#Or at least a heavy bat and something to smash with it.

[imagine-iron-fey]

Imagine convincing Glitch, Ash, and Puck to go with you to a rage room. Puck, of course, is all for it, but Ash and Glitch aren't too convinced this is necessarily the best idea.

"You've been kind of tense lately," Glitch says, eyeing you almost warily from his position on the couch.

"Exactly!" says Puck enthusiastically. "They need to blow off some steam! Besides, it'll be fun."

His eyes glint a little too wickedly at the word for Ash's liking.

He exchanges a long look with Glitch, who shrugs in defeat.

"Fine," he sighs, pinning you and Puck with an icy silver stare. "But at least TRY not to go completely ballistic. I don't want to have to bail you out of jail."

"Again," adds Glitch dryly, back to scrolling on his phone.

You and Puck agree not to end up in jail (again).

Though, as Puck points out much later--after getting kicked out of the rage room, and spending nearly six hours being berated by Ash, Glitch, and even Meghan, "He never specified how we were supposed to stay out of jail. I figured running from the cops was a totally valid option. They need to be clear about these things, y'know."

[peachsukii]

A rage room is the last place Bakugo ever thought he’d end up with you.

When you bring up the idea to him after seeing one online, he scoffs at the thought of it. Working out and training is more than enough for him to let off metaphorical steam, and he’s been seeing a therapist since senior year of UA. He doesn’t need to smash shit to feel something.

At least, that’s what he thought.

Bakugo agrees to go with you, begrudgingly at first, but ultimately to keep you company, he doesn’t want you to hurt yourself or be alone. There were only two rules: No quirk usage and no harming others in the room, everything else is fair game. You both sign the waivers and gear up to head inside. The room is overwhelming at first, full to the brim of freshly smash-able objects - a broken down car with the doors barely on their hinges, light bulbs, glass jars of all sizes, old stop lights, and other breakable trinkets.

“Start smashin’, sweets. It ain’t gonna break itself,” Bakugo jokes, patting you on the back to let you take the first swing. You pick up the bat the facility has supplied and turn to face him, setting it on your shoulder like a sword.

“You’re not gonna try it?”

He’s here and suited up, might as well let loose. What’s the worst that could happen?

Bakugo swings the bat a few times around the room, adrenaline trickling through his veins as glass continuously shatters around him. Suddenly, he’s lost in thought and caught in a slow emotional build up, like an ocean’s tide retreating before the giant swell of waves begin to crash against the shore. Memories begin flooding to the forefront of his mind, things he’d worked through in therapy - anger, frustration, fear, guilt, coursing through him. Bakugo doesn’t notice when you lower your bat, watching him curiously as he starts swinging harder, viciously picking up the pace and breathing heavily with each passing hit.

“Kats, you alright?” You call - he doesn’t hear you in his tunnel visioned state. In between swings, you can see the bat quaking in his grip as if it’s too heavy to hold.

“Katsuki!” you try again with no response. Bakugo sounds like he’s about to have a panic attack with the way his breath is labored. You toss your bat to the floor and rush over to him, gently grabbing at his shoulder to get his attention. He flinches at your touch, shaken up by his sudden visceral reaction with a tinge of embarrassment, hiding his face from you by tucking it against his opposite shoulder.

“Breathe, babe,” you sooth, rubbing calming circles in between his shoulder blades. “Do you need a minute?”

“I—” Bakugo stutters, his throat strained by his effort to hold in the onslaught of tears threatening to spill over his cheeks. He clears his throat and bites his lip in a desperate attempt to stop his emotions from overflowing, but he loses the battle.

“We can stop if—”

He snatches your breath away when Bakugo swings around and pulls you into his chest, burrowing his face in the crook of your neck awkwardly. The protective goggles are becoming foggy and wet with discarded tears, a hiccup strangled in his throat. One of your hands slides tenderly against his nape, fingers entangled with the soft blonde strands while the other lays against his back.

"It's okay, I've got you. It's just you and me here."

Turns out smashing shit gave him an outlet he didn’t know he needed. His therapist has preached to him about bodies holding onto stress and trauma throughout our lives - Bakugo thought it was utter bullshit.

He was proven dreadfully wrong. But one things for sure, he’s sincerely grateful you knew him better than himself, how badly he needed this release without verbalizing it.

[phoenixcatch7]

Kintsukuroi

'What if I put a clock pendulum in my torso' was the sort of question Bruce had come to expect when visiting Oracle.

"Pendulums are dependant on a stable base," he replied, because the last time he'd assumed they were being unserious Tim had tried to fit a chemistry test lab in his mouth and accidentally leaked the fumes through his mask.

"It'd be so aesthetic though," said Barbara, not looking up from the dozen screens she was surrounded by. "Listen. It would look so cool - Spoiler, robbery on fifth and main - Especially if I put a clock face over my heart."

"I thought you were trying to fit a super computer in it?"

"I was, but progress is slow. It's hard to fit it and enough padding to protect it plus leave enough room for ventilation. If I add the pendulum I might at least get inspiration." She gave a heavy sigh and pushed away from the desk, gliding in her chair to where her doll body was resting on a table, the glue separating the two halves of the smashed torso still glistening. Bruce followed, peering over her at the many scanners and wires hooked into it, flashing and beeping.

"Any luck?" he asked, and they both knew he wasn't talking about the computer anymore.

"Nothing."

He squeezed her shoulder, and she leant into it. They stayed there for a long moment.

"I just don't understand!" Barbara finally burst out, hands clenching on her chair arms. "I glued nearly every single piece back together! I made sure every splinter I could find went exactly where it should! I know the contract is still there. She's worked with more missing pieces before. But she's just not responding!"

"It's not you," Bruce soothed. "You've more than enough determination and strength to puppet, and we know the human body's state doesn't affect performance."

"That's the thing!" Barbara threw her hands up angrily, nearly smacking Bruce in the face. There was a chatter over comms, and both reached for their own. "One second," she said tightly, and wheeled back into the glow of the monitors. "Copy. BW, you're nearest? Thanks. Try and avoid the sniper this time. Wing, backup is in five."

She muted again and spun around, pinning Bruce with a heavy stare. "Is there anything, anything you can think of? We've - nothing I've tried has worked."

"Well...." He trailed off, one hand coming up to rub at the chin of his mask - a quiet night meant the opportunity to forgo the practical but muffling gas mask for his favoured plain black.

It was far from the first time a doll had been horrifically damaged. The incident with Bane came to mind - Batman had been in a very similar condition, body shorn clean in two and tossed to opposite corners. It was an awful memory, but the expression on Bane and the audience's faces as his bloodless body fell apart like a rotting tree trunk and then kept moving was a silver lining he'd always treasure.

But he'd been repaired and back on his feet in weeks, if bearing the incandescent fury of the doll for several more. It had been months for Barbara, and still nothing was happening.

"There's something we're missing, and I doubt it's on your side."

"I know THAT-"

"Listen," he demanded, and her jaw clicked shut mutinously. "There's something we're not seeing. Batgirl is in no shape to demand it herself, it seems. So its inaction is something we can't fully rely on."

"You've got the most experience with the dolls of all of us. Can you.. I don't know, sense anything?"

"Nothing more than the usual, with the Patriarch Doll, but we might get more if we return to the doll house -"

"No." Barbara interrupted again, but Bruce did not take offence. "She's not going anywhere. She doesn't want to head back to the cave."

Oh?

"She doesn't want to, or she doesn't care to?"

"I say she doesn't."

Interesting. This was likely a case of the doll exerting its will. The bats were well versed in avoiding the few lines their wooden bodies drew in the sand, treating them with the wary respect one would give a favorite blade or a highly trained attack dog. They could work together, share the highs and lows of life with them, but never get complacent. The dolls were forever a foreign, inhuman presence, and as with all wild creatures they would never be so arrogant as to assume full understanding. For Barbara to so strongly decide for the doll meant she was most likely not the only one deciding.

Which meant the solution would not be found in the cave.

"Perhaps there are upgrades she wishes to have?"

Oracle paused.

"Maybe," she conceded. "But there's practically a limitless amount of things I could do, and I wouldn't know where to start. And I could more easily do them when she's up and walking."

Not that then. If the doll wanted something to change but not receive upgrades or heal, than what?

... Not heal.

Batman hurried to the table. Oracle watched him with hawk eyes, but another call on the comms turned her away with a final warning glance.

Recovering every single splinter from a damaged wooden object and perfectly reattaching it was nigh impossible on a good day, never mind in the dead of night with a moving target. The dolls always returned to the cave to regenerate scratches and nicks they couldn't buff out, or accepted plaster to transmute with whatever supernatural power guided them.

The batgirl on the table, divested of all covering and armour, was still as chipped and scuffed as the day nightwing recovered last splinter.

The pieces fell into place.

"She doesn't want to be perfectly rebuilt," he realised. "She doesn't want the damage to disappear as it normally does... She wants it to remain visible. A different type of repair, then."

Oracle spun in her wheelchair to face him.

"Why?" she asked, something sharp in her eyes. Bruce chose his next words carefully.

"Perhaps she thinks such damage doesn't need to be hidden away," he said, slowly, and didn't comment when she turned away. Though she put on a strong face, and the doctors had recently released her full time, it would be a long time until the young hero was able to truly heal her mind.

"She doesn't need to do that for me. She's just causing me trouble."

"I don't think she is," he tried. "Dolls tend to reflect their puppeteer even after they accept us. You can't deny your trajectory has been changed."

They both sent a significant look to the enormous super computer taking up the wall.

"You've said you almost feel better able to protect Gotham now, with your reach and skills. Do you really feel that way?"

"I - I don't -" her mouth worked silently, and Bruce waited. "I mean I guess... But a part of me always assumed it'd be temporary, you know? Once I fixed batgirl.. It'd all return to normal." Her voice wobbled, and Bruce didn't hesitate to crouch before her, wrapping her in a long armed hug. She buried herself in his chest, regardless of the chilled metal.

"It's okay if you don't," he whispered into her hair, and held her as she shook. "I'm just throwing ideas around."

"I do though," she rasped. "I think I do feel that way. There's so much that can't be solved by violence, and it feels good to be out there but... I think I can help even more people, this way."

"That's good," he praised, "that's good. You can do whatever you set your mind to."

"You stole that from a parenting book verbatim."

"It's applicable to the current situation."

"Fine," she sighed, and pushed him away to roughly scrub at her eyes. "I'll give the doll another chance. Find some glitter glue or something, I don't know."

"Any materials you need will be provided," he promised. "I wouldn't recommend glitter glue or our usual tar."

He moved to pat her on the hair as the emotions of the moment faded, making sure to keep his unsheathed claws out of her hair.

"Once you fix her, though, I would recommend you puppet the doll during night hours still," he told her. "It wouldn't be good to put your body through twenty hour days."

"I've got a good system set up for now, but thank, B-man."

The computer dinged with another alert, and oracle spun to squint at it with a muffled curse, typing furiously. Batman escaped to the other side of the room, where the folders he'd originally come looking for lay. She waved, distracted, as he left, and although the doll could not smile, he could feel it on his face all the same.

@puppetmaster13u I summon thee dear mutual ^^

[candycandy00]

The Trade Part 3 - A Dabi x Reader Zombie AU

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Smut. 18+. Zombie Apocalypse AU. Oral, stripping, voyeurism, handjobs. I know I said part three would be the final part but it got too long!

The following week was more eventful than your past several months in the woods combined. The most notable change was the number of zombies wandering into the woods. You ran into them occasionally before. It’s not like they were a particularly rare sighting. But now you were seeing multiple zombies each day. You avoided most of them, either climbing trees until they passed you by or simply going the long way around a certain area. A few times you had been forced to kill them. 

You also ran into Touya more often, three times in one week. The first time you found him in his camp, the sound of jangling metal cans alarming you before you even saw him. A group of zombies were stumbling over the wires to get to him, the biggest group you’d seen since you’d stopped going near cities. There had to be at least twelve. 

There were already five dead at Touya’s feet, and he was swinging his bat like a madman, screaming curses at the zombies as dark, dead blood flew through the air. You hurried over and killed a couple yourself, but he really hadn’t needed your help. Once he’d calmed down, he’d seemed happy to see you. Almost immediately, he’d offered a trade. You could rest in his camp and eat a hot meal with him in exchange for a handjob. It was a hell of a deal, so you accepted. 

You sat beside him on a log as he watched the small fire, his pants open, his cock hard and standing straight up. You carefully stroked his length, using the precum leaking from his tip as lube. You started slow, then worked up speed as he moaned for you to go faster, harder. His head was tossed back, the scarred flesh of his neck exposed and somehow alluring. 

The way he groaned and reflexively thrust his hips up against your hand excited you. And when he finally began twitching in your grip, you knew he was close. Just before the first shots of cum escaped, you suddenly leaned over and wrapped your lips around him, catching the warm fluid in your mouth. 

You heard his surprised voice saying, “H-hey! You don’t have to do that…”

But his voice died away as you used your tongue to clean him up. When finished, you sat back up and wiped your mouth. 

“I thought this would be better than avoiding stepping in it all night,” you said, trying to sound indifferent. 

He stared at you for a moment, as if trying to figure something out, those beautiful blue eyes making you feel self conscious. “I’m not complaining,” he finally said, then stood up from the log. 

The second time you ran into him, you were fleeing four zombies that had cut off your path in the woods. You had slammed your heavy backpack into the head of one of them, but apparently not with enough force to destroy its brain, as it had simply climbed back to its feet. 

You were running toward a tree you’d passed earlier that looked easy enough for you to climb but still high enough that the zombies couldn’t reach you. As you fled, one of them had grabbed hold of your hair and pulled you back. You screamed and thrashed, losing your composure. You hadn’t been in this much danger since the early days of the outbreak. 

Suddenly the zombie’s grip had loosened, and you turned to see Touya, smashing the brains of all four of them in quick succession. When they were all dead, you stood there, shaking. 

Touya had only said, “Come with me,” and led you to his camp. He gave you food and water and didn’t ask for anything in return. He even let you sleep there that night without any sort of trade involved. 

Now you were on your third encounter. You’d found his van in the woods, and walked around it until you spotted him, messing around with a small side compartment. When he looked up and saw you, his eyes went wide. He suddenly took hold of your arm and pulled you closer, then pushed your back against the side of the van. The backpack you’d slung over one shoulder fell to the ground. 

You were surprised, because he’d never been this aggressive since that first time he found you looting his van. His body was so close to yours that you could feel his body heat, and he placed one hand on the van beside your head. 

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, and there was a hunger in his eyes that you hadn’t seen before. 

Your heart was beating so fast that you were sure he could hear it. But you kept your voice steady and said, “Oh? And what kind of thoughts were you having about me?”

He leaned his face closer to yours. “I was just thinking how I haven’t really touched you yet. Not the way I want to.”

You couldn’t stop a blush from spreading over your face. What had gotten into him? Had he been feeling lonely? Or was he just frustrated that there had been no trade last time? You gave him what you hoped was a flirty grin and said, “Are you proposing a trade?”

He nodded. “Let me touch you, wherever I want,” he said in a husky voice. 

Your own voice sounded small and nervous by comparison as you asked, “What will you give me in return?”

His lips found your neck, just barely brushing over your skin, his metal piercings grazing over you in a way that sent shivers through your body. “Anything you want,” he answered, finally kissing your throat. 

You swallowed, trying desperately to keep calm. “Okay,” you said in a quiet voice, and that’s all the confirmation he needed. 

His hands moved over you greedily, sliding under your tank top and then under your sports bra, shoving them both above your breasts so that he could squeeze and grope the exposed flesh. Then his hands were unbuttoning your denim shorts. One hand slipped inside your panties, fingers eagerly parting your slicked folds to reach the hypersensitive nub within. 

You moaned, your hips instinctively bucking off the side of the van and against his fingers as two of them pushed inside you while his thumb stroked your clit. His mouth was still on your neck, but it was moving down toward your chest, where it eventually closed around one hard nipple. 

“T-Touya…”

He glanced up at you, but said nothing. His tongue ran over your breasts as his fingers pumped in and out of you. When your legs began to tremble, you put both your hands on his shoulders to keep from collapsing. His thumbnail lightly scraped over your clit, and you came on the spot, clenching around his fingers and moaning his name. 

Your legs gave out, and he quickly caught you in his arms, holding you steady until your orgasm passed. Then he stood back to give you space as you panted to regain your breath. When it was over, you buttoned your shorts and pulled your bra and shirt back down as Touya went back to work on his van. 

“So what do you want for the trade?” he asked, a little more sheepish than usual, as if he were embarrassed. 

You sat down on a nearby rock and watched him tinker in the side compartment. “I want you to tell me more about you, where you’re heading, who you were before all this, that kind of stuff.”

He looked over at you with a surprised expression, clearly not expecting that. He sighed and closed the compartment, then walked over and sat on a log across from you. “How about I answer five questions for you?”

“Deal,” you said, your mind already forming the questions. “For starters, what was that all about just now?”

He frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“As soon as you saw me you were all over me,” you told him. “That’s not how you usually do things.”

He averted his eyes from yours, staring at the ground. “Two days ago I found some zombies eating someone at the base of a tree. There wasn’t much left of the person at that point. Just bones and gore mostly, and a few strands of hair… the same color as yours.” 

In your mind, you could picture the scene, and you could see how he would have jumped to conclusions. “So you thought I was dead.”

He nodded. “You sleep in trees. I thought maybe you fell out in the middle of the night, maybe even broke your back and couldn’t move while zombies gathered around you.”

A grizzly fate, and probably true for whoever the poor soul was that Touya had seen. But thankfully, it hadn’t been you. You felt a familiar heat in your face when you realized what his words meant. Suddenly his desperation for you took on a different meaning. 

“Got another question?”

“Yeah,” you answered, gathering your thoughts. “What did you do before the outbreak?”

“You mean like a job?” he asked. “Not really anything to be honest. I’d just got my license to do piercings at a tattoo parlor, but all this shit happened two days before I was supposed to start.”

Looking at him, at the various piercings dotting his face, his answer made sense. You tried to decide on your next question. You really wanted to ask how he got his scars, but you didn’t want to be insensitive. Above all, you didn’t want him to think the scars bothered you. If anything, the opposite was true. You found them intriguing. 

So you went in a different direction. “Why didn’t you want to stay with your family during all this?”

Touya stared at you for a moment, his blue eyes seeming to darken slightly. “I don’t get along with my old man, and he’s in charge of the whole household, even in a situation like this. He’s used to bossing people around I guess. Being a politician and all.”

You’d never been very interested in politics, so you probably wouldn’t have recognized his father if he told you his name. But you had always heard stories about “dirty” politicians. You couldn’t resist asking, “Was he the good kind of politician or the corrupt kind?”

Touya held your gaze as he said, “The kind that beats his wife and kids.”

Your mouth fell open, but you had no idea what to say. You thought for a moment, but all you could come up with was, “I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”

Touya shifted on the log. “Yeah, I know. And before you ask, I did try to get my mom and siblings to come with me. I didn’t just run off and abandon them. But they felt safer with him I guess. He’s supposedly trying to be a better person lately. Not that I’m buying it.”

You decided to drop the matter of his father and ask about something else that interested you. “How many siblings do you have?” 

His expression lightened a little. “Three. All younger. One sister and two brothers.”

“I’m surprised,” you said with a laugh. “You don’t give off big brother vibes at all.”  

Touya laughed too. “Took years of practice, trust me,” he joked. “And oh yeah, that was your fifth question.”

You were surprised. “What? Really? I thought that was four!” You went back over the conversation in your mind, and realized that you hadn’t counted when you asked what kind of politician his father was. You sighed dejectedly. “Oh yeah, I guess it was five.”

Touya grinned. “That completes our trade then.”

You were about to speak again when a loud gunshot rang out in the distance and put you and Touya both on alert. You both sat there perfectly still, listening. It was a rifle shot. You’d heard it occasionally over the past week, always far enough away that it didn’t directly endanger you, but too close to ignore. You glanced at Touya to find him wearing a grim expression. 

“Fucking idiots,” he muttered. “What kind of moron keeps firing off a gun? That’s why there’s so many zombies in the woods lately.”

“I think I know who’s doing it,” you told him. 

He looked at you expectantly, waiting for you to go on. 

“The night before we officially met, two guys approached me in the woods. They had rifles. They knocked me out, tied me up, and made it clear they planned to rape me. I managed to get away and hide from them. Haven’t seen them since.”

Touya’s face had shifted from curious to disgusted. “Fucking animals. If you see them again try to lead them to me. I’ll bash their fucking balls in with my bat.”

You smiled at the thought. “Thanks. But they had a lot of weapons, including those rifles. I think they’re the ones firing the gun. I think they’re luring zombies to the woods on purpose. Maybe to smoke me out.”

He grinned again. “I can deal with their rifles. Don’t worry about that.”

After talking with him a few minutes more, you stood up and walked over to the van to retrieve your backpack, then pulled it onto your shoulders. 

Touya glared at you. “What are you doing?”

You shrugged. “Leaving?”

He frowned. “There’s more zombies out here than ever. You just told me you were almost raped by two guys with guns who might still be after you. Are you seriously gonna keep doing this alone?”

You were quiet for a moment, then said, “I didn’t hear any offers to let me stay.”

He sighed. “You need an invitation? Fuck it. Fine.” He stood up and looked you in the eyes. “Stay. At least until the gunshots stop and the zombies thin out. Stay with me.”

You thought you might melt into the ground at that moment, but instead you dropped your backpack onto the ground and went back to sit on the rock. “Okay,” you said, then flashed him a smile. “So what’s for dinner tonight?”

He laughed. “Get off your ass and help me make a fire first, freeloader.”

The two of you worked together to set up camp, not knowing at the time that your fragile sense of safety was about to be demolished in a few days. 

********

Three days later, the two of you parked the van in the woods, set up the wires and cans over the doors, then walked to the river to wash up. You decided to take turns bathing while the other kept watch, since there were so many zombies around. 

Touya went first, stripping off his clothes without a moment of hesitation and walking into the water with his soap. You tried to avert your eyes, but your gaze kept being drawn back to his toned, scarred form. 

“You can look at me,” he called from the river, wearing nothing but a grin, “just keep one eye on the woods!”

“Yeah, yeah,” you called back, scanning the trees for movement. Touya’s bat was lying at your feet. 

“You might as well,” he said, drawing your eye back to him as he was lathering up his hair. “I’m definitely gonna be looking at you when it’s your turn!”

You blushed and said, “Pervert!” But you were smiling. 

When Touya was finished, he dried off and dressed, then stared at you until you sighed and began peeling off your clothes. He watched, of course, though he had the decency to remain quiet. You didn’t feel as embarrassed as before, maybe because he’d seen you naked twice before, or maybe because you were just becoming more comfortable with him. 

You entered the water, which only came to about mid-thigh, and soaped yourself up. Even though Touya was keeping watch, old habits died hard, so you watched the woods as well. You had a strange feeling that you should hurry, so you quickly rinsed off and went back to the riverbank to dry off. Just as you were pulling on a clean pair of shorts, you heard it. 

Jangling cans. 

Touya heard it too. He picked up his bat as you pulled a T-shirt over your head, not bothering with a bra. He’d already shoved your dirty clothes in his own bag, so the two of you dashed into the trees, toward the van. 

You didn’t make it far. Just a few yards into the woods, you both spotted them: zombies, spread out all among the trees. You didn’t have time to count, but there had to be at least fifty. 

Touya backed up to stand right in front of you, the bat clenched in both hands. You pulled the knife from your thigh holster. The zombies had already noticed you and were closing in. 

You leaned close to Touya and asked, “Should we go back and cross the river?”

He shook his head. “No, they’d follow us and we’d just end up trapped on the other side with no supplies. We should try to break through them and get to the van.”

You nodded, but you definitely didn’t feel great about that plan. Your strategy had always been about evading danger, not fighting it. You could handle a couple of zombies but the sheer number of corpses shambling toward you now with their outstretched arms and snapping teeth made you want to sprint in the opposite direction. 

Touya took his eyes off the horde long enough to look at you over his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll protect you.”

Dark clouds were gathering in the sky, and as heavy raindrops began to pour down over the forest, Touya shifted the bat to one hand and took your hand in the other. Then, he ran into a narrow gap in the zombie herd, pulling you with him. 

Tag List: 

@crunchtits @jabberwocky-92 @myst1cfish @missrosegold @dreamybxnny @hotvillainapologist @faetheral @touyasmaid @dabislittleprincess @cutebutdelulu @snowprincesa1 

[jumpywhumpywriter]

Drugged Hero Whumpee used as Party Favor at Villain's Party part 13

Warnings: living weapon whumpee, torture, blood, medical whump, forced betrayal, friend pitted against friend, forced fight, beating with wooden bat, stab wound

The two henchmen shrank in fear as Shadow took a hesitant step in their direction. She hated seeing the fear in their eyes; the poor men were absolutely terrified.

...But it was their lives or Ava's, and she would choose her once-friend every... single... time.

"Well? Are you going to let her kill you?! I told you to fight, cowards!" Archenemy roared. That seemed to be enough to snap them out of their shock. A man with black hair -- the henchmen with the knife -- rushed forward and took a wild slash at Shadow, who nimbly sprung out of the way. Her mind was racing, already calculating the odds stacked against her.

Bat is less dangerous than blade. If I can down the guy with the knife first, taking out the bat next should be easy.

Shadow's features hardened in grim concentration as she danced effortlessly around the henchman advancing on her, who was flailing the blade around like a maniac in a desperate effort to land a blow. In her peripheral she saw the bat-guy circling around to be in her blind spot.

Shadow hissed when she missed a beat, the blade opening a wide gash in her arm that instantly began to heal. She used the close proximity to jerk her elbow up and viciously smash it into the henchman's face with a sickening crunch as she broke his nose. He stumbled back with a yelp, clutching his bloodied nose in one hand.

Shadow stepped toward him to incapacitate him, when a blinding pain struck her in the ribs, driving every ounce of air from her lungs. She staggered heavily to the side with a choked gasp, but managed to keep her balance, at least until the bat crushed into the back of her knees next, making her legs buckle.

Shadow crumpled to the floor and rolled onto her back with a snarl, catching the bat in both hands as the second henchman brought it down on her. She gritted her teeth and wrenched it from his grip with a grunt of effort, lurching back up and spinning it in her hand a few times to test its weight.

The henchman she'd stolen it from skittered backward, eyes huge and hands raised in a placating gesture. "I-I'm sorry! I just want to escape! Please don't kill me!" He begged.

Shadow thought she was going to be sick, her stomach flipping violently with helplessness and gut-wrenching guilt. Without a word, she lunged forward and took a heavy swing, the wood connecting with the man's left arm. The man shrieked in agony, and Shadow knew right away that she'd broken bones. She wound up and aimed for his head, a quick and final blow, when something sharp punched right through her back in a spray of blood, tearing an ear-splitting scream from her.

⏪️ Back Next ⏩️

Masterlist

@scoundrelwithboba @lumpofsand @isikedmyself878 @iamheretohurt @fleur-a-whump

@ay5ksal @otterfrost @sausages-things @i-don't-know-sal @lavenderhousesposts

@togzy

[justfangirlstuffs]

Bang Bang On The Door

Hearing banging on your door typically never boded well. You couldn't recall a single occasion where it led to anything good. When you cracked open the front door, bat in hand, you weren't surprised to find your hunch was correct.

Drabble for my Cabaret AU, featuring Glitch (Eclipse) x Y/N

Hearing banging on your door typically never boded well. You couldn't recall a single occasion where it led to anything good. When you cracked open the front door, bat in hand, you weren't surprised to find your hunch was correct. You were, however, surprised at what manner of misfortune had come knocking. Glitch was leaning up against the frame, his towering figure hunched. One of his arms dangled lifelessly at his side looking badly damaged with torn metal and frayed wires poking out.

“Open the door,” the words a low mechanical growl.

You unlatched the bolt before he decided to lose his patience and smash on through, holding the door wide for him. He ducked inside and you were quick to shut and lock the door. Glitch shambled to the kitchen area, opting to sit down on the tiles whilst leaning back against the cabinets of the sink.

“What happened to you?” you asked, setting your weapon aside. Looking him over more thoroughly you could see dark stains on his clothes. It was difficult to tell what was blood and what was the dark oily substance that was dripping down one of his arms. Maybe this was why he wore darker fabrics all the time.

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with. Just some business,” Glitch muttered. He seemed to be doing whatever the robot equivalent was of catching his breath. His gleaming optics stared up at the ceiling.

“Is this one of those ‘you should see the other guy’ situations?” you inquired leaning up against the counter.

“I said don't worry about it,” he grumbled.

“Firstly, you said, I needn't be concerned. Secondly, when a busted-up giant of a man forces his way into my home, I feel I have the right to be at least a little concerned, worried, etcetera.”

Glitch’s fierce, mismatched eyes met yours in a glare, though it had little bite behind it. “You're too nosy for your own good.”

“A trait that has apparently won me a spot in your books as ‘places to go when my arm is about to fall off’.”

A sound equivalent to a snort erupted from his voice box. “I came here because I know you're at least smart enough to keep your mouth shut.”

That he wasn't wrong about. You had very little inclination to brag about this to the other tenants. “Is there… are you going to be alright?” you asked softly.

“Fine, I just need to replace the busted arm with one of my spares, then I'll be out of your hair.”  

“Take all the time you need, love. Anything I can do to help?”

Glitch turned away from you, almost deafening in his silent refusal. “Yeah, go about yer evening and pretend I ain't here.”

Tough guys and their 'pride'. You wanted to shake your head and sigh to convey exactly how you felt about that, but you refrained. Just barely. Fine, if he wanted to lick his wounds by his lonesome, it was no skin off your nose. You went back to your couch, picking up the book you'd been reading. A tawdry romance novel with nearly every romance cliché under the sun. Essentially junk food for the eyes as far as reading materials went, but for as cheesy as it was, you found the main couple very endearing, and thus, it was quickly becoming your comfort read.

Now and again, you would peek out of the corner of your eye to watch your house guest as he pulled himself up off the floor, setting his cargo bag onto the table and taking a seat on a steel stool you'd recently acquired. Certainly not because you thought about anyone in particular who happened to have a rather heavy build and might need something more sturdy to sit on. Nah, you just saw it and thought, ‘my apartment doesn't nearly have enough metal furniture’. That's all it was.

Glitch took out a fair number of tools from his bag, setting them out in neat rows on the table. You noticed that his one working hand seemed to be a little twitchy, but you said nothing. He'd told you to pretend he wasn't there after all. The soft sounds of tinkering reached your ears as you continued to read your novel, never mind that you had read the same page three times over, going on four. You noisily flipped to the next page to show that your attention was absolutely focused there and nowhere else.

After a few minutes, you were starting to actually focus on reading when a scraping noise followed by a low, static curse yanked your attention away from your book. Glitch nearly slammed the screwdriver he was working with onto the counter, and you pursed your lips.

“I would just like to state to no one in particular that I'd appreciate it if no violence is done to my furniture,” you stated loudly.

“You must think you're so cute,” Glitch muttered, tapping a finger on the table's surface.

“Oh, I'm absolutely adorable,” you stated with a broad smile. “Offer to assist still stands by the by.”

There was a very pregnant pause. “You know anything about mechanics?”

“No, but I have a pair of steady hands and I'm a fast learner.”

“Then get your scrawny ass over here so I can show you what to do.”

“My ass is quite shapely, thank you very much.”

“Fine, get your shapely ass over here.” You shot him a look and raised an eyebrow at him expectantly. He made a huffing sound. “Please?”

“Why of course, love. I'd be glad to.”

Setting your book aside, you went over to the table, drawing up a chair to sit beside him. His jacket was draped over one of the empty chairs, and both sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. Smears of some sort of oily black substance coated his hands, dulling the bright tips of his fingers. One of his arms was open, exposing a network of wiring. Several were damaged and frayed.

“I'm sure this isn't nearly as complicated as it looks,” you remarked.

“You're not gonna be rewiring me,” he said gruffly. “I just need you to help me replace my arms.”

Oh, was that all? You bit down on the sarcastic remark since, for someone like him, this probably wasn't such a big deal. “Alright, well, we're gonna need you out of that shirt then, I'd imagine.”

Rather than more grumblings, you were met with a light-hearted smirk that cause the light to glint off his single gold tooth as he cocked his head. “I can only imagine how long you've been waiting for an excuse to have me shirtless.”

Well, now... You quirked an eyebrow. “My, my, someone's finally found his sense of humor.” Standing up you got to work helping him with his shirt, which was also stained with black smears. You were doing your best taking care not to jostle something that might cause him discomfort. He released a loud hiss and you flinched. “Sorry, did I hurt you?”

“Nah, you're fine,” he replied with a snicker. “I just wanted to see you jump.”

“You...” Pursing your lips you tugged the rest of the shirt off. Despite your urge to wad it up and throw it in his face, you neatly folded it and set it aside on the table. This was certainly a whole new side you were seeing. “Did your head get damaged as well?”

Rather than answering your question, he pointed to one of the tools. “Grab those and let's get to work.”

With Glitch's instructions, you were able to assist in removing the damaged arm. It took you a few tries, not because you were doing it wrong, but because detaching the arm took quite a bit of force. Something he teased you about, to which you pointedly reminded him your body was made to mesmerize and entertain.

“Oh, trust me, doll. You're plenty entertaining.”

Considering how much you were enjoying this lighter side of him, you chose to let that comment slide. Everyone got one. Thankfully, once you got the damaged arm detached, Glitch was able to grab it from you and place it on the table. His arms were surprisingly heavy. You didn't want to imagine what it'd be like to be on the receiving end of one of his punches. No wonder most other gang members weren't keen to pick a fight with him, they'd have to be really stupid or have a death wish.

Glitch pulled out one of the spare arms from his duffle bag, and after a minute or so of you helping him get it steady to slot it correctly, with a sharp twist and a loud hiss, the new arm was attached. Glitch leaned back into the chair, flexing the fingers of the intact arm.

“That'll do fer now.”

“You're not going to replace the other one?” you asked.

“Nah, I'll wait until I'm at home to do the remaining repairs. Got some extra tools and parts to fix it up with.”

“Well, I'm glad I could be of assistance. Maybe next time it'll be me knocking on your door.”

“My place isn't exactly what you'd call cozy.”

'That's what I'd be there for, love,” you said with a smile and a wink.

Glitch gave a snort and began packing up his tools and the damaged limb. “I'll think about it.”

Oh... once more you were a little surprised. You hadn't expected him to seriously take you up on that. However, the more you thought about it, you were at least a little curious as to what sort of place he lived, and the sorts of things he did in his downtime when he wasn't shaking people down for money.

“You have a little…” You pointed to your own arm to indicate to him to check his own.

He glanced at the arm that was semi-functioning, finding a trail of black liquid oozing down the length. Glitch wiped at the leftover oil with his thumb. His eyes met yours briefly, then without warning he rubbed his thumb down your cheek smearing it with oil.

“Oi!” you squawked, arms flapping indignantly. “That's my bread and butter you're messing with.”

“You know how people say you clean up nice?” he asked, picking up his shirt and unfolding it. “Well, you dirty up cute.”

You placed a hand on your hip. “That's not a thing.”

“It is now I'm making it a thing.”

“You can't just decide something as a thing.”

“I can do whatever the hell I want.”

You picked up a rag and dabbed at your face. “You're lucky you're so handsome.”

“Handsome like your boys at the club?” He started buttoning up his shirt, an action that drew your gaze. Just for a moment. Only a moment.

You glanced away, smiling coyly. “Is someone getting jealous?”

“Hell no. Not like they get to see you like this. Not like I do.”

“Covered in robot grease you mean? Because you'd be correct that is definitely exclusive to you.”

You felt a light touch on your shoulder, causing you to turn to face him. To shoot him a questioning glare. You weren’t expecting his fingers to gently brush the curls from your face.

“Without that damn mask you’re always wearing.”

You only allowed yourself to be taken aback for a beat or so before you reached up and fastened the remaining buttons on his shirt. “Learn to button up, you whore,” you said, with a sweet smile.

Glitch laughed at that. A full-blown laugh. You didn’t think it was possible for him to sound so mirthful. He finished gathering up his things and pulled his jacket on. Neither of you wasted time with lengthy goodbyes. Not like this would be the last time you’d see each other. Your lives were intertwined, whether you both liked it or not. Once he was gone, you got to work cleaning up the residual oil stains on the table. You still had it under your fingernails, the equivalent of his blood. A result of your efforts to help. You were gonna have a time cleaning it out. It’d no doubt linger for days. Darn, you’d have to tease him about that next time you saw him. That was about as intimate as you’d been with anyone in a long time. Probably the only sort of intimacy you could afford right now.

Touching your face, you wondered if the mark he left was still there. You weren’t certain how you felt about how you could still feel the ghost of his touch on your skin. Still, you got to see another side of him you hadn’t known existed. That was worth something, even if you had let your guard down a bit.

Hearing banging on your door typically never boded well. Looks like sometimes you could be proven wrong.

[lothricknightgirl]

Tips for my artist friends drawing melee weapons/A gigantic rant about medieval weapons

Dunno how much this'll help you, but I have so much about weapons and I can't not expound upon it, so, I'm putting it into something that you can hopefully use for art refs!

So, melee weapons, with a focus on medieval stuff for my more fantasy inclined friends!

The first thing to remember about a weapon is leverage.

Physics plays are very large part in how a weapon is used and how effective they are.

Take a straight sword for example.

The power and force behind the sword is all going to be in the hilt and the tip.

Because the hilt is heavier than the blade and that's where it's held, that's where all the driving force behind it is going to be. The sides of the blade are going to carry little of that energy, but the tip is going to be carrying a lot of it, which makes it really damn good at THRUSTING attacks, big ol' forward pokes. Cutting through something with the long side takes a lot of brute force, and it can't do crap against armor, but with the tip it's easy to slash at something rather than cutting through with the long side of the blade.

Basically, they poke real well but can't smash worth a damn!

Now compare that to something like, say, a mace!

See, unlike what most video games and such would have you believe, polearms like these are actually incredibly light compared to a sword.

Unlike the sword, which can change directions very fluidly because the blade is much lighter than the handle, something like a mace cannot do that as well because the head is much heavier than the handle.

A mace's power comes from the head being heavy, and when it's in motion, the weight is what adds so much force to it, because very little of the weight is in the handle, which acts as a lever when it's in motion, giving it devastating swinging power.

Unlike a sword, you can't block a mace, at least not without great difficulty. A sword can easily be deflected away by another sword, but a mace will just straight up bat it out of the way, and if it doesn't, it definitely will damage your wrists, if not straight up break them. Even then, the metal might just buckle because of the sheer smashing force.

Maces were created as anti-armor weapons, and that's why they're designed this way, a big ol' heavy head of metal that swings and hits really fuck off hard, and it can dent and go through metal because of the sheer brute force behind it.

You can't outright block the mace without risking serious damage, so you have to sidestep it or dodge it, which is what it's weak to, because it can't change directions as easily with the heavier head and lighter hilt, which means each swing has to be a commitment.

If they miss, they have to quickly get out of the gutting range, but if they're too slow, there is a small window to shank the bastard for the mistake.

Still, they are by no means slow, and there are definitely means to mitigate it. Especially on horseback, when weapons like these are twice as dangerous.

Basically, trade some agility for raw strength and anti-armour abilities/clobbering the fuck out of somebody.

Now, polearms! Or, as I belovedly refer to them, the Long Bois! Featuring, the Poleaxe! (Not the halberd)

You can do so much fucken shit with these things.

You have the axe head, which, because the haft is very long and very light, hits like a truck and has massive cleaving/bludgeoning power power behind it.

You have the BIG poke, which has a lot of piercing power and is excellent for going through armor or chinks in it.

And the Smol poke, which you can use to also go right through armor and hook into things to trip them up!

They have massive utility, and are excellent specialised anti-armor weapons. On horseback or on foot, it's a force to be reckoned with.

It has all the parts of a thrusting and a stabbing weapon, just on a much, much longer platform, and a heavy head of steel that is great for bashing in armored skulls. You can also trip people up with it using the edges!

The smol poke on the back is also great for acting as a miniature hammer, like a Horseman's Pick, which can be used to go through chainmail and armor with sheer piercing power.

Polearms are also typically very tall, and it gives them a reach advantage. They can block more effectively with the long haft, and if it breaks, you still have the other half with the metal bits on it to hit things with.

-

So, what you have to remember about weapons, is where the lever is, how it'll swing, and how to connect it to a pose. A sword thrusts, a mace swings, some can do both, others cannot, etc, etc.

I heavily encourage you to do research into different types of polearms, swords and the like, because all of them have a purpose and many act differently than their kin.

I hope this helps you depict weapons more accurately or just helps in general.

Ciao, folks!

[8bitsupervillain]

Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 6 Tsumihoroboshi pt. 1

So what, four subsections until something dark happens then?

Very excited to once again just skip all the way to the next to last part of this just to see what the alternate ending looks like.

I wonder if the poems will tie into the narrative at some point. I imagine they will. Like chapter eight will roll around and then looking back at the poems before the very end it'll be like "aha so this meant that." It might not tie in directly to the plot, and this is more metaphorical than everything, but I imagine it'll still have some bearing on events you know?

This is a very minor thing to harp on given Rena is confessing to presumably either a big violence or murder. But it bugs me the indentation on the line "and with that there was silence." I didn't mention it during Meakashi but there was an extremely minor spelling error during the incident report. Where it mentions that Oryou was violently abused "post-portem," which isn't a word. It's post-mortem. I try not to harp on minor spelling issues though because I don't think anyone really likes that sort of extreme nitpicking.

Gonna admit going into this chapter I didn't think it was going to be the Rena chapter. Makes sense that it would be since everyone gets one, and she hasn't so far. Also for some reason this particular line reminds me of this bit from the end of the shooter Spec Ops: The Line. "I didn't mean to hurt anybody." "No one ever does."

I wonder if this chapter will go deeper into her past when she smashed up her school and classmates with a bat?

Also a clean screenshot of the curtsy just because I think it's a nice visual.

Anyway it's not a week or so prior to this confession scene. The class is going to have a big squirt gun fight for their PE class. Do the youth still call them squirt guns? Or do they just call them water guns?

Now I'm not saying it would've fit the mood at the time, but what if they had cross-dressing Satoshi or Keiichi. It's all a conspiracy, Ryukishi07 doesn't want to draw boys in lingerie. Anyway, what follows is a big water gun battle until Rena and Keiichi are the only ones left standing. Mion tries to manipulate the situation into the two ending in a tie in an effort to get away from whatever the penalty game is.

I imagine Tomita or Okamura were probably some of the ones who kept shooting Rika. I recall one of them has a huge crush on Rika so... you know. It makes sense to me.

This is playing it a bit heavy-handed huh. Everything is perfect and peaceful forever. Ignore the pre-title screen stuff, clearly everything is going to be peaceful and idyllic forever.

Something amusing happened when I started playing this chapter. I forgot to install the mod, so for a minute or so it was the remake version from GOG installed. I clicked on the "omake" button because I wanted to see if it was like earlier episodes where you could see how many TIP files there are in the chapter. It was all blank, but what's interesting was I clicked chapter jump and it had all twenty-six available right from the jump. At least I assume there's only the twenty-six, but I just thought it was interesting the game was like "hey you want to just skip directly to the end?"

I do occasionally think about just going with the unmodded version of the game before starting the latest chapter. Except for chapter one though I've just installed the mod every time. I like the voice acting.

[wrencatte]

there's a very specific type of water-related torture (There was a mythbusters episode abut it.) I've been meaning to subject a character to and Jason gets to be that lucky character! I just could never figure out the scenario and I didn't actually want him to be tortured by someone, just have it be unfortunate circumstances. Well...I've figure it out!!! Here, have the WIP i literally just started.

Jason opens his eyes to darkness. Which, yanno, is great, fantastic, abso-fucking-lutely the best thing ever. He groans and tries to sit up – finds himself unable to, something heavy pinning him to the ground. Oh. Okay. We’re doing this.

He wrenches one arm free and tries to leverage what has to be a concrete slab off of him. His glove slips and he nearly punches himself in the face. Wouldn’t hurt his face, but he’s seen what punching his helmet has done to other people’s hands so he’s very glad for that nearly. His other arm is trapped between his body and another piece of concrete. He wiggles his fingers, makes a pained noise as it sends spikes of pain up his arm. At least he can move them, yeah?

So. Trapped. Like…trapped-trapped. Great. The comm in his ear is nothing but static when not even – ten? Twenty? How long has it been? – who knows how long ago he remembers someone shouting HOOD. His helmet is dead, he can smell burnt electronics and the cushioning is starting to feel not great. Jason fiddles with the latch and takes it off, drops it from nerveless fingers.

It makes an echoing thunk and it’s like it shattered some barrier because suddenly Jason can hear everything. From the sirens outside to the shifting sound of the building settling to the sparking of severed wires to the dripdripdrip of broken pipes – one of them is dripping right on his face. He glares up into nothingness, as if the heat of his glare will be enough to weld the pipe close.

No such luck.

He’s trapped under a building. Jason squeezes his eyes shut. Fuck. He went through a lot of effort to minimize his reactions to various predicted triggers – crowbars, explosions, very specific laughter, just the general gamut – because he was not going to let his reactions get the better of him. And it worked! Maybe he gets a little shaky afterwards, like a delayed panic attack, but he’s never once frozen up when faced with red numbers flashing on a countdown. Hell, even when the Joker got to him last year and the Bats had to stage a rescue (really, how embarrassing) he managed to delay the fall out by a whole two days in order to clean up the mess the bastard left behind.

So, yeah. He’s got a great handle on this shit.

Doesn’t mean he likes being trapped like this. Who knows how stable this building is? Who knows what injuries he’s got under this concrete – because he can’t feel anything from the bottom of his ribcage down. He thinks he’s wiggling his toes, but he can’t tell for sure.

There’s a comfort, though, that he knows for a fact that someone is up there trying to get him out. He’d been with both Red Robin and Robin, providing cover fire from an adjacent building’s window…a building that wasn’t supposed to be blown up. In fact, he’s ninety-nine percent sure the voice shouting his name was Tim’s. He’s in good hands between the two of them and Oracle.

If this water would fucking stop – !

Jason grits his teeth and strains up again, huffing and puffing like a goddamn big bad wolf, and it does nothing to blow the house down. The concrete slab is twice as heavy compared to what he normally benches outside adrenaline, and he’s honestly surprised he wasn’t smashed to bits.

Another droplet hits his forehead. He flinches. It’s almost cold with how superheated he feels – like a fever but worse because there’s no relief. Hopefully it’s not actually a fever. That would monumentally fucking suck.

[thr-333]

hi 👋!!! I LOVE your Tmnt mm x 2012 crossover so far! Please continue it!! Your art is also so good! While I’m asking got any writing tips for fanfics?

Ahhh thank you! Actually posted the second chapter just now so I will be continuing. As for writing tips I’ve never been asked that, so this is gonna come out rambly and very much neurodivergent.

I’ll first establish I have aphantasia, meaning I don’t ‘picture’ things so much as I think in words(and in abstract concepts of movement). So when I write I don’t spend much time describing what things look like, I can’t picture it so why would I spend time explaining what it should look like? This means my writing is very dialogue heavy. It focuses on what character are saying and how they sound and what they do when they say it(because of how I think about movement)

So one of my best writing tips is when I get stuck or am slowing down with a scene I’ll start jotting down the dialogue. No actions in between, no they said this or that, no quotation marks they waste time, usually I won’t even note characters names and trust future me to know. Or trust I've written the charcters with strong enough individual voices that it's obvious at least to me. For example later in the fic is this scene:

We actually don't have a last name

Not until we had to go to school then we had to choose one

We didn’t really know what to pick so we settled on Stockman!

Stockman

Yep that’s our cousins last name and Baxter Stockman technically created us so that makes him our uncle-dad

I see, here Baxter Stockman is an associate of the shredder

… yeah we learnt that yesterday, but our Baxter stockman never did anything really bad!

Unless you count animal extermination as bad

Which we do

It’s still better than going with something like Smith

Writing it like this means the dialogue flows better. It also helps my brain out since I don’t have to constantly switch tracks meaning I can write faster. Also lets me move onto other scenes I have the itch to make. Often I won’t come back and fill in the gaps until I’m editing.

Another thing that helps me is using the fact fanfiction comes with prebuilt stories to work on top of. I like having an episode with premade plot points to build off of. My best example of this is another fic I wrote, The Bat Trap which was based on The Parent Trap(a movie I love). In it I had a bunch of one liners and situations from the movie that I wanted to include, so I would follow(and adapt) the plot to fit and follow. While in other places I could go off script so I wasn’t following it word by word. To this day it’s the only longform fic I’ve completed and that's entirely due to following a movie plot, so I had an endpoint I could work towards. Instead of an overeaching storyline I made myself with no end in sight.

And my best piece of advice! Give yourself a voice in your story. Especially if you’re doing something comedic. It’s all well and good to give your characters hilarious lines but ultimately only a fraction of your writing is going to be dialogue. Most of it is that connective tissue, what characters are thinking, where they are, what they’re doing. So think as the ‘narrator’ of these parts as a character equally capable of jokes. Such as my favourite technique the ‘smash cut’. My art for the first chapter is an example of that. 

“They will be fine”

“Mikey was not fine”

It’s a fun way to open a new perspective and I will use it at nauseum because it entertains me. Ultimately it’s fun! Have fun writing, undercut your serious scenes. You want to add something but it doesn't fit the tone? Screw that, write it anyway. It doesn't matter if people don’t like it, because you’re gonna spend a hell of a lot more time writing than they will reading. Eventually that becomes your writing style and people ask you for tips:P

[callipraxia]

The Unexpected Memoirs of Fiddleford H. McGucket: Chapter Two

Continuing from where we left off in Part I - have a Part II. The typographical errors in the first section are deliberate, reflecting Our Hero's confusion and alarm while writing it. "Denken mit der Hand" is German for "thinking with the hand," which is the slogan of Leuchtturn1917 notebooks, which are rather nice notebooks; I wrote the vast majority of FWJB in three of them I got on a really good sale once, so just a little shout-out there.

Again, the Prologue and Chapter One can be viewed here. That said, on with the...tale? As before, warnings for references to Fiddleford's OCD, and this time for very mild reference to the existence of sex.

Chapter Two

[A page of the manuscript is creased and stained, letters blurred in places from being handled before the ink dried fully. After the sentence “Stanford? Is that really you?” there is a meaningless series of keystrokes, ‘wekaqothwo[eknf[oaqnwooooejf,’ followed by heavy presence of scribbling, seemingly to conceal a mix of typed and handwritten text. Visible through these marks are variations on the word ‘no’ in different sizes and multiple repetitions of the statements ‘what did I say,’ ‘why,’ ‘I know what I know,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘God help me’ before meaningful content resumes near the bottom of the page]

Icol I couldn

It’s been a few days since i last worked on myremembering, and I spent them hiding out wherever I could. Couldnt stay still couldn’t rest anywhere not after what I wrote and how it just came into my head.

Stanford.

I suppose there could be two people who both cross paths with me, and they’re both named Stanford, and it’s their first name both times – but I can’t tell, because my brain is playing tricks on me. It has got to be my brain playing tricks on me, but as soon as I typed it, all at once – suddenly, I could see him like he was in front of me – this person I am remembering now, my Friend - in my head, and sure enough, he looked plenty like -

I know it’s insane. It’s got to be. My mind playing tricks on me. I don’t know the man personal or anything, but everybody around here knows all about Stan Pines. People are almost as sorry to see him coming as they are to see me! And, of course, we can’t go forgetting that time he smashed a baseball bat over my head. Though I was peering in the man’s windows at the time.

Why? Doesn’t make any sense. But then, what about my life has made sense in a long time? It seemed like I needed to keep an eye on him, so I did, at least until he knocked me upside the head and let me know he’d decapitate me with the same instrument the next time he found me lurking – though as I recall, he used a much longer sentence which contained a number of elegant terms and descriptions to embellish that idea, all of which I’d rather not repeat, as they were the kinds of things that do not look nice in print.

Because that’s just how Stan Pines is. He’s a big loud carnival man. No subtlety. He comes up with funny stories but he is not going to do the things I half-rememberst he things I have done, that we did, whatever they were. I’m just surprised he don’t chase me off from around the M.S. more often – cause I go there, and it’s like I know what’s real and what ain’t, at least as long as I stay in certain rooms, and I have no business going in the other rooms anyway. One time I did turn the wrong way and somehow end up in Stan’s kitchen and I pulled all the hair I had out and got started on my beard, just trying to get out of there, didn’t want to be in the kitchen, don’t like the kitchen, I was going to leave and then it was like nothing had ever happened and I didn’t know if it really happened did anything happen who wasn’t there I dont rememmbener

It isn’t possible. This person I remember – he can’t be Stan Pines. Stan Pines can’t be him. Something is wrong. I don’t know much to do about it but keep typing, though, and just use Stan’s name until I can think of something that makes more sense, because I can’t remember nothing just thinking about it in my brain like that’s any good. My brain’s no good. Side effects. Scars. Neuroplasticity. But when I just stop thinking and types, then the words just comes, the pictures in my head, the memories….Denken mit der Hand. The fingertips, anyway. It helps.

It isn’t possible. I didn’t work with no Stan Pines, and the Stan Pines I know of ain’t – what? A monster? A hallucination? He ain’t! He’s a real person and I am not going to do anything to him because that would be morally wrong. He exists and has nothing to do with me or monsters or whate ver happened. I’ll just use his name, though, as long as my hands wants to, and maybe figure it out when I can I don’t know what else I can do.

* * * * * * * *

“So lemme get this straight,” said Emma-May, putting the two plates in her hands down in front of each of us before she sat down on her chair at the table. “Some fella you haven’t seen since you were in college and haven’t heard from at all in years just...called you up out of a clear blue sky today, and he did this to offer you a job. Of being his assistant. Building what sounds like something out of Star Trail, and which even you say you wouldn’t have called more than mathematically possible before he said he was actually doing it. Does that pretty much cover it?”

Put that way, I had to admit, it did sound pretty absurd. Definitely way more absurd, anyway, than it had when I’d been the one saying it, and far, far crazier than when Stanford had pitched the idea to me.

“Pretty much, yep,” I said.

“And this genius recluse friend of yours wants you to come up north for months to work on this - and therefore for you go to for months at a time presumably never so much as laying eyes on me or your son?”

I glanced at the son in question. Tater, though, was occupied with cutting his green beans into smaller and smaller pieces and then arranging these pieces into patterns with the tip of his fork, and he did not seem to even notice me. I wondered if he’d even heard what his mama had said. I’d been...peculiar, as a child, no doubt about that, but even I thought Tate spent an awful lot of time seemingly lost in his own little world, busy with who knew what…

“Nobody ever said anything about any of us not seeing anybody else for no months at a time,” said I. “I reckon I can could visit onna weekends..." I considered what I remembered of Stanford's work habits. "Or at least the mail holidays," I prevaricated. "And maybe when school goes on break, you and Tater could come up to Oregon and see me a while. It would do the boy good to get some fresh air, I bet, and everybody who doesn’t already - “ by which, in theory, I meant Emma-May and Stanford – “could get to know each other.”

Emma-May cut her pork chop with deliberate, precise movements. “I’m not sure what good that would do me,” she said, “given how bad this man seems to be at keeping in touch with his so-called best friends. Dropping them for years and then calling ‘em up again only when it’s to his benefit.”

She said that with the same edge to her voice she had had when she was talking about how absurd the whole thing was, and I realized it wasn’t me she was mad at. Well, not entirely me, anyway. Probably to some degree me, being so impractical and all, but it seemed that some of her disapproval might be rooted in some kind of indignation on my behalf.

“Now, Emmy,” I said. “Don’t be like that.” I sighed and shook my head. “Truth be told, honey – until today, I’d half-figured that he was dead – we never talked much after college, long-distance charges, you know, but it was only two years ago he quit writing back if I sent him something now and then. I..." was too much of a coward to find out for sure. "I'm just glad nothing happened, apparently. I suppose genius must have its quirks.”

Emma-May’s mouth tightened up a bit, and I couldn’t tell if it was in annoyance or amusement as she looked back and forth between me and the boy for a moment. “I’ve noticed,” she said. “But you’ve always been able to get enough of a grip on yours, Fids, to do right by people regardless, so I don’t see why you’d excuse someone else for just dropping you for however many years without so much as a word. Much less that you’d do that and then - “

But she didn’t finish her sentence, just shaking her head as she cut her meat again. I frowned at her across the table.

“And then what?” I asked.

“When you were talking about him, trying to sell me on whatever craziness this is,” she said slowly, after another moment. “Your voice changed.”

I continued to frown, even more puzzled than I had been before. “It did? Like what?”

“Like it does when you’re trying to explain what’s so interesting about some dead British lady with a silly name who never even built a real computer, but somehow, she’s really important if you care anything about computers -.”

“You mean Ada Lovelace?” I considered this idea for a moment. “Hm. Well, I suppose Stanford is a brilliant theoretical thinker - “

“He must have been thinking of something mighty brilliant, to pull all this out of nowhere after two years in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

I put my fork down. “Your voice changed just now, Em,” said I. “And I know I’m not any good at telling, but to me, it sounded about half-like you thought I was lying about something, and you wanted me to know you thought it, but I’ve got no idea why you’d think that.”

“Lyin’ is bad,” announced Tate. He never looked up from the green beans, which were now shredded to a scale so small that it was hard to tell what they’d originally been.

“That’s right, it is,” said Emma-May. “And so is playing with your food, Tate. Eat your beans.”

“Waste not, want not,” I added sanctimoniously, not knowing what a hypocrite I was ultimately going to turn out to be.

Still, though – I hope my son took the lesson to heart, and not just because I had dallied with the environmental movement back in my day. It’s because my life has been a perfect example of what that saying means, one of the best I think I know of. What I wasted, after all, was the one thing you can’t ever make more of – that is to say, time. So much time – so many opportunities to be with my wife, with my son – to have any kind of life worth living. Wasted and wasted, and now I sit here, wanting and wanting, with no way to ever address the problem.

* * * * * * * *

“You really do want to do it, don’t you?” asked Emma-May.

We had dropped the subject of Stanford and his sudden offer at the table after we'd turned to the task of getting Tate to eat, and we had not picked it up again after supper. Now, it had been several hours, other subjects had been discussed since, and we had gone to bed, but I knew at once what she meant.

“I’d be lying if I said no,” I told her. Then, as she remained silent, I added, “I know how crazy it’s got to all sound to you, Em, but that’s just because you don’t know Stanford. You don’t know what he’s capable of. And if we’re working on the same thing...what he's suggestin' now...I don’t even know what we might be capable of together.” I felt strangely as if I was a little short of breath, though I was not, at the thought, and clenched a knot of sheets in my hands to keep them busy, to keep them from going toward my head. What I was feeling – it was enough like the nervousness that I sort of wanted to pull my hair, but it wasn’t the same. The mere fact I could control it proved that. But -

“And anyway – let's say you're right for a minute,” I conceded. I didn’t believe it – I don’t think I could have believed it, not then – but I’d learned that sometimes you had to entertain an odd notion to have a conversation with somebody. “But even if you are – if he really has just lost his mind – then I still...I’d still feel like I ought to go and find out for sure, anyway, you know? And try to help him, if I can.”

“And right there’s where I start having a problem with all this,” said Emma-May. She turned onto her side and propped herself up on one elbow to look at me. The moon was full that night; between that and the indirect glow of the nearest streetlight, coming into our room between the blinds, we could see each other clearly, if only in shades of grey. Shadows lurked under her cheekbones and chin, and the gloom left the glints that were her eyes looking strangely decontextualized. “That’s what I was trying to say at supper. If this man - “ that was the only thing I can ever recall hearing her call him, though I don’t know why – “is someone who’s this important to you – then why don’t I already know him, Fiddleford? Why have I never even heard you mention his name before? Why did he just – drop you for all these years, and why he’s picking you back up now? And why are you even willing to speak to somebody who treats you like that? Much less drop your whole life and go work for him in the middle of nowhere? I’ve never even heard of that town you mentioned – what didja say it was?”

“Gravity Falls,” I said. “Weird name isn’t it? But I guess it suits for somewhere to make a good physics breakthrough.”

“Sounds like a paradox to me,” she said. “Gravity don’t fall, it pushes everything else down under itself. It always ends up at the top, I reckon, if you think about it...what’re you grinning at?” she added, her eyes narrowing as she looked down into my face.

“At you bein’ so particular,” I said. I put up one hand to her face, allowing my thumb to trace the round line of her cheek. In the dark, her hair looked like the void of space as it fell on her neck and over my hand, endlessly dark, only sparsely speckled with the faintest of dying stars wherever the light hit it so as it moved. I could barely stay in a room with her for a day or two whenever she had her permanents put in, but it had been weeks since her last one, and so there was nothing more disturbing in the air than the androgynous, nondescript - though not unpleasant - smell of Pantene Pro-V, now. My hand came to rest on her shoulder, which was bare besides the thin, silky strap on her nightgown. “Come here,” I added, pulling her toward me as I moved to kiss her.

“You didn’t answer none of my questions, Fiddleford,” she said, her voice only just loud enough for me to hear.

“Shh,” I whispered back to her. Her fingers were locked together at the base of my skull; am I imagining it now, with the advantage of hindsight, or did I think, even then, that her grip was harsher than usual, as though she was trying to keep me from slipping away? “We’ll talk about it later,” I added before starting to kiss her neck.

But we didn’t – and if I had been being honest, either with her or myself, I’d have never said that we would. Wasn’t as if we didn’t know better, after all – not like it wasn’t a long, long day’s walk away from the first time I’d ever used sex to distract her from some conversation I didn’t want to have. Instead of trying to answer her questions, for her or even for myself, I lied to the both of us that night and avoided meeting her eyes all I could the next morning as she and Tater got ready to go out for the day. Once they were gone, I went into my workshop and sat down there, barely moving or thinking, even, as the morning crept by. Finally, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I said as I picked it up, as levelly as I could. “Fiddleford Computermajigs.”

“Uh – it’s Stanford again.”

“I figured,” I said. “Just gotta say the same thing on the work line all the time, though, just in case it ain’t.”

“Huh. Yes, well. I’m sure you know better than I do about...that sort of thing.” I smiled to myself, picturing the look I imagined was on his face as he said that. I wasn’t much of a businessman, but by comparison, I might as well have been the Mister Congeniality of Wall Street. If we did become rich and famous, I reckoned I was going to have to be the face of the operation, pitiable of a condition though this was for the operation in question. “So. What’s the verdict?”

Straight to the point. It seems to me now that I should have realized there was something...off, in that. Stanford had always been the type to prevaricate about asking anybody for anything, talking the problem the long way around the barn and making up all sorts of paper-thin rationalizations, and he wasn’t known for his brevity even outside of awkward situations of that sort. It took him two paragraphs to say what it would’ve taken most people one sentence to sum up, or at least, that was what it had often done before. Now, though…Nothing. Just business.

“I can’t just walk outta my house on a Wednesday without a word to anybody,” I said. “I got client orders to finish up, bills to collect on, and I got a wife and a little boy here….” Stanford said nothing and I sighed. “My life, I can’t just...up and do whatever I want without no warnin’, Stanford. We aint’ kids anymore, you know...but if you give me another week,” I added, with a feeling of doing something wrong and yet utterly inevitable, “give me that and then...I reckon I’m in.”

* * * * * * * *

Maybe what happened next was why I didn’t notice anything odd about what had come before, because getting off the phone sure didn’t end up being nearly as easy of a task as getting onto it had been. It was like, with two words, I’d flipped a switch, and there was the Ford I’d knew – he could always talk your ear off when he got excited about something, sure enough, and his thanks for my agreement were so exuberant, and the praises heaped onto my mechanical genius so exorbitant, that I probably ended up spending a good hour just protesting or pointing out areas where I felt he’d sold himself short – something which would then set him off again on my excellence, and without any of our other old friends around to holler for us to get a room already, we did make us quite the mutual admiration society! And that was even before Ford started telling me more about what work he’d already done on this thingummajig, and way, way before we ever started swapping ideas, bouncing off each other, picking up where we’d left off as though it hadn’t been five minutes since we’d last seen each other….

Oh, how we went on. It lasted for hours, that first real conversation we had, and I won’t lie and say I wasn’t having a ball most of the time, though I noticed even then that there was something about Stanford’s voice which just seemed odd that day. It had a strange, rusty note to it, and that combined with the way he had to clear his throat more and more often as the hours went on by gave the curious impression that (as I would soon learn was in fact the case) he hadn’t spoken for a long time. What I noticed and decided to just ignore, though, without even thinking through "I'm gonna ignore this - "

Like, for instance, there was this moment where he got to describing something in the plans he had made and let slip that he didn’t quite understand it. Why, I wonder now, didn’t I tell him to hang on a dad-gum minute, right then and there? Why didn’t I ask him, Stanford, old buddy, old pal, how did you write or draw it all down if you don’t understand what it is and how it works? If you need me to explain it to you? Or, a little later, when he cleared his throat for about the hundredth time and then said that this was the best conversation he’d had out loud in years – why did I not raise an eyebrow right then and ask, buddy, how in the world else have you been having conversations if not out loud? What’s that even supposed to mean?

Maybe I just can’t see him very straight – 'him' being who I was back then, I mean, not Stanford. Can’t even get my mind – what’s left of it – around someone being as innocent and stupid as that more-than-thirty-year-old man who sat there in that garage in Palo Alto that day. Or maybe it’s just that I was already thinking something that Stanford ended up saying out loud, later on. We had gotten off on a tangent about the old days (Em walked in during that conversation, I recall; she must have heard the racket produced when I was left temporarily helpless with laughter at some half-remembered anecdote. I looked up when Emma-May opened the door, but before I could say anything, she had already backed out of the garage again without a word), and on the other end of the line, Stanford sighed before he said something that surprised me.

“Those were good times, weren’t they?” he asked hoarsely – I doubt he was able to speak a word the next day, which I suppose made it convenient that he really did not have anybody around him to say one to. “I don’t think I’d even realized before how much I’ve missed you, Fiddleford.”

I could have asked him some questions right then. I don’t reckon there’s a snowflake’s chance in Sarasota he would have told me the truth, but it would have caught him off-guard, and he never was much of a liar. Evasion, he could do that well enough, but outright spinning a lie from nothing? Nah, I’d have known when he did it. Maybe I could have even got a clue that could have helped me put it all together a little sooner, before it was too late. Maybe I’d have started having more misgivings, ones I couldn’t deny, and maybe I’d have spent that last week at home talking myself out of going up there, instead of spending it making Em, at least, angry with my constant lack of attention to anything I was doing – a state of distraction she knew full well was just a symptom of the fire Stanford had lit up under my butt, filling my mind up with ideas and plans – enough that I was willing to brush it off as just Stanford being Stanford when he all but nailed one red flag to the mast with his insistence that I not tell anybody where I was going, or what I was doing, or who I was going to be doing it with. Even when that prohibition was extended to what I said to my own wife….

How stupid was I, anyway? I let myself reckon it was all right to keep important information from my wife. As much as it shames me to say it – I reckon I even justified it to myself. That I told myself, ah, well, Emma-May wouldn’t understand what I was talking about anyway, would she? Oh, sure, she’d been to college – but it had just been teacher college. Did that even count, really? She wasn’t any kind of genius, not somebody who could follow a conversation with the likes of us -

Of course, I reckon I did this all sub-liminal like, not realizing I was doing it, because surely I was never awful enough to just say something like that even in my own head? Not about Emma-May, anyway. Not about my own wife – my boy’s mother. Surely I wasn’t that confound arrogant and proud. The thing I remember is grinning and admitting – like the blind fool I was – “I, uh - me, too," before I cleared my throat and tried to think like a businessman. "What you were sayin', though, I think you're right about that - does sound like that project we did on the three-body problem. I reckon we could...."

[catlunisciawrites]

EARTHBOUND/MOTHER 2 AU IDEA

Oh brain came up with a interesting eartbound/mother 2 au situation, aka what would of happened 10 years later if Ness and the team didn't do the thing in year 19XX (if I remember the year right), like what if they went to take Gigas on when they are older 20 somethings not young teens. More under the cut because damn I had ideas

Giygas would take over the world and it would be post apocalypses most likely a weird tech heavy apocalypse if I think right but lets talk about the kids. They are the more main focus of this pile of blathering of a mad woman.

From what I have thought so far is Paula is well. So she was kidnaped by the Happy Happism cult during the events of the game to make into a priestess of said cult, Now, while there could be a dark turn for her, I disagree, there are lines in the game where she admits she will try to get the hell out...She has Psi powers, she is strong, a glass canon but thats still a canon so she could of taken them down, Now it wouldn't be instant but maybe a couple years of her secretly honing her powers to become stronger, maybe going with the bit till she takes them down from the inside all we know is she escaped and got out. She is very...angry, I think due to not only getting kidnapped by Happy Happism but also other times, She gets kidnapped at least twice in game so I would get very annoyed after a while so her on edge of getting taken would be there. I also like to think if someone does get kidnap she is the first to get up and go save them, not wanting another to deal with what she dealt with. Still with her trusty frying pan to take out those if her psi energy is depleted, her prayers never answered...till Giygas is being taken down similar to end of game.

Poo would be a Prince of a fallen Kingdom. His Kingdom Dalaam did fight against Giygas, fought his armies well but got overwhelmed and taken down, Poo being taken out of kingdom for safety he did fight, but he was then told to leave because someone has to lead Dalaam when Giygas is finally taken down, him knowing of this prophecy due to part of his training, he when better journeys off to not only train and gather the Kings items (which he does get the complete set due to training and battle) He is off to find the others not Ness, He knows this group needs to be made and formed to take Giygas down, its shown in game he was aware of it before Ness even met Buzz Buzz so he is now on this quest.

Jeff Andonuts is interesting my mind, So in this universe I like to think Giygas as a way to make sure he is not taken down has rounded up anyone who uses Psi Powers and has either had them join is side (aka the cowards, the pokeys etc of the world join him) or imprisoned in some horrible way maybe using them for some form of evil may it be a power source or something details not full on that. Which would explain why Dalaam was gone after first they have people who use Psi Powers via Muu Training they are powerful. But what does this have to do with little Jeff here? Well he is never detected, not seen as a threat, even though with his genius skill he defiantly is, heck his very distant father even decided to talk to him when shit went down because he knew both of them together could help others. His lab being used as a shelter almost in Winters. They have been working on weapontry to take down the monsters around them, and even possibly a item that can hide psi users let them use their powers with out being detected. Little finikey on that one right now but I do know he has made a lot of weapons, and really loves using those bottle rockets.

Now you maybe wondering, What about Ness? The main protag of the Earthbound story what did he do since he isn't the one traveling finding the others what will he do? Well when the attacks happened, He was at home with his mom and sister, he used his trusty baseball bat and well SMASH! he has a talent for it, he also has psi abilities and used them to heal his family when they got hurt, That is what he did a lot of when the world became what it is, when not in hiding he was healing, or protecting.

Now Other characters in the story in this au while details not fully fleshed out I have ideas.

Porky/Pokey is a high ranking member of the Giygas army. Shocking no one he bent over to him to keep himself safe and loved by his parents. So you know similar to game. Not much changed with his dysfunctional family. Picky is a good kid still though.

The Runaway 5 is interesting in this AU. So Attack happens building they were forced to work at gets majorly damage, contract more or less null and void now. So they are now free and they travel through out the land in their the van, Giygas doesn't deem them a threat they are a washed up band what will they do? But here is the thing, they are doing something. They do keep bumping into Poo and later on the others when they finally group up. They learn what they have been doing. Poo first talked about the Prophecy of the 3 boys and one girl meant to stop the great evil which is a great story lets be honest. The group use it as inspiration for new songs, using the stories these 4 young 20 somethings and their adventures to try and stop Giygas. The Runaway 5 are the ones bringing hope to the common people, they are the ones relaying what is happening. The families use their concerts as a covert way to learn what is happening to them. The underground resilience against Giygas sing these songs using them as inspiration and hope.

That one day, these 4 young 20 somethings, from different parts of the world, will collect what is needed, and take down Giyas

This is my idea of an au I wrote it down maybe I could possibly work on it some more later on, I have an idea for art of it at least which will take a bit to draw. If anyone is actually interested in this please tell me, I have ideas but I am not the best at like writing the ideas into actual scenes...hence why so much of my fanfic takes a long time to write. It takes me a bit. Would love an opinion.

[the-last-rat-standing]

Album Covers

Up until 1939, albums came in a plain white sleeve, until a young graphic designer by the name of Alex Steinweiss (1917-2011) convinced Columbia Records that they’d sell more if the albums came in something that caught people’s eye. And from that came the first record album with an image. Record sales increased by nearly 900%. 

Smash Song Hits by Rodgers and Hart, Richard Rodgers and the Imperial Orchestra (Columbia Records, 1939) (Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover)

Which leads me to my favourite covers. Or at least a sample- there are so many to choose from, for so many different reasons, either personal, because of their easily recognizable image or because of their lasting significance to music. Let’s start with one that covers (no pun intended) all three:

Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd (1973) Created by Storm Thorgerson, drawn by George Hardie. Thorgerson created ‘Hipgnosis’ with Aubrey Powell, a graphic art group that became known for their single and album covers. (Too, too many to list here, but you can check their WORKS page on wikipedia. I was surprised to see they did “High and Dry”, which is one of my favourite Def Leppard albums.)

Love at First Sting, The Scorpions (1984) Art Design by Kochlowski and Missmahl, photo by Helmut Newton This cover was the reason I did this post! ‘Still Loving You’ came up on YouTube and I wondered what happened to the models. Couldn’t find any information on them, unfortunately. Some copies in the States just have an image of the band on the front (same as the image on the inside sleeve), because Wal-Mart demanded that Polygram reissue it with a less controversial cover. This is the band’s 9th studio album and arguably their best.

Bat Out of Hell, Meatloaf (1977) Cover concept by Jim Steinman, Drawing by Richard Corben. Meatloaf’s debut album. Richard Corben was then known for his work on the magazine ‘Heavy Metal’, but he had a huge career in comics, working on everything from Hellblazer to Punisher to Hellboy. I mean, who doesn’t know this cover?

News of the World, Queen (1977) Cover by American sci-fi artist, Frank Kelly Freas. It’s an alteration of his cover for Astounding Science Fiction (1953). This is the band’s 6th studio album. The one with “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” on it. (That being said, my favourite off this album is “Spread Your Wings”.)

Low, David Bowie (1977) Cover design by George Underwood, using a still from the movie, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. George also did the covers for ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. George is also the guy who punched Bowie in the face, causing the paralysis in his left eye that made him look like he had two different coloured eyes.

This is Bowie’s 11th (!!) studio album, 1st in the Berlin Trilogy (the other 2 being ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’). While it’s not my favourite album (probably the aforementioned ‘Hunky Dory’), isn’t his most distinctive cover (probably the aforementioned ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’), nor has any song that a casual listener might recognize (but please, listen to ‘Sound and Vision’), I just like the image. I don’t know why. I find it a very calming image, almost oddly ‘normal’ for Bowie.

[chancontrarian]

Getting Through a Bad Day the Villain Way

Welcome. If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’re having a bad day. I’m sorry. Whether a trusted co-conspirator just betrayed you, or you’re dealing with your arch-nemesis, PMDD, some days you feel so full of sour rage that you could set the world on fire just by breathing. But just because you're having a bad day doesn't mean you have to be a goody-two-shoes about it. In fact, sometimes the best way to get through a bad day is to embrace your inner villain. While we don’t condone carrying out your meticulously plotted revenge, sometimes it takes an evil mastermind to overcome the doldrums of a rotten mood.

The obvious stuff. You’ve heard it all… write in your journal. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Talk to a friend. Sure, go ahead. There’s nothing wrong with those things, and they can even be helpful. But don’t expect them to be a cure; think of it more as 1) a distraction 2) you deserve it. Sometimes when I’m having a bad (depression) day, I can barely get out of bed to shower. That’s not very villainous of me. At the very least, I deserve to be clean and aired out. Plot your perfect revenge in your journal. (If you want to be productive, make a list of things that are bothering you to take to your next therapy appointment.) Check with your friend that they have “space” for you to vent, and let them know if you want advice or just support. Setting expectations for the conversation will help you get what you need and also not overwhelm your friend.

Swear a lot. There's something about swearing that just feels good, especially when you're feeling angry or frustrated. So go ahead and let loose with all the curse words you know. No one's judging you. I grew up in conservative Evangelical Christianity, where it was expected that good little girls did everything “with a cheerful spirit.” Phooey on that! If you have a mountain of dirty dishes piling up, and washing dishes is your least favorite chore in the world… fuck those dishes. Fuck them to hell and back and all the way to the cupboard (or at least the drying rack).

Put on your vampiest makeup. Sometimes, the best way to feel powerful is to look powerful. So put on your darkest eyeliner, your brightest lipstick, and your most dramatic eyeshadow. You'll be surprised at how much better you feel when you look like a total badass. (If you can manage it, take some selfies. This is a good excuse to go outside.)

Go to the driving range or batting cage. Take out your aggression on some inanimate objects. Go to the driving range and smash some golf balls, or go to the batting cage and take some swings at some baseballs. Give them names. Destroy your enemies.

Post on social media for validation. This one requires a bit of planning ahead — unless your badass makeup has inspired you to take some selfies (which I recommend!) Don’t be a whiny drama queen, but a smoking hot selfie and a sassy caption can provide some welcome dopamine-spiking likes. You’re not attention seeking, you’re gracing the world with your fabulousness!

Make a Triumphs List. No, not a smarmy gratitude list. I want you to write down all of your petty victories and gloat over them. The time you corrected a teacher. The time you were able to send a forward with “per my previous email.” The fact that she (you know who) can’t do any better than your leftovers.

Listen to angry music, or a captivating story. Now is the time to break out that heavy metal playlist your ex boyfriend made for you. Or better yet, borrow an audiobook from your local library or find a podcast with drama and violence. You’ll get so drawn into the high stakes and machinations that you’ll forget about your own foul mood. (Walking while listening to metal and scowling is a great way to scare your neighbors.)

Do sudoku or a crossword puzzle. The trick isn’t to do mindless busywork, like knitting or jumping jacks, the trick is to occupy your mind.

Kill them with kindness. You have to deal with customers all day at work? Make it a game — you are undercover as a mild-mannered office worker and have to fool them all with your charm. If someone dares to be rude to you, shame them with the scintillating brilliance of your smile. You are an actor, and this is your stage.

You deserve a treat. Steer clear of self-medication with hard substances (believe me, I know the appeal, but it won’t help), but now is the time to get that super sugary iced coffee. Go out for ice cream. Get takeout instead of cooking dinner. Buy that pretty book you already own five editions of. Masturbate (that could be a whole point itself; get that buzz! (pun intended)).

Do it to prove them wrong. I know — you’re a strong, independent villain and you don’t need any external validation. But sometimes the only thing that can rescue you from the jaws of defeat is the threat of defeat itself. Remember when I said to plot your revenge in your journal? Identify what is putting you in a bad mood and write down steps you can take to address the problem. Stinging over a breakup? Honey, you are absolutely allowed to work on a revenge body. Coworkers bullying you? Fantasize about your dream job, then look for it! Polish up your resume! Take steps to remedy or at least make yourself feel better about sucky things.

Count the small victories. A shower or walk may or may not make you feel better. But you can say you tried, and that counts for a lot! Do five pushups or squats, you can say you exercised. Can’t shower? Wash your face and put on deodorant. Can’t go for a walk? Stand in the sun for a few minutes.  

So there you have it: a few non-conventional tips on how to get through a bad day like a villain. Remember, bad days are only temporary. So embrace your inner villain, have some fun, and get through it.

[silver-ink-iron-words]

you just posted it and very much liked it :)

but also left me wanting to now see the vampire wasted on blood perhaps fluff ?? referring to that sucks bro :D

I'm so glad you liked it!

There's no vampire getting wasted in this one, but I promise it'll come soon :)

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Part 1

Part 2

That Sucks Bro, Part 3

The human squinted. “You realize that vampires aren’t actually sensitive to sunlight, right?”

“Wait, what?”

The vampire stood on the sidewalk, dressed head-to-toe in heavy dark clothing. Under their large umbrella, they wore a wide-brimmed hat and black heart-shaped sunglasses.

“Yeah. That’s just a myth.” The human looked them over. “Did you do any researched on this when you got turned?”

“Of course I did,” the vampire said, pouting. They closed their umbrella, and the human was once again certain that they would have blushed if they could. “But right after it happened, I got the worst sunburn of my life. And I just kinda figured . . . well, you know.”

“What were you doing that day?”

“Oh, just summer stuff. Barbecue with the family. Swimming in a lake. We made s'mores in the evening.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” the human said slowly, “that you just went swimming, and got a sunburn, like how normal people do?”

“Well, I uh . . .” The vampire stared at them. “Huh.”

“Please tell me that you haven’t also been avoiding garlic.”

“. . .”

The human sighed.

They grabbed the vampire’s hand, and led them into the store. “We are doing a whole bunch of google searches after this.”

Indoors, they were greeted with a series of aisles, reaching up to their shoulders. Each one was stacked top to bottom with red bottles.

The guy behind the counter glanced to the two of them as they walked in. “The donation centre is across the street, if you’re interested,” he said to the human. “You get twenty bucks a pint.”

“Thanks,” the human said, scanning the shelves. “But I’m just here to help this one buy their first blood.”

The vampire grabbed a bottle from the shelf and examined it. “Jeez. Why’s this stuff so expensive?”

“The $20 per pint might have something to do with it,” the human said. “Still cheaper this way than getting it in a bar.” They took the bottle from the vampire’s hands, and returned it to the shelf. “You don’t want that one though. AB negative will fuck you up.”

“You could always drink from your partner, there,” counter guy said. He flashed a fanged grin. “If you don’t like the price, just get the milk for free.”

The vampire’s eyes widened, and they held up their hands. “Oh, we’re not – ”

“How long will a single bottle last them, do you figure?” the human asked.

Counter guy's eyes scanned the vampire. “Lightweight like them? At least a month.”

“Hey, I’m not a lightweight.”

Both counter guy and the human shot them a glance that said “come on, look at you.” The vampire looked down and shoved their hands in their pockets.

The human kept their focus on the vampire. “Do you have a taste preference?”

“Do they have strawberry-flavoured?”

Counter guy barked out a laugh.

The human rolled their eyes. “Hey counter guy, what’s the most popular type here?”

“I’d say either O negative or A positive. Also, I have a name tag.”

“Thanks, counter guy.”

They grabbed a bottle of O negative from a nearby shelf and brought it to the front. Counter guy started to ring it up.

The vampire’s eyes followed the bottle in his hands. “So I just drink this, and I don’t have to eat food?”

Counter guy lifted an eyebrow. “Have you tried eating food?”

 “Yeah.”

“And how’d that go for you?”

The vampire frowned. “Okay, point taken.”

They paid, and counter guy handed the bottle over in a plastic bag. “I’d recommend drinking a little bit each day, rather than waiting a while and bingeing. Unless, of course, you’re trying to get totally smashed.”

They thanked counter guy, and walked out with the bottle in hand. They continued down the road for a time in comfortable silence.

“So wait . . . I can’t turn into a bat, can I?”

The human stopped. “Actually, I don’t know.”

They pulled out their phones, and began googling.

Part 4

[deadboyfriendd]

Tear You Apart | E.M. 

There was always a push and pull between you two and, to you, it was so fucking frusturating. But you couldn’t help it that he looked so goddamn good like that, on the soapbox stage, in those stupid fucking jeans in this god-awful lighting. It made you physically angry. So angry that you could reach out and choke him, though you couldn’t decide in which context. 

In the same respect, he shredded his anger across strings and frets, hoping to whatever celestial being willed him into this world would at least have the common courtesy to soften his cock ever so slightly. But he couldn’t help it that you looked so fucking good like that, legs twisted around the chrome barstool like a fucking serpent, lips puffed out pouty in that stupid fucking lipgloss in this god-awful lighting. It made him physically angry. So angry that he could pick you up and break you in half, though he couldn’t decide in which context. 

Before the set, he thought tonight could have been the night. He always wanted to up the ante on his little perverse shenanigans. He always wanted to be out-right with it, saying how bad he wanted to fuck you, but settled for glances and stolen, not-completely-accidental touches. But tonight was different, the stars or whatever, he passed it off as. Tonight it felt primal. Maybe it had something to do with the way you leaned up on your toes ever so slightly to whisper a good luck in his ear from the side of the stage, taking a step back before he could muster the courage to be spontaneous and kiss you. It must have been the way you batted your eyelashes at him and giggled at one of his jokes, making it ring and linger in his phonetic loop like a pressurized ear canal. Maybe it was the way you dragged your palms over the ridges of his shoulders and down his chest as you drew away from a hug. He knew you did that shit on purpose. You must have. You must have thought it was so hilarious how he now had to go on stage rock hard. 

You stared up at him during the last few songs on the setlist with a smile, but running through the pink canyons of your brain matter, you were seething. He must have thought it was so cute to brush behind you like that, grabbing your wait as he walked by, sending ice running up and down your vertebra and freezing your cerebrospinal fluid into ice cubes. Maybe it was the intense eye contact he made with you when you laughed with the bartender, like he was trying to stake his claim on you with a simple gaze. Or maybe it was the way his hands dragged up and down on your hips, drawing out your hugs just a few seconds longer, but also drawing you into the dip of his stomach that rested in the valley that his hip bones created. 

He purposefully took his time getting off the stage, stopping and talking to bandmates and bar patrons for a long while before he looked at you in that same possessive way. This time it held a certain hunger, something carnal. You slapped your hand down on the pack of cigarettes and lighter that he left with you, sliding them across the table and off the edge. You slipped out of the bar doors in the same manner- like the hand of God himself was smashing you like a bug against a table and dragging you out over the edge. The pressure both in your stomach and in your heart were heavy, your own carnal urges begging you to just say fuck it, and begged you to just scream fuck me. But your brain always reminded you that there were repercussions to these things. 

You almost didn’t hear the large doors swing open behind you. If you didn’t hear the disturbance in the air, you probably would have screamed when his hand grabbed you hip, dragging sinfully slow and- holy shit- painfully low on your stomach. His fingers dug into your skin over the thin fabric covering you, but you couldn’t concentrate with his denim-covered cock digging into your back like that. He held you tight against him. So tight you could feel his stomach rise and fall, still breathless from his performance. You closed your eyes slightly, feeling his hot breath fill the molding of your ear and dissipate against your neck. You breathed ever so shallowly, not wanting him to know just how turned on you were. He drew his other hand down your shoulder, feeling your soft skin and playing with the tips of your fingers for a long, painful second. He then drew the same hand back over your stomach, leaving it to rest on your sternum, where you both could feel your aorta threatening to explode into a wet mass of pericardial fluid and muscle tissue. 

There was always a push and pull between you two and it was so fucking frusturating. But you couldn’t help it that he sounded so goddamn good when he whispered, 

“I want to fucking tear you apart.”