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heresince93 · 5 years ago

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Gillian Anderson Sunday Times Interview Transcript

There is a moment in the second series of Netflix’s Sex Education when Gillian Anderson’s character, Jean, sighs a deep resigned sigh as she is lying in bed one morning and spots the messy pile of small change her latest lover, Jakob, has left on her bedside table.

It’s my favourite moment of this uplifting show about the tangled love lives of British secondary school teens that manages to appeal to both parents and adolescents alike. Anderson plays the outrageously inappropriate sex therapist Jean Milburn, a stylish, confident single mother.

The sight of those coins will resonate with any woman of Anderson’s age and stage of life (she is 51), whatever kind of relationship they are in.These pennies, a symbol of how untidy life gets and the constant imposing presence of someone else even when they aren’t in the room, represent for Jean the gradual realisation that the excitement of a new love soon becomes tempered by the boring bits.

For those of us who have been married a while, the coins are perhaps the equivalent of the dull domesticity of picking up the shirt always dropped on the floor or the wet towels you always end up refolding after your teens have left them near but not on the bathroom radiator. Anderson and I chat about this a lot when we meet to talk about the second series of Sex Education, given that we are both working mothers in our early fifties.

The actress, who is most recognised for her role as Scully in The X-Files, is twice divorced and has three children, Piper, 25, Oscar, 13, Felix, 11, all of whom live with her in London. Her partner of three years is the playwright, screenwriter and creator of The Crown, Peter Morgan, himself a father of five.

In person Anderson is chatty and witty, aloof and friendly at the same time, a peculiarly feline trait that I often encounter in driven, confident women who have reached midlife. Tell me about Jakob and the coins, I say, what is it like starting a new relationship in your forties, compared with your twenties?

“It’s very different,” she says. “I think you are more fully formed, especially if you have taken time out of previous relationships to find yourself.

“Early on after the break-up of my last relationship and before my current one, somebody encouraged me to write a list of needs and wants in a future partner. Needs are non-negotiable. If you go on a date with someone and realise they won’t meet, say, three of those needs, then they are not the person for you. It may last as a relationship, but it won’t make you happy. Wants are easier, not more frivolous per se, but easier to deliver. Doing this made it clear to me going forward who would be good for me in a relationship.

“And there is a new creativity nowadays to what a relationship should look like, too. For instance, my partner and I don’t live together. If we did, that would be the end of us. It works so well as it is, it feels so special when we do come together. And when I am with my kids, I can be completely there for them. It’s exciting. We choose when to be together. There is nothing locking us in, nothing that brings up that fear of ‘Oh gosh, I can’t leave because what will happen to the house, how will we separate?’. I start to miss the person I want to be with, which is a lovely feeling. And it is so huge for me to be able to see a pair of trousers left lying on the floor at my partner’s house and to step over them and not feel it is my job to do something about it!”

I’ve never interviewed a celebrity who, even though she is wearing heels (little pointy white boots) is still shorter than me (I’m barely 5ft 2in), but Anderson is tiny. This is only important to note, I think, because her roles since Dana Scully have been so big and so powerful: Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire and Margo Channing in All About Eve on stage; Lady Mountbatten in the film Viceroy’s House; Stella Gibson in The Fall; and now Jean Milburn.

I wonder if she is perhaps filed under “tricky, unpredictable, charismatic, spiky, intelligent and fearless woman” in the casting director’s directory of suitable roles. After all, her next part is going to be Margaret Thatcher (in The Crown). And when she arrives for our chat in the closed Chinese restaurant of a central London hotel, she apologises for the sticky mess in her hair caused by wearing the Iron Lady’s wig the previous day. Her nails are manicured pale pink like Thatcher’s too.

“She had a condition that meant two fingers of each hand would curl around — Reagan had it too — so it affected her gestures and she would wear lots of rings and bracelets to distract. But she kept her nails long, which is how I have to keep them now,” Anderson says. She is fascinated by Thatcher, concluding, after studying her childhood, that “nobody ever existed like her. She was unique.”

Anderson might be unique herself, and despite giving many interviews (three last year), I see that she has been smart and managed to remain a bit of an enigma. When I listen back to the tape, she is very good at general talk, but not so hot on specifics.

She spent her early years in north London with her American parents before going back to Michigan for high school. She was a teenage punk plagued by panic attacks that have continued to trouble her over the years, particularly during her intense work schedule on The X-Files. She went into therapy at 14, then became world famous at 25, and had her first child at 26 (the same age her parents had her, before going on to have her two siblings 12 years later). She split up with her first husband three years after that.

In 2011 she endured the death of her brother, Aaron, aged 30, from a brain tumour, which she rarely discusses. She is an impressive activist, campaigning for a variety of issues including women’s rights in Afghanistan, Burma, South Africa, Uganda and South America. There are 10 charities she has worked with listed on her website, and in 2017 she co-wrote We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, a well-received book of advice for women. She has also designed two small fashion collections for Winser London, which include some gorgeous silky blouses. I found I had three in my wardrobe without knowing they were hers.

She is a Bafta nominee and Golden Globe winner, and Neil Gaiman, who cast her in the TV series of his book American Gods, said: “She is in this strange place where everything exists in the shadow of Scully, yet she is bigger and better than that.”

When I listen to her 2003 Desert Island Discs, though, she tells a darker story. In between Radiohead and Jeff Buckley, she talks of troubled mental health that she has worked ferociously hard to improve. She has been in therapy for more than 30 years.

Anderson tells me she has been teetotal since her early twenties and despite some mild probing on my part is reluctant to elaborate on exactly why. I understand. She has soon-to-be teenage children who don’t need to know about any of the “dangerous things” she has done, as she described them to Sue Lawley.

I’m fascinated by Anderson and can see why she was the perfect person to cast as the quirky, funny therapist Jean in Sex Education, which really hits its stride in the second series. While still a comedy at heart, the subject matter tackled by its fantastic young cast is revelatory. Sex Education is one of the first productions to hire an intimacy director to make the young actors feel comfortable and process what they were doing, often naked in front of multiple cameras, to be happy and authentic about what they did and feel they had input.

Anal sex, drugs, masturbation, STDs and nudity feature graphically in this show, which I would advise all parents and teens to watch, though not at the same time — only Jean would do that. When I interview Anderson I have yet to see the finale, but Jean’s journey is that of many women in the middle of their lives after divorce with teenage children.

“There’s a grief, isn’t there?” Anderson says as we discuss the menopause. “I haven’t quite got to the place where I don’t have my eggs, but your body is going to mourn that, isn’t it? I remember the very last time I breastfed and it was heartbreaking. I wept and wept through it.

“And I know people who describe particularly difficult periods at home without realising they are describing their mothers going through the menopause.

“We’re all at the point where we’re kicking off just as our teenage children are kicking off. I was looking at some home videos of Piper when she was three and wondering where all my patience came from in my twenties. I have forgotten that version of me.”

She says she doesn’t feel quite ready for her two boys to become teenagers, but sometimes Jean slips into their conversations at home.

“I find myself saying something embarrassing at the dinner table and I don’t know if it is me or if Jean has given me the licence to say that. Maybe I have always been that way, though. Some of what she shares is too much information. I wouldn’t share it, even with my eldest in her twenties. But my son came home after having a sex education class and I completely clammed up. I couldn’t bring myself to continue the conversation. I just let it die. I really don’t know why.”

Over the years Anderson has tried to schedule her roles to fit in with her children, but like many of us who have devoted much of our time to careers, she still lives with nagging doubts about doing the right thing.

How did you deal with a small child while filming back-to-back episodes of The X-Files for 16 hours a day, I ask, especially when you decided to go it alone as a mum. “I missed her, really so much. Those moments when you see a small child in the street when you are apart from yours and the conversation just drops, it’s hard. She was on a plane a lot when she was six and we moved production to the West Coast. I justified that, I mean it was selfish on my part. I just could not imagine being away from her for long periods of time.

“I became obsessed with schedules, and I still am because of that time. I would plan and colour-code everything, make a series of propositions about schedules so I could see her, and the show would either reject or accept them.

“With the boys the longest I have been away from them was during the two X-Files movies, but again I would be travelling constantly to see them.”

I ask her if she regrets working so hard. “Not yet,” she says. “I have a feeling that will come. I definitely feel like on a level I do regret Piper flying back [to her dad, when she was six] as an unaccompanied minor.” We sit in silence for a bit, mulling over the thought.

“But there’s another version of my life where I could have worked less, had a smaller life and been more present as a parent. I could have chosen that, that could happen. But sometimes it feels like why would you, if you keep getting work as an actor, doing things you dreamt of doing and being offered incredible roles at this age, while paying the bills, and you still get to see them a huge percentage of the time and they witness a mother enjoying her work?”

She has talked to her daughter about it, but says Piper is not yet at the place where the lightbulb goes on and she realises Mum was still up at 6am the days she faced 16 hours of work to be with her, or those days we all have when we are still on the edge of the sports pitch, despite the demands of a job.

But Anderson is an all-or-nothing personality. She tells me she is either on a healthy eating plan, meditating and working out or hiding like a hermit at home eating chocolate. She has been plagued by frozen shoulders all her life, leading to months of pain-filled insomnia and cortisone injections.

“My default position is sedentary,” she tells me when I ask about her meditating and yoga right now. “I like being in bed in my PJs. When I’m working, like right now, I seem to exist mostly on chocolate. Then I go through a stage when I feel dreadful and I review it all and start a food plan, torture myself counting shots of milk and all that.

“In the cycle of all or nothing, I am in the nothing phase right now. It has gone on for quite some time, but I think I am better to be around. I was having lunch with my daughter and we were just, you know, eating, not asking for stuff without oils or sugar, and she said, ‘It’s so much better when you are not in that place.’ ”

I’ve enjoyed my hour with Anderson; she is likeable and thoughtful. I sort of hope we’ll meet again one day. It’s unlikely she’ll read the interview; she has said before that she rarely does. So what do I think as I walk away from her? I’m impressed by her curious nature and, obviously, her sense of style, a blueprint for us all at this stage of life, but mostly I’m inspired by her strong sense of self. It has obviously taken quite a bit of work for her to get there, but from what I can see, it has been worth it.

@GillianA

Sex Education series 2 is available on Netflix from Friday

Hair: James Rowe at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Mary Greenwell at Premier Hair and Make-up. Nails: Saffron Goddard at Saint Luke using Sisley Hand Care

#gillian anderson #sunday times #interview

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nobody-wants-ice-cream · 5 years ago

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Everything Wrong With The Umbrella Academy. Episode 3, Extra Ordinary.

We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals

Run Boy Run

Usual disclaimer: This is all in good fun! I wanted to do a really nitpicky re-watch of the series and found some really cool and interesting things I didn’t notice before. This is meant to have a Cinema Sins-esque tone. However, I did take off a lot more sins than Cinema Sins would have because I do genuinely like the series and the people that made it possible. So all of the good things got one sin off and all the bad things got one sin added. This is a really long post, so grab some popcorn. If there’s anything that I missed, feel free to add it!

Vanya was clearly about to sell her violin. She looked dejected and sad and was detached from her violin case. This is in character for Vanya on her pills, who must have decided that she wasn’t good enough at one point. Sin for putting Vanya through trauma. +1

The Umbrella Academy comics are priced weirdly. The one on the right is $25.00 and the one on the left is $15.00. What makes the one on the right more expensive? It even says on the cover that the one on the right was supposed to be $0.50. So why the inflation? Taking a closer look, all six heroes are on the cover, so it’s not that either of them are pre-Five leaving and therefore more expensive because Five is on both of them. Though, the one on the right does have a picture of Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben, and Reginald under where it says that the comic is 50 cents. To make a long rant short, the comics that Vanya looks at in the pawn shop window are confusing. +1

However, Gabriel Ba’s art. -1

The strange lack of technology means that Vanya’s book was written on a typewriter. +1

Vanya needed 6 pencils to write her book with. These are maybe supposed to symbolize Vanya’s 6 siblings, in which case, interesting detail, but still. Six pencils. As opposed to one pencil and a pencil sharpener? Why all the tools Vanya? +1

The six pencils (with two pointer up) symbolize Vanya’s six siblings, two of which turned around since the siblings they are supposed to represent (Five and Ben) are no longer around. -1

Vanya’s dying houseplant. Water that! +1

Vanya collects another houseplant and it looks relatively healthy. -1

The messy table garbage still has the same plate and same crumpled papers/napkins in the same position. Either Vanya was super lazy, or the set designer/director was. +1

Vanya replaced the dying houseplant with the fresh one. Poor houseplant. I will mourn you. +1

“Lost Woman” has some really on the nose lyrics. Playing the phrase “lonely woman” before Vanya starts narrating her book is ridiculously on the nose. +1

However, “Lost Woman” happens to be one of my favorite tracks from the series. -1

Luther should be part ape in this scene, (as it takes place five years ago, not seven), but he looks completely normal. This is a massive continuity error so I’m adding two sins. +2

“Starved for attention” is the line Vanya narrates over Allison reading it. On. The. Nose. +1

Diego is so pissed off at Vanya that he tapes her likeness to a punching bag and punches it. You know, like a rational adult. +1

Klaus is wearing birkenstocks and burgundy capris. +1

Also, Ben and Klaus work together to read a book. -1

But I have to ask, why did the rehab let Klaus read during group therapy. And shush his dead brother’s ghost. +1

Ben is pissed off by the line “and haunted by what might have been.” On the nose. +1

Five reads the harsh line “we all wanted to be loved by a man incapable of giving love” while next to Dolores, who is also incapable of giving love because she is a mannequin. Also, Five reads this book, full of vitriol and hate, as the last connection he has to his siblings, at age thirteen. +2

Reginald doesn’t read the book that his daughter wrote. As usual, Reggie is a dick to Vanya. +1

Vanya’s reaction to being late to rehearsal is so relatable. I swear I have done this a thousand times as a musician. -1

The Netflix captions (yes I watch with captions) say “Chamber music playing”. They have a conductor. +1

The conductor has the character of all conductors. Dick. +1

Vanya isn’t vibrating when the rest of the orchestra is. Late or not, you still need to follow the concertmaster, Vanya. +1

The rainy weather matching Vanya’s stormy mood. Foreshadowing. -1

Badass umbrella title screen. -1

However, why are all those people stopping in the street? It’s raining, get to where you’re going! +1

Allison and Luther watch the tape where Reggie dies over and over. This is weird, even if they are trying to figure out if Grace killed him. Who would want to watch someone die over and over? Not even I want to replay Reggie dying, and I genuinely hate him. +1

Luther says that Reggie thought people were out to get him. On the first watch, the audience can chalk this up to Reggie being a paranoid old man, however on the second watch we know that the Commission exists and that Reggie is probably not from this world. So either of those groups could have been out to get him. But who? This remains a sin until they explain it. +1

Training posters in the kitchen. The kitchen! Really, Reggie. +1

There’s this weird caterpillar thing with a face behind Grace in this scene. What the hell is that? +1

There was also a radio in the kitchen, which implies that Reggie either let them listen to tunes, or had training cassettes the same way he had training records. Either way, what the hell, Reggie? +1

There is a ridiculous amount of light sources in this one room. +1

Grace has a cactus full of toothpicks or skewers by the stove. Cute art project, whichever kid but likely Diego based on his fascination with pointy things. -1

The “your father was a great man” speech. Poor Grace. +1

Jordan Clare Robbins is an excellent actress. -1

Smiley face made of two eggs and a strip of bacon. -1

Diego doesn’t understand the chain of custody regarding evidence. Patch says that if he touches a piece of evidence, she can’t use it in her case. How many murderers have walked free because of Diego? +1

Hazel and Cha Cha use bullets from 1963. Dallas foreshadowing? Remains a sin until season two confirms the Dallas plot. +1

These bullets were found on the random local hires Five killed at Griddy’s. Why does the Commission use bullets from the early 60’s? Isn’t that a big red flag to their time organization? +1

Patch indulges Diego the Vigilante by asking for his help. You’re a police officer, you got this, Patch. Also, this foreshadows her death when she does things his way and gets killed for it. +1

Diego tells Patch to investigate Five. Oh, the irony. +1

“I do give a shit” is such a weird line to try to portray as romantic with the music, tone, and lighting, show. +1

Beeman, unprofessionally, brings up the fact that Patch and Diego used to date while at a crime scene. +1

Vanya washes her hands for two seconds and then goes to talk to Helen. Almost like that was the real reason why she was in there. +1

Vanya attempts to compliment Helen Cho, who is overall, not interested. Is this Vanya’s repressed way of flirting? Pick a better time.+1

Seriously, what is with Vanya and starting conversations at the absolute worst time. It’s like she wants to get insulted. +1

No way in hell would one professional musician to another be this bitchy, Helen Cho. +1

Helen straight up calls Vanya talentless. What an awful thing to say! +1

She softens, as if she just gave Vanya legitimate career advice, but she didn’t. She really just insulted the time and effort Vanya put into her instrument. As a musician, I can confirm that what Helen just said is the equivalent of saying something really, really nasty. Tumblr hate anons have nothing on what Helen just said. +3

Vanya takes a pill after being called talentless. Pill foreshadowing. -1

Cha Cha uses a curling iron to cauterise the wound Five gave her from the shovel. Where did the curling iron come from? +1

“The entire fate of the universe” oh Hazel. Thanks for the irony. +1

How did no one in the history of this shady motel notice the hidden panel? You would think at least one person attempting to have shower sex or someone cleaning or someone doing matinence should have noticed that, right? +1

Five stitches up his wound by himself despite the fact that multiple people are in the house that are capable. He’s going to pull a few of those based on the angle. Also, Five didn’t bother to clean the blood off his arm, so who knows if he bothered to sterilize the needle or his hands or anything. +1

The wound on Cha Cha and the wound on Five are eerily similar. However, what makes them interesting is that Cha Cha decided to cauterize where Five decided to stitch. Both are decent methods, but Cha Cha’s way is going to leave severe permanent scarring and Five’s way might heal. This could foreshadow the way they treat the end of the world. Cha Cha wants to end it, Five wants to fix it. Maybe not Cha Cha herself, but she does represent the Commission and their ideals. She is a stickler for their rules and uses her last moments to try to call them and get rescued. Point is. This is an English teacher moment full of symbolism, and I respect the show for this choice. -1

Billy the Choo Choo bandages. First of all, Five can never get away from the childishness of his current form. Second of all, Reggie let Five have “Billy the Choo Choo” licenced bandages??? +1

Or, Five chose to buy/steal these bandages. +1

Five puts a clean, white uniform shirt over blood that he still hasn’t cleaned up. At this point, that has got to be uncomfortably sticky. +1

Five didn’t bother to clean his wound until morning. “I guess I’ll go to sleep and bleed”???+1

Or, it took Five several hours to get the supplies. Bullshit. No way in hell did Reggie not have those supplies lying around. +1

Five still chooses to wear the full uniform ensemble even though he could at the very least get rid of the tie. +1

The teleporting kid gets the fire escape bedroom. It’s like Reggie was begging Five to sneak out of the house. +1

Dumpster Bagel: Do Not Eat. +1

“I’m done funding your drug habit” you never did in the first place? You didn’t pay him at all for that magnificent acting?? Unless Five did this before he left the mansion, in which case, Five funded Klaus’s drug habit. +1

Justin Min looks so incredibly creepy sitting on the dumpster. He has such a blank expression. Also, when did he move from the fire escape? +1

“I love you. Even if you can’t love yourself!” is a great line. -1

When Five drives away in the stolen van, he passes an absolutely bewildered guy. How the hell did Five function as an assassin? He can’t do subtlety. This contradicts “I know how to do everything”. +1

Was Aidan Gallagher actually driving in this scene? Because it kind of looks like the way a beginner would drive. This also contradicts “I know how to do everything” +1

There’s a lady passing Meritech that actually chose to wear a baby pink fedora. M’costume. +1

Five left his wife stuck in a bag and didn’t remember her. +1

He also left a bottle of some clear liquor on top of her. +1

“This is the place that it was made. Or will be made.” The delivery on this line was kinda bad. +1

Allison used her power on Claire. Claire was three years old. No matter which way you slice it, this is the shittiest thing Allison has ever done. She’s working on it, but the fact that it happened deserves a sin. +1

Emmy Raver-Lampman is a kick ass actress. -1

Allison has the most warranted case of impostor syndrome ever. Sin off because this is the one of the few scenes where two characters actually talk about their emotions. -1

Luther and Allison had that conversation sitting ridiculously far apart. +1

Leonard’s shop is called “Imperial Woodwares” Apparently, he delivers as well. How did Leonard get the business and woodworking skills necessary for running a relatively successful shop while in prison? +1

Leonard somehow knows that Vanya’s orchestra (which rehearses and performs in the Icarus Theatre) is far from Bricktown. At this point, he shouldn’t know that unless that is the only orchestra in the entire city. There is no way that that is the only orchestra in the entire city. +1

Leonard took up wood carving in prison. Is that allowed? +1

If a guy you just met makes a wood carving in your likeness you should run. Run like hell. Get a restraining order. That is so creepy. Obvious villain is obvious. +1

Also, I once read a fanfic (The Moon Laughs by Lady_Origami on ao3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/17959847/chapters/42417584) where a character is kidnaped by Leonard and tortured in this backroom where he’s showing Vanya the creepy statue. I can see where the inspiration came from. This back room has “place to keep the person I kidnaped and torture them” vibes.+1

Leonard stayed up all night to make the creepy woodcarving. He then insists that Vanya take it. And Vanya doesn’t recognize the creepy vibes. +1

And she does take it! +1

Leonard says that he made the carving for her and that she inspired him. Obvious manipulation is obvious. +1

Leonard is a dick to Vanya by using Allison’s successful career. +1

Leonard doesn’t like the Beatles. +1

Why did Allison go to Bricktown to find Vanya when that is nowhere near the theatre or Vanya’s apartment? Was she just wandering around hoping to find Vanya? +1

Allison is the Queen of actually talking out her thoughts and feelings. She just apologized to Vanya and explained why she was so angry in the last episode. Well done. I respect that. -1

Allison and Vanya sisterly bonding. -1

Five sees children playing and then immediately starts having an apocalypse flashback. This shows that Five lost his childhood as soon as he time traveled to the apocalypse. I’m sad now. +1

Aidan Gallagher plays this really well. -1

If you look closely, you can see Five/Aidan Gallagher laughing at Luther/Tom Hopper because he can’t fit in the van. I can’t tell if Five is laughing at Luther or if Aidan is laughing at Tom. Either way, that slaps. -1

However, corpsing. +1

No one has written Klaus/Dolores fanfic yet. They really hit it off in the van, y’all. +1

Five throws an empty can at Klaus for messing with Dolores. +1

Klaus’s expression after Five says “does it matter, it’s Klaus.” Sinning because Five is a dick to Klaus. +1

“Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to wax my ass with chocolate pudding. It was so painful.” I love this line. God bless Robert Sheehan. -1

Aidan Gallagher contemplates this line then starts corpsing. I don’t blame him. I’ve been trying to figure out how that would be possible too. -1

How can you use chocolate pudding to wax any hair? +1

Aidan Gallagher laughs at this line, meaning Five found this funny, but didn’t want to give Klaus the satisfaction of laughing. +1

Luther and Five are dicks to Klaus. They kicked him out of the van! Assholes. +1

Luther is sort of trying to connect with Five, but he fails miserably because it comes out really condescending. +1

“I don’t think that I’m better than you, Number One. I know I am.” Hubris much, Five? +1

Luther is already sick of Five’s “I’m better than you, I’ve done things you couldn’t comprehend” schtick and Five has only been back for three days. And we make fun of Luther’s moon thing. We get it, Five, you’re a badass. Actions speak louder than words, old man. +1

On the side of the Variety Store Klaus steals from is a billboard for Clever Crisp Cereal, which is the cereal that Reggie invented in the comics. I guess he did that here too. -1

Also, Klaus steals from the Variety Store and drops everything while running away. Why did you steal so much shit if you knew you were going to drop it all Klaus? +1

Ben’s reaction to this buffoonery must have been hilarious. Sinning the show for not showing us that. +1

“Now I’m starting to wonder if that was the wisest decision.” What? Kicking Klaus out of the van or Klaus deciding to rob the store? Because both were pretty stupid. +1

Does Agnes own Griddy’s? +1

Agnes just gave some valuable baking tips when it comes to doughnuts. Thanks, Agnes. -1

Agnes and Hazel are really cute together. -1

The Hazel and Agnes theme is my favorite instrumental piece from the whole show. -1

There are still bullet holes in the walls. Attention to detail! -1

Hazel and Cha Cha pretend to be social workers or private detectives concerned for Five’s well being. Oh, the irony. +1

“I mean who lets a kid get a tattoo” Reginald Hargreeves. That’s who. +12

Agnes is indignant about Five’s tattoo, citing his age. This whole episode has a ridiculous amount of irony. +1

Agnes draws the umbrella tattoo a bit too perfectly for someone who only saw it once and at the wrong angle. +1

Diego straight up threatens Luther at knifepoint. +1

This family meeting is a complete shitshow. +1

The monocle is likely to become a s2 plotpoint because Diego put it in a place where anyone could take it. If you’ve read the comics, you know why I think that’s important, but I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t. Either way, that was a dumb way to dispose of the monocle, Diego. +1

Diego is a dick to Vanya until she agrees with him. +1

They are legitimately talking about killing their mother. What the fuck. +1

Klaus references the van when only Luther, Five, and presumably Ben know about it. This makes no sense. +1

Votes to kill Mom: Luther, Allison, Ben +3

Klaus hisses at Ben and no one thinks this is weird. +1

Grace definitely heard Luther and Allison voting to kill her. After she made them breakfast too! Luther and Allison are dicks in this scene. (And so is Ben but Grace couldn’t hear him.) +2

Grace tries to prove her worth by making cookies. Fuck Luther, Allison, and Ben for voting to turn her off. +3

Diego and Vanya actually have a civil conversation. Well done for doing the bare minimum, Diego? -1

Vanya’s pills suggest that she was friendlier with Diego at some point. +1

Pogo for sure saw that whole thing and he saw Vanya take the pills. Dr. Complicit. +1

Reginald is a total soccer mom in Diego’s flashback scenes. This amuses me. -1

However, Reginald raised six child soldiers as “crime deterrents” so +6

Luther is casually working out in his bedroom while the mission alarm is going off. +1

“Where’s my knives” was a phrase Diego practiced. Also, Diego would never lose his knives. +1

Vanya’s room is a fucking closet. +1

“Thank you, Mother” Dante Albidone is a treasure. -1

“Boys will be boys” this is the only time that phrase is acceptable. When you’re putting out a fire your son caused for no reason. -1

“You did it! I’m so proud of you!” -1

Reginald interrupts this. +2

Diego’s flashbacks were very unorganized, which makes sense. This is probably several years worth of mission flashbacks. -1

“It’s okay if you hated him” “I would understand if you wanted to hurt him”-2

David Castaneda and Jordan Claire Robbins nailed this scene. Two kick ass actors being incredible. -1

Did Five really sit there all day with no breaks? +1

Five is arguing with Dolores and losing. She is a manifestation of his subconscious. And she is winning this argument. +1

Aidan Gallagher looked directly into the camera. We made eye contact. It was weird. +1

Lance straight up sells those illegal prosthetics where anyone could see it. Lance is an idiot. +1

Agnes’s drawing led Hazel and Cha Cha to the Academy. +1

Cha Cha left the window down in the car. +1

Would that air thing actually work? If it wouldn’t then sin on Reggie for getting cheap locks. If it would, sin on me for not getting better locks sooner. +1

Hazel and Cha Cha don’t have their masks on. What if somebody saw them? +1

The portrait of Five comes back to bite the Academy in the ass. Why haven’t they gotten rid of it? Five has been back for three days. +1

Klaus has black nail polish on his toes. -1

No way in hell is Klaus able to have his eyes open in a soapy bathtub. +1

The ghosts are creepy. Sin because Klaus is traumatized. +1

“We’re Through” by the Hollies is one of my favorite songs to play on guitar. It’s a decent coffee shop piece and I like playing it live. Thank you show, for helping me discover it. -1

Klaus is taking a bath with the door open. +1

Luther has been eating his Wheaties, Cha Cha. If you call experimental ape drugs, Wheaties. +1

Luther describing sunrise on the moon. I like this bit of writing. -1

Where were Hazel and Cha Cha keeping their guns and masks? Special pockets? +1

Diego is the only person who could possibly bring knives to a gun fight and win. Diego is a badass. -1

Hazel and Cha Cha continue to have stormtrooper aim. There are so many times when either could have shot Diego, but magically miss because Diego has plot armor. +1

Reginald’s portrait gets shot though. Right in some lethal areas. This amuses me. -1

Grace is so out of it she doesn’t notice heavy gunfire. Reggie, you suck. +1

“Who the hell are these guys?”/”Who the hell are these people?” +1

Diego, Luther and Allison just saved your ass. Less arguing, more fighting the crazy people. +1

Reggie keeps convenient weapons everywhere like they’re lamps. +1

Vanya is still in the Academy hours after the meeting, and she doesn’t think to hide during all this crazy gunfire and fighting. Sigh. +1

Seriously, it’s like she’s trying to get killed. +1

But she doesn’t because she has plot armor. +1

“Hey, asshole” goes back to Five’s “hey, assholes” from episode one. So did Luther learn that from Five, did Five learn that from Luther, or did Reggie decide that that was an acceptable phrase to teach his children? I lowkey want to write all three in a crackfic. Nice. -1

Vanya probably has a concussion. Otherwise, she would have attempted to run, right? Please tell me she isn’t that stupid. +1

You know that b99 meme where shit is going down and Gina is just chilling with her headphones. Yeah. That. Klaus, get some situational awareness, please. Also, what are these magic noise cancelling headphones that can block out the sound of gunfire and where can I buy them? +1

Allison, I understand why you don’t want to rumor anyone, but your life is literally in danger. I think you can forgive yourself if you rumor Hazel and Cha Cha into not killing you and your family. +1

“You wanna rumor this psycho?” “I don’t need to because this bitch just pissed me off” These are both horrible lines. I can’t tell if it’s because of the writers or because of the actors, but both of these lines are genuinely terrible. +1

“We just want the boy”. Nice comics reference, Cha Cha. -1

Diego doesn’t attempt to fight Cha Cha and give Allison the upper hand. He just sort of stands there. What the hell, Diego? +1

And when he does fight her, he doesn’t use any long range weapons. Diego, this is your house. I’m assuming you know where the knife drawer is? +1

Ben attempts to give Klaus privacy. In this situation. That’s a sin. I would risk seeing my brother’s naked body if it meant he wouldn’t be shot. Just sayin’, Ben. Get all up in his face. Put your ghost hands through his head. Get his attention! +1

Luther and Hazel can go hand to hand as equals and the show never addresses why. +1

Vanya really is that stupid. There are plenty of doors. And the fire escape from Five’s room. Vanya, run!+1

Luther had plenty of time to get out of the way of the chandaller. Why didn’t he shove his siblings and follow one of them? The motion would have made sense. +1

This ape reveal makes no sense. It would have worked in episode one, but it’s weird in episode 3. Why didn’t they reveal this to the audience earlier? +1

The dinosaur footprint sound effect. +1

Why didn’t Vanya and Allison hear Grace humming? Also, why didn’t anyone hear Hazel and Cha Cha breaking in. It was established in episode one that there is no soundproofing. +1

Grace is cross stitching the moon exploding. Foreshadowing. -1

She is pulling the needle through her own hand though. +1

Who gave Grace that nice bracelet? That’s so adorable. -1

Diego killed his own mother. +1

However, it is a mercy kill. Who knows what Luther or Allison would have done to her if they had found out how screwed up Grace was. I’m really conflicted about this scene. On one hand, fridging, on the other, it makes sense. Therefore, it’s a wash. -1

What is this magic cloth that Allison gives Vanya to mop up the blood and where can I get it? Seriously, it cleans up blood ridiculously well. To the point where it doesn’t look like Vanya’s been injured. +1

Diego takes out his anger/sadness/frustration on Vanya. Also, Diego would be excellent at cinema sins. Vanya could have been killed and she was stupid to stay, but there is no reason to raise your voice at her like that, Diego. +1

“She is a liability”. And you are an asshole. Diego just said that line to Allison as if Vanya wasn’t even there. As if she was just some inanimate burden. Fuck Diego for this line. +1

Allison doesn’t even attempt to defend Vanya. Even if Diego made a good point, there is no reason to let him get away with that kind of emotional abuse. +1

The show kind of addresses Luther’s body image issues, but doesn’t let him talk about it. +1

When did Vanya get Leonard’s address? +1

“I didn’t know where else to go”. Home perhaps? To your apartment? And not into the arms of creepy Leonard? +1

Hazel and Cha Cha didn’t discuss what to do if shit went sideways. No wonder Five was better than them. +1

When would Hazel have kidnaped Klaus? We don’t see it happen so we should just assume that Klaus appeared there magically? +1

Hazel and Cha Cha have FRC 891 as a licence plate. Neverending Chaos. Google FRC 891 Umbrella Academy. -1

Overall Review:

I forgot just how important episode three really is. Here we learn just how harmful Vanya��s book was, that Vanya is in an orchestra, and more about Leonard. This episode carves out who Vanya is as a character before Leonard sinks his claws into her. We can see the effects of the pills on her ability to connect with others and her ability to play the violin.

We also get a lot from the other characters. The Claire reveal is a big one for Allison. So is the ape reveal for Luther, even if it should have happened two episodes ago.

As for acting shout outs, Emmy Raver-Lampman and Jordan Claire Robbins killed it in this episode. I can’t wait to see more of Emmy in s2 and I really hope that Jordan will return.

There was some excellent use of irony in this episode. Like a lot of irony. What killed me was the Griddy’s scene. Hazel and Cha Cha pretending to care about Five’s well being so they can murder him and Agnes being indignant about someone as young as Five getting a tattoo is just amazing.

As for plot things, this was really a Vanya-centric episode. It establishes a lot of things about her, which makes the twist at the end even more obvious. This is not my first, second, or even third rewatch, so I know what’s coming, but how did I not see it before? When I first watched it I thought that Five was the main character and that Vanya was a self-insert. Looking back, I can see that Five and Vanya had pretty equal backstory and screen time given to them. You could make the argument that they are the main characters. You could even argue that they’re the primary protagonist and antagonist, but to be frank, that discussion should be saved for episode 10.

Total: 133

Sentence: Eating a dumpster bagel.

#The Umbrella Academy #all in good fun #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #Allison Hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #five hargreeves #ben hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #Grace Hargreeves #leonard peabody #hazel and cha cha

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in-tua-deep · 5 years ago

Note

Umbrella academy Pokémon AU? Each sibling has an affinity to a legendary maybe?

okay you have made me curious enough to explore this in between my monumental task of scanning in Every Family Photo in the house

so i’m thinking this is a universe where all these children are just. Found. No parents, nothing, because I want to avoid implications. But the point is that these children are blessed by a legendary, sort of. They’re not pokemon, but they’re not really human either because humans aren’t supposed to have powers like pokemon, right? They’re kind of like human shaped pokemon really

Anyway Reginald collects the kids and squirms through on a technicality because technically the kids aren’t human so he can train them like a pokemon team. And so begins the Umbrella Academy! Which is a team of six because that’s the max number of pokemon on a team of course, sorry Vanya you have to stay behind in the box manor

i’m using this page as a reference because i will freely admit i’m behind on legendaries and sub-legendaries and mythical pokemon and also i don’t really know the difference between those three categories

Luther:

Zamazenta: Shields the others, durability from steel form, fighter. Has second form which could symbolize Luther going from ‘regular’ human appearance to enhanced form that he is ashamed of as it’s less human.

Terrakion: My guy is built like a brick wall and is strong enough to destroy a castle wall in like, one blow. I love and support them.

Lunala: this one is just me being an asshole because Lunala is known as “the beast that calls the moon” and Luther’s relationship to the moon is a big old thing right there

Diego:

Palkia: this is because Palkia has the ability to warp space which is. Pretty much Diego’s power in the show right? Warps space to that his knives always hit? Also explains Diego’s fight on sight rivalry with Five if Five is Dialga’s lmao Luther stops him from yeeting himself at Five like, at least twice in the show that I remember off the top of my head

Zacian: this is literally just because it’s got a sword and Diego’s power is sharp pointy things so

Virizion: They have knife horns on their head. Knife horns. That’s all.

Allison:

Azelf: Azelf is the bringer of willpower and Allison’s whole thing is overriding that, which Azelf has been shown to be able to do.

Jirachi: her reality powers could be explained by managing to tap into wishes, though Jirachi’s wishes can’t create objects.

Klaus:

Mew: okay if we’re gently looking at comics Klaus as well then the ability to levitate and be a tiny little shit is absolutely perfect and also makes sense with Reginald’s insistence of Klaus’s incredible potential?? Let me be valid. Also, lives at the tree of life right? Opposite of life is death so that could tie in I guess??????

Yveltal: stealing life energy is as close as I could find to an actual death related legendary I’ll be honest.

Darkrai: he’s nightmares but I mean Klaus has a lot of those so. Seriously where is the pokemon god of the dead like the closest i can find are the legendary beasts because they literally died in a tower (that’s dark)

Five:

Dialga: the obvious choice because Dialga is literally like the time god. Since Dialga lives in another dimension I figure they just kind of scoop Five up and steal him? And so Five is stuck in Dialga’s dimension while he’s trying to both master his powers and get home. While having to deal with his overprotective pokemon dad. Also feeds into his ability to rile Diego up with like one word if Diego is Palkia’s

Celebi: able to travel through time and exist simultaneously through time so a stellar choice for obvious reasons. However, Celebi could also be the one who rescues Five from Dialga’s realm since Celebi can sense if something is a temporal anomaly and return them to their timeline sO that’s a possibility. Shared custody?

Xerneas: look Xerneas has the power to share eternal life and it would neatly explain why Five is just. An eternal thirteen-year-old like he is in the comics so there’s that. He would be so salty about it, too. Five just. turns into a tree for seventeen years after using his powers too much lmao can you imagine?? The tree in the courtyard is actually five surprise bitches

Ben:

Giratina: travels and controls dimensions besides those of time and space which could totally explain his ability to access whatever weird tentacle dimension exists in his stomach?? There we go Ben there is a gate to the distortion world

Deoxys: the closest I could get to a weird tentacle legendary honestly??

Yveltal: stealing life energy and then going to sleep is probably about as scary as tentacles right?? look there’s a distinct lack of weird tentacle legendaries it’s a problem

Vanya:

Meloetta: for that musical tie in yo. Also bulbapedia says that Meloetta is capable of becoming invisible and if that’s not a metaphor for Vanya’s childhood I don’t know what is.

Arceus: i mean. If anyone could end the world in one blow it’s probably the original pokemon god, right?

I’m personally liking Terrakion for Luther, Palkia for Diego, Azelf for Allison, Mew for Klaus, Dialga for Five, Giratina for Ben, and Meloetta for Vanya but there are several i like and also if there are ones y’all want to argue for or throw into the ring let me know! I definitely don’t proclaim to be the most knowledgeable person about pokemon

(especially legendaries which i lost track of years ago rip)

Ben, staring at his hands: If Giratina is my parent. Does that mean arceus is my… grandparent? Is god my grandparent, guys?

just shenanigans

Klaus: yeah i died but mom bailed me out of the afterlife

Luther: mo - you mean mew?

Klaus: oh yeah, mew. lol i dunno how they knew but they highfived me and yeeted me back to life. they have tiny baby hands i love them

Ben: i don’t know what the fuck mew is legend of and at this point i’m too afraid to ask

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gingerpeachtae · 6 years ago

Text

Concentric [3]

masterlist

Words: 8.9k

Genres: fantasy!AU, angst, fluff, enemies to lovers, eventual smut (?)

Warnings: blood, decapitation (yikes), violence

Summary: You had been ready for the end of the semester. You had been ready to spend time away from your best friend, Jimin, and finally move on from the feelings you harbored. Yet, after your friend was forced to reveal a secret, you found yourself in a new world that was chock full of magic, war, and wonder. So, here you were, basically thrown into your own fantasy novel, with your best friend on one side, and six male warriors on the other.

A/N: here ya go ya peach heads! pls engoy & I would luv to hear any feedback you have for me!

“…and then he tried fighting with swords, but he would either completely shatter the blade or the handle would fall off!” Tae was laughing so hard while he told the story that he fell on his side, clutching his stomach.

“Don’t forget the time he threw the knife behind him instead of at the target when I tried to teach him!” Hoseok chimed in.

“I-it’s not-it wasn’t that bad!” The male of subject tried to defend his actions before looking to you with pleading eyes. “I swear! It wasn’t my fault!”

You tried, you really did, to withhold your laughter for his sake. But one look at Tae rolling on the ground and you couldn’t hold back any longer.

Sounding defeated, he proceeded to whisper, “I would pick them up and they’d just break or go flying on their own.”

“Nope, you’re just a god of destruction. Our leader is too strong!” Tae exclaimed.

He had been explaining why Namjoon was the only one who fought with a mace. Apparently, the other members of the kiela refused to let him fight with sharp weapons because of how clumsy he was. There had been quite a few accidents until they finally got the sense to ban him from anything with a pointy end.

You shot Namjoon a comforting look through your giggles, and the emergence of his dimples showed you that he appreciated the gesture.

Then, looking toward the fire in the middle of the group, you asked, “Jin, are you sure you don’t want any help? I can cook fairly well, you know.”

You had finally met the eldest member of the kiela when you began setting up camp, which consisted of picking a designated sleeping spot and getting a fire rolling. When the Saeni you had yet to meet started chopping up what looked like carrots, celery, and some other familiar ingredients, you had approached to introduce yourself and offer your help. It would be an an understatement to say that your offer had been immediately and forcefully turned down.

Now, the black-haired male shook his head as he tossed another ingredient into the pot over the flames. Once he stirred it into the pot he turned his dark brown eyes to you, his hoop piercings shaking slightly from the sudden movement.

“Ya! I already told you, I’m the caretaker of this kiela, okay?” He shook his spoon at you in what you hoped was fake aggravation. “Just because you’re a female doesn’t mean you can steal my position!”

“I don’t know hyung… Y/N really is a good cook. Maybe you should let her help just a little bit.” Jimin said.

Jin’s jaw dropped. “How dare you Chim!? How dare you betray me like this?” He moved to point the spoon at Jimin’s apricot head and threatened, “Don’t make me smack you!”

“Aish! Calm down. I know you take care of all of us, but...”

“What?” Jin crossed his arms, finger tapping against the wooden spoon.

You quickly muttered, “You’re not my dad…

“Ugly ass fuckin’ noodlehead.” Jimin finished with you, laughing and giving you a high five.

Jin blinked twice before sighing, rolling his eyes, and returning to his steaming pot. The rest of the Saeni gave you both confused looks, obviously not knowing what you referenced.

Poor lads. Living in a world without Vine.

“But seriously Papa Jin, if you ever want or need help, let me know. I would love to give you a hand.”

The male just huffed and continued to stir his food.

“For Exia’s sake, you’re all so loud. Some people are trying to rest,” the lump curled on the ground complained.

“That would only be you, Yoongi.” Tae chuckled.

“Don’t be such a grouchy pants,” added Hoseok, but it lacked any real bite.

You watched as his eyes traveled over Yoongi’s form with an emotion that was quite familiar to you.

Interesting.

“Yeah, well Kookie is over your babbling mouths too.”

You shifted to look at the burgundy-haired male, noting that he was sitting stiffly, eyes on the ground. You realized he hadn’t said a word since Namjoon decided to stop for the day, which had been over an hour ago. His pea green eyes shot up and locked with yours. They narrowed before he stood up and walked into the trees, mumbling about how he wasn’t tired and wanted to go for a walk.

“Kookie’s been acting so weird.” Tae stretched his arms over his grey head and adjusted his headband.

Not necessarily wanting to get into Jungkook and his poopy personality right then, you asked to no Saeni in particular, “Who’s Eshea?”

“Exia.” Namjoon corrected you.

“Exia…?” You slowly said back and grinned when his yellow eyes brightened at your proper pronunciation.

Tae jumped into the conversation. “She’s the goddess of battle and strategy! BTS Saeni tend to pray to her more than the other gods.”

“BTS? Other gods? Jimin told me that Illain is named after Illai, but there are more?”

Hoseok groaned at Tae’s comment. “He has some fixation on calling us BTS Saeni because we’re-”

“Battle-Trained Soldiers!” Tae interrupted proudly, clearly pleased with his made-up acronym.

You glanced at Jimin out of the corner of your eye, who just shrugged as he decided to let his brothers handle the explanations.

“Okay, BTS. I can dig it Tae,” you tell him, and he beamed. “So, there’s Illai and Exia… what other gods are there?”

Namjoon took the reins once more. “There are seven ethereal beings. Illai, the mother and life goddess. Her siblings, Exia and Juufa. The latter is the god of harmony and accord. Then, the mother goddess has four children, each taking claim to a season: Ilto is spring, Vebah is summer, Keoth is autumn, and winter is Opitax.”

“Who fathered her kids? Was it her sibling?” You supposed the idea should’ve made you squirm more than it did, but you’d read enough mythology in your life to know that it wasn’t exactly a rare thing for deities to do.

“I…” Namjoon paused, thinking hard before frowning. “I don’t know.”

Hoseok began praising you for finally finding something that his leader didn’t have the answer to.

“I heard she was pregnant when she came to be.” Jin piped up.

Tae proceeded to voice his own opinion. “Nah hyung, it was definitely a self-impregnation.”

“Oh! I think there’s a species of lizard that does that on Earth!” You excitedly claim, looking to Jimin for confirmation.

“Why do you think I would know?” He said, making your face drop into a pout.

“Well, clearly, none of us know the answer. I’m sorry Y/N,” The kiela’s leader spoke up before the conversation could totally go sideways. “But anyways, many Saeni worship a particular god or goddess based on their birth season as well as occupation like in our case.”

You didn’t really know what else to say besides a simple “wow.” You weren’t the religious type, but you were intrigued by the various beliefs around the world. You enjoyed learning about them, so it was amazing to hear about the Saeni’s. Although, you did find it odd that none of them knew who fathered the four seasonal gods. Maybe somebody could bring Maury Povich over to Illain and have him do his paternity test segment with Juufa. You could just imagine his “You are not the father!” declaration to the god. Or maybe it would be “You are the father!” Who knows…

That’s why they need Maury!

You were brought out of your thoughts of bringing the American talk show host on a cross-world adventure when Jin announced that dinner was ready. Excitedly jumping off the ground at the Saeni’s words, you pulled Jimin up by his arm.

Pondering missing information from the Saeni culture would have to wait until food got into your belly.

Laying on the mat rolled out underneath your body, you couldn’t find it in you to close your eyes and drift to sleep. Your mind would not shut off and you kept wiggling around like a worm in the hopes of finding a position that would lull your ass to Snoozeland. It wasn’t working. Flopping to your other side once more, you stared at Jimin sleeping next to you. His plush lips were pursed, and he was expelling soft puffing noises.

You’re not going to get any sleep if you keep staring at his cute face!

You sighed before turning your head away. Cursing yourself for not being able to hit your internal power button, you sat up and ran your hands down your face. You cradled your head in your hands as you listened to the bugs in the dark.

All of the sudden, you perked up when you heard a melodic sound drifting through the forest. It was a beautiful, low-pitched song. Curious as to what animal was making it, you removed the blanket from where it was draped over your legs and rose to go find out. You crept around the Saeni silently, not wanting to wake them, and you paused when you made it to the perimeter of their snoring forms. The next round of pretty sounds came from your left, so you angled your body in that direction and tip-toed away, not noticing the pair of green eyes that followed your movements.

Glancing up at the moonlight filtering through the trees, you smiled to yourself. It was so peaceful here. So quiet yet filled with an orchestra of sounds. It wasn’t the buzzing of electricity, the honking of traffic, or the thumping of music escaping past closed doors. It was only the sounds of nature. Plain and simple and nothing else.

You had been looking for that mystery animal for around seven minutes. You hadn’t heard it in about three, so you halted your feet to listen carefully.

Bugs clicking.

Trees creaking.

Leaves rustling.

And was that it? You heard a faint noise, so you held your breath and leaned your ear forward in hopes of catching the sound again.

“What are you doing?”

You gasped at the unexpected voice behind you. You jerked your head over your shoulder and raised a hand over your heart to steady its rapid pace when you recognized the person who startled you.

“Fucking hell Coco! You scared the shit out of me!”

“What are you doing?” He repeated himself, and you were shocked when you noticed his voice didn’t carry its usually venom.

He almost sounded… nice.

Taken back, it took you a few seconds to respond, “Oh, um. I couldn’t sleep, and I heard this really pretty sound, so I wanted to check out was it was. And now that I say it out loud, I realize that that’s the opening scene from every camping horror movie ever, so that was probably super dumb on my part so-”

“I get it. You can stop rambling now.” The male interrupted you before sighing. “It was the call of a tilqua, they’re nocturnal so you don’t hear them during the day.”

“They’re a type of bird,” he continued after seeing your blank face.

“Oh! Cool! Uh, thanks for telling me.”

It fell to an awkward silence after that. Neither of you saying anything and avoiding looking at each other. You shifted your weight foot to foot as the painful quiet continued for another minute.

Not able to take it any longer, you blurted out, “Why are you being so cordial with me all of the sudden?”

You really should have just kept your damn mouth shut because, almost instantly, his entire demeanor toward you changed. He flinched at your question, as if it awoke him a trance. Then, he narrowed his eyes, any hint of warmth they might’ve had was now gone.

“I’m not being nice to you. I was on watch and saw someone leaving camp. I came to check why.” His voice was void of any emotion.

“I… but you... the sound-”

“It’s your fault,” he talked over you, his tone now carrying anger.

“Wh-what? What’s my fault? I haven’t done anything.”

You saw his hand descend to grip the handle of his dagger. Shit. You’d annoyed him, and you didn’t even know how or why.

“Just go back to camp. Go lay down next to Chim, and go to sleep already,” he said through his teeth, hand squeezing the dagger.

Not wanting to be around such an aggravating person anymore, you found yourself following his demand by promptly marching past him, making sure to bump into him as you did. He growled as your shoulder checked his but didn’t retaliate further.

You couldn’t believe it. The audacity of that male! He was the one who had followed you like some creeper. You let out a quiet scream of frustration as your stomped through the forest back to the camp and did exactly what he told you to do.

You woke up to Jimin gently shaking you and saying that it was time to get your ass up.

You moaned. “Mmmmmm-kay Slim Jim, just give me fi-“

“I swear if you’re about to say five more minutes…”

“-ive more minutes.” You rolled over and tugged the blanket closer to your chin.

You vaguely heard Jimin say something about not being sorry when, out of nowhere, a heavy weight plopped down on top of you, making you grunt from the impact.

“Slim Jim, I will personally shave your head if you don’t get off me!”

“Are you always this grumpy in the morning?” A deep voice that was definitely not Jimin’s murmured in your ear.

Cracking an eye open, you saw that it was Tae who had jumped on you. His handsome face was squished against yours and his long limbs were wrapped around your curled-up body. Seeing your eyes open, he gave you his signature boxy smile, which you returned with no hesitation. You couldn’t bring yourself to be mad at the guy when he looked so damn adorable.

You accepted your defeat. “Alright, alright. I’ll get up, but you gotta get the hell off me first.”

He immediately scrambled up, pulling you vertical with him. He gave you a big hug that lifted you off your feet before setting you down and skipping away to talk with Jungkook. You averted your eyes, not wanting to see the burgundy head’s glare this early in the morning.

You yawned and stretched your entire body. The sun was just beginning to peak out over the horizon and you were glad that you didn’t have a clock to see how hellaciously early it must’ve been. After gathering your belongings and shoving them into your backpack, you walked over to join the rest of the Saeni. Jin handed you what looked like an apple and tasted just as refreshing and sweet.

“Aren’t you going to apple-aud me for making sure you eat the most important meal of the day?”

You swallowed your bite before replying, “This is an apple?”

“Uh, yeah? What else would it be?”

Sorry for not knowing ya’ll had apples over here, damn.

“And what about my joke!? None of you appreciate peak humor! Ugh, you let me down Y/N.”

Before you could compliment his atrociously great dad joke, the Saeni walked away in exaggerated disappointment. At least you hoped it was exaggerated.

Lifting your shoulders in a shrug, you continued munching on the tasty, green fruit as you watched Jimin join Tae and Jungkook’s conversation. You had to admit that if you weren’t aware of who these people were to Jimin, you would have been feeling just a wee bit neglected. Your best friend had been spending more time speaking with the Saeni than with you. Granted, he always checked in with you to make sure you were doing okay, but he hadn’t really talked to you. But, you couldn’t be upset at him. He was probably just taking the time to catch up with everyone since it had been about nine months since seeing them last. Plus, you did sort of invite yourself onto the trip, so you were just happy to be here. You had also been getting to know Tae and Hoseok more, since the two of them walked beside you most of the time. They were both loud and eccentric, but they had kind souls. You really enjoyed talking with them and they loved hearing your stories about Jimin on Earth.

Just as you took the last bite of apple, Namjoon called you over. Tossing the core behind a tree to give a forest animal its own breakfast, you hurried over to the tall male who handed you your two daily petals. Tossing them into your mouth to dissolve, your body momentarily froze as the experience of consuming them together hit you in full force. It was almost overwhelming, but once it passed and your vision cleared, you gave Namjoon a smile and wave before bounding over to Hoseok who was leaning against a tree. Seconds later, Tae joined the two of you, thankfully without a certain coconut-headed asshat.

You had been walking for around three hours. Three hours of stepping around trees, leaping over logs, and being the only damn person making a sound as you stepped over foliage. Three hours before finally giving in and voicing the question you had been dying to ask.

“Do you guy carry around hair dye or does Yoongi color your hair with magic?”

When the Saeni striding next to you gave a look of confusion you expanded your question. “Well, you both have dyed hair so how do you maintain it in the field? Doesn’t it wash out? Or sweat out?

“Our hair isn’t dyed Y/N.”

“What? But you have grey hair, Tae! And Hoseok, yours is silver white! You’re not old enough to have grey or white hair!” Your eyes widened as a possibility you hadn’t considered came to you. “Oh my gosh. Are you guys old geezers? Do Saeni age differently than humans?”

Tae snickered at your panicked tone and you went to smack his shoulder, but he easily evaded your hand.

“Okay first off, can you please stop calling me Hoseok? It’s so weird to have someone use my real name.” The male himself asked.

“Uh sure, but you told me that’s your name, so I don’t know what else to call you?” You winced as your foot snapped yet another twig on the forest floor.

“Just call me Hobi, little scorja. Secondly, like Tae said, we don’t dye our hair. None of us do. It’s all natural, baby.”

“All natural my ass. Yoongi has mint-blue hair! That shit at natural, honey.”

At the mention of Yoongi’s name, Hobi’s eyes twitched over to the Saeni and faintly smiled.

Tae then filled in for Hobi since he was distracted. “Yeah, and Chim has orange hair and Namjoon’s got yellow eyes. We’re all born with it, little scorja. Our eye and hair color come from our birth season.

“Hobi, Jin, and I were all born when Opitax had control, so we have winter-esque features, hence the grey and white hair.

Chim and Joonie were during Keoth’s months, so they have autumn coloring.

Kookie has Vebah’s summer tones. And Yoongi is-”

“Ilto. Spring.” Hobi returned to the discussion.

“Hold up.” You raised your hand to emphasize your words. “Jimin had black hair when we were kids though.”

“Oh yeah! I remember when he first showed up, we all though he was an Opitax baby.” Tae laughed while giving Hobi a nudge with his elbow.

“He dyed his hair black to blend in with humans. I’m guessing that vibrant orange is not a normal color for your people, especially kids.”

You looked up to where Jimin was walking with Namjoon and Yoongi, his apricot tresses standing out among the greenery of the forest. Those same tresses that had just showed up at the end of summer one year and never went away. You always inquired how he got his dark roots to never pop up and he would give you a sly smile in return every time. You had thought he was just keeping his superb dyeing technique a secret, but apparently, the only secret was that it was his natural hair.

“And to answer that last part,” Hobi continued, “we age the same as humans do.”

“Well… that’s a relief,” you said as you tilted your head up to catch a patch of sunlight filtering through the leaves.

The conversation died, but it was a comfortable silence. Unlike last night with Jungkook. As the three of you hiked on, Tae would occasionally point out a flower or plant he thought you would find pretty and Hobi would advise you to be more careful when you stumbled over some obstacle. Overall, though, you let the forest do most of the talking. You could slightly hear Namjoon, Yoongi, and your Slim Jim making conversation ahead of you as well as Jin complaining to Jungkook behind you. As you grabbed a hold of a tree trunk to swing yourself around it, a strong gust of wind blew past you, causing your hair to go wild. Blowing the pieces out of your face, you glimpsed Tae’s feather earring swaying in the wind.

“Okay another question, please don’t hate me. Why do you all have ear piercings? They look badass, don’t get me wrong, but couldn’t they be a liability in a fight?”

“How could they be a liability?” Hobi answered your question with a question.

You explained that they could get caught on something or their enemy could yank on them or rip them out if they got close enough.

Both Saeni let out a laugh before Hobi said, “That may be true, but I highly doubt it would happen. Especially our enemies yanking on them.”

“We actually wear them to symbolize what kind of fighter we are!” Tae added as hopped over a fallen log.

“Huh?” You opted to go beneath the fallen tree, briefly pausing to curiously look at what seemed like a black hand print on the bark.

“Feather for archers like me. Metal for swords, daggers, and knives like Hobi, Kookie, and Jin. Dark beads for blunt weapons like Namjoon and his mace, and Yoongi has bone for magic users!”

“That’s what they’re for!? I thought they were just some Saeni fashion statement. Don’t they sort of… give you guys away?”

Hobi snorted as he swatted a branch out of his face. “If the weapons literally strapped to our backs don’t give us away I don’t think our ‘fashion statements’ will be the thing to do so.”

His sassy remark caused you to fake pout. They cooed at you, poking at your cheeks and sides until you giggled at their antics. Pleased they had you back to smiling, they dropped their hands and moved back to a respectful distance.

“That reminds me, I need to give Chim his!” Tae suddenly gasped out.

“Give him his what?”

“His earrings! He’s an archer too, but he leaves his earrings with me when…” He was gone before he finished his sentence, running up to where Jimin was.

You blinked at his rapid departure. For a strict, “battle-trained soldier” he sure was in a world of his own sometimes.

Thankfully, the dagger and knife enthusiast next to you finished for him. “Chim gives them to Tae so that he doesn’t lose them on Earth.”

So Jimin was an archer? Damn, you’d love to see him knock an arrow back, you bet he’d look sexy as heck. You turned your head to ask Hobi how good Jimin was, but you saw that his eyes were focused on where Tae had run up to. Focused on one Saeni up there in particular. Not the first time you had caught him staring at the other male. You had noticed that Hobi’s eyes went to find the other Saeni whenever his there was a pause in conversation. Or he would try to fight back his smile when the other’s name was mentioned. He did it so many times during dinner last night that you were about to smash their faces together and say your godly work was done. But for now…

“Does he know?”

“Hmm?” He replied still staring at the other male.

“Yoongi. Does he know?”

“What!?” He squeaked as he whipped his head to you. He coughed to try to return his voice to its normal pitched. “Ah, I mean what are you talking about?”

You smirked to yourself as you saw his face grow warm, but he obviously wasn’t ready to talk about it. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”

He visibly relaxed at your words. You wished you could help him out somehow, but it wasn’t your place to interfere. Especially given your own shitty situation. Unrequited love was quite the bitch, so you truly hoped that that wasn’t the case for Hobi.

You sent him an understanding smile and the two of you walked on.

Namjoon finally called it for the day when the group came across a wide river. The roar of the white rapids was almost deafening as they churned the water and interrupted the otherwise peaceful landscape.

You, Tae, and Hobi stayed at the designated campsite, watching Papa Jin prepare the evening’s meal, while the rest of the boys went to scout a calmer part of the river to wash off in.

Currently, you and Tae were doing your best to annoy the other Saeni as you tossed small nuts at them. You laughed as Jin shook his knife at you in a threat. Calling his bluff, you simply stuck your tongue out in return.

“Exia give me strength,” the eldest Saeni muttered, turning back to his pot.

“You were already a brat, Tae, but with her… aish. You two are the worst.” Hobi tried his best to sound serious, but the smile tugging at the corner of his lips destroyed any hope he had.

You fell into Tae as your giggles consumed your body, his arms wrapping around you and holding you close. As your lungs calmed down, you heard footsteps approaching.

“Thank Illai you guys found someplace to wash off. I need to get away from these two tyrants.” You saw Jin point to you and your partner in crime.

Ignoring his comment, you turned your head to great the returning Saeni, but your hello died in your throat.

Namjoon, Yoongi, and Jimin were in the process of putting their shirts on and you caught sight of their defined muscles. You slowly closed your mouth and gulped. You’d obviously seen Jimin without a shirt on plenty of times before, but it hit on a whole different level to see him semi-shirtless and wet.

Not to mention that both Yoongi and Namjoon clearly worked out too. It was… a lot of take in. You didn’t think you could withstand any more pure, male hotness, but the gods of Illain must have wanted you to suffer because Jungkook decided right then would be a wonderful time to show up. Completely sans shirt.

All you could do was look at him as he whined to his hyungs about something that was absolutely no concern to you at that moment. Your eyes took in his physique that was muscular but still lean. The strength of his biceps was evident as he waved his arms at the others, causing the muscles to flex. You softly gasped when you noticed that his stomach was so cut that he had a freaking eight pack. Eight! Your eyes trailed lower and… oh my…

His. Fucking. Thighs. Due to the dampness of his skin, the fabric of his pants clung to his legs, effortlessly showcasing the prominent muscles. Every step he took had them bulging and you swear you almost fainted from the sight. You couldn’t tear your eyes away as you squeezed your own thighs together.

H-holy fuck. Coco was freaking ripped.

“Why is she staring at Kookie?” You heard Tae whisper to someone.

Your eyes widened and before you could look away, Jungkook’s head swiveled to you and saw that your eyes were locked on him.

Fucking hell. Why Tae!?

To your utter shock though, was that instead of bitching at you, he blushed and ran to hide behind a tree. As he yeeted himself out of there, you caught sight of a tattoo on his upper, middle back.

“Why’d you say that out loud? You know he gets shy!” Jin lightly smacked the offending Saeni on his arm.

“Hey, the little scorja was practically drooling! We were all thinking it, I just happened to be the one t- Ow!”

You gave him a smack of your own on his leg while your cheeks heated up in embarrassment.

“That’s not nice!” He complained.

“Neither is voicing when someone is checking someone else out, Tae.” Namjoon pointed out as he sat down next to the fire.

Completely humiliated, you hid your face in your hands. Although, you did peek through your fingers to gauge Jimin’s reaction. The boy was folded in half, cracking up as his eyes squished closed.

Stupid cute squishy eyes.

You knew it was hopeless, but a small part of you had wished he’d be just a tiny bit jealous. Clearly, that was not the case.

Attempting to change the mortifying subject, you coughed before saying, “Uh, I didn’t know Coco had a tattoo.”

“What!? That kid has a tattoo!?” Jin shrieked in alarm before catching Yoongi’s “are you serious?” expression. “Oh, you must mean our draeva marks.”

“Drai-Draiva marks?”

“Drae-va.” Jin pronounced slowly for you. “Saeni are all connected to Illain. This connection can sometimes be accessed and converted to magic by certain individuals like Yoongi. Majority, however, only have the standard draeva marks.”

You didn’t notice the smiles from both Jimin’s and Tae’s faces dropping since you were transfixed on Jin’s words. “Each Saeni is born at the same time a tree begins to take root. These trees are called draeva, though they can be any species. At seven years old, we feel the connection emerge in our souls and we feel a pull to that tree.”

As he talked, you noticed Jungkook come out of hiding, thankfully fully clothed this time. He went to sit next to Tae and put his arm around the Saeni’s shoulders as Namjoon started to elaborate on the subject. He said that every Saeni goes on a journey to find their draeva when the connection is established. Once the tree is found, the connection permanently takes root in the Saeni’s soul when they rest their hand on the trunk. The Saeni’s hand print is forever embellished on the bark, and in return, the Saeni gets a mark that replicates the tree’s inner rings. Every seven years, another ring appears, and the mark provides them with heightened senses and reflexes as well as the ability to feel the state of the draeva and surrounding area.

As you absorbed the information, you realized that the mark you saw earlier on the fallen tree must’ve been a Saeni’s hand print. You wondered what happens to the Saeni when their tree collapses like that. And although you were delighted to have learned more about Saeni culture, something jumped to the forefront of your thoughts.

“Slim Jim, you don’t have one.”

He looked down at your comment. “I don’t, um, I haven’t found my draeva.” His eyebrows pulled together, and his voice was shaking slightly. “I probably don’t even have one since I’m not fully Saeni.”

“Shit. Jimin, I’m sorry I didn-”

“You didn’t know, it’s okay.” He sent you a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes as Jin reached over to give his shoulder a squeeze.

Fuck, I lied. Your squishy eyes aren’t stupid. Bring them back.

“For the second night in a row, people are trying to sleep and you’re keeping them awake with all your emotions.” Yoongi grumbled.

The magic user had been quiet throughout the entire ordeal. Until now. You hadn’t even noticed that he’d gone straight to the fire to lay down on the ground. Though you were beginning to recognize that was standard behavior for the mint-haired Saeni. When he did finally speak up, he kept his usual, annoyed tone, but you could tell he was trying to lighten the atmosphere in his own, slightly questionable way. Trying to distract Jimin from his sadness.

Tae shot to his feet, preaching to Yoongi something along the lines of how emotions are what connect people together and yadda yadda yadda.

You watched as Jimin’s face lifted in amusement and you silently thanked Mr. Sparkle Hands.

Once again, you were having a difficult time finding sleep. Or rather, sleep refused to find you because you’d tried every position and trick you could think of. Expelling the air in your lungs in a fast manner, you rose to your legs and shuffled over to where Tae was on watch.

He gave you a big smile as your approached, but it morphed into a frown. “You know I love talking to you, Y/N, but you should really get some sleep.”

“Trust me, I wish I could, but ya girl’s got insomnia.”

He hummed to express his empathy before grabbing your hand. “Well, if we’re going to talk, let’s walk the perimeter so we don’t wake the others.”

Waffling your fingers with his, the two of you started walking the circumference of the camp, far enough that nobody would hear you, but close enough to keep an eye on the area.

The two of you had been circling the camp for a decent amount of time, discussing absolute nonsense such as why you considered Steak and Shake fries to be on the bottom of the french fry totem pole.

“They’re skinny little shoestring fries! I like my fried potatoes to be girthy, you know. Give me some thick, crinkle cuts instead.”

As you argued in favor of girthy fries to someone who had never had one, Yoongi appeared out of the shadows. His face was not very happy, and you wondered what was wrong.

“Uhhh, hey Yoongi! Do you have insomnia too?”

He stopped and took you in with a judgmental face. “No. Only the small-minded get insomnia.”

“Oh, piss off.”

Disregarding your request, he turned to address Tae next to you.

“Hey! What are you doing? I wake up to take over watch and I don’t even find you at your post!”

Tae rolled his eyes. “Hyung, you know I can still see everything just fine from here, there’s no need t- Shit!”

Yoongi must have seen it a split-second before Tae had because he was the one that knocked you out of the way when the giant, black shadow of a thing came charging out of the dark.

You hit the ground hard with a grunt, scraping your forearm against a rock. Rolling over, you screamed Yoongi’s name as you saw him get tackled by the creature, the blue glow of an almost-finished spell fading as he went down. All you could do was watch in horror as wild jaws snapped at his head and claws raked down his body. Suddenly, an arrow thumped into the thing’s neck, but it only growled and continued ravaging the mint-haired Saeni who struggled, and failed, to push it off.

Hearing Tae curse, you looked in his direction and saw him running at the beast. He held his bow in both hands and defiantly yelled as he swung down. You gaped at you watched the sharp edge of his bow cut straight through the creature’s neck, causing the head to decapitate and the body to sag. The head hit the ground and rolled away from its previous owner until it came to a halt beside you.

You stared at it, blood still pumping out of the severed end in thick spurts. Midnight-colored skin that seemed rough and leather-like stretched across its skull. A thin, purple tongue hung limply out of its mouth, which was filled with rows and rows of teeth that looked like needles. You just stared at the gruesome head until you heard Tae calling Yoongi’s name.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

You wobbled to your feet and stumbled as fast as you could over to the Saeni, doing your best to ignore the headless body as Tae heaved it off Yoongi. You exhaled in relief when you heard Yoongi’s low voice responding to Tae and saw his pink eyes open and alive. Your reprieve was short-lived, however, as you lowered your eyes to Yoongi’s arms and torso.

They were… not in good shape. Deep gashes were twisted all around his arms, pouring out tiny rivers of blood that soaked the ground beneath him. Luckily, he had his main armor on, protecting his vital organs, but the creature had still found an open chink with its claws. You felt a tear run down your cheek as you saw where it had dug into the flesh on his left side. He was breathing weakly and his chest was spasming as Tae moved his hands to press against the wound.

You dropped to your knees and whispered Yoongi’s name, your voice and hands trembling as you took in his damaged body.

There was just so much blood. It was everywhere. Your vision was only red, red, red.

What do I do? What do I do!? Oh god…

“Y/N. Y/N! Y/N!”

You broke out of your crimson-filled trance.

“Y-yes?” Your chin quivered.

“I need you to go back to camp and wake up the others, alright?” You could tell he was trying to speak as calmly as possible to not panic you further. “I need you to bring Hobi back, so he can help me move him. Can you do that for me, little scorja?”

You nodded as confidently as you could before shooting to your feet and sprinting back to camp, the image of Yoongi being mauled and his wrecked body burned into your brain.

Somewhere else, hundreds of miles away from a frantic you, an injured Yoongi, and a shocked kiela, was a male sitting inside of a large tent, which was erected within his own encampment. Most of his face was shrouded in darkness, only the bridge of his nose and peak of his cheekbones were visible in the light of a few burning candles. He looked up from the map spread out before him when someone entered his tent. The wolves beside the male lifted their heads in attention at the intrusion.

“Sir? We’ve gotten word that he is back in Illain.”

The three wolves regarded the subjugate with aggressive eyes, causing him to gulp in fear.

“Anything else?” The shadowed male inquired.

“Their magic user was attacked by a lupinx.” He replied without looking away from the massive canines.

The male leaned back in his chair, a sinister smile creeping onto his face while his eyes twinkled in satisfaction.

“Perfect. Tell them to proceed with the plan.”

You felt horrible as you watched five of the Saeni train the next morning. You hadn’t been able to defend yourself last night, and Yoongi had paid for your weakness. You fisted your hands and dug your nails into your palm.

You couldn’t forget how pale he had been. How odd it was to see such a complexion smeared with bright crimson.

You couldn’t forget the Saeni’s faces, who were already on their feet by the time you’d arrived, when you stammered out what had happened in choppy, broken sentences.

You couldn’t forget the way Hobi’s expression had gone from concerned to utterly terrified in an instant.

Nor the way he’d rushed over to you, eyes unnerved as he grabbed your arm. You had wanted to whimper when he clawed into the sensitive skin around your scraped forearm. He begged you to tell him where Yoongi was, and without even telling him to follow, you had turned and run back to the bloody scene.

You loosened the pressure on your hands, but a throbbing remained where your nails had almost punctured small crescents into the soft skin. You sniffled as you observed Jimin practicing with Tae’s bow while the grey-haired owner critiqued his technique. Following the sounds of ringing metal, you shifted and saw Jungkook and Jin sparing with their swords. And behind them was Hobi, who was throwing his blades at a tree with much more force than was likely necessary. Your eyes burned as you watched them.

Expelling all the air in your lungs, you hung your head. You were so thankful that Yoongi would be okay. He as currently resting back at the camp with Namjoon looking after him.

But what if it had been more serious? What if he had died because you had needed to be protected?

What did you expect when you came to a new world with a bunch of warriors? To just skip by joyously and never be in danger?

You felt pathetic. You were a liability to the entire group. All you did was get in the way. Feeling a lump grow in your throat, you swiveled and walked away from the clashing of swords and thumping of arrows. When you could no longer hear them, you let out a frustrated roar and punched the rough trunk of the nearest tree. Your knuckles scraped against the bark, opening bleeding wounds. You brought your right hand close to your face to inspect the torn skin before shaking it out and punching the tree again and again and again, each hit eliciting an increasingly louder yell from deep inside you. Finally, your legs gave out and you slumped down while cradling your bleeding and splinter-filled hand. You felt exhausted.

“Your form is terrible.”

Raising your gaze from your damaged hand, you saw the last person you wanted to see.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying that your form is completely fucked.”

Why the hell did he have to come berate you on your shitty punching technique. Was there anything you could do around this guy that wouldn’t have him talking down to you? And why was he even here? Shouldn’t he be back with the others?

On a normal day, you would’ve given him a smartass’ response. But this was not a normal day. You felt like crap and this was the cherry on top of your self-depreciation milkshake. Your breathing went from strained to erratic and you felt the wall barely holding yourself together start to crumble. Taking a deep breath and closing your eyes, you tried to shut Jungkook out in a last-ditch effort to keep yourself together.

“Your hand is thrashed because you can’t even throw a punch properly.”

Welp.

“Why!?” You screamed at him. “Why do you hate me!? What did I do to you!?”

You started to cry. You were so overwhelmed. “You said it was my fault, but what was my fault? I’ve never done shit to you!”

Truly crying at this point, your breathing was now stuttered and gasping. You lowered your head to try to hide your vulnerable state. As sobs wracked your body, you wrapped your arms around your torso in a desperate attempt to find comfort.

Not taking pity on you, Jungkook responded in a vicious tone, “You want to know what you did? You’re the reason my kiela is broken.”

“W-what?” You lifted your head to look at him through your tears.

His right hand grasped on to his ruby-hilted dagger and his other was clenched tightly.

“We’re supposed to stay together. We’re not supposed to leave each other, but Jimin does. He always leaves! And why? Because. Of. You. He doesn’t stay because you’re on Earth and he doesn’t want to leave his precious best friend, so he leaves us, his brothers, his family, instead.”

“What-I-Jungkook, I never asked him to do that. I didn’t even know you guys existed.” You defended yourself, but it came out weak.

“My family is never whole because of you. I almost lost my hyung last night because of you. It’s all because of you. Because of a stupid little human.” He spat the words out.

He was breathing heavily as he towered over you. “It’s. All. Your. Fault.”

Your heart ached in pain as what he said fully resonated with you. He was hurting because of you. Because Jimin would rather live on Earth, would rather abandon his kiela for most of the year, partly so that he could keep you in his life. You felt your stomach drop at the thought and you gripped your arms hard, curling into yourself again. You felt so frustrated, so lost, and so… human.

You’ve been hurting his family and you hadn’t even known. The others might not have been so up front about it, but they must have been hurting too. They had to be. A new wave of tears erupted over your cheeks as you considered how much the Saeni must despise you. How much they must be pretending to be fine with you for Jimin’s sake. You continued to sob as your mind shifted to think of how you’d been keeping Jimin away from them. You’d been keeping your best friend and the person you loved away from the most important people in his life.

And Yoongi…

“Kook! Y/N!”

You hastily rose to your feet and stepped back from Jungkook while you wiped your tears away, hissing as you moved your injured hand. It was a futile effort, though, since you knew there was still evidence in your meek disposition and red, puffy eyes.

“Hey hyung,” Jungkook said without looking away from you, but he stiffened and turned to his brother when he noticed that Tae was panicking. “What’s wrong?”

Gasping for air, he looked at you and Jungkook, obviously taking note of his heaving chest and your red eyes, but he didn’t comment on them.

Instead he said in a stressed, frantic tone, “They got him, Kook! They got Chim!”

You were pacing back and forth in front of Yoongi, who was laying down on his mat. You ran your hands through your hair, the crappy self-wrap job you did on your knuckles catching on the strands. You gripped fistfuls of your hair and yanked at the roots in frustration.

“Y/N. I swear to Exia if you pace in front of one more ti-“

“Yoongi! They’ve been gone for so long! What if something happened? What if they’re hurt?

“Okay, firstly, it’s only been like twenty minutes, so you can calm the fuck down.” He rolled his eyes. “Secondly, as Tae would put it, we’re BTS Saeni. This is literally what we do for a living… so yet again, you can calm the fuck down.”

You stopped in the middle of taking your next step as you considered his statements. Deciding to agree with him, you placed your foot down, but stopped moving around.

“Fine! Fine. But I want it to be known that I hate having to just sit here and wait.”

“You’re not sitting, and you didn’t have to say that. It was already obvious.”

You glared at the Saeni but your eyes softened after taking in his wrapped arms and torso. The bandages didn’t seem to have any blood staining them, so either they were freshly changed or Saeni’s bodies healed extremely fast. You still dropped your head in sorrow at his injured body.

“I-I’m sorry Yoongi. For what happened. It was my fault.”

He scoffed at your words. “It wasn’t your fault, idiot. Stop blaming yourself.”

“I really don’t know whether to take that as an insult or not, and I’m not sure I believe you, but… okay.”

Sitting down on the ground next to him, you thought back to the events that occurred after Tae had shown up.

---

“They got Chim!”

While you asked Tae what he meant, Jungkook had immediately reached out to grab ahold of the other Saeni’s shoulders.

“Where?” His demand was filled with anger, but it was controlled.

Contrary to how he’d been a minute ago.

“Chim saw you leave to follow, uh, Y/N.” He glanced at you. “So, he followed you¸ Kook. That’s the last I saw him.”

He stepped away from Jungkook, causing the latter’s hands to fall off his shoulders. You had never seen the usually aloof Saeni so serious before. It worried you.

“Namjoon came running over a few minutes later saying he saw them dragging Chim away unconscious.”

“You’re telling me that Namjoon saw them… AND DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!?”

You were so goddamn confused at what was going on. All you knew was that someone apparently hurt and kidnapped your Slim Jim.

“Can someone please tell me what in the fuck is going on!?”

Ignoring you, Tae said, “Jungkook, come on, use your coconut head for a minute.”

You would have snickered at his use of your term, but it definitely was not the time or the place to do so.

“He was by himself and he didn’t know how many there were. You know he did the right thing to get us all together to get him back,” Tae continued.

Without another word, the Saeni turned and started running in the direction of camp, Jungkook following without missing a beat. You stared, dumbfounded, for a second before sprinting after them.

Your lungs were burning by the time you caught up with everyone at the camp. Your burst through the trees and abruptly stopped due to the five standing Saeni having their weapons drawn and pointed at you. You blanched and stammered out that it was just you, raising your hands to show you were unarmed for good measure. When they recognized your face, they collectively sighed and lowered their weapons.

“Sorry Y/N. We’re just a little on edge right now,” Namjoon apologized as he returned his mace over his shoulder.

Giving him a timid, but understanding nod, you replied, “Noted. Um, so can someone finally explain to me what happened?”

It was Yoongi, still laying down to recover, who spoke up. “Some very bad people took Chim.”

“Yeah, I got that much, but… but why?”

Hobi filled in. “We have an idea as to why, but we aren’t completely sure.”

So that was absolutely not informative. Thanks.

“Okay? Well, what do we do now? We gotta get him back!”

“You will do nothing, except stay here and look after Yoongi. The rest of us will get him back.” Jin firmly said.

You tried to protest, but one look at Yoongi and your breakdown from earlier came rushing back to you. Taking a deep breath, you slowly nodded your consent as you exhaled. Then, you asked how they were going to get Jimin back.

Surprisingly, it was Jungkook who answered, “Just leave it to us. You do your job by looking after Yoongi and we’ll do ours.”

Again, that wasn’t very informative.

Namjoon backed up his words. “Honestly, it would just waste time explaining it all, so like Kook said, leave it to us. Trust us.”

“Alright,” you hesitantly agreed, “I trust you guys, so just… just please bring him back.”

“We aren’t sure where they took him yet, so we don’t know how long we’ll be gone,” Namjoon informed you as he glanced to Hobi. “Since Yoongi shouldn’t access magic right now, Hobi will cast a glamour over you two in case anyone is still lingering around.”

Hobi can do magic too!?

Seeing your bewildered expression as he came up to you, Hobi sent you a small smile. He raised his hands and they began to glow a blinding white while he muttered under his breath. As the light faded, he stepped back.

“Yoongi and I grew up together,” he explained softly. “I can tell you more about it later, but for now the short version is that he’s taught me a few things about harnessing Illain’s energy. I can’t manipulate it to his extent, but I can do some basic things like this.”

“Well, you better come back to tell me the long version.” You demanded through your shock before turning to the others. “You all better. With Jimin.”

They each gave you some sort of acknowledgement before running off into the trees. You watched their backs disappear one by one behind the foliage, except for one. Instead of leaving with the rest, Tae jogged up to you, gave you a hug, and whispered into your ear, “We’ll be okay, little scorja. And we’ll bring Chim back safe and sound, I promise.”

With that, he turned and sprinted away to catch up to the others.

---

You sighed, praying that Tae would be able to keep that promise. Looking at Yoongi resting underneath the blanket covering him, you had to let out a dry chuckle.

“Well, since you’re hurt, at least you have an actual excuse to lay around now.”

You were lucky he couldn’t use a lot of magic right then, because his face told you that comment might’ve pushed him to use it on you in a not so pleasant way.

“And why do you think I’m tired all the damn time?”

“I thought you were just a natural slug.”

“Partly true, but I’m exhausted from making those petals for you. They’re not big, but they require a lot of fucking energy to make.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah. ‘Oh.’ So, don’t call me out for wanting to res-”

He didn’t finish his sentence as his entire body perked to attention.

“What?”

He quickly and sternly hushed you, bringing a finger first to his lips, then to his ear. Telling you to listen.

And then you heard it. Or, you should say them. Voices. Ones you didn’t recognize and neither did Yoongi, it seemed.

Briefly, you panicked before remembering that Hobi had put a glamour over the two of you, so you were essentially invisible to the outside eye.

You sent Yoongi a questioning look and he gave you a serious one in return. He opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed when the voices grew loud and three armed strangers appeared around a tree.

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kaiju-z · 6 years ago

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Seon Adventures - Episode 6, “Welcome to the Jungle and That’s the Tea”

Another great episode for us, the group /o/

When we last left off with our heroes, the five of them, Kevin and Killer the War Horses, and Azam had left the ship upon which they shared many unforgettable memories (no matter how much Luck wants to forget some funny and TRAUMATIC TM stuffs).

As Azam ran off ahead of everyone, the party felt themselves envigorated, like they went up a tier in the ladder of adventuring or something (they leveled up) and were now left to their own devices.

Their travel from the docks to the city itself was short as they soon came to realize that Menum was a city of trees. Which is to say that those, who made this rainforest their home had repurposed a number of ridicilously large trees into houses and establishments of various necessities. (Think Return of the Jedi).

Belli and Luck were the most easily impressed, as they are basically the sheltered kids. The more they travel, the closer they get to the center, illuminated by what those of the arcane could gather were Dancing Lights. (I personally assume it’s bio-luminescence from the plantlife surrounding them).

Lead by Mournimar and Belli, the disaster siblings, the party go for a high rise tavern, climbing a rope ladder with much acrobatics in tow, being drawn to the sound of people chanting.

“CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!”

What they find up top is entertaining, to say the least. A new initiate, it appears (we later learn his name is Samson) is chugging down some sort of alcoholic drink, much to the amusement and pressure of his fellows. Some sailors from the ship, others local citizens and Forestheart Bretheren, it seems.

While Mournimar and Belli join in the chanting, Luck searches for information from the bartender, upon the party noticing Azam drinking away his woes. While ordering an ale from the wood elf barkeep, Luck asks some curious questions of the Traveling Gentlemen and learns that four of them passed through here (confirming what Mournimar had told him previously on the ship of their even number now). From what he gets, he now knows that they got on bad terms with the leader of the Forestheart Bretheren and promptly made their leave, after searching for some artifacts.

What lastly he learns of them is that their next destination was the Capitol, Crystalgate. So Luck will have a lot of backtracking to do, if he hopes to get to them soon. He later joins Azam and continues a conversation from the ship, post-prevented execution.

While this is going on, Samson takes a knee. Or. Well, a back as the drink was apparently too much for him. In the merryment, Mournimar orders himself the same thing and is warned that the stuff, Centaur Moonshine, is very heavy stuff. Much to Belli’s protests and failed attempts at preventing disaster, Mournimar starts chugging and Belli tries to get help from an exhasperated Amelia.

To her chagrin, once she arrives, Mournimar is just. Out of it. Burk is proud (Proud Burk count: 1). Amelia ends up carrying Mournimar to a backroom for a few minutes, where they also see a passed out Samson.

Amelia does not have a good time in Menum, sadly and she doesn’t get a wink of sleep either, even after getting a room to yeet Mournimar into. She takes a corner, after Luck takes a second bed. (MISUNDERSTANDINGS WERE HAD and now Luck feels awkward over the disappointed MOM ENERGY from Amelia).

While the others are nap-nap-napping, Belli sneaks out and in search for someone with two silver rings. She reaches an establishment, bounced on by a tattooed Goliath, with whom she has a conversation, hinting at her relation to Ficus. She needs to learn more about his whereabouts, she misses her brother.

Being let in, she soon finds someone the Goliath had directed her towards, a changeling woman around Belli’s age (IT WAS KIT FROM THE SLEEKCLAW ONE SHOT!) and the two have a heart to heart about Ficus, with whom Kit had worked in the past. Kit gives her directions on where she’d have to go next, if she truly wants to reunite with him and the two go their own way, once they are outside. (FRIENDSHIP GET). Belli safely makes it back to the tavern and gets her shut eye.

In the morning, awkwardness between the pointy boys and Amelia. Burk was sleeping the whole time out in the open and had a close to cordial conversation with an old lady that was more confused than freaked out by the Goblin Barbarian (Gorbarian TM).

Once most of everyone reconvenes, Luck buys the lot of them lunch (including for Burk, which I’ma say he ate in canon, unless Hayden says otherwise). The party get approached by Samson, who introduces himself as such. Samson Drascullion, druid of The Forestheart Bretheren.

The party begins to ask him some questions, following a failed attempt to extort him for money (Belli and Luck, the greedy kiddos tried to bs poor Samson so hard) regarding the cult and elaborate on their quest to take the cult out of commission, permanently. Mournimar learns that they worship all the allowed deities, which confuses him. Why aren’t they worshipping the forbidden ones instead?! Samson and Luck respectively have to point out something: Samson, that the cult believes their mission to kill everyone (PAINLESSLY, YOU GUYS) is just and therefore pray to the “good” gods; and Luck that it wouldn’t make sense for them to pray to Potencia, as she is the one you call upon for ruthless action, punishment and imprisonment.

The hooved tiefling has to step away from the table at this point, because he’s very upset. Turns out that this cult had no connection at all to the one he was after, personally. Belli approaches and the siblings share a moment in front of everyone else present, revealing things about their backstories.

Mournimar spills the beans about how he was raised n a cult, worshipping the Forbidden Deity “Potencia”. Goddess of ruthlessness, control and imprisonment His mother was a member, but his father faltered. The mother told on the father and the cult attacked. Mournimar doesn’t remember much after that, but he woke up, covered in blood, surrounded by bodies. His mission from that point on was hunting down all those, who worshipped Potencia and rid the world of them.

He tildn’t want to tell Belli, because he was affraid she’d stop being so close to him. Belli’s opinion of him, however, hasn’t changed as she still loves andcares for her tall pointy “bro”.

And she reveals to everyone of her family’s tragedy, how they were turned to stone in her absence, how she tried to pray for all the gods, including the forbidden ones, Potencia especially, for help, to save them.

But she got no answer.

Mournimar doesn’t think less of her.

The two hug it out. It’s heart warming.

Burk. Has heard. None of this as he was still on ground level when this transpired.

After everyone ate, the party and Samson made a stop at his leader’s base of operations, where Samson got an ok, in private, for the lot of them to have a swing at the Death Cult, with the caviat that the FHB would come a few hours later, should they not be done with this.

Taking the war horses with them, the six adventurers made their way to the stronghold of this cult. Luck even got to bond with Kevin, thanks to Mournimar’s approach : D It was nice and Luck is now just embarrassed. That and he was carried onto Kevin’s back by Belli.

Traveling through this dence jungle, they quickly realize how warm and humid it is in here, as they pass through shrubbery and trees, by animals and what not. Luck is bascally the only one, aside from Samson, who’s got this, since he comes from a warmer climate.

They succeed on their strealthing to the checkpoint of the stronghold and see it in it’s full height of 40 ft. With guards atop, none the wiser.

As they plan on their next move, Belli suggests and implements her infiltration, using invisibility and quickly comes to realize how screwed th party would have been if they just blindly walked in.

Aside of the guards on top, there were at least tw more towerds of archers and a table of four, with one just staring in the direction of the door itself.

Belli sneaks on forward and goes through an opening and down a coridor, on the right of which she passes a guard, just sitting, none the wiser. While she can’t find traps, she does find the courage to take the man out and she does so in a few good rounds of stabbing and blufing him into believing that the “Prophet” willed it to be so., with advantage, thanks to invisibility and then, the mask she had collected from the half-elf from where this whole adventure started.

After looting the body, something good, Belli gets to look through further doors and finds 5 men, 3 red robed, 2 black robed, in what was essentially a break room. She manages to trick thm into believing that the wind opened the door and quickly locks them inside, before proceeding and learning of underground activity, including more multi-colored robed cultists, two minotaur and their leader, handling some bizarre orb.

She quickly comes back to the party and things get wild in a hurry, once she explains the situation to them. (Also. Proud Burk count: 2)

Death-ites bodies begin to drop left and right (and to pieces), with Burk gaining the 6 person kill count, above the rest. The rest do great, especially Amelia and Belli, considering Amelia’s disadvantages on rolls, what with 1 point of exhaustion.

Mockery is quite viciously dealt by the bard and Mournimar fires their arrows like a baller, missing only rarely. Episode 6 marks Luck’s first kill in the campaign as he works to break in his new daggers , taking out one greenlit Redguard, before divestabbing a second, (with Amelia finishing that one off ultimately). This episode also Marks Luck’s first use of the Lucky feat, (1 of 3 uses for the day), in which he gets bad luck and misses his target with the crossbow.

Even Samson gets into the spirit of things and takes and kicks some ass, using his druidic abilities as needed.

By the end of the fight, all the grunts on level oen are killed in a variety of gruesome ways, but one, who escapes in the jungle, where he’ll either die to the wildlife or rethink his life choices.

Mournimar almost died. Seeing Belli getting attacked by archers, he took a jump from 40 ft to get close to Belli and took a lot of damage, which didn’t help when he got shot at by the archers.

Don’t even wanna think what would have happened if he had no potions to chug and healing help from Samson @ - @;;;

The bodies were then, of course, looted and the session ended with the party thinking of a gameplan to proceed. (and the 5 of us dorking around with the scribblign feature).

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sometimesfrancis · 6 years ago

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30 days of DID system asks: Day One

Describe your system.

My system is medium-sized. The core group is a group of six, three married couples. Nora to Francis, Gilda to Harvey, and Grace to Richard. Then there’s the whole internal family system, bearing in mind that all three couples have acted in a parenting (or sibling, in the case of Duella and Nora and Francis, because Duella is older) role to all the children in the internal family system, there are also littles of Nora and Francis, called Boom and Little Francis. Lord Ryan is their son, he’s ten. Gilda and Harvey have Duella, I’m not sure how old she is. but I do know she’s like a sister to me. Then Grace and Richard have Francis as an adopted son. Francis is 25 this fall. I’m not sure how old Grace and Gilda are, you know what they say about a lady and her age. Richard is eighteen-- I know it’s weird that Francis is Richard’s son even though Francis is older than Richard. To explain this, Richard imaginably fought in world war two, but for some reason he stayed eighteen. Harvey is the second oldest, at 125, and Hanora is 319. Harvey, as a changeling man, has some vampiric abilities, but using them costs him his life experience, and Hanora is part gnome. Among other racial qualities, she has very sensitive pointy ears, and songs can get stuck in her head for days at a time. When I keep hearing the tune (that is to me a schizophrenic hallucination,) we say that they’re hearing it “In the gnome caverns”. Luckily for me, this means that Hanora has her own body in a place she personally believes in, so she never argues with me about haircuts/hormones or clothes. She just dresses up her gnome doll however she wants to, and in return I’m not allowed to say that the gnome caverns are part of a “headspace.” They are a fairy tale, and personally Hanora believes in them.

While I don’t have many great historical memories from three-hundred years ago, Hanora has friends who have come to help me for no reason other than my being Hanora’s son, like Thomas Blue, who taught me everything he knew about becoming a lawyer, which permitted me to put the Joker on trial when he came to my apartment asking for help. Hanora has been married several times, first to Victor Fries, a long long time ago, when I was in high-school, then, when I was in college, she married an introject of my high school friend and crush Charlie O’Connel (I hope he sees this.) I turned 23. Harvey had been out of his coma for a year and five months. We met a man at Alchoholics Anonymous who invited us out for non-alchoholic beers and pool and pinball at a local bar. His name was Henry. One night, walking home from the beach, I introduce myself to him as the name “Harv,” and tell him I’m a multiple personality. He takes it all pretty well. We talk about getting married. I’ve used my vampiric abilitties since then so I don’t have the same timeline I had when I was dating Henry, but I wanted us to be gay lovers.

Back to my mother Hanora’s love life: She broke up with Henry when his schizophrenia got out of control. I was put away in a nursing home, where there was an implied familial relationship between Harvey, Duella, Francis, Richard, and Nora. Nora got married to Richard when we thought he was on his deathbed and she didn’t want him to die alone, then to a factive of Michael Fassbender (a marriage which lasted only one night before we had to admit Michael to the asylum,) then to a factive of Nick D’Agnostico from Gotham, who has his own alternate personality of Harvey. She was married to a factive of Aaron Ekhardt for one night, who similarly has a Harvey introject. Lucky for me my introject of Charlie is still in my life, and he’s always very respectful. Sometimes they roleplay a game-of-thrones era fantasy where Nora is a shy noble lady and Charlie is her knight. Her last marriage was to a factive of Brandon Flowers, who is also part gnome, but he looks like Owen from Torchwood for some reason. Sorry, the last man is a gnomish man, I know that for sure, and I don’t always understand gnome customs. Suffice to say, she calls him Brandon, but he looks like Owen. Finally, she’s been escorted home several times by John Barrowman (another factive obviously) who honors his role as army captain from the doctor who universe. And my mother’s introject is dating Nathan Filion, making him a father-in-law type figure. His factive helped set her up with Nick D’Agnostico.

Speaking of the Doctor Who universe, I once wrote a very immersive episode of doctor who fanfiction called “Adam and Fate,” and in it the eleventh Doctor gets admitted to the psyche ward I was in at the time, well he formed an introject, surprise surprise, and although he was dressed like the eleventh doctor he wanted me to call him Matt Smith. To help pass the hours I would daydream silents behind every door, and this was the same hospital stay where my Robert Downey Jr. Factive went out for a game of cards, he’s in love with Aaron, who was very akward with me at the time, because I once said “Joker’s Daughter!” and punched him in the balls.

This was around the time a very malevolent introject of my oldest brother appeared and tried to take Francis into his headspace permanently, I remember Francis throwing water over himself, one of his defence mechanisms, and I remember Aaron: He asked for an apology for my holding a hot zippo lighter to my face to feel the burning so we put some lotion on. Aaron and Robert are in love, and he’s on again off again with Maggie Gyllinhall , who acts like a big sister to me. At the time he was still convinced that I was brain-dead from my death at the end of the Dark Knight era in my life, which is actually from when I was eight years old and fell down a flight of stairs, but I recreated my trauma in a shared dream-space and it translated to getting thrown off a building. I was actually put to work in a daydream factory, and my subconcious submitted certain scenes to the Dark Knight. I don’t want to believe that completely but here’s another perspective I will ask for my father-in-law Victor to help me rather than Francis:

According to Victor I have a trauma that could be categorized, a blow to the back of the head, and I didn’t make the dark knight but I came from it because there’s an applicable cause of death involved.

Thank you Victor. Let’s get on with describing the system. In my job at the daydream factory that’s where I first met The Scars of the Architect, who takes on the appearance of the Joker from the Dark Knight. They plugged me in to a modern machine: A PC, and architectural drawings appeared on the screen. This is part of how the Joker got his scars. Then there’s another Joker, his full name is Jackson P. Fitzgerald and he looks like a Joker-colored version of Michael Jackson. The Joker isn’t the only black villain in my system, there’s also Dr. Ivy Green AKA Poison Ivy who looks like a young Whoopie Goldberg, but I never claim to be trans racial or anything like that the alters know that they are only an influence on me and I’m glad they help me include races other than white bread in my stories. But there is a lot of white bread coming right up:

THE ASYLUM

In my headspace I live in a version of Arkham Asylum that has gone through a period of mental health reform. My first alter from the asylum was Dr. Jonathan Crane Sr, and I saw him experimenting on his children out in the backwater countryside south of Gotham. This all happens in Gotham City Indiana, by the way, which is on the map where Gary, Indianapolis, and Michigan City are so they’re north of some swamplands which turn into farmlands and south of the lake the city is very much a part of my system and my first introduction to it was Johnathan Crane’s old shack out in the country where(TW BONDAGE) he strapped his kids down to a chair in the garage and injected them with fear toxin and made them watch horrific videos, these are the Benson siblings, Elizabeth, Crowley, and Johnathan Jr. They all have wide white eyes except for Jr, whose eyes are very soulful and dark, and they all have SI scars again except for Jr. who is the black sheep Crowley has cuts on his arms from a carpenter knife and he chews fear weed while Elizabeth smokes it in her cigarettes and she has burns on her hands.

I follow the action one night, old lady Benson is worried about Crowley always cutting his arms so she takes him to the asylum in their rusty pick-up truck, well he spooks in the parking lot he grabs a shotgun from the back of the truck and escapes into the woods. Where the ambulance driver says “Don’t worry, Batman will catch him.”

BATMAN

Yes, I have an alter of Batman in my system. He started as a foil for me to fist-fight in a bar he sliced up my face pretty good I wake up with blood on the pillow. I go through plots trying to bring Batman the psychiatric help he needs, enacting a similar plot on my best friend Bruce Wayne, who is like Batman by day, similarly rageful, similar sizes and face shapes too but Batman is obviously funded by the military and Bruce isn’t smart enough to sneak out every night dressed in black leather without getting caught by his butler, but these are my two friends Batman and Bruce. I’ll talk about Batman first, I get a gang together one of these days I put some plastic explosives in an elevator shaft and I threaten to take the building down if Batman doesn’t go in for treatment and Jim Gordon intercedes saying we both need help well that bastard Batman jumps off the roof and vanishes into the night, but I go down the driveway to Arkham Asylum in Jim Gordon’s car he drops me off at the gate he says it’s up to me so I throw my coin into the woods and I’m walking one way or the other when an ambulance stops me and the driver manhandles me I punch him until he stops moving the Joker climbs out of the back and says “So you pulled off your first plot. What do you want the newspapers to call you?” And the scarred side of my face smiles and says “Two-Face.” I’m thinking Acid-Face or Coin-Voice but this is what the scarred side of my face says to the Joker and the Joker says “Two-Face it is!” and he climbs in the driver’s seat and he crashes the ambulance into the gates with the driver unconscious behind the wheel and meanwhile in the back I find my friend Bruce and he says “CALL ME BATMAN” so great Bruce Wayne thinks he’s Batman that’ll be the day.

RICHARD

I’m in the asylum when I realize I have a brother, adopted by the same old lady, Gertrude Dent. His name is Richard and he’s vegetative from the lobotomies. This is when the story really starts to cook. We get kidnapped from our cells one night by Harleen Qunzell posing as a nurse she takes us away to the parklands surrounding the asylum and says we’re in Poison Ivy’s Garden now. I’m Harvey AKA Lillian Valley, my brother’s are Francis aka Hawthorne, Creeping Charlie AKA Morning Glory, Poison Oak, and Patrick Isley we’re all a tribe out there in the park I rarely get into trouble but I get into trouble rarely I’m given a motel room to sleep in after a certain therapeutic period among the plants. Arkham Outpatient Treatment: Lodgings Included.

This next memory is from Francis, we do share some memories. I overheard a lady bullying her teddy bear in the bed next to mine back when I was in the nursing home and someone woke up he said “I’ll steal that bear!” and Francis said “Calm Down, Harv.” He’s easy to recognize with the scars from stress on his face and then a Harvey woke up and said “What did he say just now?” And Francis says wow youre keeping him on a pretty tight leash well it wasn’t long after that he woke up in one of poison ivy’s green-houses and she said something like “What are you doing coming back to life?” And he turned out to be called Richard. Richard Richardson is the name he wrote on the ARkham Asylum intake forms.

HARLEEN

So Harleen comes into my room and asks if I’d like to be part of an experiment like I said kidnapped so they put a mitten on my burned hand and moss in my head to regrow the brain matter that got damaged in my massive back of the head concussion and the subsequent ECT that happened only in Gotham City which is like we all know imaginary but so was the moss and I’m a better man for it and as I came round to reality I realized I had a roommate they had put me with this other man Dent-- Richard Dent, criminal turned whore, WWII veteran and semi-immortal like me, I don’t know the details of his age but he’s one of Jupiter's sons and for all the time he’s spent in prison he’s only eighteen years old to this day. Sorry twenty-two he aged up a bit earlier this year when he took his wife Grace home their anniversary is July 25th I’d better remember that

So Poison Ivy really cleaned up the asylum with Harleen working under her and Johnathan Crane doing anything to get his license restored they made a pretty ship shape asylum the doors are unlocked the walls are white and the uniforms are grey. I remember Harleen’s first experiment with me she said there was a fifty-fifty chance I would revert back to my old personality and she gave me my coin back and I threw it in a lake. This is a recurring theme with me the coin represents my reliance on the god Janus to make decisions and with every major step toward rehabilitation I have to leave the coin behind so I started over in jail with Jonathan Crane observing me I told him I was a changeling and if I didn’t get twice as much food then my twin brother would starve so he gave me double portions and I’ve always been indebted to the man.

#harvey dent #batman #actuallydid #actuallymultiple #actuallyschizophrenic #actually did #actuallydissociative #actually multiple #did #plural #actuallyplural #plurality

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erinarachma · 6 years ago

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Introduction: Allyn Neros Idyia

My name is Allyn, and I was the second daughter of Tethynia’s deceased King Delshad.I’d been lived in the castle since I was born until The War comes. My late father fighting until his life’s ended in his throne, and my mother ran away with me and my older sister to the secret tunnel which only five of us (including our royal butler) who knows the path was.

But eventually, the enemy soldiers knew where we were heading and blocked us to the outer world. My mother trying to protect us, but eventually failed and died because of a shot at the head. I couldn’t contain the rage inside my mind, distressed out and ended up unconscious in my butler’s arms.

I don’t know what happened next, but after that, I was woken up on the couch with a slight headache. I met an old, wise grandpa with her daughter in her 20’s that day, declared that he was an acquaintance of mine. He tried to talk to me whether I remembered anything this past week, but I shook my head negatively. Nothing comes up in my mind like I’ve been brainwashed. I don’t know where I was from, or who my parents and my siblings were, or anything I’d been doing these past years, even my own name. He, whose name is Halberick, was the one who gave me Shea as a surname.

I spent the rest of my childhood days in the Jordisk town. I worked part-time as a courier, carrying stuff for people, and after that playing hide-and-seek between wood boxes full of vegetables and fruit and shadowed by dark tunnels every day. Jordisk town was not a beautiful city, but the people in it are so kind and humble, always helping each other, even though we were lack of supply in food and clothes. We dressed in used clothes, like prisoners. We never see a bright sun with our own eyes. Because, we always here, in the underground, where lights of sun crept between holes up there. And then, eight years had passed.

In this city, I met my best friends. Mostly my friends were boys; because I acted like a tough girl every time I meet people. I have two best buddies. Chariot is one year older than me; he had a dirty blond hair (he said it looks like hay, but I even don’t know what hay is!), cheerful smile, bright blue eyes, and slightly tanned skin. My height compared to him is about the level of his pointy nose, so probably I’m shorter than him. He often got out from the Jordisk to Tragflache city where the nobles and their servants lived, working to help himself to get some money. Every time he comes back, he always brought something unique like bubblegum or plants like rose and tulip. He knows some secrets. But every time I asked him, he just said, “You’re not old enough for this, young lady,” and ruffled my hair. I hate it when my curiosity piled up higher and higher, but nobody would answer my questions for it.

Next is my neighbour Roya, slightly older about five to six months than Chariot, so he’s the oldest between three of us. Compared to Char which always talkative and bright, Roya loved to play with machines and create new inventions every week. He’s kind, humble, always smile even when he’s in a tough situation, and his presence sometimes calms me down. He was always with me if I want to, almost like a big bro for me. He has dark brown eyes, slightly reddish brown hair, and his skin maybe not as tan as Chariot, but his skin around his eyes is paler than other skin’s area because he often wears his favourite goggles which protecting him from sparks of fire while burning metals. On weekend, he and Chariot would go somewhere to search some scraps and some unused machine for his inventions. But they never tell me anything where they were going.

We lived like this every single day. Wake up, cleaned ourselves, breakfast, go to work (as for me delivering stuffs from store to store, person to person) until the big clock in Town Center turned 12, have a hearty lunch (just biscuits and dried berries), continue our works until evening then come back home for dinner, and then sleep. Just like that. And I’m bored.

What could possibly be at the upper side?

(developed since 25/8/2014)

#my posts #my fiction projects #character: allyn #fiction #fantasy #royalfalls

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rosecorcoranwrites · 6 years ago

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Tale of a White Rabbit

Originally published on www.rosecorcoranwrites.com

“Bostwick,” Emmaline began tentatively, “do you think, maybe, you could take me out of your pocket?”

“Why?”

“Well, It's just… a little too much jostling for my tastes.”

In reality, the repeated swaying and bumping that came with riding in the magician's side coat pocket had given her a combination of nausea and headache, but she had been raised to put things delicately, and moreover, the magician had done enough complaining for both of them that day.

“You want me to carry you again?” Bostwick asked in a resigned tone.

“I can try hopping beside you for a while.”

“Okay.” He gently pulled her out of his pocket, still a little unsure of how exactly to hold a rabbit that was actually a person, and set her on the rocky path beside him. “But try to keep up.”

They set off again up the trail, with dark clouds and looming peaks above and reddish black dirt below. Emmaline could tell that Bostwick had slowed down to allow her to keep pace with him. She was very small, even for a rabbit, and her gait, if that's what her little hops could be called, felt like a completely inadequate way to climb the mountain path. Still, she wanted to practice using her new rabbit feet, to get used to them… just not too used to them.

She looked back down the six switchbacks they had already climbed to try and see the carriage that had taken them across the Styxian Wastes, but they had already departed back toward the Empire, disappearing among the red earth and piles of garbage that they had driven through that morning. Emmaline remembered looking over an old, yellowing map of Ataxia that Mr. Charles had unearthed before they set out on their journey. The Rodomontade Mountains had looked so small and unimposing when they were just a series of small, inked-in points, but as she and Bostwick turned onto the seventh switchback, she thought they might never make it to the top.

“It's too bad we have to go by foot now,” Emmaline remarked offhandedly.

“It's not like the carriage could come up this path. It's too narrow.”

“I meant it's too bad we couldn't have taken a horse.”

“I can't ride.”

Emmaline opened her mouth to say something else, but couldn't quite think of what to say to Bostwick's remark. She had been trying to make conversation, since they had been traveling in silence for over an hour, but the magician's tone was that of someone defending himself, as if she were blaming him for his lack of horse-riding ability.

“Um, so, how far do you think we'll have to go before we reach Ramshackle?”

“The map showed a town somewhere in the mountains, but I would think it would have to be further in than this. Even goblins wouldn't build right on the slope of…”

They had just turned around a large boulder and saw that Bostwick had underestimated goblins' lack of constructional discretion. The path split in two; one way led further up the mountains, and one led to a small town that was built right on and into the slope of the mountain. The brick buildings had a sooty, factory look to them, and smoke escaped from dozens of pipes and chimneys that slithered and jutted from each structure.

“It looks like we're here,” Emmaline said cheerfully.

“And not a moment too soon,” the magician said, watching as white flecks of snow started to drift down and mingle with the soot in the air.

Emmaline hopped back into Bostwick's arms—which were much warmer than the chilly ground—and pointed her paw toward rusty metal sign that read Comewright Inn.

“That looks like a good—”

Bostwick put a hand over her head and muttered a soft shh. A crowd of tall, wooly goblins had bustled onto the street and were conversing loudly, but Emmaline remained silent until they passed. She couldn't let anyone know that she could talk. That was of the utmost importance.

Bostwick edged around the goblins, several of whom cast a curious glance at his top-hatted head, and made his way into the Comewright Inn. The interior was pleasantly warm and tastefully decorated, not all that different from a human inn, save for the innkeeper behind the reception desk. He was a pointy-nosed fellow with a bowl haircut and a covering of short beige fur on the rest of his face. He was actually very cute for a goblin, Emmaline thought, in a ferrety sort of way.

“Whooo!” he said as Bostwick approached the counter. “You're an odd-looking one. Styxian, eh? I have a second-cousin down in Styx.”

“I'm human.”

“Oh! We don't get many humans through here…” He trailed off, looked up at Bostwick's hat, and made an impressed sort of noise. “A magician, eh? What are you doing in Bombast of all places?”

“Uh…”

Emmaline nudged him with her nose. They'd been over what they would tell people, but Bostwick seemed to have forgotten. Emmaline couldn't blame him; this was the first goblin he'd ever spoken to.

“I'm… I'm doing research. For the Academy,” he finally said.

The goblin nodded, then seemed to have nothing else to say. Bostwick switched Emmaline to his other arm, nervously petting her ears back. She didn't know whether to object to this taking of liberties or not. It actually felt kind of nice, like having someone brush her hair.

“You'll be wanting a room then?” the goblin asked, breaking the awkward silence.

Bostwick gave a sharp jerk of his head that was probably supposed to be a nod, and the goblin led them up a narrow flight of wooden stairs and down a door-lined hallway. He unlocked one of the doors and held it open for Bostwick to look in. Their room was just that: a six by ten space with four walls, a window, and no furniture.

“Why…?”

“You asked for a room, didn't you?”

“I assumed that would include a bed… and maybe a bathroom, or at least a tub.”

“Bed and bath cost extra, and there aren't any vacancies for such rooms at the moment.”

“Well, could we—could I reserve a room like that for tomorrow night?”

“I'll see what I can do,” said the goblin, and left.

“Well, at least it has a window,” Emmaline said, hopping from Bostwick's arms as he knelt down.

“Great.” He pulled off his coat and dropped it petulantly on the floor. With a deep and resentful sigh, he grabbed his top hat off his head and pulled several blankets out of it, followed by a squashy pillow.

“I figured we’d have to camp out at some point,” he said, spreading the bedding out on the floor, “I just didn't think it would be while staying in an inn.”

“Yeah… Well, you know goblins.”

“No, nor do I have any desire to.”

Emmaline was tempted to retort that that was exactly what he was going to have to do, but held her tongue. Bostwick didn't have to be here, in Ataxia, sleeping on the floor. He was here for her sake, though she still wondered why. Why had he volunteered to come?

Maybe now is the time to ask him, she thought, but noticed that he had unwound his long scarf from his neck and was arranging it rather meticulously on the floor beside his make-shift bed.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I thought maybe you'd want your own bed. It's more of a nest, I guess, but you can probably fix it if it's…”

She hopped over to what indeed looked like a woolen nest. It was a little lumpy, she noticed as she climbed into it, but still fairly comfortable. She pulled the loose end of the scarf over herself like a blanket and looked up at Bostwick, who seemed to be bracing himself for a rebuke.

“Thank you, Bostwick. It's nice and warm.”

“Good.”

With that, he turned down the gas lamp on the wall, got into his own bed—carefully placing his top hat beside his pillow—and shut his eyes.

Emmaline could still see perfectly well, improved night vision being one of the only perks of being a rabbit, and looked around their room, letting her eyes and her mind wander. Both eventually settled on Bostwick, who for once looked almost happy. It was a rare sight. He had been her family's court magician for over a month, but she couldn't actually remember seeing him smile. Some people were just like that, her oldest sister had said when Emmaline asked about it. Some people were just serious. Of course, Bostwick skipped right over serious and decided to go straight for morose, her youngest brother had added.

Emmaline sniffed, hoping Bostwick was sleeping and didn't hear her. She had always been surrounded by people—her parents, five sisters, six brothers, and of course Mr. Charles, the Camellian Tea Inspector who acted as her personal tutor—but now she was all alone, in the dark, with no one but Bostwick for company. They had left the Empire just this morning, and she already wanted to go home. Had it really been only last week when they decided to go on this journey?

It had all been decided so quickly. Bostwick had barged into the meeting that Mr. Charles, her parents, and several foreign clients were having about whether or not to add extra bergamot to the new batches Earl Grey, (a measure that Mr. Charles vehemently railed against). All in attendance stared in shock as Bostwick, holding a pile of Emmaline's clothing and a small, shivering white rabbit, explained the situation as well as he could. He had found her in the garden. She—Emmaline—the rabbit. Yes, the rabbit was Emmaline. And at that point her mother seized her from Bostwick's arms, her father canceled the meeting, and the rest of the family was called in to sit around the large, teapot-covered table where the Camellian royal family typically conducted business.

Emmaline huddled against her mother's chest and explained what had happened properly. There had been a goblin in the garden. He had snapped his fingers, and then… The whole situation still felt surreal to her, but the shock and terror on her siblings faces brought it all home. She had been cursed, turned into a rabbit. It had really happened.

“Well…” Her oldest brother had said. “Well… should we go out looking for that goblin?”

“And get someone else cursed?” her father said. “Of course, our guards might have a chance if they're on the offensive. That cowardly little dastard might not fare as easily against a soldier as he does sneaking up on a thirteen year old girl.”

“Probably not,” Mr. Charles said. He and Bostwick—who was standing silently against one wall—had been asked to stay. “If he's not long gone anyway, he would prove to be nothing but trouble for anyone who encountered him. From what Emmaline described, he must be an imp, and imps aren't known for their repentant behavior.”

“Then… then what can we do? Surely human magic can't break a curse like this.”

“No.” Mr. Charles poured himself a cup of tea, sipped it for a moment, thinking, then said, “But goblin magic might be able to. Mind you, the only sure-fire way to break the curse would be for that imp or someone from his family to reverse it, but like I said, you'd have a fine time convincing them. Your best bet would be to find some other way of turning Emmaline permanently human again. There are a number of magical items I've heard of: lamps containing genies, wishing stones, magic wands. Ataxia has many such items, but it won't be easy finding them, and it will be even more difficult obtaining what you've found.”

As this statement settled over them, Mr. Charles began pouring tea for everyone in attendance. They passed the cups around the table, with one for Bostwick, but no one but Mr. Charles actually drank anything.

“So I'll have to go to Ataxia,” Emmaline finally said.

“It looks like it,” her mother said, hugging her close. “But you won't have to go alone. Surely… surely someone…”

They looked around the table. Though Camellia was the smallest of the countries in the Empire, everyone in the family had important jobs to do. Emmaline's parents and her two eldest siblings ran the affairs of state within the country itself, while her second and third oldest sisters and her twin brothers (who were the second oldest brothers) oversaw the many tea plantations that covered the hills of Camellia and provided the country's wealth and stability. The rest of her siblings acted as ambassadors to the countries around them, some traveling as far abroad as the Nopali Desert in the South or the Opal Islands in the East. Even now, three of her siblings were out somewhere in the Empire, negotiating tea deals with other countries, and would not find out that their youngest sister had been cursed into a rabbit until she had already left for the goblin-run continent of Ataxia in the north. They couldn't spare anyone for a quest like that.

“I recommend against a large troop of guards,” said Mr. Charles. “Or a group of humans of any kind. It would attract far too much attention. Attention invites curiosity, and curiosity… Well, it might not be a very good idea to let anyone know you're a princess.”

“True,” her youngest brother said. “They're liable to kidnap you for ransom.”

“But I'll need some sort of… bodyguard,” Emmaline said, unsure if that was the right word. Companion? Comrade? Someone to saddle the burden of journeying through unknown territory with her, while fending off any hostile goblin activity they might encounter along the way. “Maybe… maybe a magician could come with me. They expelled the goblins from the Empire in the first place, so surely…

“I can't see any goblins giving a magician too much trouble, at least,” Mr. Charles agreed. “Magicians have been known to journey into Ataxia to conduct research for the Academy from time to time. That might actually prove to be a good cover story. You can go disguised as the rabbit they use for hat tricks.”

After a moment of thinking it over, Emmaline's father said, “Very well. If that's decided, we'll need to contact the Academy as soon as possible to find a suitable—”

“I'll go,” Bostwick said, stepping out from the wall.

Everyone in the room stared at him, some open-mouthed. Though he was the most logical choice, none of them had even considered asking him, for they all assumed that he would refuse to go, or that he might even leave for another country if they pressed the matter; with his skill, he could have his pick of any royal court in the Empire. Yet he had said it. The disagreeable and standoffish Bostwick von Dogsbody, who prided his prestigious position as court magician to one of the Empire's royal families, and who had worked very hard in school to get there, was volunteering to accompany the last princess in line for the Camellia throne through an unwelcoming continent full of humanity's ancient enemies, on a quest for something that might not even exist. It was the second most shocking thing that had happened that day.

“A-all right,” Emmaline squeaked out. “Bostwick and I will go. We'll go to Ataxia.”

A week later, they took the train from Camellia to Borderton, a town just to the south of Styx, where they hired a carriage company to take them as far into Ataxia as possible, which proved to be a straight, one day ride through the Wastes of Styx to the border of a country called Bombast, where they would start their search for a cure.

“Why 'permanently',” Bostwick asked, as Emmaline reminded him of Mr. Charles specifications for what they might be looking for before they set out from their spartan Bombastic lodgings the next day.

“I certainly don't want to change back and forth into a rabbit at random times.”

“Obviously. I meant why bother stating that. Why wouldn't anything we find change you back permanently?”

“Well… I don't know. Maybe Mr. Charles meant beware of quick fixes. There are probably potions that only let you stay human when you've drunk a certain dose or spells that wear off after a while.”

“That would still be better than nothing.” Bostwick donned his coat and picked Emmaline up in his arms once more.

“Try asking the innkeeper first,” Emmaline said. “See if he knows about any magical items.”

Bostwick held his finger to his lips and Emmaline ducked her head into his hand. She was going to have to get used to pretending to be a dumb animal.

“So…” Bostwick began, leaning on the counter of the reception desk. “I'm researching curses.”

“Ooh, I'm not sure I would want to teach humans how to do those,” the innkeeper said.

“I don't want to cast them, I want to lift them… or know how to lift them… for research purposes.”

“Hmm. Well, I don't think you'll find anyone with curse knowledge around here. Not many Bombastic goblins can cast curses.”

“I thought all goblins could.”

“No, no, no. Some goblins can set things on fire, or conjure large blades of metal from nowhere, but that 's hardly what you might call a curse, now is it. Imps and some Stuffian goblins are quite adept at curses, and I suppose certain royal families have acquired the ability over the years. I myself can only imbue ink with magic in such a way as to make it change color, but that's my lot in life, I suppose.”

“Wait, you mean that different kinds of goblins have different sorts of magic?”

“You really do need to do your research. That's basic knowledge.”

“I'd just assumed that since humans can do all kinds of spells…”

“Yeah, I'd heard that, too, but you all need to practice magic, right? Imagine that. Practicing magic like a child practicing tying their shoes.”

“It's a little more complicated than that,” Bostwick began, but Emmaline pawed at his sleeve. They were getting off track, and though Bostwick might find the conversation interesting, it didn't seem to be leading them any closer to an idea of how to break her curse.

“Anyway,” the magician said, picking her up in one hand and pulling her away from his sleeve, “I have to get going. There wouldn't be any magical items nearby, or…”

“Hmm, well, there's the mayor's house. I heard his wife is an avid collector of magical items from near and far. That would be your best bet, as far as Ramshackle is concerned.”

Bostwick made his way out the door and up the street. It was not hard to find their way around, as the town had been built vertically up the hillside, with a single street zig-zagging back and forth through it. The mayor's house, the innkeeper had explained, was of course built at the very highest point in town because “being high up is better than being low down”, which was apparently some sort of goblin proverb.

Though belonging to the mayor, the house was just as blackened as the rest of the town, which sent its smoke up to curl around the mayor's walls. Bostwick covered his mouth with his scarf and wrapped Emmaline's head in the other end, which actually made it harder to breath, but she was so muffled that she could hardly say so. Bostwick knocked, and a short, round, thoroughly cow-like goblin opened the door.

“Oh, my! A Styxian! What a surprise! Come in, come in!”

“Actually I'm a human.” Bostwick said, stepping in and removing the scarf from Emmaline's face. “Do Styxians look human? That's the second time I've been mistaken for one.”

“Oh, you're the spitting image. But a human, dear dear, I can't think of the last time one came through here. Must have been seventy years ago. I was just a girl.”

The goblin certainly didn't look or sound older than seventy, but then again, Emmaline thought, they might age differently than humans, or live longer.

“Right… Anyway, I'm doing research for Melieh's Academy of Magic, and I was told the mayor's wife had a collection of magical items.”

“Ooh, indeed I do, dear. I never knew they were world famous, but I suppose it is quite a large collection…” She was clearly flattered that even a human had heard of her, and waved Bostwick down the hall into a room that was filled, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with glass cases holding velvet covered shelves, upon which sat thousands of small, gleaming silver and gold objects.

Bostwick and Emmaline gaped at the sheer number of objects, then approached one of the cases to see what exactly they were.

“Thimbles?” Bostwick asked.

“Thimbles!” The bovine goblin said. “Largest collection this side of Pandemonium.”

“And they are magic thimbles, right?”

“Oh, of course, dear. When you wear these thimbles, not only will you never prick your finger, you'll also be able to thread any needle, no matter how small the eye or how large the thread.”

“In that case…” Bostwick said, making to leave, but Emmaline scrambled against his chest, trying to climb up to whisper in his ear. He opted to place her on his shoulder instead and leaned toward one of the cases on the premise of examining the thimbles.

“What?” he whispered from the corner of his mouth.

“You can't just leave, Bostwick. That's rude!”

“There's no point in staying.”

“Just make small talk. See if she knows about any other magical artifacts around town. She is the mayor's wife after all.”

“ 'Other magical artifacts' implies that these are also magical artifacts…” he muttered,” which I hardly think—”

“Who are you talking too, dear?” the goblin asked.

“Oh, um, just my rabbit.”

Emmaline scratched him hard on the neck, trying to remind him to remember their cover story, and he whipped her down off his shoulder.

“I often talk to dumb animals,” he said, glaring at her and rubbing his neck with his other hand. “It's just a habit some of us magicians get into.”

So he hadn't forgotten… Well, how was she to know? Still, he didn't have to squeeze her so hard. She wiggled around into a more comfortable position while Bostwick started a conversation about whether or not all the thimbles did the same thing.

“Oh, yes, it's a common enchantment, really.”

“And do you use all of them? Or… any of them?”

“No, no, don't be silly.” She waved a hoof-like hand with stubby, hard looking fingers on it. “I collect them because they have little pictures on them.”

“Hmm. And none of them have any curses on them, right?”

“Oh, no… at least, I don't think so. Hmm, I wonder, though…”

“If, hypothetically, they did, how might you go about removing it?”

The bovine goblin seemed exceedingly disturbed by this line of inquiry, and Emmaline looked pleadingly up at Bostwick. He was being too obvious.

“I only ask because I have a cursed… spoon.”

“A cursed spoon? Oh dear, whatever does it do?”

“It… Well, it turns into a fork whenever I put it into soup.”

“You poor thing!” the goblin said with sympathy. “Oh, but… why not just use a different spoon?”

“It's a good spoon… aside from its being cursed,” he said, clearly at his limit for hastily cobbled-together explanations.

The goblin brought her hoof-hand thoughtfully to her chin, contemplating Bostwick's predicament for a moment, then clapped her hands with a slight clicking sound.

“I know! There's a shop at the bottom of town that might have just what you're looking for. Just take the road all the way downhill and it will be the last shop on the right. You can't miss it!”

Bostwick thanked the goblin and followed her back down the hall, only to stop in mid-step on his way out the door.

“What was it you said they sold there?”

“All kinds of kitchen utensils. Everything under the sun. You're bound to find a nice new spoon there.”

“Ah. Right.” With that, he continued out as the goblin waved cheerily after him.

“How did you know she had spoons in mind rather than curses?” Emmaline asked once they were out of earshot.

“I think having Clarence as a roommate gave me a sixth sense for detecting inanity about to happen. Not that it helped much. With nothing else to go on, we might as well make our way down through the town and see if there's anyone who has the vaguest idea about curses. Unless you have a better idea.”

Emmaline didn't, so they proceeded through town, talking to any goblin who met their eye and visiting every shop that was open. Although Emmaline was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the goblins were friendly, if not as chipper as the mayor's wife, she also noticed some downright angry stares from some of the goblins they walked past, and one or two huffed away before Bostwick could ask them anything. Bostwick's mood went downhill with every passing encounter, and she could tell that the complete lack of information on curses was getting to him. For once, she shared his depressed mood. Not being able to ask her own questions was frustrating enough, but Bostwick also kept switching her from hand to hand, or up to his shoulder, or back into his pocket. Even now, as they made their way back to the inn with nothing to show for a whole day of inquiries but a supply of hopefully-edible goblin food, he wedged her into the crook of his elbow while trying to get a better hold of the sack of foodstuffs they'd purchased.

“Ow! Be more careful, Bostwick!”

“Sorry.”

“That's twice today you've squeezed me. Rabbits are a lot more fragile than humans.”

“Sorry,” he repeated, though he didn't sound like it this time, “but you're sort of inconvenient, you know?”

“Tactful as always,” she muttered, hopping to the ground. In a way, he was right—this entire situation was far from convenient—but she was just as dirty and tired and discouraged as he was. It wasn't her fault she was difficult to carry; she didn't want to have to be carried at all.

As they entered the inn, Bostwick scooped her back up—carefully, she noticed—and started up the stairs, only to be stopped by the innkeeper, who delivered the first good news of the day.

“Ah, Human, I was waiting for you to show up. There's a bed and bath vacancy open if you still want it. You certainly look sooty enough to warrant it, at least.”

He led the way to their new room, which was the exact same size as the last one, only with a bed and bathtub squeezed inside, only inches apart from each other.

“Why…?” Bostwick began.

“You asked for a bed and a bath, right?”

“Please tell me the tub is at least hooked up to the plumbing system.”

“Of course it is. What kind of lunatics do you think we are?” the goblin said with a chuckle, leaving them to their room.

Bostwick once again dropped his coat to the floor; a small cloud of black dust flew up from it. Ramshackle really was filthy, Emmaline thought, examining her own gray paws. She couldn't wait for a proper bath, but she was also bothered by the large, ground floor window above the tub.

“It doesn't have much privacy, does it?”

“That shouldn't be a problem.”

With a swipe of his hand, Bostwick conjured a long, purple curtain in mid air right in front of the window, then conjured two more to block the view of the tub from the rest of the room.

“Whoa…” Emmaline said.

“What, that?” he glanced up at his handiwork as he removed his shoes and socks. “It's just conjuration and levitation. You've seen me do those spells before.”

“Yes, but never with anything so large, and conjuring all three at once…”

Bostwick shrugged, as if pulling objects from nowhere and defying the laws of gravity were nothing special, though Emmaline knew that even for a magician, what he just did was no easy feat.

Bostwick climbed onto the bed and pulled one of the curtains aside. He turned the hot water faucet on full blast, with the hopeful and expectant look of one who had not had a proper bath for days, but then jumped back as if something had suddenly occurred to him. Emmaline had thought of it already. They both stared at the tub, with a glance or two at each other.

Of course it was fine for Bostwick, Emmaline thought. He could take a bath while she did something else—study the map of Ataxia, perhaps—but how was she supposed to bathe? Rabbits might be able to swim, but she couldn't, and she didn't know how slippery her paws and claws would be on the porcelain, even if the tub wasn't filled all the way. Before they had left Camellia, her second oldest sister had helped her take a bath in the sink, but now? What if Bostwick had to help her? She was mortified at the thought; even if she was a rabbit, she was still a girl!

“Ah,” Bostwick said, snatching his top hat off of his head. “This might work.”

He pulled a long saw out of the hat—Emmaline had heard of tricks where people were cut in half, but never seen one—grabbed the blade in one hand, gave the whole thing a wobble, and turned it into a cooking pot.

“Clarence taught me that one. He took a lot of classes in the door-to-door magician track, where you're expected to travel and make do for yourself in the wilderness. I thought they were pretty useful spells, even if I never thought I'd actually end up needing them,” he finished bitterly.

Emmaline felt a hollow, guilty feeling in her stomach. She was no expert on magic, but she knew that court magicians studied hard to be able to perform the sort of spells Bostwick did, and here he was, for all intents and purposes a traveling, door-to-door magician, a job usually reserved for those whose magic was sub-par at best. He had stood by her, no matter how “inconvenient” her situation was.

Now, he had rolled up his sleeves and was filling the pot with water, then clambered off the bed and placed the pot on the floor. Conjuring a knife, he cut a sliver from a large bar of soap.

“It looks like there's only one set of towels, but you can use this washcloth,” he said, draping the cloth over the handle of the pot, with the little piece of soap on top of it.

Emmaline hopped over to what had become a perfect, rabbit-sized bath tub, in awe of Bostwick's ingenuity.

“Could you, um, help me into it?” she asked. Bostwick obliged, plopping her into the steamy water that half filled the pot. She reached for the soap, but ended up knocking it to the floor; Bostwick picked it up for her and placed it in her paws.

“You're on your own from there,” he said, and disappeared behind the curtains of the bathtub.

They left town early the next day and took the path further up the mountain, where it eventually leveled out and meandered between two slopes. The sky above was still cloudy and seemed to be threatening snow, but the innkeeper said there would be a settlement about a day’s walk away that they could get to before the weather became too bad. Bostwick had made a comment about the high likelihood of them catching their death in a blizzard instead, but took the innkeeper's advice to head out anyway. Though the road was covered in sharp pebbles and bits of briars, Emmaline hopped along beside Bostwick. She wanted to be as little of a burden as possible, which seemed like a good idea for the first hour or so of walking, until she cried out in pain.

“What's wrong?”

“I stepped on a thorn or something.”

Without asking, Bostwick picked her up and examined her front paw, from which protruded a small but very thick and spiky black thorn.

“It must have been from one of these bushes. Can you pull it out?”

He extracted it easily, and Emmaline jumped down, wincing as she hit the ground, then hopped a few paces.

“You're limping,” Bostwick said.

“Oh, well, it just hurts a little.”

“Here.” He whisked her up once more and started walking again.

“Sorry about this,” she mumbled.

“What?”

“You always having to carry me around. I know it's probably annoying…”

“It's not your fault. At least now I can walk at a decent pace.”

Even when he's being conciliatory, he somehow manages to complain, Emmaline thought. Of course, he had been the same way in Camellia, but now, spending twenty-four hours a day with him, it was almost too much. Still, at least she wasn't alone on her journey…

“Bostwick, do you mind if I ask you something… personal.”

He looked down sideways at her, then said, “Suuure.”

“Why did you volunteer to come with me?”

“Why?”

“You know we could have asked another magician.”

“You could have, but none of them would have agreed to come. Magicians are generally pretty snooty. You couldn't expect someone who's used to the life of a stage or court magician to want to wander around the boonies with a rabbit.”

Anyone else might have added “no offense”, Emmaline thought, but instead said, “But surely a door-to-door magician would have jumped at the chance to travel like this.”

“Not through Ataxia they wouldn't—well, maybe Clarence would, but he's still in school—and anyway, when push comes to shove, you're going to need someone more skilled than a door-to-door magician.”

“So that's why you volunteered? You knew you had what it took to be able to protect me, and you were willing to give up the life of a court magician to do it.”

She was impressed. Bostwick might not look it, or act like it, or say anything to even hint at it, but he was a genuinely good person. Yet here he was, frowning again as usual.

“I thought I could protect you, if need be, but I'm starting to have my doubts about whether or not human magic really is a match against goblins. You heard what that innkeeper said about them conjuring blades and fire, and if a goblin could curse you just by snapping his fingers…”

“But magicians drove them out of the Empire.”

“That may be so, but none of the spells I know could do that. I can put on an entertaining show, but that's pretty much it.”

“I don't think so. Your spells have already been really useful. Like how you put all our supplies in your hat, or turning a saw into a pot… It's more than I can do, like this at least.”

“There's not much you could do as a human, either, to be honest.”

Bostwick had never struck her as the most tactful person, but this was going too far. She had been trying to cheer him up, and really was thankful for his magical abilities, and here he was insulting her to her face. She could take a few complaints about the problems of her being a rabbit, but to scorn the abilities she had as a human was the last straw. She bit him hard on the hand and leapt to the ground, favoring her hurt paw as she did so.

“I'll have you know that I could do plenty as a human! I've been preparing to accept my royal duties my whole life. I've learned all about history and geography, diplomacy, biology as it relates to tea, politics…”

“I only meant you wouldn't be good in a fight against goblins,” Bostwick said, sucking on his hand, which had a nasty red mark where Emmaline had bitten it.

“I guess… I suppose not… but neither would you!”

He sighed, or growled, or something in between, then said through clenched teeth, “That's my point!”

This statement echoed softly through the still air around them. So they were both a lost cause, that's what he was saying. Should she feel depressed about this, or perhaps take their mutual uselessness as a form of camaraderie? Either way, Bostwick's constant pessimism was maddening. One the one hand, she probably ought to say sorry for biting him, since he apparently hadn't meant to insult her, but that would no doubt lead to some new line of negative commentary from him. Instead, she opted for hopping a few feet in front of him as they continued on in uncomfortable silence.

It had started to snow again, and the ground was incredibly cold on her paws. Looking back, she saw that Bostwick had donned a pair of gloves and pulled his scarf up around his chin. Oh well, she thought, rabbits survive in the cold. She had a fur coat of her own.

The path began to wind back and forth around the mountain slopes, so that they couldn't see too far in any direction, but the light behind the clouds grew steadily darker, so they must have been nearing the settlement. Emmaline hoped they were, at least, as the wind was picking up and the flakes of snow were gathering together in thicker, wetter bunches.

“Hold on,” Bostwick said from behind her, “you’re getting hard to see.”

Bracing herself for being picked up again, Emmaline was surprised to see everything go black for a moment, then to feel the ground get swept out from under her as the magician scooped her into his top hat. She looked up at him, wondering why the sudden change in transport, but he wouldn't meet her eye. He probably doesn't want to get bit again, she thought.

“Look,” he said, “if I put you on my head, you won't scratch me, will you?”

“On your head?”

“It's getting too snowy out here, and I don't have any other way of sheltering you… I definitely don't want to use the blankets, in case we have to camp out again. If you ride on my head, with the hat over you, that'll keep all the snow off, but you have to promise not to scratch if you can help it.”

Emmaline wanted to think it over—she was more concerned with whether or not Bostwick could actually keep her on his head without her falling—but the hat was filling with snow as they spoke.

“I promise I won't scratch you.”

With a nod, Bostwick flipped her onto his head. There was one tumbling, disorienting moment, and then she felt her feet come down on his hair, and was again surrounded by darkness.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Okay.”

They were off. Though Emmaline had to work a little to stay balanced, Bostwick had a remarkable steady rhythm to his steps, which was odd, considering how jerky her ride in his pocket had been.

“Where did you learn to hold your head so steady, Bostwick?”

For a moment the only sound was the wail of the wind and the pat-pat of footsteps, then Bostwick said, “I used to walk with books on my head sometimes.”

Emmaline had heard of this practice used by some young nobles to improve posture, but had assumed those stories were made up. Besides, Bostwick's family were shop owners, from what she had heard.

“Why did you carry books on your head.”

Again, there was silence. It seemed to stretch out so long that Emmaline didn't know if Bostwick had heard her, but finally, quietly, he said, “I thought it would help me walk more like an aristocrat, like everyone else at the Academy.”

He offered no other explanation, but none was needed. He was from a merchant family; most students at the Academy were fairly wealthy, if not actually nobility. Emmaline had always assumed that because Bostwick was so good at magic—the best in his class, according to her father—that he'd been revered by his fellow magicians, but maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe Bostwick had spent his whole time at the Academy trying to prove himself. He certainly had, in her opinion, and Camellia had been fortunate enough to be one of the only countries in current need of a new court magician at the time of his graduation. His hard work had all paid off while he served as their magician, living the kind of life that any aristocrat might lead, but now, because of her curse… If she had been human-sized, she would have hugged him, even if he probably wouldn't appreciate it. As it was, she settled for snuggling down onto his head.

They continued walking for about half an hour, occasionally taking a turn here or there from what Emmaline could feel. Eventually they seemed to slow down, and finally stopped.

“Great,” Bostwick said, his voice the definition of sarcasm.

“What is it? What's wrong?”

He lifted up the front of his hat for her to peak under. They had reached a settlement of sorts, for there were a few wooden buildings lining the mountain path. All of them, however, had boarded-up windows, and several had caved in from some prior disaster. As unwelcoming a sight as this might be, the storm really had become a blizzard, so Bostwick pulled the boards from one of the doors and hurried inside.

The interior, Emmaline saw as Bostwick removed her from the hat and put her on the ground, was drier than outside, but just as cold. The magician snapped his fingers, conjuring a small flame into his hands so they could get a better view of their surroundings. It might have been a barn or a bar at one time—it was difficult to tell which—but the floor was now covered in a thin layer of straw and a few broken chairs and a table had been pushed to the side of the room. Emmaline hopped over to these, seeing if there might be anything of interest left by the previous occupants, while Bostwick busied himself with shoving the straw into a pile and lighting a fire. It was crackling in no time, aided by some of the chairs' legs. They were at least warm enough to pass the night. Emmaline sat in her neck-scarf nest and looked across the fire to her companion, who had removed his snow-dampened coat in favor of the blankets he'd been carrying in his hat. They were both exhausted—emotionally, on Emmaline's part—and neither made any move to start a conversation. Bostwick poked the fire from time to time, then finally fished in his hat for some of the food they had bought in Ramshackle. He unwrapped a small potato pie and slid it on its paper wrapper over to her, then started on his own.

The soft snap of fire and the muted wind outside were the only sound for a while, until Emmaline sat back on her haunches and asked Bostwick if he could wrap up her half-finished portion. He did so without a word and stowed it back in his hat. Dinner was over, and without anything else to do, they might as well try to sleep, but Emmaline didn't want to leave things as they were.

“Um, Bostwick, about earlier… I'm sorry for biting you.”

He looked at the mark on his hand. “It's okay.”

“No, it really isn't. You were just being realistic, and I… I suppose I took it personally. I already feel like I can't do anything, physically, as a rabbit. I hop too slowly, and I can't hold things. I can't even talk to the goblins we meet, and getting information from people is something I know I'd be good at, since I've been taught about negotiations and diplomacy. I'm still a princess, even if I am a rabbit… Anyway, there was no excuse for me hurting you like that.”

Bostwick at first showed no reaction, but poked the fire a little more and added one of the chair backs for fuel.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I wasn't much good at getting information from those goblins.”

Don't take it that way! she wanted to scream. Instead, she hopped out of her nest and over to where he was sitting, putting her paws up on his leg.

“I didn't mean it like that. I just wish I could help you out more, since it's my fault you're here. I'm not blaming you for us not finding anything in Ramshackle. There was nothing to find.”

For a moment, Bostwick raised his eyebrows in surprise before bringing them down into a concerned scowl.

“I'm not blaming you either.”

“What?”

“It's not 'your fault' we're here, Emmaline. You didn't ask that goblin to turn you into a rabbit; he just did.”

“I know that, I just meant, well… You don't have to be here, but you came anyway. I know how much you loved being a court magician, and now you're basically working as a door-to-door.”

“Yeah.”

It was such a blunt, bitter reply that Emmaline didn't know how to respond. Anything she said was sure to be met with more pessimism, but, she reminded herself, some people were just like that. In which case, there was no point being diplomatic or delicate; she could say whatever she wanted.

“Thank you.” She leaned her head and paws on his leg, which was as much of a hug-like gesture as she could manage. Surprisingly, an moment later, he pet her ears back.

“Just doing my job.”

They slept through the night curled up on their respective beds, as close to the fire as they could manage without getting burned. It had died out by the time they woke up, but fortunately, so had the blizzard. Sunlight and snow dust poured in through the doorway, and beyond that, a blanket of snow, two feet deep, covered everything in sight.

“Great,” Bostwick said, donning his coat once more.

“It doesn't look too bad.”

“You don't have to walk in it. Speaking of which, I think I have a way of keeping you warm.”

He had crammed his scarf part way into his hat and let Emmaline climb into it, then wrapped the two ends tightly around her. She imagined this was how it felt to wear swaddling clothes, or maybe a straight jacket, but she was at least warm. Holding her in his arms, he set out into the snow.

The clear, clean white under the blue sky gave the mountains a beauty that had been hard to see before. Each ridge appeared in more detail, and the pine trees they found themselves walking through glistened and sparkled with frost. Even the ever-present rocks and boulders had taken on the appearance of soft, smooth lumps under the snow.

“I hope we don't get lost,” Bostwick said.

“Always looking for that cloud behind the silver lining, aren't you?”

“I'm just being realistic. Things like that always happen to me. During one of the festivals in the Capital, when I was a kid, a dog tried to bite me and I had to climb a lamp post to escape. And then when I was offered a place at the Academy, a bunch of people looked down on me for being a von Dogsbody. Then I couldn't pull a rabbit out of my hat…”

“Well, at least that has changed, in a way,” she offered, but Bostwick either ignored or didn't hear her.

“And then there was that time I won third place in the poetry contest…”

“That doesn't sound bad at all.”

He stared off into the distance for a moment, then shuddered, as if recalling some terrible event, leaving Emmaline to speculate about what sort of white elephant prize he must have received.

The path they hoped they were on led gradually uphill and the trees around them grew thicker all the while, until the path crested. They saw before them a clearing with dozens of houses, each with multiple chimneys issuing smoke into the air.

“This must have been the settlement the innkeeper meant!” Emmaline exclaimed. “We just had to keep walking a little longer.”

“If we'd done that, the blizzard would have—”

Emmaline never found out what the blizzard would have done—though it was something awful, no doubt—because one of the trees had chosen that moment to dump the melting snow off its branches and onto Bostwick's head.

“What did I tell you?” he said, wiping the snow off of his hair. “The worst possible things always happen to me.”

“Really?” Emmaline said, taking his attitude in stride. “Have you been cursed by a goblin and turned into a rabbit? Because I think that might be the worst possible thing.”

Bostwick glanced away, apparently realizing that he couldn't say much to this, but then muttered, “Well, the way things go for me, I probably will be before long.”

Emmaline burst out laughing. He really was maddening, but whether it was their talk last night or the prospect of a warm, dry room before them, she couldn't hold it against him.

“I'm glad my misery amuses you,” he said.

“Well, isn't that what you're supposed to do? You are still my court magician, right?”

“Sure,” Bostwick said, with a grudging smile, and walked on toward the town.

#short story #original content #fantasy story #fantasy short story #magician #white rabbit #cursed princess #goblins #goblin #fantasy short #story #booklr #bookblr #writeblr #writelr #fantasy writeblr #fantasy writelr #fantasy booklr #fantasy bookblr

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themyskira · 7 years ago

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Amazons Attack! - part 1

Once upon a time, in the lead-up to the 2005-2006 cesspool of a crossover event that was “Infinite Crisis”, DC had plans for a miniseries called “Amazons Attack!”. The story was to be helmed by then-Wonder Woman writer Greg Rucka and artist Ethan Van Sciver, and it would deal with a conflict between the Amazons and the United States following Diana’s killing of Max Lord (and, presumably, building off the simmering background tensions between the two nations since the floating islands of Themyscira had crashed into the ocean off the coast of the US in early 2004).

The idea was nixed, but it never entirely went away. Over the next few years, it passed through the hands of numerous people at DC before finally landing in the lap of Will Pfeiffer in late 2006. By this stage, the original proposal was no longer feasible. The Max Lord story had been resolved, Themyscira had retreated entirely from the mortal plane, and there was no longer any interaction between the Amazon and American peoples.

But that wasn’t gonna stop DC from achieving their glorious vision of man-hating harpies attacking the US capital with swords and pointy sticks.

Around this same time, somebody else in the company had a genius idea. Jodi Picoult, a bestselling author with a strong following among women readers, had just released a new novel about family relationships and trauma, and one of the main characters happened to be a comic book artist. Why didn't they find out if Picoult was interested in writing an actual comic and, you know, lending DC some of that New York Times Bestseller cred?

Picoult wasn’t sure. She didn’t know if she had the time, let alone the interest, in the project. She’d never been much of a Wonder Woman fan. But her kids talked her into accepting, and so, with no previous comic writing experience and far too little editorial guidance, Jodi Picoult set out to make her mark on Wonder Woman.

Together, Picoult and Pfeiffer would craft one of the most widely-derided stories in Wonder Woman’s history. There would be crimes against the written word. There would be character assassination on a mass scale. There would be bees.

Part 1: Wonder Woman volume 3 #6 -- Jodi Picoult (writer) and Drew Johnson (artist)

Some context: For reasons too stupid to go into, Diana has decided to assume a secret identity. She hopes to can gain a better understanding of those she protects by living a normal human life… as an elite Department of Metahuman Affairs field operative charged with neutralising metahuman threats.

Agent Diana Prince is standing in a scungy restroom trying to remind herself that she’s not Wonder Woman. She’s doing that thing where the hero looks in the mirror and sees their alter ego reflected back at them, but due to some poor art decisions, it instead looks like she’s staring at a Wonder Woman poster that somebody has hung over a grotty sink.

More bad art choices occur in the next panel, where the mirror glowers at her behind her back.

Diana continues to puzzle over how having a secret identity is really hard since she doesn’t know the first thing about how to be a human being. Because it’s not as though a large part of Wonder Woman’s career as a public figure in Man’s World has been working as an ambassador and engaging with people across the world at all levels of society or anything.

Also, Jodi Picoult misspells “Themysciran” twice and both typos are left uncorrected, setting the standard for the number of editorial fucks given in this crossover.

Then she steps out of the restroom and into a superhero-themed amusement park, where we meet Diana Prince’s charmer of a partner, Tom Tresser.

“I can’t believe this is my job!” Tom exposition/whines. “I can’t believe we have to baby-sit some sore loser who won a reality TV show to become the new Maxi-Man! I can’t believe you are my partner! I can’t believe cotton candy costs four dollars now…!”

I can’t believe I’m reading this fucking crossover.

Diana diplomatically replies that she’s not used to working with a partner either, and Tom sneers that, based on what he’s read in her record, she’s “not used to working, period”. Because Batman was skilled enough to build an entirely new identity for Diana, but not smart enough to give her an employment history…? How the frig did she get hired by the DEO, then?

Also, great to see that Diana and Tom are both taking their assignment to prevent a human person from dying so seriously. While Maxi-Man is signing autographs out in the open, a sitting duck for any would-be attacker, Tom is gorging himself on fairy floss and Diana is trying to order a Wonder Woman-branded milkshake.

Diana: One Wonder Woman milkshake, please. Server: It’s been discontinued. It’s now called the Black Canary shake. Tom: Wonder Woman!! Now there’s a partner I wouldn’t mind having…

In case you hadn’t figured it out, Tom Tresser is the love interest. Whatta catch.

Also, no, Jodi. No. Either the Wonder Woman milkshake has been discontinued, or it’s been renamed the Black Canary milkshake. You can’t have it both ways.

This, by the way, is the first of several “hilarious” gags about how Wonder Woman is unpopular and regarded as kind of uncool. Picoult’s going for cheeky meta, but she comes off as ignorant, tone deaf and kind of mean-spirited.

In the real world, Wonder Woman doesn’t share the same level of popularity as Superman and Batman. But in the DC Universe, and particularly in the Wonder Woman comic, she’s consistently portrayed as a hero with a strong public presence and an ability to inspire, to the point where literally the issue preceding this one was a oneshot revolving around Wonder Woman’s influence as an empowering and inspiring hero.

If Picoult was playing, as Rucka did, with the idea that once Wonder Woman started using her public status to express her opinions, a large swathe of the public turned against her, that’d be one thing. But, no, she’s just decided, as a basis for her punchline, that Wonder Woman is a nonentity in the DCU, which is out of step with canon and does a huge disservice to the character.

As a meta joke, this also misses the point, because the fact that Wonder Woman doesn’t sell as many comics as Batman and Superman cannot be divorced from the the historical (and persistent) sexism in what remains a very blokey, male-dominated industry, not to mention the fact that DC put significantly more resources into producing and promoting Batman and Superman comics and merch. Those aren’t the only reason for the discrepancy in popularity, but they’re not things you can just brush off.

It gets even more unfortunate in the context of this particular comic’s publication. See, about ten months prior to this, DC had relaunched Wonder Woman with a new #1 issue penned by Allan Heinberg, who had recently earned much acclaim as the writer and co-creator of Young Avengers at Marvel. Between them, Heinberg and DC then proceeded to royally fuck up the relaunch. Heinberg wasn’t able to balance scripting duties with his TV writing job, causing issues to be delayed for months at a stretch, until it became clear there was no way he’d be able to finish his first arc before Jodi Picoult started her run and DC had to move on without him (he would eventually finish his story in the 2007 annual — over a year after he started the five-issue arc). Picoult’s first issue was only the third Wonder Woman comic to hit the stands in more than six months.

So basically, she’s making her funny-funny “boo, nobody buys Wonder Woman” against a backdrop of DC failing to produce Wonder Woman comics for months on end.

Anyway. Diana and Tom finally get around to doing their job and return to Maxi-Man’s signing table. Maxi-Man asks them to get him a chilli dog (“and a drink! I hear the Black Canary shakes are awesome!” GROANS FOREVER), and Tom has the nerve to be offended. “I don’t remember seeing this in my job description.” Well, gee, Tom, I don’t remember seeing ‘leaving your principal unprotected so you can slack off and stuff your gob with fairy floss’ in the job description either, and yet here we are.

Tom continues to grizzle about how unfair it is that his incredible talents are being wasted on this boring assignment, and this time Diana’s starting to get fed up. Meanwhile, the reality-show superhero they’ve been looking down their noses at is the only one who’s noticed that the rollercoaster behind them is spontaneously falling apart.

Of course, the moment Maxi-Man springs into action, he’s immediately knocked out cold by a piece of flying rubble, leaving Diana to take charge. Tom does what he does best, by which I mean he complains.

Diana: Tom! You get Maxi-Man to safety! I’ll get that crowd away from the roller coaster! Tom: But… I… we… Diana: There’s no time! Now! Tom: Who the heck’s she to order me around?!?

A quick costume change, and Wonder Woman saves the day, but not without internally griping about how stupidly confusing humans are.

Maybe this is what I was born for. To protect them… not understand them. But how can I…? They don’t even understand themselves.

urrrgghghhhhhh haaaaaate.

We never learn why the roller coaster spontaneously fell apart.

Later, as Diana and Tom make their way back to DOMA, Tom is still complaining. This time it’s about the fact that he missed Wonder Woman’s appearance at the theme park, because “I bet she looked hot”.

They stop at a store selling superhero merch so that Tom can get his niece a Wonder Woman action figure for her birthday. Diana comments that she thought Tom was an only child and Tom conspicuously doesn’t answer. And sure, it’s possible that the “niece” is a real human person who’s the daughter of a close friend or non-sibling relative, but given everything we’ve learned about Tom in the last eight pages, I think it’s far more plausible to assume that there is no niece and he’s planning on jerking off to a Wonder Woman action figure.

Diana continues to be terrible at having a secret identity.

“The Batman one’s better. Look — it’s got a detachable Batarang… But my — er, Wonder Woman’s lasso doesn’t even come off.”

All the Wonder Woman merch is 75% off because lol Wondy is uncool, and for some reason Diana is super offended and tries to lecture the poor store clerk about how obviously Wonder Woman is cool because saving the world is cool so there.

Clerk: Wonder Woman’s not cool, I guess. Diana: Doesn’t saving the world all the time make you cool? Clerk: All I know is she’s never sold as well as Superman or Batman… Tom: 75% off! Sweet!

Next, it’s time for a stop off at the gas station for some hilarious comedy hijinks around Diana’s total lack of familiarity with modern society!

Ha ha! Champagne comedy! All of this is just so new to her, don’t you know! It’s not like she’s ever lived among ordinary mortals

or held down a job

or, you know, interacted with any human being at length.

Now, I don’t blame Jodi Picoult for not knowing any of this. I’d be surprised if she’d even read a Wonder Woman comic before DC approached her, and though she would have done some background reading in preparation for this gig, she couldn’t be expected to be across every element of Wondy’s post-Crisis continuity, which at that point already stretched back two decades.

Her editors, however? Were not new to comics. They should have picked this shit up.

So, they go to get gas. Tom asks Diana to pay and she pulls out a ten dollar note. Tom points out this is insufficient in the most patronising way possible.

“Uh, gas is $3 a gallon, sweetheart. That might get us down the block…”

He asks he if she has a credit card, and she blinks in incomprehension. Yeah, because it’s not like Batman would have arranged cards and a credit history when he manufactured Diana’s false identity. Not like he’s known for being detail-oriented or anything. (And by the way, this is a thing that happened four fucking issues ago, so nobody has any excuses.)

Aaaaand Diana continues to suck at the secret identity thing.

Tom: Geez, how do you normally get around? Fly or something? Diana: Ha, ha. Funny. Fly places. Imagine…! Tom: Ten bucks? No credit card? Where are you from? Mars? New Hampshire?

Oh yeah, and this whole scene she’s been internally complaining about how humans are relentlessly acquisitive and materialistic and confusing and booooooo being an ordinary person is haaaaaaard.

Finally, they arrive back at HQ, where Sarge Steel chews them out for allowing a known fugitive like Wonder Woman to slip through their fingers at the amusement park, even though they weren’t at the park for Wonder Woman and this is literally the first they’re learning that Wonder Woman is a fugitive.

He also blames them for the rollercoaster getting destroyed, even though they had nothing to do with the damage and their only contribution was to get people to safety. Although, given how much they were slacking off on the job, it’s entirely possible that some metahuman terrorist snuck in and sabotaged the rollercoaster on their watch. Since Picoult still hasn’t told us how the rollercoaster was damaged, I’m just going to assume that this was the case.

It turns out that Wondy is wanted for questioning over her killing of Max Lord, even though she’s already been cleared of charges, so Tom and Diana’s new orders are to find her and haul her in. Awkwaaaaaard.

So obviously they get straight to work this important government assignment. I’m just kidding, they head straight for the DCU version of Starbucks. In fact, so far I haven’t come across any evidence that either of them do any work at all.

Things we’ve seen Tom and Diana do this issue:

Leave their principal unprotected so they can gorge themselves on junk food

Bicker and complain while a rollercoaster explodes behind them

Shop for superhero action figures

Fill up on petrol

Drink coffee

Things we have not seen Tom and Diana do this issue:

Their fucking job.

We get the usual obnoxious joke about Starbucks coffee sizes being weird and Diana being confused by them, which I’m pretty sure was hack material even in 2007.

Tom: Iced double Vente soy latte with Turbinado sugar, please. Diana: Um… Small cup of coffee? Server: Venti, Duovent, Grande, or Uber? Diana: Um… Small cup of coffee. [Everyone stares at her.] Diana: [whispers to Tom] I don’t think she speaks English…

They sit in the park, drinking their coffee, and Diana cries because humanity is confusing and everybody is mean to Wonder Woman.

No, really, that’s exactly what happens.

Diana: Why don’t you people just leave her alone? Who cares what she’s done? Tom: You talk about people like you’re not one of them, you know that? Diana: [CRIES]

Picoult’s Diana is so outrageously bad at maintaining a secret identity on even the most basic level, even a self-absorbed wanker like Tom Tresser ought to have cottoned onto her by now. Then again, he also failed to notice a rollercoaster collapsing a few metres away from him, so…

In an out-of-character display of ordinary decency, Tom gives Diana a pep talk, then heads off home. As he walks away, Diana hears a scream for help and jumps into action—

—aaaaaaand it’s an attractive young white college girl being mugged by a thuggish, armed black man. Definitely no ugly connotations lurking there.

Diana subdues him with a single punch, and is rewarded with proof that some people do still find Wonder Woman cool because, yes, we’re still on that tired gag.

College girl: I did a paper on you in my feminist theory class! I said you were an icon of womanhood we could all divine strength from… but I didn’t realise you were so… cool! Diana: I hope you got an A.

Tom, driving home, gets a call that Wonder Woman has been sighted in a seedy part of town. In addition to illegally talking on his phone — not hands-free — while driving, he does that thing people do when they’re pretending to talk on the phone, you know, helpfully repeating all the relevant information for the audience.

“Tresser. Wonder Woman? Seen at the Villains and Vixens Bar? I’m there, out.”

If we could hear both sides of the call, I can only imagine that it’d go something like—

Tom: Tresser.

Agent: Hey Tom, it’s Fred; hear you’re on the Wonder Woman case. I know it’s late, but we got a couple reports of sightings at the Villains and Vixens Bar. You happen to be anywhere near there?

Tom: Wonder Woman? Seen at the Villains and Vixens Bar?

Agent: Yeah, that’s what I just sa—

Tom: I’m there, out. [hangs up]

Agent: Jesus, I fucking hate that guy.

Basically what I’m saying is, he absolutely deserves it when he stumbles, ill-equipped, into a suspiciously flirtatious Wonder Woman who is wearing an earlier iteration of Diana’s costume and striking all kinds of ridiculous sexy poses, and instantly gets himself captured by what is obviously Circe in disguise.

Diana gets called back to headquarters, and she’s still wrestling with the question of how she can possibly do her job when her job is to arrest Wonder Woman. (WELL GEE, DIANA, I GUESS YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE YOU TOOK A JOB UNDER AN ASSUMED IDENTITY AT THE DEPARTMENT DEVOTED TO POLICING METAHUMANS LIKE YOU.)

Also turnstiles. She is deeply perplexed by turnstiles.

comedyyyyyyyyyy

Sarge tells Diana that Tom has been abducted and a pair of Amazon bracelets were found at the scene. This is all the evidence Sarge needs to conclude that Wonder Woman has gone back to her old neck-snapping ways and must be stopped. He gives Diana the bracelets in an evidence bag and tells her to take them to the lab and see what she can find out.

I have questions.

Why weren’t the bracelets already being analysed at the lab? Did Sarge Steel wrestle the evidence bag off a hapless crime scene investigator and smuggle them up to his office just so he could play show-and-tell with Diana? How do they know the bracelets are Wonder Woman’s? In this superhero-merch-flooded world, wouldn’t Amazon bracelets be a dime a dozen? Or is Wonder Woman so ~uncool~ that every Amazon bracelet manufacturer immediately went out of business and buried the shameful evidence of their failed ventures in a New Mexico landfill alongside all those Atari cartridges? And why would Wonder Woman leave her bracelets behind? They’re not the kind of thing she’s likely to forget. Yes, we know Circe’s planted the bracelets deliberately, but the DOMA agents don’t.

And most importantly, why does Sarge Steel’s reflection look like Diana?

Diana doesn’t need to take the bracelets to the bag, because she knows they’re replicas and, what’s more, she knows where they come from.

“They were designed to complete a uniform I donated to the Wonder Woman Museum… which closed down over a year ago.”

Okay, now hang on.

I realise we’re back on the hilarious ‘Wonder Woman isn’t popular’ gag, which absolutely has not outstayed its welcome, but a museum is not the same thing as a theme park concessions stand or a pop culture store. A museum does not just go, ‘buhhhhh, I know we’ve amassed this huge collection of great historical, social and aesthetic significance. Indeed, it is almost certainly the largest collection of Wonder Woman and Amazon-related items in the world, and much of it was donated by Diana herself, making it immensely valuable. But — and this is awkward — it turns out people don’t want to visit us because Wonder Woman isn’t cool. Guess we have no other choice but to pack it in and open a Black Canary Museum down the road.” That is not how museums work, Jodi.

I’m also confused as to why Circe needed to steal a Wonder Woman costume from a museum when it would have been far easier to glamour her clothing to look like Diana’s, the same way she glamoured her features. This seems needlessly complicated.

Diana whips off her glasses and does the spinny-transformy thing from the TV show. This is technically a power that Wondy has at this point in continuity — at the end of Allan Heinberg’s first arc, it’s revealed that Circe has given Diana the supremely useless “gift” of being able to turn her powers off, allowing her to switch between Amazon and mortal with a spin and a flourish.

Except, when this issue was published… Heinberg’s last issue hadn’t been. Remember, he flaked on his scripting duties, so the final instalment of his story and the introduction of the dumbass spinny-power-up wouldn’t come out until November 2007 — six months after this issue was released.

The issue ends on Wondy flying to the rescue while Circe lies in wait in the defunct Wonder Woman Museum, predatorily clutching a chained and shirtless Tom Tresser.

#when shamazons attack #comics talk #i have made a terrible mistake #please send help

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zwatchtowerz · 7 years ago

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Thanks Nonie! Sorry for being late. I hope you like it! I posted it in AO3 too

The Fluffy Wolf & The Boy Who Smells Like Green

The Hale family was well known in Beacon Hills. In a small town like that, the only big family living all in one house was noticeable. They were six adults and a lot of kids. From months old to old enough to start college, the thirteen Hale kids were the famous part of the family.

Peter was the youngest ‘original’ Hale sibling. He had two kids, a girl called Malia and a boy called Matheo. Andrew was the oldest with six kids on his own, Lilly, Robin, Jules, Aaron, Hanna and the twins Rey and Cassy. Talia was the middle sister and she had the last five kids, David, Devon, Laura, Derek and Cora.

Talia was the first to be married, making her the one with the oldest kids. David was about to leave them, going to college. Devon had three more years before leaving as well. Laura was twelve, Derek was almost seven and Cora was the ‘baby’ with four.

With so many people in one family, the town was constantly seeing them everywhere. The popularity had nothing to do with the fancy cars or the big mansion outside town in the middle of the preserve. Or that mystery around where the money came from. No, not at all.

Thank Good nobody seemed to notice the howls in the night around the house. The werewolf part would be harder to explain.

It was for Derek’s birthday when Talia and her husband Daniel witnessed the cutest moment ever.

The Hales loved birthday parties, but the kids didn’t have a lot of friends outside the family. The big secret kept them away from school until they were old enough to control themselves. For the kids they made a bit deal about presents, games and fun, a way to distract them from the lack of new kids. For the teenagers, they were to high school and had his own friends, finding boring and not cool a party with a bunch of ‘babies’, and opting instead for a private movie and popcorn in their private cinema (cause they had one at the mansion) with that weird music they liked.

But despite the type of party, they always invited people who knew about the supernatural. They were mostly people with an important position in the community and that was another motive why the rest of the town looked at them like they were royalty. Not everyone could say they had part of the sheriff station in their kids’ birthday.

Deputy Stilinski was among those who knew. He was send looking for one feral animal, that an old lady saw running around from her windows. He was the one who found a young Aaron, with bright eyes, claws and growling. It was only luck that his partner didn’t see him until he changed back.

He had the Supernatural 101 course and from there, he and his wife were invited to every birthday party, every year. They went happily, enjoying the sound of children. John and Claudia didn’t have kids for the first couple of years, dozens of birthdays passed. But when Claudia had a boy, Claudia opted for being at home every time a Hale kid reached a new year.

“Mieczysław is old enough to have fun with the kids, John. You should bring him and Claudia this weekend.”

“He likes to be called Stiles, Talia and you know it. I’ll… I’ll talk to Claude.”

All that was how it happened.

XxXxXxX

Derek was a bit moody, he never liked the parties. Too much noise for his ears, too much people he didn’t like. The party was for him and his seven years. Of course, he loved the presents, but the price to spend hours with adults talking to him like he was a baby, like they always did with his cousins and siblings, was too much.

This time, he smelled something different. Sweet and green like candy with grass. He was approaching the living room when he saw him. A kid with big amber eyes and a ridiculous buzzcut.

“Derek, honey, came here” His mother called. “You know John and Claudia. This is Stiles, their son. He is four, be careful” That was a code to ‘he is a squishy human, don’t break him’. Derek was home schooled, since he didn’t have a lot of control and sometimes he changed when he was upset or sad. His dad said he didn’t have an anchor, whatever that was.

Before he could react to the human, Stiles, put a box in front his eyes. “It’s a present for you! I picked it but I don’t know if you would like it cause I don’t know you. Can we be friends? I only have one friend but Scott has ats..as.. he can’t breathe fine and can’t play with me to be superheroes.”

Derek felt his eyes fight the change and ran inside. Talia started to apologize but Stiles ran after him laughing and being loud, with the box firmly in his hand.

XxXxXxX

The party went on, Derek hiding in the weirdest places, and Stiles always finding him, telling everyone where he was. It was funny to see how, slowly, Derek was making easy for Stiles to find him, like he enjoyed the game.

“Derek, are you okay? Is Stiles too much for you? ” Daniel asked him when he found Derek hiding in his room and not down stairs like before.

“Stiles smells weird, dad” Sure, Stiles smelled like ADHD medication, but it wasn’t that weird for him. Maybe for a kid it was a stronger smell. “I can smell the color green on him. How I can smell a color?”

And okay, that wasn’t the smell he was thinking.

“Are you sure that’s what you feel?”

“Yes, is weird but nice. And he smells like candy too. “

Daniel was about to jump in happiness, or call his wife, but he needed to know for sure. “What is the first thing that pops in your mind if you think in Stiles?”

“Home? Like you and mom and everyone else. Like pack. But he is not pack, right? ”

XxXxXxX

The teenagers were bored soon and had permission to go out or be in their rooms. The babies and kids got tired after a while, falling asleep in the couch or the floor. Andrew and his wife were taking care of the mess the kids made. Soon, the guests left, leaving only John and Claudia at the end of the day.

“You should stay for dinner, there is something we have to talk. “

“Thanks for your invitation, Talia. We love to stay and Stiles liked Derek.“ Claudia said smiling at how hard Derek was attempting to glare at Stiles, who had a plush wolf in his little hands and was trying to touch Derek’s face with it.

“Stiles, don’t bother Derek. “ John told him.

“Oh trust, me, Derek is having fun with your son. If he was annoyed, he would…you know.” Daniel said letting his eyes glow for a second. John nodded understanding.

They watched them a little more before dinner. Stiles chatting about why he picked the wolf for Derek as a present, Derek participating with a yes or no here and there. Stiles seemed to be fine being the one talking, sitting right next to Derek in his personal space.

“Mom says there are wolves here but they are good wolves and they protect us. This is for you, he can protect you too!” Stiles said.

And without warning, Stiles kissed him in the cheek and pushed the wolf against Derek’s chest. Daniel, Talia, John and Claudia stayed quiet, as Derek wolfed out, eyes bright yellow, pointy ears and a lot of hair for a seven year old. They were expecting a scared Stiles, it happened before with other humans. But no, Stiles just stared with big eyes and run to his mother.

“Mom! Mom! Look at Derek! He is so fluffy!!”

Derek turned back to his human self, causing delight in Stiles. “Do it again, please!” And he did it. Perfectly in control, he changed between human and wolf a few more times until Stiles hugged him laughing at his new “awesome friend”.

“So, remember that conversation we needed to have? What do you remember about mates and anchors?” John asked for a whiskey.

XxXxXxX

It was late when Claudia said they had to go, John had a morning shift at the station next day. The house was silent, kids sleeping since the hour before, adults drinking coffee or something stronger.

They found Derek cuddling Stiles and the plush toy, asleep in one of the couches. Talia gasped and make gestures to Daniel, who went looking for something to take a picture.

After more than one picture (“This one is for us, this one is for you Claudia, this is from a different angle, John, is not the same…”) the Stilinskis really had to go.

“Derek, Der, Stiles has to go” Talia said tugging gently at his son’s arm. In a sleepy voice, he mumbled “Mine, don’t go” Claudia and Daniel made a slow “aww” and John just sighed.

“Maybe is better if he stays here tonight. I can pick him up in the morning if is okay with you guys”

“Seems like this is the only beginning”

“Are you sure you can handle Stiles more often?”

“Are you sure you can handle a protective Derek?”

The mothers laughed and the fathers exchanged a look that was a mix of “Oh God” and “I love my wife”

XxXxXxX

In the morning, when Stiles kissed him goodbye on the cheek, Derek smiled at the smell of green, safety and home.

#my writings #my stuff #sterek #derek hale #stiles stilinski #teen wolf fanfic #stiles #kid!fic

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whittlebaggett8 · 6 years ago

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15 details you might’ve missed on the latest episode of ‘Game of Thrones’, Defence Online

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Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie as Jaime and Brienne on “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Game of Thrones” season eight, episode two, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Below is a full recap and analysis of the latest installment in HBO’s final season of “Game of Thrones.”

From the weighty meaning of Jaime and Brienne’s swords seen side-by-side to the musical cue that added emotional depth to scenes with Davos, keep reading for a look at the major details and callbacks you might have missed.

The eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones” pushed forward on Sunday night with an intimate and emotional episode. Acting as a precursor to next week’s massive 82-minute battle sequence, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” was packed with meaningful characters moments and callbacks to earlier seasons.

Keep reading for a look at the 15 details you might have missed.

Opening credits changed slightly again, this time showing the war preparations at Winterfell.

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The credits for season eight, episode two, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

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HBO

While last week’s credits were entirely new for the series (showing three major historical events on the show), this week there were simple additions.

First, Last Hearth was shown enveloped in the icy blue tiles that represent the Night King and his Army of the Dead. Then, as seen above, Winterfell was shown battle-ready with the deep trenches built around its border.

Daenerys referred to Tyrion as Jaime’s “little brother,” nodding to one of the more popular fan theories for the Lannister siblings.

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Daenerys speaking to Tyrion in the great hall of Winterfell.

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HBO

“Perhaps he trusts his little brother to defend him,” Daenerys said when Tyrion tried to come to Jaime’s defense. “Right up until the moment he slits my throat.”

In George R.R. Martin’s books, the prophecy told to Cersei as a young girl has a third and important part. The woods witch told Cersei “the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

Valonqar means “little brother” in Valyrian, and Cersei interpreted that to mean Tyrion would eventually kill her.

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Young Cersei as seen on the fifth season of “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

But many fans have come around to the idea that Jaime is the real valonqar – he’s also her little brother, after all, just by mere minutes.

But the show removed this part of the prophecy back on season five when we were given the flashback of Young Cersei hearing the predictions, so we can’t be certain this theory will manifest at all on “Game of Thrones.”

Regardless, this episode appeared to make a clear reference to it, if only to stoke the fires of speculation once more.

Read more: Our full breakdown of the Valonqar prophecy and what it could mean for Cersei

Jaime repeated Brienne’s argument from the season seven finale when Daenerys asked him to explain his desertion of Cersei now.

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Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie as Jaime and Brienne.

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HBO

When Queen Daenerys still seems doubtful of Jaime’s intentions, he turns and looks at Brienne before answering.

“Because this goes beyond loyalty,” Jaime said. “This is about survival.”

That’s very close to what Brienne told Jaime in the dragonpit when she was trying to convince him to fight with the North.

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Jaime and Brienne on “Game of Thrones” season seven, episode seven, “The Dragon and the Wolf.”

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HBO

“Oh f— loyalty,” Brienne said, much to Jaime’s shock. “This goes beyond houses and honor and oaths. Talk to the queen.”

It was Jaime’s invokation of this sentiment that finally pushed her to stand up and defend Jaime in front of all the Northern lords, Lady Sansa, and Queen Daenerys.

A familiar musical cue played at the end of Jaime’s scene in the great hall of Winterfell.

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Grey Worm handing back Widow’s Wail to Jaime.

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HBO

Just as Grey Worm roughly thrust Widow’s Wail into Jaime’s chest (more on that important sword in a moment), the score kicks in and plays Jaime’s theme song.

This music was first heard on the series back on season three towards the end of Jaime’s memorable bathtub confession scene, in which he told Brienne the story of killing the Mad King for the first time.

That theme has never been featured on the official soundtracks released by HBO, but that will change this season.

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Jaime Lannister on season six of “Game of Thrones.”

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Helen Sloan/HBO

It was notably heard on season six, when Jaime went to Riverrun to break the Blackfish’s siege. Composer Ramin Djawadi said this emotional theme will “definitely” appear on the season eight soundtrack.

“Yes, definitely,” Djawadi told INSIDER at HBO’s red carpet premiere for season eight when we asked if we could finally expect the theme to be officially released. “A lot of people have approached me [about that].”

Arya and Gendry’s flirtatious forge scene was a shot-by-shot recreation of a season two moment between them.

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Arya Stark watching Gendry on season eight versus season two.

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HBO

When Arya walked up to the forge just as Gendry was starting to work on a weapon, the framing of the shots was identical to a scene from the end of season two, episode five, “The Ghost of Harrenhal.”

Here’s Gendry, now and then, in the same shot.

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Gendry on season eight versus season two of “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

Actors Joe Dempsie (Gendry) and Maisie Williams (Arya) have aged along with their characters as the series has filmed over the last decade.

When they first began shooting, Williams was 12 years old. Now she’s 22. Dempsie was about 23 by the time season two rolled around, and now he’s 31. Their characters are meant to be much closer in age (about 18 and 23, respectively).

Read more: Fans are divided over Gendry and Arya’s sex scene on ‘Game of Thrones’

Tyrion repeated a joke we’ve heard before about how he’d prefer to die.

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Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister on “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

“I always pictured myself dying in my bed, at the age of 80 with a belly full of wine and girl’s mouth around my c—,” Tyrion told Jaime.

Clearly Tyrion loves this little jest, because Jaime finished his sentence for him.

We heard it the first time back on the first season, when Tyrion was surrounded by the mountain clans in the Vale.

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Tyrion and Bronn facing down the mountain tribes on season one, episode eight, “The Pointy End.”

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HBO

“How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?” said Shagga, son of Dolf. And Tyrion answered with his typical wit, saying the “belly full of wine” joke again.

The scene on season eight ended on a potentially more terrifying note, when Tyrion said perhaps he’d “march to King’s Landing and rip [Cersei] apart” after he was killed.

This might have been a line in the script designed to prepare fans to see their favorite characters not only killed in the upcoming battle, but resurrected and turned into murder-happy wights.

Read more: The difference between White Walkers and wights on ‘Game of Thrones’

With Jaime and Brienne together, this marked the first time the pieces of Ned Stark’s sword have been back in Winterfell since his death.

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Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie as Jaime and Brienne on “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

The ancestral blade of House Stark was a greatsword named Ice. The blade was Valyrian steel, making the metal precious (and one of the rare substances that can kill White Walkers).

The sword was taken by the Lannister when Ned was arrested, and later melted into two new blades.

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Ned was executed by Ser Ilyn Payne with his own sword, Ice.

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HBO

At the start of season two, Tywin Lannister had Ice melted down and forged two new swords from it.

He gave one of these swords to Jaime, who in turn gifted it to Brienne. She named it Oathkeeper. The second sword was given to King Joffrey, who named it Widow’s Wail. After Joffrey’s death, Jaime took the blade for himself.

Now, for the first time since Ned left Winterfell on season one, episode two, Ice is back in its rightful place of House Stark.

Both Davos and Gilly were visibly moved by the sight of a young girl who reminded them of Princess Shireen Baratheon.

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A little Winterfell girl, Ser Davos, and Gilly on “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

The young girl had burn marks on her face, in the same place where Shireen’s greyscale covered her cheek.

Davos thought of Shireen as a daughter, and was devastated to learn not only of her death but to hear she was executed by Stannis and Melisandre. Shireen helped both Davos and Gilly learn how to read. We saw the young princess bond with Gilly on season five, when they were both at Castle Black.

The scene was given added emotional weight with an instrumental version of the song Shireen once sang playing in the background.

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Davos and Shireen with each other for the last time on “Game of Thrones.”

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Helen Sloan/HBO

During a season three scene with Shireen, she was heard singing an eerie ballad called “It’s Always Summer Under the Sea.”

The melody of that song is the same music heard on the season eight scene when Davos has a visceral reaction to seeing the young Winterfell girl in front of him.

During the War Room session, we got a peek at the battle plans for the coming fight.

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The battle plan for Winterfell’s fight against the Army of the Dead.

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HBO

From left to right on the top, the plan is to have House Stark and Arryn forces on the left (where Brienne will lead), then Targaryen and Dothraki fighters in the center. On the far right is more Stark soldiers.

Inside the castle walls, House Mormont (led by Lady Lyanna) will apparently protect the main holdfast. Then there’s a blank black tile, marking a mysterious set of people. Perhaps this indicates where the crypts are, but we can’t be sure.

We also know House Greyjoy will be posted in the godswood with Bran, aka the Three-Eyed raven.

Meanwhile, Sam Tarly keeps reminding us of those important books he stole. What could be inside them?

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Also, Ghost is back! Kinda. He just stood there.

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HBO

Upon the ramparts, Sam talked to Jon and Edd about the books he stole from the Citadel library. What exactly are those books? Is there important information in them? Sam poached them from the restricted section of the library, where tales about the Long Night and Azor Ahai were kept.

We had hoped to get a peek in them before the big battle started, thinking there might be useful info inside for our heroes. But we’re still waiting for whatever those pages will reveal.

Read more: 37 important questions we hope ‘Game of Thrones’ season 8 will answer

When Arya found out Gendry was a Baratheon, the weight of that revelation added fuel to a fun fan theory.

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Maisie Williams as Arya Stark on “Game of Thrones” season eight.

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HBO

Back on the pilot episode of “Game of Thrones,” Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark spoke in the crypts of Winterfell about their familys.

“I have a son, you have a daughter,” Robert said. “We’ll join our houses.”

King Robert was referring to Joffrey and Sansa but, as we soon learned, Joffrey wasn’t Robert’s son at all but the bastard of Cersei and Jaime.

Fans have spent years hoping that line might foreshadow a romance between Gendry and Arya, the real son and daughter of Robert and Ned. And tonight they got their wish (just sans the arranged bethrothal part).

Tyrion and Jaime mention the Siege of Pyke and Whispering Wood, two battles with loaded significance.

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Tyrion, Davos, and Jaime sitting together by the fire.

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HBO

Tyrion calls Jaime the “fabled hero of the Siege of Pyke.” That fight happened decades before the contemporary events of “Game of Thrones,” but Jaime had a meaningful conversation with one of the Stark household soldiers about it on the first season.

On season one, Jaime was standing guard duty when Jory — one of Ned Stark’s most trusted men — came to him with a message.

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Jaime and Jory together on “Game of Thrones” season one, episode four, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things.”

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HBO

The two exchanged pleasantries, and talk turned the battle at the Siege of Pyke, where they had fought side by side. Jory mentioned how he nearly lost an eye fighting one of the Greyjoy men.

The next time Jaime and Jory saw each other was when Jaime and the Lannister men attacked Ned in the streets of King’s Landing.

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Jaime killing Jory as he stares at Ned Stark on season one, episode five, “The Wolf and the Lion.”

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HBO

Jory tried to take Jaime on single-handedly, but Jaime shoved his dagger through Jory’s eye, killing him instantly and bringing their earlier conversation around full circle.

Back on our season eight episode, Jaime calls himself the “fabled loser of the battle of Whispering Wood.”

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Jaime and Theon standing before King Robb Stark on season one, episode nine, “Baelor.”

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HBO

This was the first major battle Robb Stark won. He surprised the Lannister forces and captured Jaime, which eventually led to Jaime’s release with Brienne and the loss of his hand.

Given how Jaime-centric Sunday’s episode of “Game of Thrones” was, it’s fitting for us to be reminded of these two monumental character moments for Jaime. The first is an example of his previous cutthroat loyalty to his family, and the latter shows how far the relationship between House Stark and Lannister has come.

Meanwhile, that emotional knighting ceremony was a deep reference to George R.R. Martin’s books.

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Brienne knighted by Jamie on “Game of Thrones.”

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HBO

In addition to the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, Martin wrote three novellas set in Westeros around 100 years prior to the events of “Game of Thrones.”

Each novella follows the tales of a knight called Ser Duncan the Tall and young Targaryen prince known simply as Egg. Ser Duncan even got name-dropped on the fourth season of “Game of Thrones,” when King Joffrey was reading through the White Book of the Kingsguard.

Ser Duncan the Tall is Brienne of Tarth’s ancestor.

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Ser Brienne of Tarth in all her glory.

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Helen Sloan/HBO

After years of fans speculating that the unusually tall Ser Duncan might be one of Brienne’s ancestors, Martin confirmed the theory at a convention in 2016. The three “Dunk and Egg” novellas were packaged into a single book called “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Knowing Brienne’s shared heritage with the chivalrous Ser Duncan made that incredible knighting ceremony all the more powerful when Jaime said, “Arise, Brienne of Tarth, a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

The song Podrick sang was pulled straight from the books, and it’s known as “Jenny’s Song.”

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Daniel Portman as Podrick on “Game of Thrones” season eight, episode two.

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HBO

The song, renamed “Jenny of Oldstones” for the show, appears during one of Arya’s chapters in “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Learn more about the song and its hidden meaning here.

For now, here are the full lyrics to Podrick’s version:

“High in the halls of the kings who are gone Jenny would dance with her ghosts The ones she had lost and the ones she had found And the ones who had loved her the most The ones who’d been gone for so very long She couldn’t remember their names

They spun her around on the damp old stones Spun away all her sorrow and pain And she never wanted to leave Never wanted to leave (x5)”

The version which played as the credits on the episode ran was by Florence + The Machine.

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Daenerys and Jon Snow at the end of Sunday’s “Game of Thrones.”

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Helen Sloan/HBO

Just after Jon Snow dropped the bombshell news of his parentage on Daenerys, the Night King’s army arrived and the episode faded on an ominous note. Watch the lyric video for the Florence + The Machine version of “Jenny of Oldstones” here.

For more “Game of Thrones” insights like these from INSIDER’s Kim Renfro, pre-order her book “The Unofficial Guide to ‘Game of Thrones’” now.

The post 15 details you might’ve missed on the latest episode of ‘Game of Thrones’, Defence Online appeared first on Defence Online.

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#Features #Game of Thrones #Game of Thrones episode recap #HBO #News #This Is Insider #TV

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klstheword · 7 years ago

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Rebecca Hall made her New York stage début, in 2005, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, playing Rosalind in “As You Like It,” and if you were lucky enough to see her in the role it is unlikely that you have forgotten the experience. Hall, who was twenty-three at the time, exquisitely conveyed the sometimes tremulous combination of knowingness and naïveté that characterizes Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most winning comic heroine. Hall’s performance felt perfectly naturalistic—her Rosalind was absolutely real and present—and, at the same time, her delivery showed an adept grasp of Shakespearean verse: if you knew and loved Rosalind’s lines, it was thrilling to hear the subtlety with which Hall delivered them. It also did not hurt that Hall looked perfect for the part: like Rosalind, Hall is “more than common tall,” which meant that she was able to stand eye to eye and equal to equal with Orlando, her eventual beloved, played by a promising newcomer named Dan Stevens.

The production also showed the mastery of its director, Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the former head of London’s National Theatre, and Rebecca Hall’s father. Given Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the relations between fathers and their offspring, and with the complicated questions of lineage and inheritance, the casting choice looked less like nepotism and more like a fruitful artistic convergence. “My father was a real Shakespearean fascist, in that he had a view about how it should be done, in terms of how you speak the verse,” Hall recalled recently. “But, at the same time, he taught me that, instead of being restrictive, understanding how to play the verse gives up the meaning. Like, if you have a breath at the end of a line and the sentence isn’t complete, then you’ve got to find a reason why there’s a pause for thought there. And your reason is what gives you interpretation. So within those parameters, he gave me complete freedom.” Hall’s key to unlocking the character of Rosalind was in identifying the character’s trepidation—the fear experienced by someone who is cognizant of the demands entailed by the complexity of adult love, and finds herself on the brink of it for the first time. “Isn’t that, on some level, the experience of first love, and isn’t that what the whole play is about—how terrifying it all is?” Hall said.

More than a dozen years after that arrival in Brooklyn, Hall, who turned thirty-five this spring, is now a full-time resident of the borough: she lives in Brooklyn Heights, with the actor Morgan Spector, her husband of nearly two years, and the couple’s two cats, whom Hall can sometimes be seen walking with along the neighborhood’s leafy streets. One of them is leash-trained, and will pad down the sidewalk wearing a harness. The other prefers to be carried in a Japanese hoodie designed specifically for toting a pet, with a kangaroo pouch in front and pointy ears on the hood—a gift from Stevens, who is now a Brooklyn neighbor. “I’m very aware that it’s sort of an eccentric thing to do, and I love the eccentricity of it,” Hall told me. Hall and I spoke not in Brooklyn but sequestered in the aseptic luxury of a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Manhattan—rented for the day by the producers of “The Dinner,” a promising-on-paper, forgettable-in-actuality movie that was released last month. Hall was awaiting a “glam squad”—movie parlance for a hair-and-makeup team—to prepare her for television interviews later that afternoon.

She was not, it is worth pointing out, entirely lacking in glamour even before the squad arrived, as she poured the fussy cucumber-flavored bottled water with which the room had been supplied, made an ironical face, and sat cross-legged on the couch in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Hall has become best known to American audiences not for her work on the stage but on the screen—the kind of work that gets you a glam squad and a Manhattan suite for the afternoon. (Though not, as Hall noted with some chagrin, for an overnight stay). Last year, she won acclaim for her performance in the title role in “Christine,” a drama about Christine Chubbuck, the television reporter who took her own life on camera, in 1974. She was nominated for a Golden Globe, in 2008, for her winning turn in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Woody Allen’s Catalan comedy. In between, she’s appeared in a wide variety of roles, in movies ranging from excellent (“Frost/Nixon,” in which she played Caroline Cushing, David Frost’s girlfriend) to mediocre (like “Transcendence,” in which she played the wife of an artificial-intelligence expert enacted by Johnny Depp). Writing in the Times of her performance, Manohla Dargis called Hall “one of those actresses who always seem smart even in dumb roles.” Hall acknowledges the hazards of casting. “It’s not easy to get roles that are satisfying,” she said. “And, even when you get ones that you think are going to be satisfying, there is no guarantee that they are going to continue to be satisfying throughout the film, and indeed then when you see the film.”

This month, she returns to the New York stage—a perhaps slightly more predictable environment—in a production of a new play, “Animal,” by the British writer Claire Lizzimore. It would be spoiling the plot to say much more than that Hall plays a woman who fears she may be losing her mind. It’s a demanding role: Hall is onstage for the entirety of its ninety-minute length, and the part requires her to course along a wide emotional range, from playfulness to supplication to anger. It’s the first time that Hall has performed in New York since 2014, when she made her Broadway début, in a revival of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal.” (She met Spector in that production; he played her lover.) “Animal” is, she says, “a short, sharp shock of a play.” When we spoke, she was about to go into rehearsals. “She’s a very idiosyncratic character,” Hall went on. “She is very mentally dexterous, and she is also full of rage, and it is also a real expression of female rage, which I find quite potent. I think it’s going to be hard.”

Hall grew up in the theatre, often quite literally. Her mother, Maria Ewing, is an internationally known opera singer. When Hall was born, her father had been the director of Britain’s National Theatre for almost a decade, overseeing its controversial move from the Old Vic into its current home, on London’s South Bank. “There’s a very funny picture of my father trying to do what looks like change my nappy on the desk of the National Theatre, while being on the phone dealing with all that—the strikes, and all the criticism,” Hall said. Sir Peter, who is eighty-six, is now ailing from dementia. To celebrate his eightieth birthday, the National invited him to direct “Twelfth Night,” in which Rebecca took the role of Viola. While Hall had strenuously tried to be just another actor for her father in “As You Like It,” performing in his “Twelfth Night” was a very different story. “That was totally about doing something that I knew he really wanted to do, and it was very emotional as a result,” she said. The usual question that might be asked of the creative person—did you always know you wanted to do this?—does not even apply in Hall’s case. “I know that’s the privilege of the family I was born into,” she said. “It’s not a question of ‘Oh, I would really love to do that,’ it’s more a question of ‘I am one of those people. I am that, too, so I am going to do that, too.’ The relationship to the dream is much more simple.”

As a child, Hall lived in the shadow of her parents’ lives on the stage. “I remember being taken to dinner parties when I was very small, and being allowed to stay up very late just to sit and listen to people,” she said. “I remember sitting in rehearsal rooms and going to performances, and I remember noticing the way people looked at my father and mother, and noticing there was a sort of a level of importance or gravitas—that the energy changed when they walked into the room.” She was frequently backstage when her mother was performing. “I often had free rein when she was onstage, and if I was in the theatre I would run around in the foyers and then run into the auditorium and peek to see where they were,” she said.

Hall’s parents divorced when she was seven or eight, but not before Sir Peter had directed Ewing in a daring production of “Salome,” a role Ewing would continue to perform for a decade. “I couldn’t not watch the last three minutes of that, where she gets smashed to death,” Hall told me. “The way it was choreographed was that soldiers would all run together in a circle, and she would be in the middle, and she would jump up through the middle and contort her body, so it looked precisely like she was being crushed to death. Every night, I forced myself to watch. You know the way you have childlike superstitions: if I don’t watch it, that would be the moment when she actually gets hurt.” The production was also notable for the fact that Ewing’s Dance of the Seven Veils ended in complete nudity: “She said it would be vulgar if you put on a bikini, and that what is not vulgar is the female form.”

Hall’s upbringing was bohemian and somewhat chaotic: “Like, how’s she getting to school, has she been to the dentist, has she done her homework—that kind of stuff. I don’t think either of my parents ever asked me that,” she said. Her older siblings—there were four of them, from Peter Hall’s two earlier marriages—had all gone to arty boarding schools, but, because Roedean was conveniently located close to her mother’s home, Hall went at the age of fifteen to that institution, favored by aristocrats and the conservative élite. Ultimately, she became head girl. The school “was very sure of its place in raising young girls to go out and be great career women; and then there was this other side of it,” she recalled. One Speech Day—an annual end-of-year ceremony, with distinguished guests and prizes for the best students—a teacher stopped Hall in the corridor. “She said, ‘You’ve got to stop looking so sloppy, pull your socks up. This will be the most important day of your life, apart from your wedding day.’ ” Other teachers gave better advice that still resonates, particularly about the need to read ambitiously. “There was one who said, ‘There is nothing wrong with being pretentious. Pretentious is often the place you have to start if you want to get somewhere else,’ ” Hall said.

Surrounded by titled young ladies, Hall was something of a class oddity. Though her father was knighted in the nineteen-seventies, for his services to the theatre, he came from more humble circumstances: his own father was a stationmaster. Her mother grew up in a working-class family in Detroit, discovering her gift for opera by singing along as her father played piano. Ewing’s father, a doorman at a hotel, was African-American and possibly Sioux, and married to a woman of Dutch descent; it appears that he passed as white when Hall’s mother was a girl, living in a working-class white neighborhood. (He died when Hall’s mother was sixteen.) “She catapulted herself out of a biracial, impoverished, confusing situation, into this high-art world, as my father did on some level,” Hall said. “And I sort of feel that in me. Neither of them fit into some sort of class mold. When I did hang out with these people who did operate in those worlds, I did feel slightly observational. I don’t know where me and my family fit in.”

In her teens, Hall flirted with not being an actor—she thought of following a career in the visual arts, and remains an adept painter, as is occasionally evidenced by her Instagram feed. “My husband laughs at me, because I have to be doing several things to incubate one thing,” she said. “There’s a sort of trail between my desk, where I think about things, and the piano, where there will be some open music, and another area, where I will have some drawing up, and I will dock between those three things.” But there was never really any doubt that she would act. Hall did not go to drama school: she already knew how a rehearsal room worked, and needed no help finding an agent or making contacts in the world of the theatre. She’d already worked as a professional actor, at the age of ten, in a television drama, “The Camomile Lawn,” which her father directed. “And I didn’t want to be given a system of coping mechanisms to deal with how awful it all is,” she said. “My father was a huge influence in that respect. He always said to me, ‘If you want to be a good actor, acting holds everything.’ It’s the art form of interpreting human behavior. So one of the things that will strengthen that ability to do that is engaging with your mind. That means reading books, that means looking at art, that means interpreting the world analytically and having an analytic involvement with life.”

She enrolled at Cambridge University to study English Literature, in which she had specialized in high school. As a wedding gift, she gave Spector a trousseau of canonical British books that he had never had occasion to read: “The End of the Affair,” “Sons and Lovers,” “The Rainbow,” “Persuasion,” and George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”—the fact that he had failed to read the last, she said with a laugh, “nearly derailed my marriage.” When I told Hall that she would have been the ideal actress to play Dorothea Brooke, the serious, ardent heroine of “Middlemarch,” she told me I am not the only one with that notion: Sam Mendes, with whom she was in a relationship for several years before marrying Spector, had hoped to adapt the novel to the screen. There had even been a script that she’d read, but for one reason or another it never came together. “I went through my twenties praying that someone would make a ‘Middlemarch’ film,” she said. “And now I am too old, probably. I would have loved it.” (Mendes did direct her onstage, in “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Winter’s Tale,” which played in an ambitious double bill at the Old Vic in London, and at bam, in 2009.)

At Cambridge, Hall spent much of her time in student theatrical productions—she first met Dan Stevens when she was cast opposite him in “Macbeth”—but left Cambridge two years into her three-year degree. “The trajectory of ‘head girl from Roedean School, degree from Cambridge’ suddenly felt really undesirable,” she said. “I thought, If I can buck this and walk away from this, then, A), I will have no other option—that I will have to be an actor, in other words. And B), I won’t have a sort of shorthand calling card that proves my intelligence. I thought that, if I have the strength to walk away from this thing that everybody wants, and is so wonderful, maybe I will have the strength to make those bold decisions for the rest of my life.” Not having a Cambridge degree, she says, provides her with an impetus to keep learning. It leaves her with something still to prove.

These days, Hall is attempting to expand her artistic horizons: “I feel I am coming into my own in lots of ways, and that I can step beyond just doing the acting, and feeling more confident showing the world that I can write, and thinking about directing,” she says. She is working on an original script, and has recently tried to write a play. She’s also adapted as a screenplay the novella “Passing,” by Nella Larsen, the Harlem Renaissance writer, and is shopping it around with the hope of directing it, in part as a way of exploring her maternal grandfather’s life and her own racial heritage. “Spending any time in this country, and living here, you just think, This question of race is so integral to the very heart and soul of everything this country is built upon,” she says. “It’s huge. And so I find myself thinking about it increasingly and wanting to engage with that history, whatever it is.” She expresses a perhaps surprising desire to be on the show “Who Do You Think You Are?,” in which celebrities have their genes publicly analyzed. “It seems like a fascinating story that doesn’t benefit from being hidden,” she says.

Marriage has granted her a kind of peace of mind, she says, and an expansion of her creative capacities. As a “well-educated child of divorce,” she thought that she would never marry; she certainly thought she would never marry another actor. “And then it came up, and it felt, like, absolutely that’s what I want,” she said. “If you are born of things that are disparate, and you are a bit nomadic and your life is a hodge-podge of beautiful, loving chaos, you can end up going through a large chunk of your life thinking that’s what you need, or that is what makes you comfortable. And I feel really lucky that I had some sort of realization that, actually, I needed an anchor. And I got married, and I realized this is what I have been craving.”

Spector plays Hall’s husband in “Animal,” and before the show started previews, at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s stage on Twentieth Street, the company rehearsed a few blocks away, on an upper floor of the Google building. I stopped by one afternoon to watch them work. At first, Spector, who is bearded, with dark curly hair and saturnine features, was doing stretches on the floor in a corner, while Hall worked on a scene with another actor. Then they worked on a scene together: an intense confrontation, in which Hall was fey and fickle and furious by turns, while Spector stood on in helpless frustration. When a break was called, they leaned fondly against each other for a moment.

For the role, Hall had to switch between high heels and flat shoes. I had noticed when we’d talked in the hotel suite that on her ankle is a small tattoo: an inscription, she explained, in her own handwriting. It reads, “This above all:”—a fragment of a line from “Hamlet,” spoken by Polonius, the pedantic adviser to the King, to his son, Laertes. (The rest of the line is more famous: “To thine own self be true.”) “It’s a useful reminder for me for a lot of reasons,” Hall told me later, in an e-mail. The ink has blurred, and Hall said that she has thought of having it removed and redone. “Tattoos seem to be a good exercise in living with regret,” she said. “But I love them, actually. I love the regret factor, too.”

#theatre #Rebecca Hall #Brooklyn #Dan Stevens long time buddy

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