him. “But you like the rosemary and milk soap!” 

“I do, but being in there with everything hitting your nose all at once? Ugh.” No, he was never a fan of Birds and Bees, the holistic skincare shop you love and often dragged him to. “It would be even worse for me now. Somebody hiked close by a few days ago and I could smell that orange perfume they sell there, even though they’d left hours before.” 

“Okay, tell me more, about how it feels beyond what you can smell,” you say, reaching to play with his hair, watching his face brighten more. Indulging in every little innocuous action that you once shared when he was human, it seems to return him to himself a little. You aren’t alone in thinking the man he once was became lost to the darkness. 

He ponders for a few seconds. “Even in the pitch dark, I can see everything, hear everything. It's a very visceral experience, the world is suddenly so much more alive with colour and sound.” He pauses, smirking. “I woke up last night fucking feral for sex, but of course I have nobody for that, so I had to use my hand. Greatest fucking orgasm of my life. Intense didn’t even cut it. It was... wow.” 

You laugh, watching him look slightly pained at his confession, closing his eyes tightly for a moment as he finally joins you in that soft laughter. “You’ve been a vampire for four months and you only found this out yesterday?” That’s virtually unheard of for someone with his sex drive.  

“It wasn’t exactly high on my priority list,” he confesses, raising an eyebrow. “It is now, though. Now I know how good it feels.”  

That eyebrow? It continues its ascent. “Oh no. Get that idea out of your head.” 

“Why?” he laughs, poking your nose with his index finger. “It isn’t like we never have before.” 

True, you have. In times of drunken horniness, you and your best friend have occasionally turned to one another in the past to sate that need. It’s always been amazing, too, but now? Hmm. The trust you’ve regained in him is tentative at best. What if his arousal lets loose some of the vampire wildness, and he ends up hurting you again?  

“You look worried, and I know why.” It’s hard to negotiate, how perceptive he’s become since being turned, seemingly able to see inside your brain. “It doesn’t make me murderous. Just fucking ridiculously aroused. I came, and my dick stayed hard for about an hour afterwards. Came five more times and it still didn’t go down.”  

Temptation nibbles at you, knowing, remembering just how good he is. Sharing a gaze, you see it, his eyes shining with all the sincerity they used to have, and more than a touch of lust that you were never able to resist in the past. Perhaps, if you did agree, it might mend all that has fractured between you, your mouths nearing, his cool lips capturing yours before you’ve time to give it any further thought. 

And those lips? They’re cold, but god. Those kisses burn hot.  

He turns you onto your back, body covering yours, tongues swirling languidly as you sink into the kisses, the familiarity of it, the heat. He pulls away for a second, stroking your face. “If my fangs pop out, don’t be frightened. It’s a horny response I can’t help,” he speaks, pressing his crotch against you firmly, letting you feel that his cock is already like iron. “A bit like this, I suppose.”  

You push a hand between your body and his, trailing over the bulge formed solid at the front of his jeans. “I’m always fond of this.” Your kisses resume, hands wandering in teasing stroke over one another, clothes discarded, until all that covers your bodies is each other’s skin.  

“I missed this,” he murmurs, shuddering when your hand wraps around his cock, mouth burying itself at your neck. “Missed you.” You pull all manner of beautifully sinful noises from him, and in turn his fingers sink into the petals of your cunt, stroking, dipping inside, moving to rotate over your clit. It blooms incandescent, your kisses urgent, the need for him stoking a bonfire to crackle through your blood, feeling him move and push into your dewy heat effortlessly with a soft grunt. 

He feels strange, that coldness breaching you, mouth and hands wandering in a sensuously silken glide all over you as he roots himself deeply in your warmth. His mouth returns to yours, kissing you with such feeling, you’re knocked sideways by it. He needs this, to connect with you, just as much as you did, to show himself that perhaps, fundamentally, he hasn’t become lost.  

You are the anchor he chains himself to, that last piece of a life now gone he clings to for support, and you let him, your hands stroking through the dark silk of his endless masses of beautiful hair, thighs tightening against his waist as he plunges back and forth. It drags sparks through your core, his cock starting to warm within the clutch of you, moans tumbling from his lips, his hands cupping your face. 

“Promise you won’t go tonight,” he demands with urgency, eyes burning brightly, the flames of the fire twinkling against the deep abyss of his pupils. “Stay with me.”  

“I can stay longer, but not for the night,” you pant, his grip against your face tightening. 

“No.” Using his body, he presses into you with force, the glimmers skittering up your spine making you wail. “Stay with me. Don’t leave me alone.” 

“David, I can’t. I...” 

The way his stare then fixes fills you with a shiver of dread, his fangs suddenly revealing themselves with an audible pop, his face darkening. “Stay with me.” 

It’s between the terrifying realisation that his words are not a request, but an order, that he bites onto your neck, your whole body flooded with fear as he drinks your blood, your screams piercing the quiet of the night.  

No. He said he wouldn’t. You trusted him. You trusted him!  

Unlike last time, though, you have no silver to weaponise against him, and he keeps on going, fucking you as he feeds, your mind burning with the shame that beneath the weight of your fear, you’re still enjoying it. Your heart races, your vision blurring, frightened beyond comprehension when you realise; he isn’t going to stop. 

You’re going to die here.  

Tears slip from your eyes, your body feeling tingly and light, feeling yourself dying there beneath him. You’re barely conscious when he finally pulls away, his bloodied mouth then biting into his own wrist, offering it to your lips. 

“Drink, and you’ll be fine. Please drink, you’ll heal. I promise you.” 

How you know the hollowness of his promises though, feeling his blood drip into your mouth. 

“Come on, drink. Just do it and everything will be okay.” 

You’d do anything for it to be okay, for this night to end, to give way to the dawn so you can escape here and never come back. And so you do as he instructs, and you drink of him, your vision swimming as you continue to falter. Is this even real? You feel no closer to the warmth of life as you suck back mouthfuls of blood, something dark and swirling moving like a vortex through your chest, until there’s nothing left.  

Into nothingness you slip, knowing it was all a lie. That nothingness does give way eventually, though, but you’re no longer upon the rug in front of the fire. It’s dark and cold, where you are now, opening your eyes and seeing nothing. You feel around, earth moving as you wriggle, your limbs moving at a speed you cannot fathom, having no idea where you are, but knowing you have to go up.  

For a second, you think he buried you alive, until it dawns on you. Dawn; a time of day you will never witness again. The dirt should be preventing you breathing, except you don’t need to, tunnelling yourself upwards to eventually break the ground of your grave, David sitting there, waiting for you. 

No. Not David. Graf. 

“You...” you whisper, a hunger like no other cording through your very being, having one of the bags of blood you brought for him thrown in your direction. “You did this to me!” 

“Drink,” he instructs, nodding at the bag. “You’ll feel better.” 

You’re loathed to, but god, the hunger that skitters through you like a phantom. Snatching the bag, you open it and drink back the contents, the blood quenching your every need, every hunger, every thirst. It does little to quell your rage, though. 

“I don’t feel better.” Your voice, it’s so angry. You’ve never heard yourself like that, each word pushed forth by a hissing death rattle, the life you had stolen by him. “Why? Why did you do this to me? I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t want it!” 

Something saddens in his eyes, his so far annoyingly passive face letting the emotion rise to the surface. “Because I didn’t want to be alone any longer. I wanted you to stay with me, and now you can.” He moves rapidly, reaching for you, your brand-new lightning reflexes swatting his hand away with utter contempt. “All that we were, we can be again. Just you and me. I made it better. It’s just us now, like it always used to be.” 

How can he even reason that this makes it better? How can he... how? 

The cold you feel at his incredulous selfishness has nothing to do with your new living death, watching his eyes burning green fire through the darkness. It is both the most beautiful and ugly thing you have ever seen, all the sounds of the night thrumming through your head, every creaking tree, every insect scuttling, the moon glowing brighter than ever before.  

It is a luminescence tinged with the dark of the deed, though, your life taken by the greedy desires of the vampire who made you. Now, you’re forced to walk in darkness with him forever, lest the loneliness eat you up, just as it did him. How you could happily rip him to pieces for that. He made a monster of you, too. 

David truly is dead.  

[pudding-parade]

Get to know you - Sims Style

@rstarsims3 tagged me for this a while back, and I'm finally posting my answers, which took me a while to compile because 1) Blabbity blab blab blab, as usual, and 2) Still needing lots of rest and stuff, so no sitting at a computer for hours on end.

But here we go! I'mma put my blabby answers and my tag list behind Ye Olde Cut.

What’s your favorite Sims death? What an odd question, especially to lead off… Well, I guess if I had to pick one, it'd be the one from TS2 where cloudwatching occasionally brings a satellite down on the cloudwatcher's head. But generally, mine die of old age, if they manage to get that far. I play with long, but realistically proportional, life stages, mostly because I'm almost always playing "experimental" saves where I'm "road testing" rulesets and such, so I need a lot of time to work out kinks and test ideas and stuff.)

Alpha CC or Maxis Match? I land on a combination of more-realistic (but not ultra-realistic) stuff for CAS, but for everything else, like with furniture and deco and stuff, I tend to prefer CC stuff that visually fits in with the EA stuff in terms of style and textures and whatnot, so that the CC doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when combined with EA stuff. In fact, my "go-to" CC for build/buy is stuff that adds on to EA stuff, like more doors/windows that match an EA door/window.

Do you cheat your sims weight? What, to make the fat ones skinny? The skinny ones fat? The skinny ones buff? No. I don't see why I would. It's easy enough to make a sim gain or lose weight without cheating, which I'm assuming means just using the sliders.

Do you move objects? Is there anyone who doesn't? That's a serious question. Is there any one who doesn't? I want to know.

Favorite Mod? I'm leaving aside the NRaas mods because I don't see them as mods so much as things that are just essential to make the game playable in the often-weird ways that I play. There are others that I also consider just essential for when I'm playing in certain styles, especially for more primitive settings. But for ones that are optional and just pure fun, I'd nominate all of @thesweetsimmer111's baby- and toddler-related ones.

First Expansion/Game Pack/Stuff Pack? I know for TS2 it was Seasons. For TS3…For a long time, I had just the base game, which I got when it came out, but didn't play beyond trying it out and then going back to TS2. Then, years later, I got a new computer and decided to give TS3 another try, but I couldn't find the CD or DVD or whatever it was, so I bought a combo pack with the base game, Late Night, and the High End Loft or whatever it is stuff pack, so I guess it would be Late Night. Other than that, I bought all the other TS3 EPs in one go when EA had them on sale for 50% off via Origin, which that combo pack forced me to install. (But which I am now free of again. 🏴‍☠️)

Do you pronounce live mode like aLIVE or LIVing? As aLIVE. Because that is when the game is live. Games do not live, but they can be live. See, this is one reason why English sucks.

Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? Here's a thing about me: I don't really get attached to the pixel people. For me, they're just tools. I'm guessing it's because I'm not a storyteller when it comes to Sims, so I don't see sims as characters. Sure, sometimes I find one endearing for one reason or another. Usually, they have traits that make them assholes, and I like to watch them create chaos and ruin wherever they go. One of the founders of the Random Legacy that I will get back to one of these days is one of those. But I find I like other people's sims more than mine, though that's more of a testament to those simmers' story-telling skills than anything else.

Have you made a simself? Only by accident. A few times I've just been randomly moving sliders around and somehow I ended up with something that looked like me at some stage in my life. It stayed that way for a minute or three, before I yelled OH GOD NO! and quickly slidered the horror away.

But to be honest? I find the entire concept kind of creepy, at least in terms of putting a self-sim in the game and playing them as a character. That would just feel weird to me. That said, I suppose it might have been something that would have appealed to me if I had played when I was a kid, but the game didn't exist when I was a kid. Computers didn't exist when I was a kid, at least not in a form that regular people could own and that could fit on a desk. I was in my 40s when I started playing the game. My daughter played TS2 when she was a kid, and she had a self-sim inserted into the stories she would play, so…yeah. Maybe it's a younger-person thing. Or maybe I'm just weird. Yeah, it's probably that second option.

Which is your favorite EA hair color? Probably the black, but even with that I have to add some highlights to it because otherwise the hair just looks like a creature from the void eating the sim's head.

Favorite EA hair? None of them. They all need to DIAF.

Favorite life stage? I don't have one. I have a least-favorite, babies, because they're basically just objects, but once they're actually sims, I enjoy playing sims of all ages equally.

Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? I originally bought TS2 just to build in it, and for a couple of years, that was all I did. I only started actually playing the game later. Now, I enjoy both building and actually playing the game, depending on my mood. Usually, I'll have a binge of building, but I eventually come to a point where I'd rather do anything other than build. Then I play the game. Then, eventually, the urge to build comes back. So it's a back-and-forth.

Are you a CC creator? I made lots of stuff for TS2, mostly object retextures/recolors. I've made a few minor things for TS3, and I retexture hairs and add preg morphs to clothing for my own use, but I wouldn't consider myself a CC creator for TS3. In fact, I'm actively resisting learning how to make stuff for TS3 because I really don't want to go down that rabbithole again.

Do you have any Simblr friends or a Sim Squad? Friends in the sense of "people I enjoy talking to and sharing ideas with and sometimes arguing with here on Tumblr?" Sure. Are those the same as friendships that develop face-to-face in the real world? Nope. But, sometimes I like talking to my Simblr friends a lot more than talking to my real-life friends, so make of that what you will. Y'all are less draining sometimes. LOL

Do you have any sims merch? No official merch, but my brother-in-law is into making pottery, and several years ago he made me a big stoneware mug with a plumbbob on it. Which is ironic because when I play the game I turn off the plumbbobs because I hate them. LOL But I love the mug. It's heavy enough that neither cats nor wagging dog tails nor giant snakes (though he could do it if he focused all four of his brain cells on the task) can knock it off of tables, but not so heavy that I can't comfortably lift it. I use it for eating soup and the occasional mug cake, and also for drinking the awful herbal tea my husband makes me drink, though since the recent surgery, I don't have to drink that anymore! *dances* So now it will just be my soup or cake mug. Or one for tea that I actually want to drink.

Do you have a YouTube for sims? I don't have a YouTube for anything. Well, OK, I have a YouTube account for watching other people's stuff and making playlists of things I want to watch, but I don't post videos on it, and I don't really watch video game-related stuff on YouTube, either.

How has your “Sims style” changed throughout your years of playing? It hasn't, really. I've pretty much always just come up with wacky scenarios to play and see how they go. In fact, for me, coming up with the scenario and figuring out how to make it work in the game and then inventing a ruleset to govern it is sometimes more fun than actually playing the scenario. LOL

And my Sims all look like the game made them because…the game makes all of them. I just poke the random button until it produces something that doesn't look too much like a freak of nature, then I hit up a couple sliders to remove or tone down any remaining freakishness. (Though I confess that I will spend an inordinate amount of time sculpting the titties of those who have them. Why? I have no idea, other than I just like me a nice pair of titties. Too bad there aren't any sliders for male titties…) Then I just slap on a different hair, maybe change the eye color, and slather on some makeup and facial/body hair and shit until they don't look too stupid, and then off I go. From there, they're all born in the game, and I just leave them as-is, mostly because I can't be bothered. "I can't be bothered" is pretty much my philosophy of life.

Who’s your favorite CC creator? I hate this kind of question. I feel like all they do is disappoint and discourage people if they're never picked. I refuse to do that over something so trivial. So, my favorite CC creator is you, the person reading this. Yes, you. Even if you don't make CC. It doesn't matter. You're the best.

How long have you had Simblr? I started my TS2 one in 2013. (I can remember that only because I know that I started it the same year I met my husband. LOL ) I started this one….2 years ago? 3? Something like that.

How do you edit your pictures? Other than basic cropping and resizing and maybe adjusting brightness/contrast a bit if the pic is too dark or whatever, I generally don't. I don't even use Reshade all the time anymore, only in certain situations, though I do have an NVIDIA profile for the game that adds ambient occlusion and better antialiasing and shit like that. Sometimes, though, I'll decide to photoshop scenery pics, and then I just kind of stab at it with various tools and filters and layer blends and shit until I like I how it looks. There's no actual process involved. I'm random like that.

What expansion/ gamepack is your favorite? I gotta go with World Adventures. Bits of it are a bit, shall we say, culturally problematic, but man, I never get tired of doing those stupid, stupid tombs. LOL Plus, I love that NRaas Traveler allows you to "travel" to any world, and I don't think that mod works without WA, so…. Yeah. WA.

Tagging: I have no idea who's done this, so I'll just tag a few random people, off the top of my head. Feel free to do or ignore, as you choose. No pressure from me! So...@nectar-cellar, @happy-lemon, @erasabledinosaur, @esotheria-sims, @lilleputtu, @littlefrenchsims, @anamoon63, @lazysunjade, annnnnnnnd @papermint-airplane.

[unsociableandtaciturnbarbie]

Bridgerton is just socially acceptable Jane Austen Fanfiction, change my mind.

I have a friend who is really into Dungeons and Dragons and one of the most interesting things I’ve learned from her because of this is how mainstream role playing games have become. There’s a TV show on Amazon Prime called Vox Machina that’s actually based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign called Critical Role that was streamed on Twitch and as a Podcast on Spotify. In other words, a game of roleplaying between a few friends has become a popular TV show for people who don’t even roleplay to enjoy. Naturally, when I heard about The Good Society, I was curious to see what content is out there on the internet. So, I searched it up on Spotify and, lo and behold, a podcast of people playing The Good Society does exist. Each episode is approximately 4 hours long, and I unfortunately do not have the time to dedicate to listening in full. However, the latest episode (from December of 2020) is titled “Zombies”, so I had to at least give it a brief listen (Here’s a YouTube link to a video of them playing through this episode, but I listened in Podcast format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TiAgFD4DMw&t=9256s). In the episode description itself it’s called a “one-shot” which I feel like I only ever hear applied to fanfiction (more on that later though). 

I started by listening to the first 10 minutes. In those we got an ad break, a brief introduction of the players, and also a song meant to give an overview of the game containing the lyric, “ballers gonna ball”? Then they start to move into the full description of characters, kind of along the lines of what we did in class today. At this point, I learned that they were combining legitimate expansion packs with names like, “Sense, Sensibility, and Swordsmanship” and “Pride, Prejudice, and Practical Magics”. I really needed to see what was going on when they threw all these things together so I just skipped to a random point in the podcast and tried to figure out what was going on. I landed around the 2 hour and 33 minute mark where they are in the letter writing part of the game. This was really interesting because the letters are very “in character” interactions where the players are all talking in accents and using not super modern vocabulary where the rest of the game seems like just a lot of friendly chatting and hanging out. I stuck around just for long enough to find out that they’ve come up with a character who’s going to bring some zombies into the house that’s central to their game. At this point I’d listened to ~30 minutes of this episode so I called it a day, but it was definitely fun to listen to them really get into character and then work together to set some things up and then get in character again and it kind of made me want to play too. 

All I could really think the whole time I listened (and when I first was reading about this game) was that it felt very fanfiction-esque? These characters felt a little more different from Austen characters than our characters, maybe because the players are more experienced and had more time to develop the characters’ personalities, but when we were playing in class today, I felt like if you changed a few names we were just writing Elinor Dashwood/George Wickham fanfiction. When I first heard “Jane Austen roleplay” I thought it was a crazy idea, but the more I learn about it I feel like it’s just Jane Austen fanfic in a collaborative way and I kind of love it.

Having heard about the Dungeons and Dragons show I started to think about what a The Good Society show would look like, but then I thought: Bridgerton exists. Would the writers of Bridgerton call what they did roleplaying? Probably not. But I bet they did sit down together and do almost exactly what we did in class today, coming up with characters and relationships and finding ways to sort of connect them based on that. That kind of got me thinking about the like levels of social acceptance of these things, so I made a meme.

The template here being where as you go down the diagram the description is supposed to be of cooler and more “mind-blowing” things, but all of the items are sort of interlinked as like small steps up from one another. Seriously though, why don’t we call Bridgerton Jane Austen fanfic? I don’t mean to suggest that all regency-themed things are Jane Austen-based; she did not invent the regency. But, the tropes and character hallmarks utilized by Austen show up again and again in fanfic, in romance novels, and yes, even in Bridgerton, whether it's in the meddling mother characters or the brooding rich men. I'm not sure whether we like to pretend we're totally original or admitting to writing fanfic is still too socially unacceptable, but on some level, the background in which modern-day regency romance is set is the world created by Jane Austen, and I think as long as the regency romance genre is around we’ll always be able to find a new bit of Austen within it.

[bonefall]

I was wondering, how do you feel about Tallstar's revenge? If it's in the rewrite, is it mixed into Brokenstar's cataclysm due to Heatherstar being more involved? Would she have even let him leave?

It kind of caught my eye because (grain of salt I only read the book once and it was two months ago) it seemed the least xenophobic given how windclan allowed cats that weren't from a clan to join, and how while Talltail was sad because Jake went back to his home, it was relatively respected.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, though.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on Canon Tallstar's Revenge. I have a few asks in here about it, so I'm going to be covering the Bonefall Version's fragments when I answer one of those right after this one.

But before I do, I have a few possible titles for the redux. It's important insight to the Campaign Era, so I might title it Tallstar's Campaign as a contrast to Pinestar's reworked SE, Pinestar's Crusade. I also like the idea of putting emphasis on the tunnels and the cave-in that kills Sandgorse though, so "Tallstar's Collapse" would also be a good name.

Anyway, canon

What I really like about Tallstar's Revenge is the clan culture expansions it introduced. I LOVE tunneling and the politics of Tunnelers and Runners. I love the Nomads who are welcomed to visit yearly. I love how much personality is packed into the new characters here, from Woolytail and his gentle wisdom, Sandgorse and his high expectations, Palebird and her journey with grief...

It really made WindClan feel alive. It makes you want to be there-- something that I don't think any other SE has truly captured.

But also, like most SEs, it can be a mess too.

Why is ShadowClan attacking? BECAUSE THEYRE EVIL

Why did Shrewclaw bully Talltail? It was a joke c'maaaaan

Why did Heatherstar abolish tunneling now, of all times? Uhhh it was dangerous actually and uh they didn't show up to 1 battle.

How does Talltail come to terms with how his father hurt him and reckon with the loss of a tradition Sandgorse so desperately wanted his son to love as much as he did, losing the one piece of connection he could have to that parent? Uhhh sandgorse was great and I forgive him for no reason now

Why have a prophecy about Talltail leaving just so Heatherstar can allow him to come back if you're going to play it for tension anyway?

It feels like a lot is established only to be dropped later. More than anything though, I wish they wouldn't have made Heatherstar some perfect leader. I hate that they had to make Cedarstar into an evil gremlin to start this war-- it makes a lot more sense to me that Heatherstar, who says THIS line at the start of the book,

“I promise that I will make WindClan a force to be respected among all the Clans of the forest... And when I join you, I hope you will welcome me with pride at what I have achieved.”

Could have been ambitious instead of just reactionary. It's a battle culture, why do we have to constantly make ShadowClan the cause of all conflict to prevent our other characters from BEING BATTLE-FOCUSED?

And then, it makes a lot more sense to watch Heatherstar essentially dismantle all the things that made WindClan unique. The nomads, the tunneling, if they can't help you win the war, they've gotta go.

[laylainalaska]

I watched Foundation S1-2 this week and really enjoyed it, for certain values of enjoyed, copying over my write-up from DW, now with corrected character names since I've looked them up rather than spelling them from vague osmosis from the show.

(Blacklist the Foundation tag if you don't want to be spoiled from gifs, as I plan to promptly go seek out the least hinged gifs from this entirely unhinged show and bombard everyone with them.)

This show is a bonkers SF soap opera with gorgeous production values, Lee Pace hamming it up in crop tops, and a series of increasingly off the rails holographic versions of a dead chessmaster mathematician deploying his 9999-step plan to save the galaxy. I've literally seen nothing about this at all in my social circles, to the extent that I didn't even really know about it until the spouse started watching it. I was kind of halfway glancing at the screen now and then, if I happened to be in the room, for the first half of season one (and have only the vaguest idea what happened in the first few episodes, based on later events), then got invested and eventually completely hooked in season two, which also picks up after a 100-year timeskip so the cast has changed a lot anyway. Although between stasis pods, cloning, and holograms, it's mostly the same actors. (We have a running joke that by season 3 the cast will be at least 50% Cleons and Hari Seldons by volume.)

Anyway, so it is good? Hard to say! It's sort of like if Expanse and Game of Thrones had a (somewhat more optimistic) baby, in which the budgets are huge, the planets are beautiful, the spaceships are shiny, and lots of Big Feelings happen. The Evil Empire is run by an endless series of clone emperors played by Lee Pace in Romanesque armor and capes with massive amounts of scenery-chewing and an immortal robot bodyguard he occasionally has sex with. They have All The Clones in storage, so if he gets killed, they'll just transfer his memories and activate another one! Meanwhile the rebellion is being orchestrated as a 4000-step multi-century Xanatos gambit by a guy who started by having himself killed and activating a digital copy. Interestingly though, there is so much going on, and it's taking so much time for his plan to come to fruition, that it never really feels like the two of them directly pitted against each other (at least not that much), it's more like all of the stuff that happens along the way, the planets and the pretty spaceships and the people we meet who struggle and fight and save each other along the way.

I have to say that while I'm occasionally reminded by certain plot points and tropes that this is a series based on books from the 1970s, they did a good enough job with racebending, presumable genderbending, and so forth that it rarely feels like it. (Also, though I only know the books from general osmosis, I'm fairly confident the plot has gone way off-book anyway.) In season two there are no less than four young female characters of color in major plot-defining roles, there's a central gay couple whose loyalty to each other in the face of the Empire is a major plot point, and in general it's just a pretty, pretty show full of pretty people and pretty planets (and occasionally some really dazzling space-operatic SF stuff). It is definitely the most OTT and operatic thing I've watched since probably the MCU, and I'm really enjoying it.

Under the cut, out-of-order and largely out-of-context comments on various things I had a reaction to (mostly season 2 since that's where I got invested).

This show is an emotional roller coaster of the highest order. How many different instances of presumed dead and identity-switching can we pack into a single episode?

CONSTANT MY BELOVED. Season 2 in general gives great female characters, I already loved Salvo (;__;) and I also really enjoyed the ladies from the Cloud Dominion, but Constant!! She's just so funny and fun and so absolutely deadpan about everything from conning randos on some backwater alien planet to kidnapping a guy. I was so glad she lived through all of the half-dozen times she almost certainly should have died.

I was surprisingly upset about formerly-trapped-in-the-Radiant half-crazy Hari's death, "surprisingly" because, well, Hari being Hari, and also, it wasn't like this leaves us entirely without Hari Seldons, there's still Creepy Monolith Hari and who knows how many other copies out there. But that one had been through enough with Gaal and Salvor that he really felt like a different person. He's still a manipulative sack of dicks but I liked him! I was sad, but at least hoping he was backed up somewhere! And then two episodes later the most excellent reveal that he and Gaal faked the whole thing! I thoroughly loved all of that. Gaal hugging him! <333

"Don't trust the planet of the creepy utopian space psychics!" Orion and I were chanting at the screen, while they proceeded to not listen to us and it was, predictably, a bad idea. Seriously, when in all of sci-fi was trusting the creepy psychic utopia a good idea?

I had guessed/hoped that the guy with the whispership (can't remember his name) was going to warp into the plaza and save Constant from execution, but I really wasn't sure, and even with an inkling it was going to happen, that was an AMAZING entrance, A+++, no notes. Especially after Constant gave her speech and everything seemed to be setting her up to be a martyr to the Foundation, I was less and less hopeful she was going to get out of it alive somehow. Excellent rescue, very pleased.

I really enjoyed the entire subplot with the Evil Empire Honorable Space Admiral (can't remember anyone's names here either) and the scene in which he justifies his continued loyalty to the Empire is really a good scene. I mean, it's awful. But you can see his reasoning. He can't overthrow the Empire, if he refuses orders it won't change anything, he and everyone he loves will die, and someone else will be put in his place and follow the orders anyway. But then the whole thing with Constant's rescue points out that it may not be possible to change the entire Evil Empire, but you can make a lot of difference for just one person.

But I still wanted him to make better or at least different choices on the blowing up the planet sequence! I guess it all worked out according to Hari's 9999-step plan (my death is only the beginning! the death of my planet is only the beginning!) but that hurted.

Between Honorable Space Admiral and his fighter pilot husband, I was absolutely *not* expecting the husband to be the one of the two of them that survived. However, Honorable Space Admiral and whispership guy got a dynamite final episode (the fistfight with Cleon! never has a man deserved so much punching! the airlock switch!) and they both got to go out in an excellent death scene.

The entire thing with Terminus getting blown up! And then Deus Ex Monolith! And Constant's dads and Space Admiral's Space Husband are alive after the whole exploding planet fell on them! (I was SO happy Constant's family got reunited, I was so afraid she and Space Dads were going to go down each thinking the other one had died.) I think this episode gave me emotional whiplash.

SALVOR NO. WHAT WAS THAT EVEN. She just randomly died at the end there?? Come onnnnn. We already got like 12 death fake-outs in the last couple of episodes! Why'd that one have to be real?!

If time passes differently in the monolith, does that mean the entire rescued Terminus population are still going to be around after the second 150-year timeskip? I have questions!

Speaking of time passing differently in the monolith, best dialogue: Whispership guy: Whoa, it's dark. How long was I in there, anyway? Constant: Three years. Paulie: More like three hours. Constant: We agreed we weren't going to tell him! I love them. <3333

That sure was A Lot with the Cleons. And now I guess there's an entire Cleon/Cloud Dominion dynasty out there somewhere just waiting to cause trouble.

So yeah, I'm really enjoying my bombastic sci-fi soap opera! Season 3 when pls.

[thegothingtons]

The days flew by and Jana had completed the transformation into a vampire. The thirst for blood led her back to Ciudad Enamorada to her parents.

It was shortly after midnight and silence lay over the house. Bishop and Anne were already asleep and Michaela was still working on a commission for the art gallery.

Jana: "Hello mother."

The ice-cold tone in her daughter's voice made Michaela shiver. "So you're back?! Where have you been?"

Jana moved towards her like a predator. "I was born again and found my true family."

Annoyed, Michaela sighed and put down the brush. Did Jana always have to be so theatrical? She walked up to her daughter. "What nonsense are you talking about."

Jana: "Nonsense?! For you, I was never more than that." Anger and bloodlust took control and she lunged at the woman who had given her life as a Sim.

*******

Bishop and Anne were awakened by a dull thud.

Anne: "Dad, did you hear that?"

Bishop nodded. "You stay here, I'll go check."

Anne: "No, we're going together."

Bishop: "All right, but you stay behind me."

They went downstairs and found Michaela lying bloodless on the floor.

Bishop froze when he saw his wife. He had felt this pain before when Danielle's mother died. A deep grief came over him.

Anne and Michaela didn't have a good relationship, but she hadn't wished her mother this end, sucked dry by a vampire.

After the Reaper had taken Michaela's soul with him, she embraced her father.

Anne: "How could the vampire overcome the protective barrier that Grandpa conjured up?"

Bishop shook his head. "I have no idea. Have you seen Jana?"

Anne looked at her father and her cheeks reddened. She hadn't even thought about her sister for a few days and enjoyed her absence. "No, certainly not for a week."

He ran both hands through his hair. "Neither do I. Damn. What a father I am."

Anne: "You're a great father. Jana has been doing what she wants for months. Not even Mum comes ...", she swallowed. "Got closer to her."

Bishop: "What if something happened to her, too? I would never forgive myself."

Anne: "Dad, Jana can take care of herself. She's certainly doing well."

Bishop: "I pray to the Watcher that you're right."

*******

A few hours later...

Bishop had composed himself enough to be able to take Michaela's urn to the cemetery. Benjamin accompanied him.

Both regretted that the new expansion pack was only released in a few days and that there were no funerals yet.

Bishop: "Dad, what do you think, how could your barrier be breached."

Benjamin closed his eyes and thought. "Normally it's impossible, unless you have the barrier completely open. The only thing would be that it was a vampire in which our blood flows. But that's out of the question."

Bishop's blood froze in his veins. "Jana, she had withdrawn from us lately and has been missing for more than a week. What if she was turned into one of these monsters?"

Benjamin slapped his hand in front of his mouth. His heart weighed tons. "That would be conceivable. An explanation of how the attacker was able to get into your house. Why didn't you say anything?"

Bishop: "Because I didn't really notice her disappearance. What a lousy father I am. Michaela and I had an agreement after our family life became more and more difficult. We divided the girls among us. I took care of Anne and she took care of Jana. She didn't say anything, so I thought everything was fine."

Benjamin exhaled heavily. "If Jana is really a vampire, then you and Anne can no longer stay in Ciudad Enamorada. It's too dangerous."

Bishop: "Dad, she's my daughter!"

Benjamin: "Your wife, her mother is dead. Vampires are unscrupulous and without morals. You have to get out of there as soon as possible."

Bishop: "Where should we go?"

Benjamin smiled: "To Glimmerbrook. A house has just become available in the neighborhood."

Bishop was silent for a moment. "I'll talk to Anne."