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cecilysass · 2 years

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The Caller You Are Trying To Reach (1/1)

Read on AO3 | Rated Mature | Tagging @today-in-fic

He hasn’t been able to reach Scully all day, and it’s making him behave badly. She’s free to do what she wants on a weekend, obviously. She doesn’t have to tell him, even if she usually does.

He calls her cell. He gets a message saying the caller is unavailable. He tries again. He decides he’s going to stop calling for a while and do his laundry or go work out, but then fifteen minutes later he can’t help it, he’s trying again.

On the twenty sixth time, she picks up on the third ring.

“Hey,” he says, keeping his voice casual, but it sounds unconvincing even to him. “Where are you?”

“No,” she says. “Where are you?” There is a repetitive dinging sound behind her he can’t place.

“I’m at home. I have been all day. I’ve been calling you,” he says, trying not to sound annoyed. “Listen, Scully, I had an idea I thought we should look into about the Ganz case— the brother’s bank account? Maybe we should see if there are any other examples of—”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

“What?” He frowns, trying now to hear better. “Are you okay?”

“I said shhhhhhhhhhh. No more talking. Talk, talk, talk…” She pauses dramatically. “…talk.”

His face goes slack. “Scully.” Alarmed, he stands up from his couch. “What’s going on?”

“Too. Much. Talking. Mulder. Fox.” Her voice drops into a syrupy lower pitch. “You can do other things besides talk, you know.”

At the sound of her words his mouth has slowly fallen wide open. He’s hit with a number of strong reactions that he can’t quite get a handle on. Part of him wants to burst out laughing, but he’s not sure this is funny. “Where… are you right now?”

“I’m at the hotel. Waiting for you. Where are you? I’ve been looking and looking—” She is interrupted by the sound of someone’s voice, someone’s low post-adolescent masculine voice. “Thanks, cutie.” She giggles in a breathy, throaty way Mulder is certain he has never, ever heard from her, in all the six years he has known her.

“Mulder, somebody just told me I was a beautiful woman,” she whispers loudly. “He walked all the way across the casino to tell me. He has a shaved head, and I sorta want to go over there and rub it.”

“The … casino?” Mulder’s mouth is completely dry. Fear has started to ramp up. He begins to pace back and forth across his living room. “What casino? What city are you in? Have you been drinking?”

“Las Vegas,” she says. “You told me to come to Las Vegas, you goof.” Her voice goes sing-song. “I always do what you tell me, don’t I, Agent Mulder?”

“I didn’t tell you to—”

“Everybody keeps asking me if I’ve been drinking,” she says petulantly. “The bartender. The man at the bar. The other man at the bar. The … other man at the bar. But I haven’t had a single drink, not even one! Just an autopsy.”

“An autopsy? Why? Who did you—”

“I want a drink,” she announces. “Gin and tonic. Wait, what happened to the bar, Mulder? It was here a second ago.” Her voice goes distant. “I might need to set you down and look for the bar.”

“Stay on the phone,” he begs. “Scully, is it possible you’ve been drugged?”

“I’m going to tell you something you don’t know about me. It’s an important secret. Shhh.” She lowers her voice. “I’m really, really good at getting men to buy me drinks at bars. Did you know that?“

“Uh, no.”

“Are you surprised?”

It seems more than remotely plausible that men would want to buy Scully drinks at bars. “Not exactly, no.”

“Do you know my trick?”

He hesitates. “No.”

“I’m a flirt.” She laughs in that ridiculously breathy way again, and it seems to be aimed directly in his ear. “Melissa said I was a tease. But no, no, no! Not a tease. Just a flirt. I used to be the best flirt.”

“Scully,” Mulder says, keeping his voice level, but starting to feel decidedly frantic. “What I really need you to tell me is the name of the hotel you are in.”

There is a pause. “When a man buys you a drink at a bar, sometimes he thinks it means you’ll go home with him. Have sex with him …” A stage whisper. “Fuck him. Of course it doesn’t always mean you want to fuck him.” Her voice shifts to that low, dark molasses quality again. “Sometimes you want to, Mulder.”

Mulder smacks his head into the palm of his hand. Too, too many reactions, not all virtuous. “Jesus, please tell me, what’s the name of your hotel?”

“I could go home with someone if I wanted to,” she sounds almost defiant. “Any time I want to. I could right now.”

“Scully.” Mulder’s voice is as steady and firm as he can make it. “I know you could. Jesus Christ, I know you could. But you’re definitely incapacitated. Please don’t do anything—just stay on the phone with me, okay?”

She groans in apparent frustration. “Why don’t you ever let me have sex, Mulder?”

He wills himself not to analyze that statement too carefully. “You’re not yourself. Let’s try to figure out what’s happening here. Do you see a sign saying what hotel you’re in?”

“How do you know I’m not myself?” she whines.

“A sign on the wall, maybe?”

“You don’t know what I’m like.”

“I know you, don’t I?” he says in exasperation. “You don’t normally act like this. Is there a sign—”

“That’s a lie. I do normally act like this. What am I doing? Talking on the phone with you. I talk on the phone with you alllllllll the time. Constantly. I am acting like myself.”

“You don’t normally want to have sex with strangers in bars, Scully.”

“That’s a lie, too,” she says. “I do. Want to. Sometimes. Sometimes I might sit in a bar and think, maybe I will let that man buy me a drink. He’s tall and good-looking, and he could take me home and throw me on the bed and fuck me until I can’t see straight.” She laughs again, full on.

“Oh,” Mulder manages, his voice strangled.

“But do you want to know a secret, though?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. Another stage whisper. “That’s not what I think about the most.”

“No…?”

“That’s not what I think about at night. And in the bathtub. And … lots of times. Do you want to know what I think about?”

He really, really does. He one hundred percent does. But fuck it all to hell, he knows he needs to change the subject. He can’t be the guy digging for titillating information when she’s like this. And Jesus Christ, he can’t lose sight that her safety is possibly at risk. He’s got to get his head out of his dick here.

“Scully,” he says, clenching his jaw in frustration, “please forget about that, please, and help me figure out where you are. I just really need to know the name of your hotel.”

“I don’t remember the name,” she huffs. “Stop asking. Why aren’t you even curious about what I think about? Don’t you even care?” She sounds disconsolate.

“Can you find someone to ask? A concierge desk maybe?”

“Why don’t you even want to know my secrets?”

He sighs. “I just think you’re going to find it embarrassing later,” he says quietly.

“Will I?” She giggles again, and although he prefers Scully with her faculties intact, he does appreciate how much this version of Scully laughs. “Why would I be embarrassed?”

“Because, well.” He gulps. “Your sexual fantasies are just usually something that you keep private. I think it would bother you that I knew what they were.”

She whispers. “But you’re curious?”

Yes. Yes. Very curious. He chooses his words carefully. “Not enough to make you uncomfortable later.”

She groans again, and the sound is so prolonged and low, right in his ear, that it adds to the growing problem of Mulder’s inappropriate and shame-provoking arousal during this emergency phone call.

“Scully, scan the room,” Mulder says. “Look for someone wearing a uniform that might have a hotel name on it.”

“I’m walking to see better. There are so many people here,” she says. He can hear the murmur of crowd sounds around her. “Oopsy—I didn’t mean to bump into you, cutie. You have the cutest little cowboy mustache, you know that? What did you say?” There’s a pause and some muffled talking. “Noooo, I can’t do that right now, I’m on the phone with Mulder.”

Mulder freezes mid-pace. “What did he ask you to do?”

“He was having a little private party he invited me to,” she whispers. “But I’m doing your thing now, Fox, so I can’t go.”

Mulder feels sweat beading on his forehead. “This is very, very important. Listen to me. Don’t go anywhere with anyone,” Mulder says, gesturing emphatically with his hand, although she can’t see him. “No private parties. Stay in public, stay on the phone here.”

She yelps. “Ouch, stop.”

Mulder jumps. “What? What happened, Scully?”

“That lady bumped into me,” Scully complains. “Too many people.”

“I don’t like this,” Mulder mutters. “I don’t like the crowd. Go to the perimeter of the room. Avoid other people.”

“I can’t talk to people?”

“Are you walking out of the crowd?”

“I always do what you tell me to, Mulder,” she says in a husky voice again. Her tone changes. “But Mulder, you never let me do anything fun, not like I used to do. You are such a … what’s the word Bill’s friends used to say? You’re such a cockblock.”

“W-What?”

“It’s so unfair,” she says, another whine. “I never go out. I can’t date anyone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. “I have no authority over you. You can date whoever you want, Scully, when you aren’t incapacitated.”

“Ohhhh, that’s not true,” she says, a low laugh. For a moment she almost sounds like herself. “Nooooo.”

“Scully—”

“Can you imagine what you would do?” She starts giggling. “You would make a face like this…” She pauses, still giggling, presumably demonstrating his face, a demonstration Mulder can’t see. “You would throw a temper tantrum.” She giggles again, even snorting a little.

“Okay, okay,” he tries, “that’s not—”

“But it wouldn’t be funny,” she interrupts. “It’d be sad. Because I don’t like to see you upset. You’re my Mulder.”

Mulder touches the phone lightly. “Hey,” he says softly, stupidly moved by her childish statement. “You’re my … Scully, too.”

“So no sex, Mr. Cockblock,” she exclaims loudly. “No sex with anyone. Not with men from bars, and not with you either.” A deep sigh. “Never, ever, ever with you. Even when it seems like it might happen, it doesn’t.”

He’s shocked into complete silence.

“Mulder,” she whispers. “I see someone dressed like Elvis in a what-do-you-call-it-suit. The people in space. Who travel in a ship? Pointy ears?”

“Star Trek,” Mulder says automatically, still numb from the previous statement.

“I knew you would know,” she says triumphantly. “Elvis in a Star thing suit. He’s dancing.”

“Scully… when you said…” he starts.

“When I said what?” she says. “When I called you a cockblock?” She giggles.

“No,” he says. “Never mind.”

“Can I ask you a question, Mulder?”

“I guess.”

“Do you have any sexual fantasies?”

Mulder paces back and forth a little faster, shaking his head. This is a nightmare. “Of course, Scully. You know about the videos that aren’t mine.”

“Ohhhhh, I get it, yeah,” she says knowingly. “Big tits, big hair, fakey fake orgasms. Like those girls in the group shower one? Who all scream in the exact same way every time? Why the exact same way?”

He pauses. “You’ve watched the group shower one, Scully?”

“But noooo. Not what I mean. I mean real fantasies. About real life.”

“I think most people have real life sexual fantasies,” Mulder dodges.

“He doesn’t want to say,” Scully announces conversationally to someone, presumably an innocent bystander. “He thinks they’re private.”

“Well, yeah,” Mulder says, flustered. “I think most people would say they’re private.”

“Mulder,” she says, her voice again some sexy, dark-hued parody of her normal argumentative work voice, “I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about you.”

“Scully,” he protests pathetically.

“Maybe you need an example,” she suggests.

“No, no,” he says hastily. “No examples.”

“What about one … where you stop the car? And you get out of the car to flash your flashlight in the dark trees, but it’s nothing, and you’re very frustrated. So we come back to the car but instead of getting in, you keep talking and you …. press me up against the side of the car and you’re speaking to me, close, and you have me pinned hard. And ohhhhh, there’s your breath on my neck.”

“You’re talking about … me and you?”

“Yes, silly,” she says. Her voice turns breathier. “And then your mouth is on my neck, moving down, and it’s everywhere, and I’m gasping, and you pull off the buttons of that white silk work blouse—”

“Oh my god,” Mulder says. His mind is way too quickly following her scattered thought process, filling in details easily where she has left them out.

“Do you like that one? Because I have others.”

“Uhhhh,” he says. “That one is just fine.”

“I like the getting fucked against the car idea,” she whispers confidentially. “Skirt pulled up, panties down, shirt wiiiide open, bra hitched up, back against the metal, you’re kind of grunting, those lips crushed in my ear.” She sighs luxuriously. “Is that everyone’s fantasy, or just people who spend lots of time in cars with you, Mulder?”

He’s now got his palm on his stiff crotch, unwisely running it back and forth. It’s not the time, he really shouldn’t, but he has always had a weakness for phone sex, and this is Scully, it’s Scully. He can’t think straight any more.

“Mulder?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, tightly. He’s trying to get it back together.

“What do you think?”

“I think— I think it sounds…”

“Oh Mulder, yours probably are in the office all the time, aren’t they? You love the office sooooo much. With all the files.”

“You’re not … entirely wrong,” he says in a miserable voice.

“The desk?” she says huskily. “Is that it? Bent over?”

“Among others, sure.” He’s whispering, and he knows his cheeks are burning.

“You see, I guessed,” she says. “Not very imaginative, Agent Mulder.” She giggles again.

“Trust me,” he mutters. “I’m plenty imaginative. Imagination is not the problem.”

“You know,” she says in a low, liquid tone, “I wish you were here right now.”

His heart is thumping. The sultry sound of her voice sends blood rushing straight to his cock. He runs a finger down the side of the phone.

“I do, too,” he says, keeping his voice even with great effort. “Because… I think you need my back-up. And these things you’re saying, well, obviously they’re affecting me, I can’t hide that, but I don’t know if I’m really talking to you or whatever drug is in your system.”

There’s a pause. “You know, you’re just plain … sweet, Fox Mulder.”

He rolls his eyes and shifts weight between his feet, feeling like a teenager getting a compliment. “Come on, Scully. Give me a break here.”

She gasps into the phone, and he practically jumps to the ceiling.

“Mulder! Look! Look! Do you see who it is?”

“No.” He’s trying to readjust his pants. “I’m on the phone, Scully. I can’t see.”

“It’s Frohike,” she says excitedly. “He’s looking for someone. Maybe he’s looking for me, Mulder. Melvin! Yoo-hoo. I’m over here.”

“Frohike,” Mulder repeats. He narrows his eyes. “Frohike.”

“Yes. Is that Byers with him? Nooo, I don’t think so. Where did Byers go?” she says. “I think Hickey sees me, Mulder! I can’t wait to talk to him.”

“The Gunmen are with you,” he says grimly. And their days are numbered, he thinks.

“Of course they are, silly,” she says. “They’re the ones who brought me up to speed. That’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? Up to speed. Whoosh!”

Mulder hears Frohike’s urgent voice in the background. “...looking for you everywhere, Scully. Where have you been? Who are you talking to?”

“Hickey!” There’s a shuffling sound, and Mulder imagines that her arms have probably gone around the little man, no doubt giving him the thrill of his life. “Frohike, it’s Mulder. Want to talk to him?”

There’s a pause. “That’s Mulder on the phone? Right now?”

“Get on the phone, Frohike,” Mulder bellows into his phone, so loudly the window panes in his apartment vibrate.

“You don’t have to yell,” admonishes Scully.

“I’ll talk to him later, Scully,” Frohike’s voice says in the background.

“Frohike, what the fuck are you guys doing–” Mulder shouts into the phone receiver.

“Shhhhhhh,” Scully says. “Shhhhhh, you need to calm down, Mr. Crankypants.”

“Okay, okay,” he says to Scully, modulating his tone. “Just ask him if—”

“Listen, I’m going somewhere with Frohike now, okay, Mulder? He says it’s important.”

Mulder lets out a frustrated exhale. At very least he’s certain the Gunmen will prioritize her safety, although apparently he can’t be sure they won’t put her at risk for stupid reasons.

“Fine,” he says. “But give Frohike this message for me: I expect a full and a detailed explanation from him within twenty minutes…or I’m reporting the abduction of a federal agent, and every available member of law enforcement in metropolitan Las Vegas will be out searching for the Three Stooges, including every two-bit traffic cop and park ranger.”

“Waaaaaay too long of a message,” Scully complains.

“Uh, I heard,” comes Frohike’s voice nervously in the background.

“I mean it, Frohike,” Mulder says, raising his voice again so Frohike can hear.

“Hickey, do you know what Mulder said? He said—”

The call clicks off abruptly. Dial tone.

Mulder stands in the middle of his living room floor, phone in hand, unable to do a single thing.

***

The following day

Mulder leans against his kitchen table, phone cradled under his chin, scowling, listening closely to Scully’s explanation.

“It doesn’t take much to imagine the potential uses of the anoetic histamine,” Scully is saying. “Suggestibility, mind control. It’s troubling, to say the least. I’m going to write a full report when I get back.”

“That’s a good idea,” he says neutrally. “And you yourself were injected with it?”

“I was, yes,” she says. “I don’t remember very much of those hours, but evidently I presented as though I had been drinking a lot. I’m sure it was… humiliating. The whole experience has been unpleasant, to say the least.”

“And you’re okay? It sounds potentially unsafe, to be drugged up, suggestible, wandering around a Las Vegas hotel.”

She huffs a sigh into the phone. “The Gunmen claim I was safe the whole time. Trust me, Mulder, I was ready to throw all three of them out the penthouse window when I figured this whole thing out.”

“What time is your flight back, g-woman? You need a ride from the airport?”

“Sure, thank you – it’s around seven.” She pauses. “So Mulder … you and I didn’t speak on the phone yesterday at all?”

He bites his lip, hard. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just felt like I might have remembered something about that. It’s a little fuzzy.”

“Hmm,” he says. “The memory effects sound interesting. Something for your report, I guess. So what’s your flight number?”

A heavy sigh. “We did speak, didn’t we?”

He rubs his forehead wearily. “Yeah.”

“It was … bad, wasn’t it?”

“Come on, Scully,” he says lightly, “we’re all friends here. Who among us hasn’t acted badly while drugged?”

“I can’t decide if I want you to tell me about it or not.”

“You don’t,” he says with finality. “Please trust me on this. You don’t.”

“Tell me just one thing I said, just to set my mind at ease,” she begs. “One thing so I can feel like I have some idea.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. “All right.” He can hear her taking a breath in anticipation on the other end of the line. “You’re apparently very good at getting men to buy you drinks at bars. Not because you’re a tease, but because you’re a flirt.”

“Ah.” She exhales. “Okay. That’s not so bad. A little embarrassing. Not horrific.”

“No. Not so bad. See?”

“My flight number is 4543. I’ll meet you at the downstairs entrance like usual,” she says. He thinks she’s about to hang up, but there’s another pause and he can hear her inhale. “Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“You held back, didn’t you?”

“Please just drop it, Scully.”

“Something else,” she says. “Please.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t–”

“Loss of memory makes me nervous.”

“Okay,” he relents. “Okay. I know. I get it.” He considers for a moment. “Here’s another. Let me think about how to put this. Here goes: I thought Frohike was the only friend I had who was borrowing my videos that aren’t mine, but apparently I was wrong, because you were able to describe choice details from a scene.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

“There you go.”

“That’s more embarrassing.”

“They’re my videos, so not especially embarrassing to me.”

A pause. “The neighborhood cheaters one?”

“Nooooo,” he answers. “The group shower one, but holy shit, Scully. Just ask before borrowing next time, okay?”

“Mulder,” she says, “did I say other inappropriate things… things that…?”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” he says, and means it. “Nothing. Really.”

“The very fact you know what kinds of things I mean,” she says, her voice small, “makes me think that I did, and that I should be embarrassed.”

He considers how to put this. “You didn’t say anything that I couldn’t have said to you.”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment. “You’ve flirted in bars to get drinks?”

“No comment,” Mulder says primly.

“You’ve practically taken your shirt off in a diner to get the last piece of pie from a waitress,” she says, “so I guess I can see it.”

“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about, Scully.”

“Okay,” she says. “Thank you, Mulder.”

“So that’s that,” he says, a businesslike tone. “And I’ll see you at the downstairs entrance of the airport tonight.”

“All right,” she agrees. “And on the drive home, maybe you can tell me about all those imaginative office sex fantasies you have.”

She hangs up the phone.

#the x files #x files fanfic #xfiles fanfic #my fic #3 of a Kind #three of a kind #The Caller You Are Trying To Reach

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darkesttimelinestuff · 1 year

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Death in the Afternoon

Day 10 of Fictober! Wow! Mulder, Scully, casino, a Death in the Afternoon.

Prompt #16 - "Do you know a way out of here?"

Find me on Ao3

Mulder had convinced Scully to accompany him on a trip to New England. It wasn’t a case, per se, but they’d privately investigate the stacked rocks of the Makiawisug, while also experiencing the amenities and nightlife of Mohegan Sun Casino of Connecticut.

“So, you want to take me to New England, in the fall, to investigate some stacked rocks?” Scully had put it.

“Not just any rocks. It’s said by the Mohegan Indians that the Makiawisug are little creatures, not unlike leprechauns, that are generally kind, but occasionally known to cause mischief. They were the ones who taught the Indians to grow maize. And, when spotted by a human, would point a finger and cause the person to freeze in place. They would take all the person’s belongings.”

“So we’re on the case of a very old robbing.” Scully deadpanned.

“We’re not on a case. We’re on vacation.”

“You have a funny definition of vacation.”

“Well, Mohegan Sun has many award-winning restaurants, some of the best shows, and relaxing spas,” Mulder offered.

“Now you’re talking,” Scully said.

That had been two days ago. Their investigation of the ancient rocks had come up short. No small creatures to cause havoc were found. Mulder was mildly disappointed, but they each enjoyed their couple’s massage that evening.

“Let’s get a drink,” Scully suggested, already tipsy from a combination of the spa’s champagne and the glorious, nearly orgasmic massage.

“You go ahead. I want to change into something nicer,” Mulder said. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”

When Mulder found his way back to Scully, her lively and high-pitched voice carrying through the crowded bar, he was not prepared for the sight: Scully, tossing her hair, batting her lashes at everyone around her, sipping from strangers’ drinks, taking a drag from something that was definitely not a cigarette.

“What the hell happened while I was gone?” Mulder muttered.

“Mulder!” Scully exclaimed excitedly as he approached. “Bye, everyone!” she said. “Foxy’s here and I’m going to get laid!”

“Scully! Shhh!!”

“There are so many people! Do you know a way out of here?” she asked, doe-eyed.

Mulder led her out of the crowd by the elbow and she high-fived several people on her way to the elevators.

“What has gotten into you?” he whispered, calling down the elevator.

“Well,” Scully said, thoughtfully, tapping a finger to her chin, “that delicious spa champagne, a Death in the Afternoon, and definitely a hit or two of pot!” She giggled.

“What? The Hemingway novel?” Mulder spat.

The elevator doors opened. Scully pushed him inside and the doors closed behind her.

“In the afternoon,” she repeated and kissed him, hard.

Her hands were all over his body, his cock reacting instantly to the fondling.

“What’s a ‘death in the afternoon?’” he managed, his mind going hazy with pleasure.

“A drink,” she said, her tongue in his mouth. “Champagne, absinthe. It’s good.” She licked down his neck and under the collar of his shirt, then got down on her knees.

“Get up! What are you…” Mulder said and the elevator doors dinged open on their floor.

An older couple, mouths agape, stood before them.

Mulder helped Scully up and quickly whisked her off to their room.

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bravenewolympus--hq · 5 months

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𝒅𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒚𝒔𝒖𝒔, 𝒈𝒐𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒆, 𝝂𝒆𝒈𝒆𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚, 𝒇𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝝂𝒊𝒕𝒚, 𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔, 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 𝒆𝒄𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒔𝒚, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒓𝒆.

this character is allied with and/or a ranked member of the minotaur network.

suggested faces — please note, this character must be 35+ years old. robert sheehan; avan jogia; harry styles; chay suede; phil dunster; cameron monaghan; nico tortorella; michael vlamis; michael evans behling; james scully;

suggested occupations. owner of an up and coming night club, that doubles as a front for their drug importing operation: having discovered an ingenious way to turn ambrosia and various other party favours into champagne. alternatively, either a drug dealer (especially to the wildly wealthy or famous), or someone who owes his dealer (and by extension, the minotaur) a significant amount of money as a result of the above partying habit.

𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒔𝒌𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒔 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏.

ʙʀᴀᴠᴇ ɴᴇᴡ ᴏʟʏᴍᴘᴜꜱ : ᴀ 21+ ᴍᴏᴅᴇʀɴ ɢʀᴇᴇᴋ ᴍʏᴛʜᴏʟᴏɢʏ ᴅɪꜱᴄᴏʀᴅ ʀᴏʟᴇᴘʟᴀʏ. athens, new york: an island city, all trees and marble, glass and steel and highrises set against an ocean skyline. bustling and loud, crowded, but not without a bizarre sense that it must have sprung up overnight, somehow, when surely it must have always been here, no? on a clear night, you might even be able to see the lights of its more famous cousin, new york city, across the water…if you squint hard enough. it may not get as much attention as the shiny apple across the hudson, but those not so blinded by the lights must certainly have been coming here for years. is there something in the water here, too? no one leaves, not in any meaningful way anyway. feels like it has a special way of pulling you back in, if you try. they, that is anyone who was anyone or paid even an iota of attention to the evening news, called him the minotaur. the media does love a catchy nom de guerre, doesn’t it? sells newspapers like hotcakes in the morning. ambrosia, whether it’s the latest designer drug trend or the latest pestilence sweeping the streets of athens, just depends on how tightly you clutch your pearls on sundays. must infuriate the police, don’t it? that without fail, by the time they arrive to any crime scene at all, all that’s left is the heap of little cream-coloured business cards, the red lines of a labyrinthine logo more taunting than they are helpful. between an epidemic of pearlescent powder, neatly parceled out in small plastic baggies, a tide of crimson bull graffiti, casinos and bordellos and the nightlife (oh my!), it’s no small wonder they call this an atlantic sin city. it’s a vice eat dog world, ain’t it? and anyone who calls athens home is just living in it. powerless, with no memory of their past lives, what's a god gotta do to survive?

#mythology rp #city rp #crime rp #discord rp #open skeleton #open male #open male skeleton #male skeleton #olympian gods #dionysus

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indefatigablepaths · 9 months

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The X-Files - Mulder and Scully see UFO in Area-51 [1x02 - Deep Throat]

youtube

I can't hear you fox my names deep throat not phonetic semantics I'm most likely an Indian at the casino.

#planets #programming #space #youtube

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xtruss · 2 years

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Cultural Comment: Fifty Years of “Learning From Las Vegas”

The cool appraisal of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s revolutionary book has a lot to inspire the architects of today.

— By Christopher Hawthorne | January 27, 2023

On the morning of January 10, 1969, thirteen graduate students gathered inside Yale’s Art and Architecture Building to give their final presentations in a studio led by the married architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. The students had spent the previous semester studying the urban design of Las Vegas, including a ten-day visit to the city during which they sketched hotel façades, measured nighttime illumination levels on the Strip, and crashed the opening gala for the Circus Circus Casino while wearing thrift-shop formal wear.

The agenda for the day stretched for more than eleven hours, with presentations on each of the studio’s dozen research categories, several short films (one of them shot from a helicopter borrowed from Howard Hughes), and breaks for lunch and dinner. The experts who assembled to discuss the results—the jury, in art- and architecture-school parlance—included the prominent Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully (whose son, Daniel, was a student in the studio) and the writer Tom Wolfe, whose 1964 Esquire essay “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” was an inspiration for Scott Brown and Venturi.

The following week, Venturi wrote a letter of thanks to some of the jurors, alluding to some of the raised eyebrows that he and Scott Brown encountered while bringing a close study of billboards and casino layouts into the architectural academy: “We think it went well in general,” he told them, “but I am still a little unbelieving that some people can’t understand we just wanted to look at Las Vegas in a dead-pan way which is also a poetic way of long standing.”

The book that emerged from this research, “Learning from Las Vegas,” published by M.I.T. Press in the fall of 1972 and credited to Scott Brown, Venturi, and their teaching assistant Steven Izenour, turned fifty last year. While it remains among the four or five most influential books on twentieth-century American urban form—alongside Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York” (1978), and Mike Davis’s “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990)—it has also never quite outrun the critique that Venturi identified in that letter, a criticism that begins with suspicion of the idea that Las Vegas could ever be a subject worthy of serious architectural study.

The Times review of “Learning from Las Vegas,” by Roger Jellinek, carried the following headline: “In Praise (!) of Las Vegas.” Certainly, the conventional wisdom by that point saw Las Vegas and cities like it—and urban sprawl generally—as a scourge. (The Times had used a nearly identical headline, “In Praise (!) of Los Angeles,” less than a year earlier, for Jellinek’s review of Reyner Banham’s “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.”) The architect and critic Peter Blake’s widely read 1964 book, “God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape,” saw evidence in the postwar commercial strip, with its jumble of gas stations and drive-ins, of “the decline, fall and subsequent disintegration of urban civilization in the United States.” The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made a similar argument (in similarly apocalyptic prose) in an essay called “The Schema of Mass Culture”: “The neon sentences which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.”

Scott Brown and Venturi were certainly comfortable staking out a contrarian position; it was then, and long remained, their go-to move. “Learning from Las Vegas” prompted just the kind of polarized reaction they were aiming for. It dominated discussion within architectural circles and won praise from younger critics, like Paul Goldberger, who wrote in the Times that “the Venturis,” as they were sometimes called in those days, had, by giving Las Vegas so much attention, “infuriated other architects, fascinated students and made themselves perhaps the most controversial figures in American architecture today.” The book also reached an audience of general-interest readers, for whom it explained changes in American cities which were increasingly difficult to ignore but hadn’t yet been framed in such an engaging way. The book’s first run of two thousand copies quickly sold out, and it has stayed in print ever since.

But did “Learning from Las Vegas”—and the Yale studio that inspired it—really set out to praise the architecture and urbanism of the Strip? Or was it meant instead as a cautionary tale about sprawl, a phenomenon that could be seen at its “purest and most intense,” as the authors put it, in Las Vegas? The answer is both—and neither. What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture. “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,” the authors wrote. “Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.”

Robert Venturi à la Magritte on the Las Vegas Strip, 1966.Photograph by Denise Scott Brown / Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc.

Scott Brown and Venturi first visited Las Vegas together in November of 1966, a year before they were married. The trip was her idea. A young widow from South Africa, Scott Brown had begun teaching at U.C.L.A.’s new School of Architecture and Urban Planning after earning a master’s degree from and serving on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where she and Venturi met. At first, she thought that Los Angeles might make the most useful laboratory for studying the emerging urbanism of car-centric cities—for employing the analytical method that she self-deprecatingly called “town watching”—before realizing that Las Vegas offered a petri dish of more manageable size. “We rode around from casino to casino, dazed by the desert sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what we saw,” she recalled. “We were jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins.”

As is often the case when architects travel—especially architects who write—the jolt wasn’t simply a reaction to what they saw. It was also an electrifying realization that what they were seeing might be material, fodder for a potent follow-up to Venturi’s influential first book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” (That book, published in 1966, argued that modern architecture, by stripping away references to earlier landmarks or design movements, had drained new buildings of nuance and verve in favor of “prim dreams of pure order.” It also looked ahead to some of the preoccupations of the Yale studio by asking, in a reference to the American city-making of the era, “Is not Main Street almost all right?”) What if the pair mined their ambivalence about Las Vegas, that feeling of “both loving and hating what we saw,” for insights about the state of the postwar American city?

The trip formed the basis for a 1968 Architectural Forum essay by Scott Brown and Venturi, titled “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas,” which gave rise to the studio and a formal book proposal. Scott Brown later suggested that “Learning from Las Vegas” wasn’t really about Las Vegas but instead about the broader “symbolism of architectural form,” and there is something to that notion. The book is preoccupied with the ways in which vernacular architecture in Las Vegas and places like it had begun to respond to the dominance of the car—and with how travelling by car through cities affects our understanding of speed, distance, and the information conveyed by signs of all kinds. “Is the sign the building or is the building the sign?” the authors ask. “These relationships, and combinations between signs and buildings, between architecture and symbolism, between form and meaning, between driver and the roadside are deeply relevant to architecture today and have been discussed at length by several writers. But they have not been studied in detail or as an overall system.”

Most architecture students over the years have read the shorter second edition of the book, a paperback published in 1977, but the 1972 large-format hardcover version is the livelier and more revealing document, if also the more contentious editorial product. It is divided into three parts. The first largely reproduces the Architectural Forum essay and includes a close study of the Strip’s architecture, signage, and street furniture. The second provides an analysis of how trends visible in Las Vegas relate to larger developments in architecture and urbanism. This section is anchored by a tribute to “ugly and ordinary” architecture, including a now famous distinction between buildings that are “ducks,” which is to say, commercial structures that take the shape of what they’re selling—a Mexican-food shop in Los Angeles resembling a giant tamale, for example—and those that are “decorated sheds,” or expediently made buildings that gain energy from signage and ornament. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to a more conventional architectural frame.

Many late-modern buildings, in Venturi and Scott Brown’s view, had become by the nineteen-sixties a species of duck, their flat roofs and spare geometry existing primarily to advertise their architectural loyalties—to sell stale International Style tamales, as it were. (As Ada Louise Huxtable put it in reviewing “Learning from Las Vegas” for The New York Review of Books, “The modern building has rejected decoration only to become one big decorative object in itself.”) Scott Brown and Venturi much preferred the decorated shed, in no small part because of the high-low frisson produced when sophisticated architects mixed straightforward design choices with ironic and over-scaled ones, as they themselves would do for the rest of their career.

The final third of the book is made up of a survey of design projects in the office of Venturi and Rauch (as their firm was then known), from 1965 to 1971. This section, whose advertorial tone will be familiar to regular readers of architecture monographs, was removed for the second edition. That edition also introduced an entirely different approach to graphic design. Scott Brown and Venturi clashed from the start with the head designer at M.I.T. Press, Muriel Cooper, who worked in the so-called Swiss style and had overseen a mammoth 1969 survey of the Bauhaus by Hans Wingler.

Much of Cooper’s design for the first edition of “Learning from Las Vegas” follows the modernist playbook to a T, with sans-serif typefaces, an unyielding five-column grid, and oceans of white space in which both text and undersized images swim. As Scott Brown later put it, “That our argument against Late Modern was couched in Late Modern graphics conveyed, to say the least, a mixed message—‘one irony too far,’ I said. We argued mightily with Muriel.”

At the same time, perhaps overcompensating for her reputation, Cooper also proposed an initial cover design, later modified, which included a bubble-wrap slip cover and was crowded with large text, busy to the point of being shouty. For Scott Brown and Venturi, this choice was altogether too much on the nose. “The cover as designed is absolutely unacceptable: leaving out questions of good or bad design, it is inappropriate,” they wrote, in a letter to Michael Connelly, the M.I.T. Press editorial director. “This is a serious study with a serious text and deserves a digniﬁed conventional image. The shock must come from the contents inside the book.”

As Aron Vinegar notes in his excellent 2008 history, “I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas,” “Scott Brown was convinced that Cooper had given them a ‘Duck.’ Cooper was sure that that was what they wanted all along.” Scott Brown and Venturi persuaded Connelly to let them design the second edition themselves. Among other changes, this “small, cheap, readable” edition, in Scott Brown’s words, added a subtitle (“The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form”) and featured a serif typeface, Baskerville, along with a discreet, even boring, cover. It also saw a bigger role, or at least more prominent credit, for Scott Brown: it included a preface signed only by her, and it removed the first edition’s “Note on Authorship and Attribution,” which had carried just Venturi’s name.

Roger Conover, the longtime executive editor for art and architecture at M.I.T. Press, hoped for years to reprint the first edition, which had remained something of a cult favorite among graphic designers. Scott Brown and Venturi always refused. This changed in 2015, when Conover, nearing retirement, approached Scott Brown to make one final try, not only promising her the chance to write the introduction for what is now known as “the facsimile edition” but also to give her, as he put it, “the last word in the case of any editorial differences.” (Venturi’s health was fading by this point; he died in 2018.) She agreed, settling some scores with Muriel Cooper in an essay that she titled “The Tyranny of the Template: The Graphic Design of the First Edition of Learning from Las Vegas.”

Venturi’s use of the word “dead-pan” in his letter to the Yale jurors—“we just wanted to look at Las Vegas in a dead-pan way which is also a poetic way of long standing”—was perhaps the most significant clue about what he and Scott Brown expected from the book’s design: something that was coolly above the fray (even while admiring so much about the fray), that didn’t try quite so hard or bear the signs of coming from any theoretical camp. This also reveals something important about their sources of inspiration. The Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, in particular, had by the mid-nineteen-sixties established an attentive but ostensibly nonjudgmental approach to photographing urban landscapes, including gas stations and apartment buildings, that Scott Brown would later refer to as “deadpanning.” The title of Ruscha’s best-known book, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” from 1966, is itself part of this approach, suggesting that by including “every building” he is not choosing or critiquing, just documenting.

Members of the Learning from Las Vegas Studio in front of the Stardust, 1968.Photograph courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc.

When the students in the Yale course travelled west to Las Vegas, they stopped off first in Los Angeles and visited Ruscha’s studio, where they would have had a chance to learn how he captured his images of Sunset Boulevard by attaching a 35-mm. camera to the hood of his Ford. (They also spent a day at Disneyland.) A photo montage in “Learning from Las Vegas” is labelled “The Ed Ruscha elevation,” and one of the short firms produced for the Yale studio was called “Deadpan Las Vegas (or Three Projector Deadpan).”

“He was very sweet,” Scott Brown told me over the phone, of the visit to Ruscha’s studio. “The students did what they did best—they brought a case of beer and drank it together.”

Several other artists had been mining a similar vein for nearly a decade. Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing the abandoned industrial buildings of Germany’s Ruhr region in the late nineteen-fifties, presenting them in a detached black-and-white style, and later shot the steel mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, using the same technique. The actor and photographer Dennis Hopper took a well-known photo of a Standard Oil gas station in Los Angeles from inside a car, in the early sixties. In 1964, Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer published “The View from the Road,” a book meant as a primer for the design of the rapidly expanding American highway network. The Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry first gained wide attention with a 1965 Melrose Avenue live-work studio for the graphic designer Lou Danziger, which was wrapped in plain stucco, aping the banal architecture around it.

It was not as though these artists and architects suddenly lost their powers of judgment. But if “deadpanning” was a pose, it was a strategic and timely one. The most direct way for up-and-coming designers to separate themselves from the modernist generation was to reject the idea of heroic gestures, of remaking cities from the ground up. As Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli write in the introduction to “Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” “Venturi and Scott Brown’s approach was revolutionary precisely in its renunciation of the rhetoric of revolution in favor of focusing architectural thought and action on the here and now. . . . It is this insistence on the city as it actually is that is the lasting legacy of Learning from Las Vegas.”

Yet that legacy, in certain respects, is fading, even as Scott Brown herself, and the work that she did before teaming up with Venturi, has become the focus of new scholarship. (A symposium on her career and teaching methods, pegged to a new book of essays edited by Frida Grahn, will be held at the Yale School of Architecture on February 8th.) “Learning from Las Vegas” now finds itself, perhaps more so than at any time since its publication, out of step with the current tenor of architectural practice and criticism. According to Izzy Kornblatt, who is in the first year of a Ph.D. program in architectural history and theory at Yale, students now tend to know the book “only for its title and for the distinction it makes between ‘ducks’ and ‘decorated sheds.’ ” And it is precisely the book’s nonjudgmental framing, what younger architects might call its passivity, that is responsible for this attitude, particularly when it comes to the effects of unconstrained capitalism on city-making. Activism—in particular efforts to take on the climate crisis, racial inequities and exploitative labor practices—has returned to the fore in the profession, and for good reason. “To tear down Paris and begin again” is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Corbusier. An approach that begins with close observation and ends with highly literate if occasionally self-satisfied commentary on that observation—the Scott Brown and Venturi method—seems ill-equipped, these days, to change the world in all the depressingly vast ways that it needs changing. What good is town watching when the town is on fire?

This is not a new critique. The architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri dismissed Scott Brown and Venturi for what he called their “facile ironies.” Yet those twenty-first-century readers tempted to brush off “Learning from Las Vegas” as a neutral travelogue risk missing the real power of its analysis—and the ways in which its approach might make today’s architecture of activism and political urgency sharper and more effective. We forget it now, perhaps because the effort was so entirely successful, but the book’s larger goals went far beyond understanding the quickly growing cities of the American West. Scott Brown and Venturi also wanted to accelerate a changing of the guard in architecture. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allowed them to plausibly claim a kind of “Who, me?” innocence as they worked to make room for their own generation to start running things.

After all, their frustration wasn’t with the revolutionary nature of the modernist project so much as with how it had grown stagnant and pleased with itself. As they write in the acknowledgments of “Learning from Las Vegas,” “Since we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intensive admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”

It would be going too far to claim that “Learning Las Vegas” was organized fundamentally as a kind of Trojan horse, sneaking anti-establishment ideas (about, for example, all the ways that modernism and its leading practitioners had reached a dead end) into the academy in the guise of mere empiricism, of diagrams and measurement. But the book’s seeming impartiality does serve to disguise its cunning. The young architects of today, who have their own designs on upheaval—even if their goals are more urgent or politically ambitious than Scott Brown and Venturi’s—could learn a thing or two from the strategy that the couple and their students perfected a half century ago, not so much storming the barricades as walking calmly and determinedly around them, flashing a camera or sketch pad as a kind of all-access pass. The “right revolution” this time around, whether it’s founded on climate activism or an architecture of racial or economic justice, will only benefit from that kind of savvy. In more direct terms, some of the most exploitative and environmentally suspect examples of recent urban planning—see the recent World Cup host Qatar, for starters—still haven’t received anything near the level of analysis that “Learning from Las Vegas” brought to the Nevada desert. ♦

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albusthedog · 5 years

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Scully: Hey Captain, how much does it cost to raise a sunken ship

Hitchcock: Answer, less than a casino makes in a year ... hopefully

Is it just me or did this scene make you want to invest?

#b99 #brooklyn 99 #hitchcock and scully #hitchcock #scully #sunken casino scam

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enigmaticxbee · 4 years

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✖️✖️✖️✖️ 6x20 Three of a Kind

The one where... where the Lone Gunmen trick Scully into going to Las Vegas with them and a mind control injection turns her into Loopy!Scully.

Best: I adore Loopy!Scully. The giggling and tickle fingers and the faces she makes in the hotel scene while Suzanne is examining her are... so cute 😂 GA has such phenomenal range to be able to play highly intelligent characters and also complete airheads. And her physical comedy! She should do more comedy, she’s hilarious.

Worst: It’s sincerely a tragedy that Mulder does not get to interact with Loopy!Scully. Although there’s no way that scenario wouldn’t have blown the lid off of the whole ‘platonic partners’ situation so I can see why the show didn’t go there (thank you for your service fanfic!)

❌ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

✔️ Autopsy

❌ Evidence Disappears

❌ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

✔️ Voiceover: Byers intro

❌ Catch Phrase

❌ Scully is a Medical Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

❌ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr!

❌ Fox/Dana

❌ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

❌ Casual Mulder

❌ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

50 States: Nevada x4 (39/50)

Investigate: Apart

Solve Rate: 60%

✔️ Bechdel Test: Barely - it’s a stretch to call it a conversation but Suzanne Modeski and Loopy!Scully do interact.

MSR: 🐝

Goriness: 👽👽

Creepiness: 👽👽

Humor: 👽👽👽👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

It was all a dream: Byers’ dream really seems even more impossible in 2021 doesn’t it.

The Gunmen exploit the fact that Scully will drop everything and jump on a plane based on a 2am call from Mulder and think nothing of it.

Scully: My medical opinion? BEEEEEEEEEP (CLAP) I remember when we first watched this episode my sister and I thought this was HILARIOUS and kept reenacting it (we might still do this on occasion).

Frohike recognizes Scully’s laugh from across the casino. And I don’t blame him because Scully’s laugh: 😍

Scully: I just can’t decide who lights my fire...

I do appreciate that Scully got Morris back for those ass slaps. Although Morris obviously enjoyed his a lot more.

Mulder’s not the only one going around tasting blood at crime scenes! Weirdos.

Scully better kick their asses. Not that it’s their fault per say that she was drugged, but they definitely brought her out there on false pretenses. I mostly just enjoy this episode for a fun, silly Scully time but if you think about it from Scully’s perspective as someone who has been traumatized and violated too many times to count at and understandably likes to be in control of herself this could be very triggering.

Was Suzanne’s fate ever addressed in the Lone Gunmen spin-off? I kind of feel like Byers should have gone with her 🙈 Although maybe it was enough for him to know she was free and safe - he couldn’t abandon his buddies, his true soulmates.

Episode-Related Fanfic Recs:

82: Three of a Kind by @contrivedcoincidences6 - Under the influence Scully leaves Mulder a very explicit message, NSFW.

Illicit Desires by @gaycrouton - What if Mulder came along to Las Vegas? NSFW (consent issues are handled pretty well but your mileage may vary)

Cold Coffee and Cologne Coats by @catarinquar - Scully’s having a bad weekend but finds Mulder waiting at the airport for her 🥰

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #xf #txf #xf motw #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #msr #fic recs #6x20 #three of a kind

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scullysexual · 4 years

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50 Days of Prompts (18/50)

@today-in-fic @mypanicface @starwalker42

- - -

Blind date set up by friends.

Maybe something about that phone call was off. That Mulder’s voice hadn’t sounded quite right. Scully had put it down to being awakened at 3am but the sounded robotic, synthetic, fake; lacking any form of emotion or humour she had gotten used to over the last six years. Most importantly, the voice on the phone hadn’t been Mulder’s.

.:.:.:.:.:.

Mulder thought he was here to investigate a mysterious drug. Scully had told him about it, done the ringing up at 3am for a change, told him to get to Las Vegas and well…who was he to refuse her order?

But Scully wasn’t here (maybe she was just on her way) until Mulder had caught sight of a little toad-like man running down the corridor and that was it, the game was up and Mulder had figured it out.

“Who’s idea was it?” He’d asked after bursting through the door of their motel room.

The Gunmen had guilty looked at him, Frohike looking the most unimpressed with the whole ordeal which just left Byers and Langly.

“It was a joint decision,” Byers tells him.

“Don’t say we don’t do anything for you,” Langly had added.

Mulder hadn’t been surprised when Scully had turned up to a casino in Las Vegas dressed in her work clothes.

.:.:.:.:.:.

“So it was a blind date?” Scully asks. Her face is flushed, hair curling at the ends slightly with the heat, her jacket having been removed, and he’s pretty sure an extra button on her shirt has come undone.

“Definitely seems that way,” Mulder says. In the most Gunmen-way possible. A text-to-speech program of all things.

Scully laughs and it’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard.

#50 days of prompts #prompt 18 #i write

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nbcbrooklyn99 · 5 years

Photo

SDCC BioGIFs: Dirk Blocker & Joel McKinnon Miller, Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Tumblr stopped by the Brooklyn Nine-Nine activation at San Diego Comic-Con to ask Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller about their inevitable Hitchcock and Scully buddy-cop film, which is shaping up to be a serious drama / love story that takes place on a sunken casino boat.

If there was a biopic made about Hitchcock and Scully, what would it be called?

Die Lard.

What would be the tagline?

A love story swimming in cholesterol.

What genre would the film be?

Joel McKinnon Miller: It would be a drama. It would be about four hours long, so you’d have to watch it over two nights.

Dirk Blocker: Or you could watch it in ten minute segments but still watch it in two nights.

If roles were switched for an episode, who would you want to play?

Dirk Blocker: Scully, of course

If you could create your own Con, what would it be?

Joel McKinnon Miller: Well we once tried to con Captain Holt into buying a floating casino.

Dirk Blocker: Floating Casino Con.

Joel McKinnon Miller: Or a Wingsluts franchise. We could have Wingsluts on the boat.

Who would you like to guest star on the show next?

Joel McKinnon Miller: Sting. My wife says I remind her of Sting.

Dirk Blocker: Well you look just like him.

Thanks Dirk and Joel!

Check out more of our #TumblrSDCC celebrity interviews, GIFs, videos, and photos from our official Tumblrs, like @entertainment, @fandom, @gaming, and @art.

GIF illustrations by Cubby.

Portrait by Josh Telles.

#sdcc2019 #brooklyn 99 #tumblrsdcc #biogifs #hitchcock and scully

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mulderspice · 4 years

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CHAPTER 7: we reconvene with Maya a few months after the Joshua Tree incident. She is about to go talk to Malouf about her Bronson plan. In the past few months she has not only planned this out perfectly, but also gotten a new tattoo. It’s the same one Scully has, the Ouroboros, right above her arrow wound. She’s actually terrified of snakes, but decided she needs to come to terms with them if she was going to work in the desert. Dutchoven called the ouroboros “snake suicide”.

Maya finally meets with Malouf, and explains to him how acquiring Bronson’s land could be worth billions of dollars. She compares it to a Reno or Las Vegas situation- the land could be stripped of oil and minerals and turned into a strip or casino town. Dutchoven took an opportunity to be gross here, and explained that Maya’s left boobie “unintentionally” touched Malouf’s back. Maya has breast implants, by the way. Anyway, she explains that the way to get to this land is through Bronson’s kids, because california has strict homeschooling laws that Bronson’s family is breaking. So, Maya and Malouf make a plan to go to the board of education and get someone to sneak out to Bronson and inform him that his kids need to go to actual school. Maya calls Bronson a “kinky motherfucker” for having multiple wives here too, but personally I’d go for the low-hanging fruit of naming one of your kids after Poop. Maya also plans to manipulate the entire situation to make herself and Malouf look like the good guys and throw the board of Ed under the bus for “taking children”. In fact, they are going to make it look like they are aiding Bronson by taking his land in exchange for his children.

Malouf cuts in, saying he has a theory that Bronson thinks with his dick because he has 2 wives, so he’s making Maya play out all of this because she’s hot.

They talk about the ocean for a bit and Maya makes some incredibly misogynistic remark about being like a self-made version of Bezos’s ex wife, but Malouf says he’ll fund Maya’s plan. He kisses the top of his head. He does not want to be outwardly involved in the scheme, so Maya’s going to be taking the fall if it doesn’t work out. They agree to discuss this only in person, and then she shows him her new tattoo and leaves.

this plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever

#anonymous #mulderspice bookclub

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mldrgrl · 5 years

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This Way to Safety

by: mldrgrl Rating: PG Summary: Am I too late for the @xfficchallenges fic is medicine Prompt 1? I hope not!

First, they asked for Scully, due to the “unusual nature” of the bodies. Mulder had watched her pack her laptop after returning from Skinner’s office, a thousand questions swirling through his brain, but things were rather precarious right now and he was trying to tread lightly. (She might not agree with that, but he was.) They’d only barely gotten the x-files back, but their partnership was on thin ice, faring only slightly better than their personal relationship, which was in tatters. Though he was burning with curiosity, he was conscious of her reticence to share.

“Take care of yourself,” is all he said, but even that almost sounded like an insult. The Fellig case was still fresh.

She’d nodded, tight-lipped. And then she was gone. Off to Sin City without him. Though, only two days later, he was summoned as well. That’s when he knew they must be desperate.

Somehow, the Vegas PD had been able to keep the news of a serial killer under wraps. Maybe because initially, no one put two and two together until an ambitious young assistant ME finally noticed the tattoos. And then it had quickly become obvious that what seemed to be random, run-of-the-mill murder, was actually the work of a very active and aggressive serial killer. That’s when they brought in Scully. But, aside from the post-mortem tattoos on the inside of the victim’s eyelids, there were no leads. That’s when they brought in Mulder.

So, Scully sliced and diced all day and Mulder sat in a windowless closet of a room at the Vegas field office with paper-thin files on the victims and the crime scenes and tried to get into the head of a monster. And never the twain shall meet. He’d had brief conversations with Scully over the phone to clarify aspects of autopsy results, but she was always distracted and rushed. And he was in the zone, as it were.

It took just over two weeks for Mulder to construct his profile. Mentally exhausted, he handed over the why and the what, but it didn’t give him the who and that was what frustrated him the most. They thanked him and sent him home. Home, though, to do what? He was both wired and fried. He couldn’t get on a plane and he couldn’t be alone.

Suitcase in hand, he checked out of the motel room he barely saw and called a taxi. He knew the name of Scully’s motel and that was enough for the cab driver. Twenty bucks got him her room number from manager on duty. If he had another twenty, he was pretty sure he could’ve gotten a key as well, but it was all he had on him. The lock was easy enough to pick.

Much like his room, Scully’s looked unlived in. The bed was made, her belongings were neatly stowed in the closet, toiletries in tidy rows on the vanity. Always bringing chaos to her order, Mulder dropped his bag on the floor, tossed his jacket in the direction of the chair by the window, and kicked his shoes towards the foot of the bed. He flopped down gracelessly, face-first onto the pillows. He could smell her perfume. It quieted his mind, like he knew it would.

Disorienting brightness is what woke him. Startled, he rolled away and threw an arm over his eyes. When the door was slammed shut, he rolled back and lifted his arm enough to squint in the general direction of the door.

“Why do I always seem to find you in my room, in the dark?” Scully asked.

“I like the element of surprise,” he muttered. “Can you please turn that off?”

“No.”

“But, I asked nicely.”

He heard her sigh and then it went dark again and he moved his arm back over his head. A few seconds later, he heard her utter a soft curse under her breath as she tripped on his shoes.

“Sorry,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She just moved into the bathroom and shut herself inside. It wasn’t long before she came out again and he caught a glimpse of her before she pulled the door nearly shut, leaving just enough light to maybe not trip over his shoes again.

“So what are you doing here?” she asked from inside the closet.

“Rough day. Rough week. Rough couple of weeks.”

“Tell me about it. Don’t you have your own motel to go to?”

“Not anymore.”

“Did you finally piss off the wrong person on the task force?”

“I played very nice, Scully, you’d have been proud of me.”

“Oh?”

“I was a very good boy. Laid low, kept my head down and did their profile like they wanted. Turned it in this afternoon as a matter of fact and got sent on my merry way with a pat on the head and everything.”

“Oh.” She pushed the closet door closed with her foot and stood by the bed with her neatly folded pajamas. “I’m tired, Mulder. I’d like to get to bed.”

“I won’t stop you.”

“Mulder.”

He knew she was on the verge of kicking him out, and he knew he couldn’t handle that. Not even getting another room right now was going to suffice. Maybe if he was already back home in DC, he could manage, but right now, alone in Las Vegas, he couldn’t do it.

“Please don’t send me away,” he said, and he sounded pitiful even to himself.

“Mulder?”

“It’s been…it’s just been so...”

When he couldn’t finish, she did it for him. “...I know.”

The whole room seemed to pause as Mulder waited for what might happen next. Only a few moments later, Scully returned to the bathroom, but for mere seconds. She turned out the light and he heard her shuffle across the floor. The bed dipped lightly as she sat down on the empty side and then her shoes thumped softly as they dropped to the carpet. They both lay staring up into the dark towards the ceiling.

“How many autopsies have you done in the last few weeks?” he asked, when the silence became uncomfortable.

“I don’t know. A couple dozen.”

“And the tattoos, are you sure there’s not-”

“You have my reports,” she interrupted brusquely. “I’m sure you know better than I do just what-”

“I do,” he broke in apologetically. “I do. It’s just making me crazy.”

“Well, you’re not the only one.”

“You’re right.”

“What are you doing here, Mulder?”

He sighed and turned onto his side to face her. She wasn’t much more than a grey silhouette beside him, but he could make out the slope of her nose and the glimmer of her open eyes. He knew it would be too much to ask of her to put her arms around him, which is what he really wanted. He needed her to be the grounding force to the electrical storm inside, but he certainly couldn’t ask that.

“I missed you,” he said.

“I’m sorry this isn’t an x-file.”

“Sure, but...what I mean is that I missed you.”

She didn’t answer and he rolled into his back again with another sigh. The shadows filling the void flickered on the ceiling. He could swear he could hear his watch ticking.

“Not just these past few weeks,” he said. “These past few months. I’m sorry that-”

“Not now, Mulder. It’s late.”

“Okay.”

Time ticked by again. Despite being in the city known for bright lights and casinos that never sleep, it was surprisingly quiet in this little motel off the strip.

“I missed you too,” Scully said, breaking the silence.

“Yeah?”

She didn’t repeat or confirm it for him, but that was okay. There was a little bit of peace he found in knowing she could want him around.

“You know that when the seas are rough, you’re my port in the storm, don’t you?” he asked. “The lighthouse I look for so I don’t go too far off course.”

It was her turn to roll towards him, first by turning her head, and then inch by inch, shifting until she was on her side. It took restraint he didn’t even know he had not to look towards her.

“You still manage to get yourself lost quite a bit,” she said.

“And you still manage to bring me back.” He did look at her then, but she was only shadows. He could feel her though, mere inches away. It was the closest they’d been in ages.

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and leaned a little closer to him as she exhaled. “It has been a really...it’s been so…”

“...I know.”

“I just want to go home.”

“Me too.”

“But, this is…having you here now is…”

“Good enough?”

“The next best thing.”

He rolled to his side and they were so close that the tip of his nose touched hers. He tucked his head down a little so their foreheads were almost pressed together. She brought her hands up under her cheek and they shared her fingers like a pillow. A little hesitantly, he brought his arm over her and rested his hand at the middle of her back.

“Is this okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“So you’re not kicking me out?”

“Not tonight.”

Not ever, he hoped.

The End

#i wrote this #xf fanfic #msr #xffanficchallenge #season 6

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sambergscott · 4 years

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5&23? ☀️

5. what line do you quote the most by hitchcock and scully?

it’s a dead tie between “how much does it cost to raise a sunken ship?” / “answer: less than a casino makes in a year. hopefully” and “GET WOKE SCULLY”

23. what character, other than jake or amy, do you hope takes to the peraltiago baby quite emotionally?

🎶 rosa rosa roooosaaa 🎶 she’s going to be the best tía ever i can’t wait

send me b99 questions!!

#niamh answers

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ahnsael · 5 years

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I’m going to try to keep this spoiler-free for those who may have not yet watched yesterday’s big sportsball game and still have plans to.

From the time I got up for work last night, I worked VERY HARD to avoid seeing the results of the Super Bowl. I usually at least open my browser to see if I have any messages on social media before I leave for work (if they’re pressing I respond, if not I make a mental note to reply in the morning after work). I didn’t do that last night. I just opened my email, saw nothing work-related, and turned my computer back off (I would have just checked on my phone or watch, but turning on my computer when I wake up is a habit, even if it’s only on for 10-15 minutes).

Even at work, with 32 televisions (and 30 of them tuned to sports channels), I averted my gaze away from them. Which is not easy when one of them is literally the size of the average bedroom wall (and tuned to the NFL channel, so I KNOW they were talking about the game). I saw some flashes of celebrations just enough to see a lot of the color red, but fortunately for me that’s a color both Super Bowl teams wear, so the color itself wasn’t a spoiler as long as I didn’t look directly at it and see a team logo.

I knew there was a replay of the game on at 12:30am on the NFL network and, even though I would still be working and couldn’t just sit and watch it, I wanted it to be as “organic” as seeing the results of the Australian Open, which was live over the past week or so while I was at work due to the time zone difference -- I would take a few minutes here and there when I could to watch a few plays (and I had the audio playing in the sports book room, where the gigantic TV is -- I thought it would be overkill and maybe send people packing if I played it throughout the casino; this is the one morning per week that I REALLY want the casino to be empty, but...not if they’re later going to complain to someone else about the audio), but other than that just have it on six of the TVs so no matter where I am in the casino, I can glance up at it.

And in three shifts this week, I re-enabled Closed Captions on all TVs where some jerk keeps turning them off for the third time (I’ve actively been trying to find out who is turning them off so I can explain why they’re important, but so far either nobody knows who is turning them off, even though the poll of people who have access to do so is short now that we control our TVs with a password-protected app instead of a regular Cable remote control -- I leave them disabled on the big screen since we can play audio on that one PLUS have that channel on one of the other 9 TVs on that wall WITH captioning so everybody can be accommodated, including people who hate the idea of words but more importantly, those who LIKE to read words but I want them enabled on all 31 other TVs -- this was the deal I struck with the Sports Book, and this is a deal I’m going to go down fighting for), so that if I wasn’t in the sports book area to hear the audio, I could read the commentary on the screen.

I told my co-workers at the start of the shift that I didn’t want to know the results just yet, that I hadn’t watched it, I don’t have a DVR, and so I was going to be seeing it for the first time during my shift. I told several guests, when they brought up the subject, what I was trying to do.

And then, as there were less than three minutes left in the game and the result was very much still up in the air, a manager from a competing local casino came in to play (managers at his casino aren’t allowed to play in the casino at which they work, where I am okay to play at the casino at which I work).

He said, “Can you believe that game?” So I repeated my refrain of the night: “I haven’t seen the result yet -- it’s on the TVs right now and I’m trying to not spoil the ending until I can pretend I saw it live.”

And then he spoiled the ending. He mentioned a thing that happened late in the game and literally one minute later that basically cemented the result in favor of one team, I saw that play on the TVs.

By then I had a feeling I knew who had won based on how things were going in the game -- it was still close, but it was getting a bit more desperate on one side.

But I was bummed to have it spoiled for me before it was a sure thing, even though it ended with the result I kind of thought was going to happen (I would have bet on it, but I would have only won $1 for every $1.20 I bet -- so if I put $12 on the game, I would have gotten paid $10).

I will say the game was good for the sports book (not ours -- we lease the space to them, though I don’t know whether we get a percentage or a flat rate). Our sports book location alone took in over $20,000 in live bets on the game (not counting bets made in the automated kiosk, which had a line about five deep Saturday night until it was shut down at 3am to get its daily odds updates).

But I was SO CLOSE to finding out the result organically instead of through a third party.

It’s like one Super Bowl Sunday where I was working the popcorn cart at Central Plaza at Disneyland. I figured, “there are no TVs for guests in the park, all I have to do is avoid the subject backstage, and I can take breaks in less populated break areas to help my odds, and then I can watch it on my VCR at home which I have set to record the game.”

But then, just before the second parade of the day, some jerk with a Watchman (remember those? Then you’re probably over 40 -- I’d say that if you’re younger, think “Walkman” but for TVs but you may not know what the Walkman is either) in the parade crowd yelled out the final score.

I just recorded over the game without watching it. I can watch some movies over and over again, despite knowing the ending. But if I know the ending of a sportsball event, I can’t even try to bother watching it once.

I mean, there are exceptions. I can watch Kirk Gibson’s 1988 home run with Vin Scully’s commentary countless times (though I probably wouldn’t watch the full game again). That moment was LIKE a movie. I can watch clips of sports when I know what happens. But a full game, with the time outs and the down times for commercials and the plays that mean nothing? Can’t do it. But put a copy of Waking Ned Devine in front of me, and I’m all in, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

#Waking Ned Devine #seriously if you have not seen that movie and have the opportunity #DO IT #one of my favorite films from my old 1990s movie theater days #hard to believe that movie is already 22 years old #and doesn't have a cult following yet

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