#Society for the Study of Surrealism

[zoomdigitaltv]

Leonora Carrington deslumbra en París: mujer surrealista en su máxima expresión

“TALISMANES DE UN VIAJE SAGRADO”: 70 años de arte personal de Leonora Carrington celebrados en los festejos del Centenario del Surrealismo en París. Esta exposición, presentada por el Consejo Leonora Carrington, transformó la Galerie Sator en un santuario mágico del surrealismo. Creada por Fermín Llamazares, con la organización de Laurent Doucet, la Maison André Breton y el Centre International…

[pupyuj]

→ “pick your poison.” || kim jiwon x reader fic.

— your mentor, the ingenious witch kim jiwon, has claimed to have made a breakthrough in her most challenging research yet and in an attempt to finally create the world's first working love potion, a few mishaps take place...

word count: 24.8k.

dynamic: dom!witch!liz x switch!apprentice!reader.

warnings: student x teacher (technically), age gap (liz is in her early 30s, reader is in her early 20s!), intoxicated sex, praise kink, thigh riding, fingering, breast worship, gagging, hair pulling, overstimulation.

requested?: nope.

a/n: EHEHE. I CANT BELIEVE WE BEAT THE DREAMLIKE WORD COUNT WHAT 😭 i was truly expecting this to be only 8k words long but as you can see, it exceeded WAY past that but i think it's exactly what this fic needed! 💕not very proud of how long this took me (a few more months in the drafts and it would have been a year 💀) but what i am proud of is how it turned out! with this setting and scenario, i was truly free to just say anything and ya'll know me, i fucking love saying ANYTHING‼️‼️ ANYWAY i hope everyone enjoys this, and as always, feel free to pour every single one of your thoughts about it in my inbox! 🥺💝

becoming the apprentice of an infamous witch has never been part of your ‘grand plan’.

the plan was to leave your comfortable little rich girl life to sneak your way into the best academy for wizardry, rightfully earn your place in society as an accomplished witch, and live amongst magic for the rest of your life! and all of that you wanted to achieve by yourself. you weren’t some wannabe runaway princess who had some bullshit excuse to want to escape your perfect life—not even your sweet mother, bless her heart, respected or entertained your dreams of being a witch. and of course that led to you resorting to desperate measures to study and use magic without guidance… or a permit.

magic, as you’ve learned, was as dangerous as it was beautiful. people with little to no knowledge of magic aren’t even allowed to get anywhere near it as even the way one interacts with it can either end well or very, very badly. in your case, it was the latter.

you can blame it all on false advertisements though. who ever knew that using a quickspell scroll would blow up a huge chunk of your father’s precious library?! it didn’t say that in the scroll itself—all you wanted to do was create a starry landscape in the room, it was the simplest form of illusory magic! but of course, your inexperience bit you in the ass. you created a spark… then an explosion that woke the entire damn mansion.

you were extremely lucky to have survived with none of your limbs blown to pieces and only a scar on the cheek. and you were even luckier that you were not jailed for attempted manslaughter and the very obvious crime that was the illegal use of magic, as that would’ve landed you in prison your entire life! you did get a mouthful from your parents and your grandparents, and even your aunts and uncles! and when your father forbade you from even surrounding yourself with magic, that was when you finally ran away.

now here you are, eight months later, living in a humble hut, sitting on the edge of your bed at four in the morning as your mentor goes on and on about how she has apparently made a breakthrough. you were barely listening—you have spent too many mornings in this exact situation to know that your wonderfully insane teacher was just… rambling. as you stare at your teacher barely awake, you start to think about how fate had a funny way of having things work out for you in the strangest way possible.

your teacher is kim jiwon, the brilliant witch who had a hand in the creation of the quickspell scrolls that greatly advanced the evolution of ‘accessible magic’ when she was only seventeen! it was one of the greatest feats of a witch from the modern era of magic. it was especially surreal to meet her in front of her hut after being chased down by decaying werewolves after messing with necromancy as she was one of your idols. it might have been strange to idolize someone who was so close to your age, albeit only a few years older, but it really was a dream come true.

enough backstory though. the past doesn’t matter to you anymore. not as much as the present, and certainly not as much as whatever future is waiting for you!

“(y/n), are you paying attention? this is very important! you and i will make it to the history books again after the dust has settled! well… me in the history books again, for the fourth time to be exact—not bragging, it’s just the truth—and you for the first time! alright—”

you yawned, “that sounded very much like bragging to me, ma’am. have you had your coffee yet?”

jiwon shakes her head, “no! caffeine is nearly not as crucial as what i am about to tell you. so—”

you sprang up from the bed, “ah, perfect. let’s go ahead and have some, then you can tell me about your findings. again.” you took a hold of your teacher’s arm and started tugging her out of your bedroom, much to her dismay.

“hey! wait, you didn’t even let me talk about it!” jiwon complains, but she doesn’t bother to resist and allows you to drag her all the way into the kitchen where you sat her down and conjured two fresh mugs of coffee on the table with a wave of your hand. you fight back the urge to smile smugly. it was hard to be humble about how fast and efficiently you have been learning under jiwon. 

if you tried to conjure anything six months ago you would have probably accidentally summoned a horde of undead for jiwon to fend off, but between her being a surprisingly amazing mentor and you being so dead set on learning, it was hardly surprising that you’ve got decent enough experience to enter the academy and pass an assessment or two. maybe even three!

“i must insist that i don’t really like being woken up so early in the morning for something so trivial as a… ‘breakthrough’ in your experiments.” you say after sitting down across from jiwon. she hummed approvingly at the taste of your coffee, and again you fought back a smile. practically wrestled for it to not show.

“listen, my love potion will change the tides! not a single witch in history, all of history, has concocted it perfectly and we’re going to change that. starting right now because i have found a way to make it all work,” jiwon leans closer and grabs both of your hands across the table, smiling brightly at you and your sleep-deprived self. “and it’s all thanks to me.” she says quietly before leaning back to her seat and sipping on her mug.

you blink your fatigue away and sigh, “again with the love potion. i don’t understand—you’re a wonderful spellcaster who has authored the spellbooks that the academy is using to teach their students as we speak. you’ve especially excelled in enchantment magic in your days as a novice! why do you need the love potion?” after your question has left your mouth, jiwon chugs down her coffee and slams the mug down on the table, making you flinch.

“i don’t need the love potion for anything, (y/n). i’m—oh, thank you,” jiwon pauses her train of thought when she notices you filled up her mug again. “i am as you say! i learn quickly and i learn well. i’m gifted with having been attuned to magic since i was an infant and that contributed a lot to me becoming the brilliant witch everyone knows today. being adept in spellcasting has always been a constant in my life but you know what else is?” there was a flicker of insecurity and… vulnerability in her eyes before she masks it with something else entirely.

of course you’ve been aware that jiwon has been perfect her entire life so none of this was brand new knowledge to you. still, you decided to entertain your mentor, “what else, ma’am?”

“potions are my greatest and only weakness, darling. potions! not potions themselves as i can easily nullify the effects of whatever concoction people want to make me drink—and trust me when i tell you that a lot of them were lethal poison, ahaha—but creating potions!” jiwon sighs deeply once again, now deflating on her seat, all sulky about her alleged ‘weakness’.

you chuckled, “yes, i bet it is so hard for you to only have one flaw.”

jiwon sticks her tongue out, “please don’t get all cheeky with me, (y/n). because what exactly did you do when you realized that a future with magic was nowhere near within your grasp before you ran away?” jiwon conjures her own coffee this time, eyes piercing yours as she waits for your answer.

you shifted uncomfortably in your chair, but answered honestly, “i didn’t accept it.”

“exactly. you persevered! even going as far as to give up the future that was going to be fed to you with a silver spoon just so you can whip coffee out of thin air! you challenged your fate and look at the results!” jiwon gleefully beams at you and you find yourself smiling back at her. her joy has always been contagious, and who were you to pass up the opportunity to rave about your own achievement?!

you still didn’t understand, but you always did admire jiwon’s never-ending journey of self-improvement. through teaching you, she’s able to hone her skills and learn new things about magic that she may have overlooked in her younger days. she always strived to know more, turned every situation into an opportunity to test her knowledge and of course, every single one of her self-tests, she passed with ease. you’d think that such a seasoned witch would be satisfied with everything that she has right now, but not jiwon.

“wake up, my faithful student! for this will be the very first time you’ll see a witch perfect the love potion.” jiwon bumps her mug against yours and chugs it down the remnants of her coffee before sending it off to the sink (that was cleaning the dishes by itself, by the way). she immediately sets off to her laboratory, which she likes to call ‘the sanctuary’. as your eyes follow your chipper teacher disappear into the other room, an adorable, furry creature jumps on your lap and greets you a good morning with a purr. jiwon’s familiar, cheddar, is your best friend in the form of a cat with the softest orange and white fur.

“looks like we’ll have a busy day, cheddar.” you leaned down and kissed the top of the cat’s head before letting it jump back down to the ground and stretch. you finished the rest of your coffee and sent it to the sink with unfortunately less care and flair than jiwon did and nearly broke the mug as it fell with the rest of the pile.

once you got yourself situated, you followed cheddar into the sanctuary and found jiwon standing gingerly in front of one of the bookcases in the corner of the room. the sanctuary was a heap of mess that consisted of books, sheets, vials, ink bottles and quills but it was home nonetheless. if you aren’t working on your spellcasting outside of the hut (where furniture wouldn’t disappear, get destroyed, or turned into something else entirely by accident), you were in here honing your craft and studying it with jiwon to watch and guide you. (and of course, cheddar would be there with you too!)

you watched by the doorframe while jiwon walked back and forth around the room gathering books and the random sheets scattered on the floor. you then realized that she must have not slept since she made this supposed ‘breakthrough’, which was probably why she was so eager to down three entire tall mugs of coffee. it wasn’t at all unlike jiwon to stay up until ungodly hours to soak up whatever knowledge there is that she needed to consume but sometimes you do worry for your teacher. she was… maybe a bit too passionate about witchcraft.

but hey, she wouldn’t be kim jiwon if that wasn’t the case.

“how is it that not a single witch and wizard in history has been able to successfully brew up a love potion? wouldn’t that be a fairly easy task to do considering what it does?” you finally asked. you always thought that people never bothered with such a potion—what use would it have after all? but after finding out that not even the most talented witch of the modern age of magic can’t do it… well, you grew curious.

“if it was, then wouldn’t you say that the spell counterpart of the potion should be easy too? you’ve seen the spell used yourself, haven’t you? the caster literally has to play cupid for it all to work! what a tedious spell,” jiwon shook her head, but she chuckled. most likely remembering all the times she has used the spell herself and made her fair share of mistakes. “naturally, the potion is just as complicated if not more, so nobody just bothered.”

you let out a laugh, “that’s it? people just gave up? i didn’t take witches and wizards to be… lazy, for the lack of a better word.”

“you can say they’re not as stubborn as i am, it’s fine,” jiwon spreads the sheets she collected on the table next to a small empty cauldron and a stack of books before she beckons you over. you do as you were told, and stare at the pieces of parchments before your eyes. “we can finish the potion before midnight if we’re swift. i will teach you everything you need to know about it first before we gather what we need.” the excitement in jiwon’s voice wasn’t too hard to miss. if she started vibrating and jumping around the room, you wouldn’t be surprised. she was so sure that this would all work… and so you trust her.

it was about an hour and a half into jiwon telling you every detail regarding the potion when you expertly led her back to the kitchen, sitting her down while you busied yourself with making breakfast for the two of you. however you managed to focus while jiwon talked on and on, you’ll never know… but what was a bigger mystery was your ability to have absorbed every single word despite being busy with another task. maybe it was months-long experience of being under her wing finally paying off, and that despite what people may say about her rambling, jiwon was a more-than-efficient educator.

on top of it all, the actual complexity of what you thought was a simple potion was a fascinating subject to you! you weren’t a talented spellcaster just yet but you were convinced that simply enchanting someone with the spell equivalent of the potion was way easier than going to such great lengths and a huge gamble. if jiwon’s formula was perfect, the person that consumes the potion will be head-over-heels in love with whoever gave them the concoction in the first place. although there was one very crucial ingredient that made you grimace upon hearing it—the hair of the person one wants to be in love with them.

“is the hair really necessary? can’t it just be like… i don’t know, a personal item?” you asked as you brought your perfectly-made eggs to your mouth.

jiwon shakes her head, “it’s just one strand, (y/n). and it’ll basically disintegrate once it’s in the cauldron! nearly every potion that needs a very specific person to target requires their hair, you should know this.”

you grumbled, “of course. but hair…?”

“trust me when i tell you that you’ll find yourself gathering stranger ingredients when making other potions. wait until you have to skin a fish alive.” jiwon teased, then laughed loudly at the sight of your bemused expression.

afterwards, you convinced jiwon that there’s no harm in taking an hour or two off from research and successfully got her to take a well-earned warm bath while you took the opportunity to clean up the sanctuary. before disappearing into the bathroom, jiwon joked that cheddar was now supervising you but you were sure that the damn cat was taking the task seriously with how it watched you intently as you tidied up the room.

in pure jiwon fashion, her bath took forever. in fact, you had a feeling that she had accidentally fallen asleep in the tub. (and you would know because of the rare times she had started up the bath for you and put all kinds of spells in it that made you feel like you were in heaven.) you half sat, half laid on one of the bean bags in the sanctuary, quietly reviewing jiwon’s notes while cheddar purred on your lap.

months ago, you would have been thoroughly confused reading jiwon’s notes and trying to decipher her strange accompanying sketches, but now you’ve become fluent in her little language. it was funny, becoming so familiar with someone who seemed like a dream to you not so long ago. you can thank fate for that. before you met her by chance, you were convinced that the great young witch kim jiwon would be living in a fancy tower in the heart of the biggest city in the world! although you should have known that someone as eccentric as her was the most likely to end up settling down in a dingy-but-comfortable hut in the middle of an unmapped forest.

as you read jiwon’s notes about the potion, you noticed that she had been keeping track of her progress as she studied. some entries were dated eleven years ago! you always knew that she was weirdly hyperfixating on the potion for quite some time, but you had no idea that it had been for that long! no wonder jiwon wouldn’t leave it alone—she can’t just accept that she can’t do this one thing! perhaps you shouldn’t have been so dismissive about her reasons for pursuing what would undoubtedly be a great achievement.

eventually, you fell asleep while you sat on the bean bag. the sheets of paper tucked in between your limp fingers sprawled down to the floor, and not even the way you fell back softly woke you up. cheddar was napping with you too! her head nuzzled on your stomach as she lay on your thigh, purring ever so softly. oddly enough, it was the best sleep you’ve had in a long time. odd, because it was on a darn bean bag with a cat on your lap and in an awkward position! and with you being so deep in sleep, you didn’t hear jiwon skip inside the room with a huge grin on her face.

“you know what, (y/n)! you were right about baths being life changi—” your mentor abruptly pauses when she spots your asleep state. normally, jiwon would shake her head and immediately wake you with how much she has been looking forward to finally creating the world’s only working love potion but instead, she finds herself smiling softly at you. she crouches down, her doe eyes examining your features closely as if it was the first time she was seeing you. in her defense, between her research, studies, and teaching you the basics of spellcasting for months, she didn’t really have the time to realize that wow!—you were beautiful. almost absurdly so!

the longer jiwon stares at you, the louder her heartbeat gets. that she didn’t quite understand and usually, anything unknown to her intrigues her but something as strange as… finding the way your hair fell perfectly on your face akin to the stars aligning in the night sky discourages her to find out more about it. instead, jiwon pries her eyes away from you and collects the scattered pieces of parchment on the floor.

the potion, jiwon thinks to herself. she huffs, gently pats both of her cheeks and puts her notes back on her table next to the small cauldron. that is what matters right now.

although jiwon would have loved to put all of her attention to fine-tuning her notes on the spell, she couldn’t help but worry about the smallest inconveniences that might befall you. for example, she worried that you might wake up with some back pains with how awkward your sleeping position was! she thought about sending you back to your bedroom using a levitation spell, but she knew you would’ve been woken up. and cheddar was all over your lap! what if you hate waking up covered in her fur? should jiwon send cheddar elsewhere? nevermind!

with a flick of her hand, a warm blanket conjures right on top of you and envelopes your upper body, eliciting a satisfying hum from you. jiwon couldn’t stop herself from smiling as she set her eyes back down on her notes, nor could she stop her ears from ringing and flushing red. but she ignores all of these sensations as if her life depended on it—nothing must stop her from accomplishing her life-long quest. not even you! you pretty little thing.

~

“out of all the days the markets decided to be busy…” jiwon sighs as she pulls the hood of her cloak down. she stares begrudgingly at the crowd before the two of you, pouting as she wondered if she could just postpone making the potion for a day. you stood beside your mentor, eyes droopy, lips dry, and still a bit fatigued since you happened to be woken up abruptly for the second time this day only half an hour ago to start ingredient-hunting. you kept your hood up, partly because the sun was blinding and mostly to avoid being recognized as the runaway rich girl whose face has been plastered on a few posters around the town.

when leaving the hut in the daylight, you made it a habit to use a disguising spell to make sneaking around the town a lot easier. but again, you didn’t have the time to do all that since jiwon had already been dragging you out the door while you put on your cloak. ah, if only it was nighttime… you would feel better wearing only your own skin.

“what are you thinking, ma’am?” you asked, and yawned immediately after. like jiwon, you were surprised that the markets were incredibly packed. usually around this time of the day, people would be in schools, or at work, or still sleeping! the thought of a wandering noble or decently-dressed businessman who just so happened to be right where you are made you anxious, but you knew you were just paranoid. you have been in hiding for eight months and things have been nothing but great on your end. your luck wouldn’t run out now… would it?

“well, we do what we came here to do, of course. i trust my cheddar to keep our hut safe if we take longer than expected. now come.” jiwon leaves your side and if it hadn’t been for your equally-as-quick-feet, you would’ve lost her in the crowd. you followed your mentor closely, careful not to raise your head too high and have your face show in the sunlight.

curse jiwon’s eagerness to make that darn potion—she was walking too fast and you could barely keep up now. you can’t even hear whatever she’s mumbling! you squeezed through a small crowd of four women, apologized to a young man after having to push him aside just to keep jiwon in your sight, and apologized even more after making an older gentleman drop a few fruits out of his wicker basket. you tore your regretful gaze from the old man and stopped in your tracks, realizing that your mentor was now nowhere to be found. oh, for heaven's sake!

how in the world were you supposed to find her now? you can’t even look up without fearing that someone might fully see your face and hand you over to a knight nearby! 

your eyes desperately search for jiwon’s blonde hair. it should be easy, it literally never stops shining! your frantic head turns made you dizzy, and the sheer amount of people coming and going from your vision made you feel disoriented. you grabbed onto the arm of a cloaked young lady, thinking it was jiwon… and you thought wrong. you muttered a quick apology and backed away from the stranger, only to bump your back into another one right behind you. whipping your head around, you were met with a well-put older man and your heart drops.

“are you lost?” the man asked. your breath catches in your throat. he doesn’t look like a person who lived in this town, not even the inner city where all the nobles and the aristocrats resided. he had the kind of poise and distinguished nature that you saw only in wealthy men that lived in the countryside. your father. his buddies. your male relatives. oh, goodness. what if he’s one of your father’s men? or worse—one of his friends, and he has spies all around him to get you. no. no way your father would rope one of his companions into looking for you! you can’t be that of an important piece to his little empire, right? he shouldn’t care!

“oh my, you look quite unwell, child.” an elderly woman dressed in elegant but fit-for-travel attire chimes in. must be a member of a small noble house in the inner city. an accomplice? shit. the woman ducks her head slightly to take a better look at your expression, which was so obviously startled and fearful. you looked pale as well and it certainly didn’t help your case. looking away from the woman exposed a bit of your face to the man standing beside her, and maybe you were indeed losing your mind but something in his eyes flashes in recognition… but the look quickly vanished and was replaced with worry.

you nearly trip over the half-untied laces of your boots as you stepped away from the man and woman, “i’m f-fine—i just need to find—”

“—oh, there you are!” an arm snakes around your waist, and from the smell of caramel and freshly-cut grass wafting into your nose, you could tell that it was jiwon. “you have to stay close to me, dearest.” jiwon whispers. she smiles politely at the man and woman and makes the most pleasant of small talks with them before tugging you away gently.

she takes the two of you into an alleyway where it was free from traffic and pulls your hood down, taking a good look at your fear-stricken face, “it’s alright, (y/n). they had no idea who you were.”

“but that man… he looked like he did know me.” you spared a glance at the ever-growing crowd behind jiwon. nobody was trying to come into the alleyway, nor did the man try to follow both of you. you looked back at jiwon, whose hands started releasing a bright, sparkly pink aura.

“that man hails from the south and owns a small fishing business. he’s travelling all the way over here to get a feel of the community and scope out a business opportunity. trust me, (y/n),” jiwon smiles reassuringly before whispering an incantation under her breath and making a circular motion with her hands. she has successfully had you under the guise of a lady of her age with silver hair. jiwon then brushes your hair away from your face. “you’re safe.”

you hold on to jiwon’s words for dear life.

the two of you walked out of the alleyway and once again joined the crowd. jiwon made sure to cast a spell that made the two of you bound to an invisible string that would tug one closer to where the other is. just in case you lose each other again. your hand itches to reach out for jiwon’s, but you wondered if that was pushing the boundaries of your relationship as teacher and student… but it wasn’t like you wanted to hold her hand out of romantic intent! recognizing that absolutely insane train of thought, you came to the conclusion that you were thinking too much about it and instead just kept up with jiwon as much as you could.

jiwon visited one stall after another. she was either shopping to restock her potion ingredients or chatting with the vendors. yes, it did require the two of you to stay in one place longer than needed but at this point, you were used to it. sometimes, you even joined the conversation just to do something—it was all very entertaining, surprisingly. while jiwon did ease your worries earlier in the alleyway, you still couldn’t help but look over your shoulder from time to time as well as instinctively turn away whenever you were met with a knight doing their rounds in the streets. one can never be too sure, after all.

eventually, you were holding two wicker baskets full of potion ingredients as you and jiwon ventured deeper into the markets. you stopped in front of a store that you have come to know as jiwon’s second home, considering the shop was owned by one of her long-time friends, jang wonyoung.

“ah, of course. it’s busy inside here too.” jiwon sighs as she enters the shop with you following closely behind. you followed jiwon as she carefully made her way up multiple flights of stairs, avoiding bumping into people as best as you could. still, however, a young boy who wasn’t looking at where he was running off bumped into your shoulder as you took a step up the stairs, making you lose your balance and fall. but then, you feel something akin to that of a rope tightening around your waist and pulling you safely up the top of the stairs and right onto jiwon’s back.

“s-sorry! i fell and the spell just… pulled me here.” you uttered, suddenly feeling warm from how close you were to jiwon. this sensation was vaguely familiar to you. cheeks hot, goosebumps all over your body, skin tingling and are you… blushing? blushing?!

jiwon merely smiles at you and takes a gentle hold of your wrist, “come on, wonyoung is waiting for us.” she safely guides you through the crowd. a few of the people that work in the shop that you have come to know smile and wave at you, some even tried to make conversation with you but you couldn’t seem to focus at all. not when jiwon was now holding your hand instead of your wrist. if you had known that she would be so casual about hand-holding, you wouldn’t have fought for your life following her through the streets earlier!

after climbing up a more fancy set of spiral stairs, you and jiwon have finally reached the small room at the very top of the shop. and as if on cue, the door swings open, revealing the beautiful and truly magical interior of the shop owner’s study. jiwon enters the office with you in tow, and as soon as you step inside, the disguising spell immediately wears off; it seems the defensive charms set up inside the room were working as perfect as ever.

you were then met with wonyoung, who was sitting comfortably by her desk flipping through books that were suspended in the air. wonyoung visibly lights up at your arrival, dropping her books on her desk neatly and removing her speed-reading glasses.

“good morning, my favorite witches! what kinds of trouble have you gotten yourselves into this time?” wonyoung stands up from her seat, walking all the way around to the front of her desk and leaning her back against it. her eyes flicker down to your and jiwon’s linked hands, and a smirk spreads across her glossy lips. 

you noticed that wonyoung’s adorable familiar, cherry, was nowhere to be found. not on the floor of her office anyway, but instead, the fluffy white bunny was hopping in the air, bumping into several floating books as she made her usual rounds around the study until she eventually ended up beside your foot. the bunny rubs its cheek against your ankle very briefly before hopping away once again.

“nothing much. we went ingredient shopping and thought of giving you a little visit! and,” jiwon clears her throat, bites her bottom lip nervously before speaking again. “i—we need access to your dungeon.” jiwon waves your joint hands and puts on a tight-lipped smile. truthfully, you have no idea what was going on. this was the first time jiwon has ever spoken about wonyoung having a ‘dungeon’! you were really hoping that it was just an inside joke between them, being long time friends and all, and that sweet, beautiful wonyoung doesn’t actually have a… you know what, you can’t even imagine it!

“oh, jiwon… i told you that if taking a young one as a student proved to be too much, you can just hand her over to me! there’s no need to throw (y/n) in my dungeon.” wonyoung sighed with her hand over her heart. you quickly took your hand out from jiwon’s grasp and stepped away, looking at your mentor in disbelief until you saw her shake her head and chuckle while wonyoung started laughing.

ah, ‘twas a joke.

“you know i would never discard (y/n)!” jiwon pulls you over closer to her side once again and gives you an only slightly awkward side hug. she pats your hair and looks at you lovingly, laughing when you eventually return her affection and bashfully put your arm around her waist and squeezed her gently. 

has she always been this doting? after your lackluster nap, did you somehow wake up in an alternate reality where jiwon was uncharacteristically touchy-feely? as confusing as it all was, you were… somewhat okay with it! if anything, this was a sign that you and jiwon are getting closer! from the scene in the crowd earlier, the binding spell, the hand-holding, and now all this… you can definitely get used to it.

wonyoung crosses her arms, “what do you need from there? i mean, yes, i’ll let you in but i need you to promise me that you’re not unleashing that elven demon lord we sealed years ago—”

“—pardon?” you asked, mouth agape in both shock and… admiration? even if wonyoung was joking or merely exaggerating whatever she has stuffed in her ‘dungeon’, you don’t doubt that they can seal away a powerful foe. you have literally witnessed jiwon defeating trolls quadruple her size and strength using only her wits!

“ah, how is the old fella? still bitter and angry that a pair of young adults ended his thousands of years old dream of world domination?” jiwon asked, giggling. oh, she wasn’t kidding? neither of them were kidding?! a part of you wanted to barge into that dungeon and see it all for yourself. who knows what other ridiculous greatness is hidden there?! infamous enemies of the old, magical artifacts, never-before-seen treasures, forbidden knowledge… if you somehow managed to be allowed in there, you would be the happiest little wannabe witch in the whole galaxy.

“nevermind that for now, jiwon. what do you need?” wonyoung asked. she was starting to get impatient, and a bit suspicious. judging by the way she warned jiwon with her eyes. you don’t exactly know what the warning was about, but you did know that jiwon absolutely cannot say the wrong answer to that question.

“right! we almost got off track there, huh, (y/n)? haha!” jiwon gently elbows your arm and you look at her with your eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

wonyoung groans, “jiwon.”

“do you remember ten years ago, we were twenty-two, and i… attempted to create the love potion and failed horribly?” jiwon asked with great shame. it was in her voice, her expression, even the way she stood! you almost wanted to laugh because she looked funny, and the thought of your mentor failing so horrendously that it became her greatest embarrassment in her otherwise flawless career was something worth giggling over because of course! of course kim jiwon’s biggest failure would be an inaccurately-made potion! you were willing to bet that it probably wasn’t even that disastrous and jiwon was just overreacting and being the perfectionist she always is, and has been, apparently.

“yes, jiwon,” wonyoung’s eyes flicker between you and jiwon—she was trying to piece something together but you don’t know what. surprising, considering that wonyoung and jiwon have been friends for so long. wonyoung should know that jiwon has a thirst for knowledge that can never be quenched right? why does it look like there’s something she knows about jiwon’s intent that you don’t? okay, maybe you were in over your head a bit. “whatever you want to do with it, i forbid you from doing it.” wonyoung moves away from you and jiwon, walking towards a bookshelf to the left and busying herself with rearranging the books.

“we haven’t even told you! it’s brilliant, wonyoung. i have it all figured out!” jiwon chases after wonyoung with you in tow, acting as if you were some kind of charm that will make wonyoung change her mind as long as you were present.

“right, right. do you remember what happened when you thought you had that potion ‘figured out’ ten years ago?” wonyoung asked. her tone was stern and serious, but she let out a chuckle at the memory. you looked at your mentor for answers, but jiwon was too busy scratching her head as she tried to use her words correctly.

“um… i was really happy to become the godmother to your and gaeul’s kid very early on in my life—ow!” jiwon winces as wonyoung pinches her cheek before she moves on to a different shelf. now this was a shock to you. the possibility of wonyoung being a mother didn’t even cross your mind, but now that the image is there and confirmed… it does make sense, what with how much she parents and scolds jiwon in person and through the letters they send each other when they can’t immediately see one another.

“you made me swear an oath to keep the formula as well as what was left of the potion in my dungeon forever, and being the good and responsible friend that i am, i’m keeping my promise.” wonyoung flips open a book and skims through it, not sparing jiwon a single glance as she speaks. 

again, jiwon runs over to wonyoung’s side with you still being dragged around like a rag doll, “good point! and thank you for keeping it there for all these years but since i was the one who gave you that responsibility, i have every right to lift it from your shoulders as well.”

wonyoung pauses, allows jiwon’s words to soak in, and sighs. she closes the book in her hands and puts it back on the shelf, then she finally faces her friend once again, “you’re right. but you made it very clear back then that we should never tamper with what you created ever again.” this time, wonyoung sounds anxious. you hear in her voice that she was definitely going to allow jiwon in her dungeon to retrieve the original formula, but she sounds absurdly worried.

it got you thinking just how big of a mistake jiwon ended up making that the potion needed to be locked in a dungeon—with an elven demon lord, no less!

“i know better now, wonyoung. i promise i’ll be careful,” jiwon takes a hold of wonyoung’s hand, smiling adoringly at her friend. wonyoung stares at your mentor for a good few seconds, deeply wondering if there was something more behind her intent. “i promise.” jiwon squeezes her friend’s hand tightly. and that, apparently, was enough for wonyoung to accept everything as is and trust jiwon with access to her dungeon.

you were then politely asked by jiwon to wait outside of the shop. you tried to ask questions, mostly out of concern but also because you wanted to invite yourself in wonyoung’s dungeon but jiwon was very insistent that you wait outside and keep quiet about wherever she and wonyoung had gone. you obliged, of course—perhaps going into a powerful witch’s dungeon would be too much for a novice such as yourself. perhaps jiwon was just keeping you safe. like she had been this entire day! so, you don’t let your curiosity eat away at you and silently wait for jiwon’s return.

passers-by ignored you as you stood patiently beside the shop door. it made you wonder whether or not you truly looked ‘one of a kind’ compared to the locals of this part of the outer city, so much so that jiwon altered your appearance to the point of looking like any other person around. you leaned back on the concrete wall behind you and just as you got comfortable, the building started shaking.

“what in the hells—” you stepped back as the shop door swung open and out came a few customers screaming, terrified.

“not to worry everyone! our shop owner’s just doing some hard work!” you heard an employee say from the inside of the shop. with all the dungeon talk from earlier, it was impossible to think that jiwon and wonyoung weren’t behind this panic. wonyoung’s workers seemed to be used to it though, and even a couple of regular customers ignored all the shaking and continued on shopping… was this a regular occurrence? what a peculiar world. you don’t rush back inside the shop like you wanted to. despite being worried sick for your mentor, you stood idly by outside of the shop and waited like a puppy on a leash.

you eventually just took a walk around the shop’s vicinity and played with magic, picking up a few pebbles from the ground and turning them into very small figurines of animals and other creatures. you kept the figurines safe in your wicker basket—cheddar would probably appreciate them! or she would… tear them down but either way, she would love them!

you circled back around the entrance of wonyoung’s shop and to your surprise, jiwon was on her way out. she had been saying goodbye to wonyoung’s employees one by one as she exited through the front door. tucked in her arms were some old, wrinkled parchments and she was holding a… cage? you watched, confused, as your mentor approached you with a skip in her step. how could she act like she wasn’t holding what looked like a cursed thing?! is that even safe to be swinging around in public?! perhaps wonyoung had valid concerns…

“let us go home and make history at once, darling!” jiwon once again casted the binding spell on you and herself before handing over the parchment to you. you noticed that she looked disheveled, there was dust all over her clothing as well as parts of her hair, and she had a small cut on her right cheekbone that was bleeding.

“did you… hurt yourself, ma’am?” you asked although you knew you were very much staring at a minor injury.

“oh, this? it’s nothing! as it turns out, the old man did need a new lock on his cell. so, wonyoung and i got to work, but he sure had a lot of energy!” jiwon guffaws, and you were simply baffled at how it all seemed like just another chore for her. maybe it really was better for you to stay behind and wait for her—you might’ve not been able to handle it all. “he tried to fight back with all the power he’s been saving up for the past decade but he is well beyond his prime so it was fairly easy to force him back into confinement! but he’s not important. let’s get our priorities back into place!” jiwon loops her arm around yours and drags you back into the crowd, towards home.

you saved your many, many questions about your mentor’s strange life for tomorrow. as jiwon said, you have history to make after all!

~

upon further inspection and by having common sense, you could finally confirm that the object inside the cage that jiwon retrieved from wonyoung’s dungeon was, indeed, ridiculously dangerous. 

it wasn’t cursed, per se. curses can’t be kept in a pretty little bottle with a pink ribbon, nor did they smell like honey and fresh tulips. curses also didn’t radiate light. well, they do—but they weren’t… captivating. alluring. and… arous—

“jiwon, could you explain something to me? why is it that i… feel like i want to fuck while i look at this thing?”

a brief silence cuts the thick air around the sanctuary, and you find yourself being surprised by your own words. you have never called jiwon by her name, nor have you ever talked about such a topic with her! a blush creeps up your cheeks, and suddenly you can't face jiwon at all. something was off about that object—your entire body felt like it was on fire just by looking at it! yet you couldn’t stop looking at it, and you didn’t want to move away from it either. you stare and stare at it… until jiwon snaps her fingers right on your ear and you finally break out of a haze you weren’t even aware you were in.

“ah, i should have known better. my apologies, (y/n)! i had forgotten that not everyone is immune to my… wretched creation,” jiwon pulls you away from the glimmering bottle and takes you to her desk where it was now full of ingredients and an assortment of random items that it supposedly needed for this brew. from this distance, the object didn’t have that much of a pull on your heart and entire being. good. “that thing is my awful first attempt at making the love potion and as you can see, there are a lot of things wrong with it.” jiwon sheepishly smiles. her ears were red, seemingly from the embarrassment of letting her student see her failure.

cheddar, curious as ever, jumped up to the stool where the potion sat and started pawing at it, seemingly amused by its color. and then she started licking at the cap, making you laugh and making jiwon sigh deeply.

“cheddar, don’t touch it!” jiwon shoos her precious familiar away and the cat jumps back down to the ground and scurries off elsewhere, but you knew that it was just going to find yet another thing to make jiwon grow grey hairs about.

“may i ask why it is glowing? and why did… i feel like… that?” you asked. it was despicable enough to be thrown in a dungeon where a whole demon lord was confined in—you were sort of terrified at what it was truly capable of.

“i misjudged everything while i was working on it and the finished product made the drinker feel not love but instead… lust,” jiwon shakes her head. “don’t get me wrong, however. for centuries, potions that increased the drinker’s sexual desires have existed but mine was… well, the council considered revoking my rights to practice, research, teach, and create magic as well as throwing me in jail if it hadn’t been for wonyoung who defended me in court.” the older girl recalled the memory lightheartedly, but still, you knew that it wasn’t very fun experiencing that moment back then.

“what?! even as the single most influential witch of our time?! because of a failed potion?” you couldn’t believe your ears!

“why, yes. i mean, just think about what it was able to do with you! and you never even had a single drop of it! it’s an abomination, and i realize now that i’m a pretty awful teacher for exposing you to it… but unfortunately, it holds a few of the same ingredients and procedures to create my love potion and that is why i retrieved it from the dungeon,” jiwon smiles at you, then guffaws. “although, i did make wonyoung swear that oath… which was ordered by the council. and i was warned that i will get a little more than a slap on the wrist if i were to interact with the potion in any way… but ah, it’s been ten years! who even cares anymore!?” she keeps on laughing, and you get the feeling she did not actually find any of this funny and was actually scared for her life. as she should.

oh, heavens… if you weren’t going to be found by your father, you were going to be in jail for affiliating yourself with a criminal!

realization strikes you, “you mentioned that wonyoung had an unexpected pregnancy… did the potion do that?! does it impregnate women?!” you exclaimed.

jiwon gasps, “no! all the potion does is make the drinker awfully horny! what happened is that gaeul, wonyoung’s wonderful wife, volunteered to allow me to see if i succeeded with the potion and… she and wonyoung were very, very horribly sexually active for nearly a whole month until i was able to find a countermeasure. and yes, i know what you’re thinking—gaeul, a woman, doesn’t have the… tool to make a baby inside wonyoung so how could i have become the godmother of the beautiful and adorable jang hyunseo nine months later?” the older girl takes a deep breath and for the first time in her life, shrugs upon being asked a question. “magic, literally. something happened while gaeul was intoxicated and all of a sudden my best friend became a relatively young mother.”

your mouth hangs open at the unhinged story you were just told. a witch’s life sure is strange. is that how your life is going to be after you’ve earned the right to call yourself a witch? not the pregnancy-by-magic part, of course. who would even be there for that to happen to you?! jiwon is the only person you’re around with and… well, anything could happen but that doesn’t mean it should! what are you even talking about?! you have got to get away from that darn potion.

“but enough about the past. i will not make the same mistake again. i cannot! not with a reliable, intelligent student like you to have my back on all of this.” jiwon caresses your cheek. you don’t flinch away or look at her incredulously like you usually do when she does something too weird or questionable—you don’t even feel awkward. you actually lean into her touch and you… get closer. jiwon retracts her hand, but she doesn’t move away.

very quickly, your eyes flickered down to jiwon’s lips before coming back up… only for you to see that jiwon’s own eyes had been doing the same. “careful, ma’am. i don’t think you’re completely resistant to the potion like you thought you were.” you say, grinning.

“oh, my… don’t give in to it, (y/n). this is exactly how it will get you!” jiwon replies, laughing before putting distance between the two of you. it didn’t really matter anyway—you closed the distance once again, suddenly feeling addicted to jiwon’s scent. you lazily leaned on the table, never staring at the sheets long enough and always finding yourself looking back at your mentor, who was amused, by the way. mostly because she knew that if you were in your right mind, you would detest the way you were acting under the slightest influence of the darned potion.

“fighting it is so mentally exhausting though… i don’t really feel like wrestling it.” you sighed. you summoned a chair behind you and sat on it, laying the side of your head on the table and staring up at jiwon. the older girl stared right back at you, amused and concerned at the same time. she knew she shouldn’t let you completely fall victim to the spell… but she had to admit, you were adorable like this. your face was slightly flushed—no doubt that you were slowly losing bits and pieces of control over yourself, including how you behaved.

“if you’re talking like that, then you have already lost. come on, (y/n), i need your help finishing this potion. set yourself straight, please.” jiwon sounded serious for once. no matter how much she wants to see more of this funny side of you, her study will always come first. and it was as if the last remaining bits of your normal self heard her words and ‘woke you up’. ashamed at how you were currently acting, you shook your head and did, in fact, ‘set yourself straight’.

for the next two hours, you ignored the failed potion’s pull. you wished jiwon would put it back in its charmed cage so you would have a less difficult time trying to put all of your attention on your work, but the older girl was too focused. the glass of water you brought from the kitchen just for her remains untouched, and even the sweet pastry that jiwon herself bought earlier from the markets had gone hard and cold on the next table over. you were getting worried about her, but you dared not to make her think that you’re not doing your job for a second.

jiwon has entrusted you to make duplicates of the love potion by yourself. see, when it comes to your brewing skills, you knew you were beyond decent. hell, your first time making a healing potion was perfect—even jiwon herself was very impressed considering you have never brewed anything in your life! it was the one natural talent you had when it came to magic, so it made sense that jiwon wouldn’t think that you wouldn’t fuck any of this up. however, you can’t help but question her faith in you still. something as important as creating history’s first working love potion should be a job for a skilled witch such as her! not a novice like you, no matter how talented you are at brewing!

and as expected, you found yourself stuck at a certain step.

“ma’am… i—just how are we supposed to make this potion without a… volunteer? whose hair should i put in this?” you asked, looking over at your mentor who has not said anything for the past two hours you’ve started working on the potion.

jiwon replies, “i used my own hair, and you’re the volunteer, (y/n).”

you blink. slowly. “i beg your… pardon?” yes. yes. yes! something inside you was screaming in festivities. it must be the failed potion getting the best of you again.

“i must admit… i somehow forgot about how we must put our target’s hair in the potion. i got too excited after i came back from wonyoung’s dungeon that i couldn’t have us scout for potential volunteers for this brew so,” jiwon smiles beautifully at you, acting as if she wasn’t staring directly at your panicked expression at the moment. “we must take matters into our own hands! you must fall in love with me, (y/n)! hahaha!” she joked. she then takes your hand, puts two strands of her blonde hair on your palm and nudges you back over to your station.

with your mouth still slightly agape from what jiwon had just told you, you dropped the strands of hair in your cauldron and watched as the boiling water finally showed the pastel pink color instead of red. fearful that you had made a mistake, you looked over jiwon’s table and saw that her brew showed the same colors as yours did! surely that meant you did your work correctly, right? there was only one way to find out… but you and jiwon can’t both be intoxicated with the potion, and how would that even make sense in jiwon’s case?! she can’t fall in love with herself!

you were quickly regretting ever entertaining jiwon’s briefing of her breakthrough earlier in the morning. once you were completely under the effects of the potion, you would have no control over your feelings, thoughts, the things you will and everything you would do! a nightmare scenario that you can’t believe jiwon would willingly want to go through just to ‘make history’. your head was starting to hurt just thinking about it!

“moment of truth.” jiwon hands over a small vial with a reasonable amount of the potion in it. you stared at the pink liquid for a good long while, swallowing deeply and accepting your fate once you took the vial from your mentor’s hand. your eyes flickered from the failed potion to the one in your hand, and finally onto jiwon, who was smiling and nodding. her thrilled expression did not comfort you one bit, nor did it convince you that this was a good thing to be doing considering that you just thought about all the things that could go wrong once the potion settles in your system.

with a grumble, you attempted to escape the situation one last time, “is… is it too late to go to the bathroom?”

“drink it, (y/n).”

“…yes, ma’am.”

and down it goes. somehow, it tasted a lot like peaches. so much so that you wondered if jiwon snuck a whole slice of peach in her cauldron just to make the potion taste better. it was harder to swallow than you thought—it was like trying to swallow orange juice with a dry throat. it stung, the taste stuck in the back of your mouth, and you knew you were going to smell it in your nose somehow for a few days. still, you finished the vial and put it down on the table, wiping the residue off of your mouth and taking a deep breath.

jiwon puts a hand on your shoulder and makes you face her, “does anything feel different?” she asked.

“it hasn’t sat long enough inside me yet, ma’am. i don’t know,” you answered truthfully. sighing, you nodded your head towards the door. “i’m going to have a glass of water.”

once you were out of the room, jiwon saunters over towards your station and stares at your cauldron. she can confirm that you did everything correctly judging by how carefully and truthfully you followed jiwon’s instructions, but she couldn’t help but suddenly feel anxious. she takes a glance towards the kitchen, where you’ve run off to take a break, before walking back to take a look at her own cauldron.

“eh?” jiwon’s eyebrows furrowed tightly once she notices that the potion that she worked on is now too bright and deep of a pink. it was a concerning contrast to your friendly pastel colors that remained the same and did not change like jiwon’s did. oh, heavens… there was no way she made a mistake, right? not again! but she can’t have made another failed potion that greatly increases the drinker’s sex drive (and gets people’s best friends pregnant!)  because if she did, she would know!

so, what the hell did she just create this time?!

not only was this embarrassing as hell but it was also very, very dangerous! the nature of whatever she just shoved down your throat remains unknown until you start showing signs of peculiarity which means she can’t brew up an antidote of some sorts to snap you out of it all and coming up with such a thing is no easy feat, even for her! jiwon knows that wonyoung will absolutely have her head once she tells her about this… but whatever this was, jiwon just hopes it’s not the same as the failed potion.

first of all, she wouldn’t even know what to throw at you to relieve you of your… needs. the hut was pretty far away from the nearest town, the forest is unmapped with no other living soul around, and she certainly can’t throw herself at you! that’s just wrong! jiwon has heard that things such as ‘pleasure toys’ have been pretty popular among the nearest surrounding communities but jiwon doesn’t have any! and rightfully so. she is not one to participate in those kinds of activities! 

she digresses—maybe this will all be easy for both of you to navigate. it could just be a potion that will give you boils all over your body, and jiwon knows an easy fix for that!

“yeah… yeah! it could also just be a singing potion where it would make her sing every time she opens her mouth! haha! yeah, that’s… that would be funny…” jiwon scratches the back of her neck, laughing awkwardly as she falls deeper into a pit of anxious delusion. it was when she realized that you had been away for longer than eight minutes that she thought to check on you in the kitchen. she was really hoping to find you covered in boils, or randomly belt out a note once she sees you but alas, she was incorrect.

instead, jiwon finds you sitting on one of the chairs around the table, quietly sipping on a glass of ice-cold water. she tilts her head to have a better look at your face from a distance—no boils. you weren’t singing… but you weren’t jumping on her and demanding her to have your babies either! jiwon cautiously approaches you with a spell on the tip of her tongue just in case you try anything funny, but all you did was tear your gaze away from the glass of water and look at jiwon.

the older girl stares right back at you, analyzing your eyes and the millions of emotions that just went through you upon setting your eyes on your mentor. you were frozen in your seat, mouth slightly hanging open and failing to get any words out of your throat, and you looked to be in pure awe at the mere appearance of the woman you have been living with for eight whole months.

“hi, you.” you greeted with what probably was the brightest smile jiwon has ever seen on your face.

jiwon returns the smile, albeit awkwardly, “hello, (y/n). are you feeling well?” she asked. she took note of how quickly your face got red and how you suddenly got all jittery and nervous when she got closer, but she wasn’t able to make a proper conclusion about the effects of the potion since you started bashfully giggling.

“i don’t think i’ve ever felt better, ma’am.” you replied. you sounded sincere enough… even though you really were acting quite strange. jiwon doubts that you would stare at her for so long with nothing but devotion in your eyes. the only time she has seen that happen is when the two of you first met all those months ago—when she saved you from those undead wolves and took you in as her apprentice.

“that’s great to hear, but are you sure the potion didn’t… um, do anything to you? i mean, you’re acting quite differently… and can you tell me why you’re wearing my coat?” jiwon asked now that she noticed that you had yourself wrapped comfortably around one of jiwon’s fancy coats that you had no doubt wonyoung picked out for her, knowing that jiwon does not really have an eye for fashion but you digress!

“why, it’s a very cold night out here in the forest! and this is so comfortable and warm… not to mention that it smells so good,” a blissful sigh escapes your lips as you bury your nose on the collar of the coat. you then looked back up at jiwon and gasped softly. “is that your perfume…? or is that just… how you smell? because if it is… then wow.” you stood up, got up close to jiwon (who didn’t react fast enough and was thus frozen right in front of you) and grabbed her arms, pulling her close.

jiwon, flabbergasted, doesn’t do anything. she stays still as you tilted your head and put your nose down on her right shoulder, your hands slowly but surely now holding her waist, keeping her still. as a witch of her caliber, jiwon would feel very offended if all her potion did was make you sensitive and addicted to scents!

“u-um, (y/n)... you’re a bit close—whoa, hey��!” it took all of jiwon’s strength to suppress an unholy sound from coming out of her mouth when you completely pressed up against her and hugged her. strangely enough, jiwon didn’t feel like resisting against you, even though she was very much overwhelmed at the way you were behaving. she trusted that you wouldn’t hurt her, that you wouldn’t do anything that would be a cause for her to retaliate physically. your embrace was awkward and clumsy, but as seconds passed by, jiwon was feeling more and more… at ease.

“oh, jiwon… you’re so warm… i never would have known.” you whispered. there was a tinge of longing and regret in your voice. you held her like you would a lover—tight, but not so much that it would suffocate her. tight in a way that made her feel safe. protected. loved. nobody can blame jiwon for letting her guard down just for a moment to hug you back, right? it wasn’t everyday she allowed herself to feel like this after all. she doesn’t even mind that she could practically feel your eyelashes brushing against her neck due to how close you have gotten, nor did she pay any attention to the small circles you were making on her lower back with your finger.

“what do you mean, ‘never’? i could have hugged you at any moment if you so wanted.” jiwon says with a smile that she couldn’t be bothered to hold back. 

she hears you laugh softly at her words before completely resting your face on the crook of her neck, “do you mean that?” you mumbled.

“of course,” jiwon replies quite swiftly. even she was surprised about it, but you didn't give her a lot of time to dwell on it further when you raised your head to stare at her. well, her lips. and jiwon wasn’t completely clueless when it came to things like this, okay? obviously, there was only one thing you would do next if she allowed you to have that opportunity but in her state of quickly-rising panic, she looked away. “let’s figure out what that potion did to you, shall we?” jiwon gently pulls away from your embrace and sits you back down on a chair.

judging by the dazed look on your face, jiwon assumes that it was going to be hard to get you to behave properly.

meanwhile, you watched closely as she sat across from you, and of course you couldn’t resist the temptation to scoot your chair just a bit closer to still feel her warmth. you really, sincerely don’t know why your precious mentor was looking so different all of a sudden. her hair looked a lot brighter and she wasn’t even directly under the lamp above! her big, gentle eyes looked so perfect that you could stare at them forever, and the more she looked at you with so much concern and worry, the more you did feel like just staying still and taking her all in.

“well, i don’t exactly know where to start, but i’m just going to ask you questions that might be a bit out-of-pocket but as awkward as your answers might be, we will know whether or not we got it all right or… terribly wrong.” jiwon tucks some strands of her beautiful golden locks behind her hair and looks at you, carefully observing the smallest of actions that you make. you smiled at her. your hands itched to hold hers. you remembered how healing it was when she held them earlier through the crowd inside wonyoung’s shop.

but instead of listening to that tiny, innocent voice on one side of your head, something else tugs at your innate, underlying desires and threatens to bring it all to the light. jiwon continues on rambling about the love potion, reiterating the effects it should have on your entire being and state of mind and shamefully admitting that she may have made a mistake on her brew that you unfortunately just so happened to consume when that familiar feeling of hunger starts slowly washing over your senses. 

you blink and take a short glance behind you, towards the sanctuary. you could see the failed potion glowing angrily from where you sat. it was calling to you. and you recognize that it was quite terrifying to think that it would affect you this much even from such a great distance, but you realized that it was not because it was so powerful, now that you were truly examining the bottle where it has been sealed for the last decade. the cap was loose, and that’s why it had been growing stronger for the past few hours that you and jiwon were busy working on your brews.

and the culprit? the fat cat with white and orange fur that was conveniently nowhere to be found because she knows her witch will absolutely lose her goddamn mind over all of this.

“(y/n), are you listening?” jiwon tugs at the sleeve of your shirt, bringing your attention back to her. you weren’t listening, and you have come to the decision that you will not be listening for the rest of the night. it was hard to pay any attention to a single thing. what with the failed potion slithering through the cracks that the ‘love’ potion had created in your mind now that the latter was starting to truly make itself comfortable in your system.

something foreign has become a strong voice inside your head. it was as if all the hidden, unspoken things you have strongly felt towards jiwon all this time have made themselves seen. and it feels… great.

it feels great to not run away from your heart. to not turn away from what your brain is telling you you should chase after. to not deny yourself of love. of fondness. of closeness. of pleasure.

you want her… you need her… and you shall do whatever it takes to have her.

and somehow, you agreed.

“all i have to say is that we were successful, jiwon… everything is so clear to me now,” you sat even closer to your mentor. she had no idea just how much you wanted to pounce on her, but she’ll know about it soon enough. you put your hand on her knee as you leaned closer, your eyes glued to her plump, pink lips. yes… the only pair of lips you’ve wanted to have all over your body this entire time. “we should celebrate this wonderful feat.” you suggested with only one activity in mind.

jiwon looked especially delighted to hear your confirmation. her eyes lit all the way up, making it impossible for your heart to stop beating erratically, “have we really created the world’s first working love potion?! have we really, (y/n)?” she puts a hand on top of yours, squeezing gently.

“i believe so. and it’s all because of you, really… that amazing mind of yours. your drive,” feeling particularly courageous, you gently pushed jiwon’s long, golden hair to her back—it was necessary for you to see her face up close without any obstructions. she was too beautiful to be hidden away, truth to be told. but hey, if she didn’t live in seclusion in a dangerous, magical forest then you wouldn’t have found her, right? maybe it was all a blessing, and a message. one that said that jiwon was only meant to be seen and loved by… you. “i can’t believe it took me this long to finally take this leap.” with your free hand, you cupped jiwon’s cheek with your one free hand, smiling lovingly at her.

the older girl blinks, “hm? what are you talking ab—” you don’t let her finish her words. you crashed your lips onto hers, hungry and needy. her lips were everything you hoped for. pillowy soft with a burst of flavor that fed your desires and had you chasing for more. your hand slides down from her cheek to the collar of her shirt, grabbing a fistful of the soft material to pull her closer. it was then you felt her grab your wrist and move back slightly to take a breath or maybe even try to stop you, but you don’t let her separate your lips for too long.

you took a tighter hold of her shirt and connected your lips again and this time, she was less resistant and melted into you a lot easier. your hands now held jiwon’s face, controlling the kiss and even pressing your thumb firmly against her chin to make her open her mouth, which she does obediently. a moan slips out—you couldn’t tell if it was from you or jiwon but this only fueled your lust even more. it seemed to have affected jiwon too, now seeing that she had her hand up your thigh, slowly creeping up towards the hem of your shorts.

a shiver crawls down your spine. you can’t bear it. you pulled jiwon to stand up with you and started leading her towards the sanctuary where your heart screamed at you to go. you feel her hands touch you everywhere. her fingertips tug furiously at the waistband of your shorts and the slightest touch of her cold fingers brushing against your warm skin had you reeling in the best way possible. but suddenly, jiwon pins you against the doorframe and leans back. confused at the absence of warmth on your lips, you opened your eyes and… wow, she looked stunning. lipstick in disarray, hair disheveled, chest heaving up and down, and her eyes holding nothing but desperation and need. that’s a side of hers you’ve never seen before, and it was delicious to see.

“i can’t fight it, (y/n),” she glances at the failed potion, spots that the lid was completely loose, and scans the air. traces of powerful enchantment magic were scattered around the entire room, which means it was impossible to escape its effects. “i can’t resist…” jiwon mutters under her breath with a sigh of defeat. 

she knew in her heart that you bringing her into the sanctuary was intentional and she wanted to be mad at you for it and most of all, for taking advantage of her softness for you. but whatever irritation she felt was now slowly turning into love… and now all she wanted to do was pour all of that love into you in the one way she only knows now. sure, a simple kiss or even some flowers would be nice… but oh, it was all so clear to jiwon now too that she wanted to give you more.

“it’s okay…” slowly, you started leaving kisses from your mentor’s cheek all the way down to her jawline, where you have decided to leave your first mark of the night. a nice little love bite from you. jiwon looked perfect with it. she still looked reluctant, however. you had no idea she was such a fighter… but you should have expected it from the most talented person you know.

“it’s… i-inappropriate… and wonyoung would really kill me if i acted on it…” the older girl says. it was clearly her last line of defense, otherwise she would have pushed herself off of you already.

jealousy was all you felt upon hearing wonyoung’s name leave jiwon’s mouth. “don’t think about her,” you said rather sternly, shocking even yourself. “besides, she doesn’t have to know. nobody does.” and it’s all thanks to you again, you wanted to add because really, neither of you would be able to do this if jiwon had lived in a lavish mansion in the city with bustling streets all around, but you used your lips for something better instead.

you leaned in for another kiss but this time, you were a lot gentler and jiwon was less… frantic. her shoulders relaxed and her lips fell into a steady rhythm against yours as if it was part of her daily routine. and now both of you were thinking that maybe it should be. this didn’t even feel wrong! what was jiwon even talking about? ‘inappropriate’? the two of you were exactly where you needed to be. and when you pulled her further inside the room, the world was suddenly nonexistent.

you pushed the older girl down on one of her comfortable bean bags—she didn’t seem to mind. jiwon watched intently as you took off your shirt and shorts without delay, and you didn’t miss how she shamelessly licked her lips upon seeing your body. she even beckoned you back over using her fingers, grinning when you scoffed but obliged anyway. you weren’t embarrassed to admit that seeing jiwon express her need for you so freely turned you on more than the potion did. in fact, there was exactly no room for embarrassment when you’ve enthusiastically allowed jiwon to grab your hips and made you grind yourself on her thigh.

at least it was temporary relief for your core, so you didn’t complain. you held jiwon’s stare as you rocked back and forth, even going as far as brushing your hair behind your shoulder so your bare breasts were on full display just for her. that seemed to have tickled something in her brain quite nicely judging by how the corner of her lips tugged up slightly. you put one hand down on jiwon’s forearm and the other on her shoulder while you increase your pace, your moans now getting louder and a lot higher. jiwon liked that even better! so much so that she grabs a hold of your ass, squeezing lightly and still guiding you.

however she managed to act crude but appear innocent and angelic as ever was beyond you. not that you could use your brain to think anyway. nobody can blame you for that though, not when you were damn near reaching the pinnacle of ecstasy the longer you rode jiwon’s thigh. your climax only becomes nearer and clearer when the older girl unexpectedly slaps your ass and slightly digs her surprisingly long nails in your skin. you whimper weakly and quite awkwardly when an ounce of shame manages to slip through your feeble heart and mind, quickly reminding you that yeah, you are acting like this for your teacher!

your teacher that was nine years older, your teacher that was your senior in every way possible but most importantly in magical terms what with her years and years of experience that you severely lacked, your teacher that technically is the cause of your intoxication but… can you really resist those big, brown eyes? those soft lips that you have come to know so well in so little time? those hands that you have always secretly wanted to hold and be held by? no, you couldn’t.

(the potion told you so. but you knew deep in your heart it was all true.)

“you’re not going to cum just from this, are you…? you haven’t even been doing it for long either.” jiwon asked, thoroughly entertained by how carelessly you were moaning now. she must admit that she appreciated you making her sit down because she wouldn’t have traded the view of your face scrunched up in pleasure and your breasts bouncing slightly because of your constant movement for anything else. jiwon felt like a nasty pervert for just simply observing but hey, you were the one that was putting on this show for her. therefore it didn’t feel right for jiwon to be a gentlewoman and look away! especially not when the more she watches, the more she wants to devour you.

“no, i’m… oh, goodness… i’m n-not…” you were shaking your head, and yet you held onto jiwon’s shoulder a little tighter when she made the slightest move to move her thigh upward. you really tried hard to look tough but eight whole months of no intimacy practically had you begging to be touched. why, your underwear was soaked, your nipples sensitive and needy, and your eyes were telling jiwon basically everything you wanted her to do to you!

“are you sure, darling?” jiwon says with a sly smile. she knew what the stupid pet name would do to your mess of a brain, and she was right. the only thing you did was whine, falling deeper into submission the longer you chase your quickly oncoming high. at this point in time, neither of you were aware that the longer the potion bottle stayed open, the more of it got out and got stronger. well, maybe you didn’t know that, but there was certainly a constant reminder in jiwon’s head that she was actively ignoring.

she needed you too much to stop now. jiwon doesn’t want to admit it but staring at your pretty face earlier while you were sleeping made her start seeing you in a lot more different lights. one of them was that… well, she quite liked seeing you vulnerable. jiwon liked that you had a fire in you—loved it, even. it was what caught her attention when she first met you. in all of her years of being a witch, she has never once wanted to have a student. she never even thought about it purely because it didn’t interest her but your determination intrigued her, so she took you in. lo and behold, you were one resilient pupil! even when you mess up badly during lessons, you never let it discourage you. it was admirable.

so, seeing someone like you who was usually so strong fall apart before her eyes like this and knowing that the fault is her own… it fed jiwon’s ego real good.

you’ve gotten a lot more desperate—and it’s just how jiwon likes it. you grabbed her shirt and pulled it off of her body yourself. what you needed a lot more than be cum was to feel the older girl’s skin on your own, and when she held you in her arms as she kissed you hungrily, it felt exactly like how you thought it would. like heaven.

it was getting harder and harder to control yourself. in fact, you gave up on that. jiwon’s lips were addictive whether they were against your own or on your body, but especially the latter. she holds your waist tightly as she marks up your neck, covering every inch she could see with pretty, red marks that she knew would stay there for a couple days. jiwon grabs your hair and pulls hard on it, forcing you to expose more of your skin just for her to leave even more of her beautiful work on you.

her kisses eventually reached your chest and she didn’t treat it any differently than she did your neck. you had no idea that her need to let it known that you were hers was so… well, intense. even without either of the potions putting words in your mouth and thoughts in your brain, you have always considered yourself to be jiwon’s. you have never admired any other witch this much, never wanted to spend so much time with another being this much, and you certainly have never wanted to be loved by anyone this much. you would have definitely told jiwon that this wasn’t necessary but ah, you couldn’t deny that this felt nice anyway.

the room starts spinning, colors started to pop a lot more brighter in your eyes, and you were suddenly hearing just about everything—jiwon’s panting and tiny little moans, the sound of her suckling on your tit now that she finally found the time to pay attention to them, the rustling of the leaves outside the hut (heard through the conveniently open window inside the sanctuary), the magic that was oozing out of your and jiwon’s now abandoned cauldrons… it was overwhelming, but at the same time, it wasn’t enough. 

frustration builds up in your stomach due to jiwon not putting her priorities where they should matter. you didn’t bother to wonder if she was purely being a tease or if she had a specific way of going about this because you didn’t fucking care. you could roll your eyes at the way jiwon stared at you with nothing but pure glee through her bangs, you couldn’t believe she was having the time of her life witnessing your misery. perhaps you could push her off and just walk away leaving both of yourselves hot and bothered, maybe she’ll find that funny too!

but who were you kidding? at least ten people would be needed for you to be pulled off of jiwon who, despite your annoyance, was still the only one you wanted. and so, focusing purely on the pleasure you were feeling, you begged and begged for jiwon’s touch, “i need you… please…!”

jiwon, thoroughly surprised that you actually gave in, grins widely. “well… when you say it like that, how could i even resist you?” you didn’t even let yourself listen to half of what she said as you already grabbed her wrist and slid her hand inside your underwear. both of you moaned—you, now that you were finally going to get what you wanted and jiwon, because feeling your wetness on her hand made her brain go on a frenzy. jiwon’s fingertips briefly brushed against your clit, which only encouraged you to use your hips again just in case your mentor missed the goddamn cue to fuck you already.

“please… d-don’t make me beg all night…”

jiwon didn’t feel like fighting against you this time. she figured that you had enough of whatever antics she was planning for you and besides, she wanted you just as much. maybe even more.

“as you wish, dearest.”

one of these days, jiwon was going to get all the courage she needed to conjure up a cock on herself, because holy shit—her fingers were simply not enough. the feeling of your walls clenching up on her digits almost immediately after she had inserted them was incomparable to even the biggest accolades jiwon has ever received in her entire career. the sounds you made were even better, if that was somehow possible. jiwon found herself completely enamored by you, even opting to sit all the way back into the bean bag and just watch you.

every time jiwon would pull her fingers out, you would just slam your hips back down to have them inside you again. you almost looked like you wished she had a dick at this moment too, you wouldn’t hesitate to take all of her in. just like how you didn’t hesitate at all to take another finger in, even moaning purely out of joy once you felt a lot… fuller. you’ve held onto jiwon’s shoulders for dear life, not at all caring that your nails were piercing through her skin, and that blood was slowly starting to seep out of the small cuts you’ve made.

“you’re making a mess of my hand, darling…” jiwon teases all because your slick was starting to make a tiny pool on her palm, but she wasn’t complaining. if anything, it really fed her ego! the only reason you were this wet and feeling so much was all because of jiwon and her work. from the failed potion, to the questionable-but-otherwise-successful love potion—what’s not to be proud of?

“i’m sorry… it just feels too good…” you shamelessly admitted.

“don’t worry about it,” your mentor laughs at your sincerity. she hadn’t realized that you were genuinely too far gone to notice that she had been joking, but now that she does know, it was a bit baffling. but exciting, nonetheless. “you were right… this is a very good way to celebrate, hm? the only way, too?” jiwon quickly taps your chin so you could look at her and her sly grin. the fact that she was having so much fun ruining you both pissed you off and turned you on even more.

still, you agreed with her. “y-yes… ahh, fuck…! oh, jiwon…!” you were embarrassed of how loud you had gotten. it’s not like anyone else but you and jiwon would hear, sure, but perhaps that was what made it all so much worse in your head. but thinking about ways you can look jiwon in the eyes after all of this was a problem not for your intoxicated mind, which had only one goal tonight. a goal that was sure to be met very, very soon if jiwon continues on with her pace. you were barely keeping up with her—every thrust was successful in cutting off the last remaining threads of control you had of your frail mind. and you were starting to feel exhausted as well, even going as far as to rest your heavy head on jiwon’s shoulder, moaning away as she further abused your cunt in the best way possible.

jiwon had her free hand on the small of your back, giving you reassuring caresses and gentle squeezes anytime you needed them. she left deep kisses all over your neck and shoulders which sometimes came with a soft tingle considering she suddenly developed the liking to bite you. every sting that came after each kiss only further intensified the sheer need you had for jiwon, however, as you find yourself asking for more. you placed your hand on the back of jiwon’s head, pushing her closer to the parts of your neck where it felt the best for her to leave her marks. and jiwon didn’t complain at all. in fact, you heard her laughing softly while she did her work, both of them, happily.

“hm… i think this is the one mistake in my career that i’m actually happy i made,” jiwon says. she glances at the failed potion and rolls her eyes. “make that two mistakes actually.” she begrudgingly muttered.

despite the state your head was in, you found the energy to chime in. “and not three? or… fuck—is it t-too early to call this a mistake…?” a part of your heart was hoping that jiwon would disagree. but you wondered why you’d be disappointed if she said otherwise in the first place. the lust that she was feeling towards you was all because of the potion, right? but would she have even allowed it to affect her mind to such a degree if she hadn’t already been feeling something for you? fortunately, jiwon didn’t let your doubts plague your mind any longer.

“why would it be, (y/n)?” jiwon leans away from your neck and stares at you directly. her eyes have softened, even her movements have slowed, and all you thought about was how you wanted to feel her lips on yours again. especially when she looked like she was thinking the same, and wanting the same. her eyes fluttered to a close as you caressed her face. she even leaned into your touch, finding it so easy now to not run away from her loudly-beating heart like she did earlier in the day.

you kissed her, not even questioning how the action didn’t feel so wrong and somewhat dangerous anymore. it didn’t bother you quite bit either when jiwon regretfully pulled her fingers out of you and instead, wrapped her hand gently around your wrist, caressing the back of your hand as you kissed her. you pushed her back down on the bean bag as your kiss grew a lot more passionate over the seconds that passed. and as the two of you lay there while lust reignited in the air, you’d think that it was finally your turn to make jiwon feel as good as she had been making you feel this entire night.

so, you put your hand on her breast. you were slightly annoyed that there was still a piece of clothing in your way but jiwon didn’t even give you the chance to even think about pulling it off of her. the blonde wraps her arms around your waist, quite tightly, before gently flipping you over and gently laying you back down on the bean bag. and almost automatically, your legs snake around jiwon’s hips, keeping her still as her kisses get wilder.

you smile triumphantly when you felt her hands getting hasty once again, and perhaps the reason why jiwon had taken so long to just go ahead and take you before was because the older girl found the first few kisses, touches, and very action of taking your clothes off a… major turn-on. she seemed to be annoyed at the lack of clothing to tear off of you, what with how she tightly gripped your thighs and hips with her semi-sharp nails and how her eyebrows were furrowed as she kissed you.

with that in mind, you guided one of her hands towards your center as you did before—maybe the reminder that she still had a damn job left unfinished will quench the oddly specific thirst she had at the moment. the hair on the back of your neck as well as your arms stood on end as soon as you felt jiwon’s nails grazing your lips. was it pathetic of you to admit that you were already missing how she felt inside you? it might be, but with you naked laying on a bean bag with your teacher directly on top of you, there was hardly anything to be sheepish about anymore.

why would you even be embarrassed about something that felt so good, anyway?

but, apparently this time, jiwon didn’t want to be so… ‘controllable’. she pulled her hand away from your grip, and smirked when glared at her and tried to win her back by tugging her closer.

“you’ve been waiting for a while now, isn’t that right? this entire time you’ve been under the influence of the potions and in addition to the eight long months you’ve been away from your old life… don’t you want to make this just a bit more… grand? something that’s befitting a modern princess like yourself?” jiwon says. you can’t deny that her biting her lip as she looked at you up and down was the reason you instinctively clenched your thighs. “turn around, darling.” jiwon nods at you, expecting you to just immediately do as she says.

“turn… around? w-what for?” you asked. out of all the things you expected to come out of jiwon’s mouth at this hour, it was not that.

“what else for, (y/n)?” jiwon replies with a soft laugh. she doesn’t bother to wait for you to catch on to what she was saying and instead, flips you around herself, and only then did you realize what she meant. anticipation courses through your veins as you get comfortable in your new position—it wasn’t one you frequently found yourself in back when you used to sleep around with people, so it was difficult to not feel excited. you just hoped that it wouldn’t show too much because you knew jiwon would use it against you. even at such a crucial time as this!

jiwon leans down and kisses your shoulder while her hands go back to work. you bask in the feeling of her hands travelling all over your body once again, even whimpering ever so slightly when her fingers brushed against your nipples. and it was a different kind of bliss when jiwon fills you back up but this time from behind. you tried very hard to look strong, to look like you didn’t just want to lay there and allow jiwon to do the worst things in her mind to you but with the witch being so smart that she already had your favored spots figured out… it was useless to even put up a façade.

“down, girl.” jiwon grabs a fistful of your hair and pushes your face down on the bean bag, muffling your moans but effectively making you arch your back further. fuck. it seems like jiwon doesn’t even need to put any effort in breaking you down anymore. good. her eyes would flicker up from your back (where she had made wonderful scratch marks from trying to hold you still) to your face. she could only see a small portion of your expression due to your hair being a mess on your head, but even then, you still managed to make that pool in between her legs worse.

jiwon would have loved to relieve herself, especially if she had to use you… but this was a much, much better way to do that.

at this point, there was no doubt that the potions have completely taken over your senses. you were completely infatuated with jiwon and you were quite literally salivating at every sensation her fingers gave you. you felt whole, complete. there was nothing more that could make you feel better than this, you were convinced of that. and so, you opened your mouth. yet another louder and dirtier string of moans left your throat before all the pleas you so boldly declared seconds after. jiwon was more than happy to fulfill your wishes, making sure that every thrust, bite, and kiss was worth all the trouble that will inevitably follow the two of you come next morning.

but of course it was. this was all in the name of magic, isn’t it? this was clear progress! jiwon should be delighted, and she is. and how much better could she express that than taking you to the very pinnacle of your pleasure and allowing you to finally have that release you desperately needed from no one but her?

“you are… absolutely breathtaking, (y/n).” jiwon whispered as she watched you crumble before her. one would think that she would stop as you’re cumming all over her hand, but jiwon proved to be relentless. her fingers kept on fucking you in that same merciless pace, not at all giving you the luxury of recovery even just for a second. naturally, as soon as you had finished, a second orgasm came right after. you would be embarrassed but really, you were more focused on not passing out from exhaustion.

oh, it gets worse.

jiwon raises her free hand to her lips and licks her fingers before swiftly reaching down in between your legs and rubbing her damp fingers against your clit. you grabbed her wrist with one hand, digging your nails into her skin to make her stop or at the very least, chill the fuck out while the other was kept busy with holding onto the bean bag for dear life. you were so confused because on one hand, this might have been the greatest thing to have ever happened to you in your life but on the other… it was so difficult to keep on pretending like you can take all of what jiwon was trying to give you.

your third orgasm of the night comes to fruition, just like jiwon wanted. the witch then decided to finally slow down… but she shoves her wet fingers inside your mouth. obediently, you sucked on them, licking your juices off of her digits. you think you heard jiwon praise you for being such a dirty little dog for her, but you don’t hear any of it because she goes right back into her work. somehow. but at this point, you really couldn’t keep it up anymore.

“j-jiwon… enough, please…” you mumbled so pathetically weakly that it actually did the damn trick. between your roughed up state, tears, and the most adorable pout known to humankind, jiwon couldn’t find it in herself to push your limits even further. so, she pulls her fingers out of you and allows you to melt into the bean bag.

jiwon, dazed, takes a thorough look-around at the sanctuary and spots the failed potion that is still, as one can imagine, raining enchantment magic fumes. something tugs at her mind to keep ruining you, to continue on wanting you, to completely and just utterly finish what she had started… but jiwon resists this time. looking at you and your roughed-up body, she knew she had done enough. you didn’t need to suffer any more stress about this entire mess tonight, and hopefully, never again!

and so, jiwon makes a move to leave you so she could start the search for the cap that cheddar had successfully taken off of the potion bottle and lock the stupid thing back in its charmed cage so it wouldn’t do any more harm to you or her, but you somehow found the energy to turn yourself back around and grab jiwon’s arm, successfully getting her attention. you couldn’t find your voice, so you merely shook your head at her and gave her a look that you hoped would get the message “stay with me” across.

jiwon doesn’t leave you, thankfully. she brushes your hair away from your face and from where you lay, you can still see her desire burning deep behind her affection. in a way, it flustered you. so much so that you couldn’t exactly meet her eyes when she caresses your cheek.

“you can’t walk, can you…?” jiwon asked, and you would have laughed at her sudden bashfulness if it wouldn’t have made you urinate on the spot because this sure was quite a shift in behavior! you shook your head as an answer, still embarrassed by how you would sound had you actually tried to speak. “we can’t stay here… but i can’t carry you either. do you think you can try to walk? i’ll help you.” jiwon said.

“can’t you just… magic the numbness and exhaustion out of me?” you asked with all the strength you could muster. as expected, your voice was hoarse but you chose to ignore that. you were thankful that jiwon did so as well.

your teacher laughed at your proposal, “it would come at a cost, (y/n). you know this! if i proceed with a spell that grants you temporary relief of your… affliction, it’s all going to hit you the next day like a full swing of an ogre’s oversized baton. i would know.”

“but i can’t move… are you sure we can’t stay here? we had fun, didn’t we?” you asked without even realizing what you had just said. but it was too late to take them back now.

jiwon pauses. there was a hint of interest in her expression before she just laughed softly, “don’t start. you were the one who wanted out, remember?” she says. she then leans down with the very obvious and innocent intent to kiss you, until she remembered that you both had somewhat of a grasp of your minds now and stops.

“i think you’ve done worse things than not asking permission to kiss me tonight.” you teased, cupping her cheeks with both your hands and pulling her closer.

jiwon sighs defeatedly, “don’t say it like that…!” she says, but you kiss her before she goes off on a whole tangent about whatever she was thinking.

it was funny how she made such a fuss about how the two of you couldn’t stay in the sanctuary because of the potion, but now it seemed like she didn’t want to leave anymore. you could physically feel yourself falling into the potion’s trap once again—there was no way that your libido would be ramping up at an alarming rate on a normal day because of a kiss! the familiar surge of desire washes over you, despite your best efforts to ignore it. but jiwon was just one step ahead of her own damned creation.

she pulls away from you and gently but firmly states, “no.”

jiwon grabs the blanket that she conjured for you earlier in the morning and wraps it around your body before urging you to get up. you do as she says, having had enough of the potion being in control of you as well. as much as it was a pain in the ass to drag yourself out of the sanctuary because of how numb your legs still were, it was very much worth all of that trouble because as soon as you stepped out of that room, your mind was a lot more clear.

“most of the magic is still inside the room, thankfully. it should be easy to clear out the rest of the hut but for now… i think it’s best if we shut off this one area for a while.” jiwon mutters before sealing up the archway that led to the sanctuary with a spell. it was completely inaccessible from everyone except jiwon and whoever she chooses can venture inside.

you could tell that even though jiwon was fully committed to helping you get settled under the comfort of your bed, she wanted to take action and get rid of the potion as fast as possible. but you, once again, managed to wordlessly convince her to lay on your bed with you. she doesn’t resist when you pull her underneath the covers with you, and neither does she resist waiting for even a second until she holds you in her arms as you drift off to a nice, well-earned sleep.

jiwon doesn’t sleep until a couple of hours later, mostly due to the fact that she was still mildly under the potion’s influence and found it hard to focus on anything but your bare body laying almost on her own. but she was also thinking about how your relationship as teacher and student would suffer at the hands of this… study. of course, jiwon would totally respect your decision if you decided to part ways with her after this because who in their right mind would even think that this whole debacle was something one can move on from quickly? let alone, at all?!

but it would be a shame. a great shame, indeed. she has bonded so closely with you in just over the course of eight months, thanks to your shared love for learning. watching your eyes shine so bright after every spell casted, after every potion brewed, after every lesson successfully learned, made jiwon remember just why she fell in love with magic in the first place.

she had been in a dark place before she stumbled into you—she had become a legend to many and yet she felt so… empty and lost. jiwon had achieved many great things and it just seemed like there was nothing much she could do in her life anymore. but then she met you, listened to your wishes of wanting to study and practice magic to become a witch, and it all clicked for her because of course! if jiwon had nothing to learn from anything anymore, she could pass her knowledge on to those who deserved it!

and it turns out, as everyone knows now, you did deserve it.

jiwon was willing to deal with whatever repercussions she has to face the next day, but if this was the last time she was going to appreciate you without her pride getting in the way of her feelings, then she might as well do so until her drowsiness finally decides to pull her away from you.

~

three days later, you and jiwon anxiously sat in the dining room in front of an inexplicably-but-understandingly furious wonyoung and her sweet wife gaeul who was smiling kindly to alleviate any fear you were definitely feeling under the weight of wonyoung’s stare, bless her heart.

“i don’t know what i expected to happen, honestly,” wonyoung sighed as she leaned back on her chair. she had many words to say to you and jiwon but she didn’t want to waste anybody’s time by nagging your ears off. especially not when she had just been graced with the information that the potion has been sitting in the sanctuary for three whole days without any attempt from jiwon to get it back in its cage. well, any successful attempts, that is. “but i did expect you, jiwon, to be the most careful you have ever been. which, by the way, you promised before you left my shop with the thing and would you look at that!” your mentor’s best friend laughs, but you didn’t think she was amused at all.

“i know, i know, alright? i was stupid. trying to create the love potion in the first place was stupid and getting my student involved is probably the stupidest thing about all of this but please, spare me the talk, wonyoung.” jiwon said. she was embarrassed to have to recall the events of that night and spell it all out for her best friend, but there was a tinge of irritation there too. in fact, jiwon has been restless and frustrated for days on end. she hadn’t been looking forward to alerting wonyoung about the incident, much less asking for her help to clean it all up. and with the knowledge that wonyoung will probably want to hand the potion off to the authorities for good and potentially tell them about that night as well, it made a lot of sense for jiwon to be so… unlike herself.

what didn’t make sense, however, was how she had gotten so distant towards you.

you could say that it was inevitable considering how awkward the situation really was. who would even look at their subordinate in the eyes after a night like that? no doubt jiwon was ashamed of herself. you just felt bad that you couldn’t comfort her and tell her how you really felt about it all now that you were finally in your right mind. all because she wouldn’t let you.

gaeul was quick to sense the tension between her wife and her friend so she was quick to attempt to lighten the mood, “at least the two of you are unharmed, alright? nobody is hurt, suffering from any side effects, or pregnant, heaven forbid.” she said, laughing, but she immediately pauses and looks at you. “are… are you?” she asked.

“no! no, of course not,” you answered fairly quickly, which loosened jiwon, wonyoung, and gaeul’s tight shoulders and undoubtedly, chests. “we… concluded that pregnancy or any other anomalies, no offense—i’m s-sure you both are amazing mothers—would only occur if the potion was consumed and the drinker had very, very strong feelings of love for the other person.”

“so, neither of you consumed the potion,” gaeul said to which you and jiwon nodded. but she still looked confused. “but wonyoung said the two of you are deeply in—”

“honey. if i may?” wonyoung interrupts her wife with an obviously forced laugh. you chose to ignore how your mentor’s cheeks quickly grew pink at whatever gaeul was insinuating. “jiwon, i don’t want to get you arrested and condemned for the rest of history and be a cautionary tale for young witches and wizards aspiring to specialize in enchantment magic, so… what are we telling the council?”

jiwon momentarily forgets that she was upset at the world and sheepishly smiles at her best friend, “do we have to…?”

“jiwon.”

“just think about it, wonyoung! the legal chaos we would all face! (y/n) included! she’s not an official practicing witch—she would get reprimanded to hell and shoved back into her family with yet another magic-related crime under her belt, which we know she doesn’t want to happen at all. you and i broke the law so heaven only knows whatever’s facing us on the dark side of justice and with gaeul being your wife and the very first… victim of the potion, she would get in trouble too!” jiwon frantically explained. you shuddered at the thought of some knights dragging you to your father’s doorstep and this time as an actual criminal. you can’t even imagine the yelling you would receive, let alone the punishments.

wonyoung was silent, but visibly conflicted. she knew her and gaeul’s daughter would also suffer the consequences should the four of you get… arrested. hyunseo was only ten years old, she does not need her parents going to jail at such a crucial time—which is exam season.

“jiwon is right,” gaeul says. and of course, wonyoung doesn’t fight it because not only did she agree that jiwon was not at all crazy this time around but she also cannot say ‘no’ to her wife. “but there is still the problem of what in the world are we going to do to return your hut to its former, humble glory.”

to your surprise, cheddar jumps up on your lap, probably sensing how down you have been the entire morning due to your dear mentor refusing to hold a conversation with you for more than three minutes. jiwon had forgiven the cat for being the main reason things went haywire that night, but that didn’t stop cheddar from being the cute troublemaker she has always been. but you were glad about that because at least not everything changed after that mess of a study. you caressed the cat’s soft fur, hating how your mind was forcing you to think back on how jiwon’s hair felt all tangled up in your fingers as you kissed her three nights ago.

it was useless to try and ignore the truth about what you felt for your teacher. the love potion, the one that you drank as per jiwon’s request and not the other one, only worked so well because it amplified the pre-existing romantic feelings you already had for jiwon. the very same ones you tried to convince were just deep admiration because she just so happened to be the most talented witch you know. perhaps that was all it was in the beginning, but you knew they developed into something else overtime. you just refused to acknowledge it, for obvious reasons.

add that to the list of reasons why you are particularly bummed about jiwon’s behavior towards you as of late.

“(y/n)? are you okay?” gaeul asked. when you looked up, the three older women were looking at you, worried and alert.

“y-yes! sorry…” you mumbled, embarrassed at how you spaced out during a very important discussion. jiwon holds her stare at your face, probably searching for the real problems but you don’t give her the chance to worry about all of that when there are much, much bigger things to sweat over.

“let me get this straight. you want to enlist two of our friends to cover up this mess—one being yujin, who works directly under the council’s orders as a knight, and the other being rei, the most prized professor of an elite magic school and is a daughter of two council members?” wonyoung says, holding back any and all of the urge to call her best friend ‘dumb’.

“are you implying that they would let their best friends get whisked off to prison just to save their behinds? surely you have more faith in them than that, wonyoung,” jiwon jokes, but wonyoung was still not convinced that any of this would work. you were getting a very strong sense of deja vu right now. it was amusing to think that this is the way the two of them have always been since their younger days—jiwon always doing the most with her talents while poor wonyoung has to basically babysit her. “also, yujin never does her job correctly and even rei has bent and broken a few sacred rules. they’re no stranger to crime!”

wonyoung looks at you, her wife who reached out to hold her hand, and then back at jiwon, who looked like a drowned kitten trying to beg her best friend to go along with her plan. she shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and glances at her wife one last time before admitting defeat and giving in, “i’m going to hell for this.”

later that morning, while gaeul and wonyoung got busy trying to find a way to break the news to their friends, you retreated into your bedroom in hopes of taking a really short nap since you didn’t get a lot of sleep the previous night, or at all. your head has been filled with nothing but worries, it was impossible to even want to fall asleep. for the past three days that jiwon tried to clean up the mess by herself, you were doing absolutely nothing. sure, you could have helped, but jiwon didn’t want you to and frankly, you didn’t know how you could. so, you have just been watching your teacher stress over it all while you waited until you could do something, but it seems like today was not that day once again.

you sat on your bed, now contemplating if you should sleep or see if the witches needed anything from you, however little it was worth. it was hard to be in your room and not think about how jiwon held you in her arms as you slept that night. the side of the bed where she laid still smelled like her, and you felt like such a pervert for even noticing that but it was the truth!

“(y/n)...?”

speaking of which.

you flinched at your mentor’s unexpected appearance, “oh my—! you scared me, ma’am.”

“is this a bad time?” jiwon asked. you shook your head, but you didn’t tell her that this was what you have been waiting for for three whole days. you were hoping that it didn’t show too much either. jiwon carefully approached you and at first, it seemed like she was just going to loom over you as she talked but then she suddenly decided to sit down beside you. it baffled you to think of how awkward things had gotten between the two of you, but you had to find a way to be fine with it because again, what did you expect?

whenever jiwon was anxious, she never knew what to do with her hands, so she tended to fiddle with the hem of her shirt. seeing her do exactly that while she flips her brilliant mind upside down to find the right words to say to you was comforting in an oddly specific way that only you could understand.

“first things first, i’m deeply sorry to have put you through… all of that,” jiwon didn't look at you while she spoke. she couldn’t. “i should have known better, especially since you didn’t. even though the night ended with as little of a mess as possible, if you can even believe it, i practically forced you to be in danger and i did unintentionally put you in such a… demeaning position, what with making you as the volunteer for the love potion and of course, not shielding you from that other abomination.”

you smiled at jiwon even though she couldn’t see it because she had her eyes glued to the floor, “it’s all fine, really. we were just trying to—”

“and because of all that, i don’t think i should be your mentor.”

oh? 

oh, wow.

is this what heartbreak feels like? if so, you weren’t very fond of it.

you took a deep breath, refusing to let your emotions take over you just to discern whether or not jiwon was joking. she decided to look at you now, and those warm brown eyes that you’ve fallen hopelessly for were filled to the brim with guilt. your heart sinks… but you were never one to just give up on anything just like that.

“it… it was one incident, jiwon. worse things have happened while we were doing other studies! i-i almost started a wildfire right in our backyard, i accidentally summoned a supposed-to-be extinct species of a monster that nearly killed you before you conquered it, and you technically were the reason i fell and broke my leg during broom practice because you got competitive over a stupid race!” you were more than willing to tell her other happy accidents that happened throughout your short journey as teacher and student, but you knew in your heart that jiwon herself remembers it all.

it made you angry just how much you wanted to stay with her. truth to be told, you probably didn’t need her to learn magic and become a witch. you could just find another teacher, or do everything on your own like you initially wanted to do.

but… this was jiwon, damn it.

“(y/n), hey,” the older girl holds your hand, laughs when you try to pull away and only holds it tighter. “let me finish, darling.”

and now you feel really dramatic for being on the brink of tears.

“my dear friend, rei, is a teacher at one of the most prestigious private schools for magic in the city, as wonyoung mentioned before. it’s actually the one i graduated from but that’s not important. anyway, the headmistress adores her and allows her to be in charge of admissions and if you think you know where i’m going—no, you don't, so keep your pretty lips sealed tight,” jiwon said. she grins and laughs when you close your mouth like she demanded. “rei runs her own little gathering of the gifted kids that she stumbles into during the practical part of the entrance exams, and i told her about you.”

you nodded, very slowly, “o-okay…? i’m afraid i don’t understand.” you truly didn’t.

“what i mean is; congratulations, (y/n) (l/n), for you have just been accepted at everybody’s dream school and you’re under the direct care of its best teacher! woo!” jiwon starts clapping with the widest smile on her face, which slowly starts to drop when she notices the blank look on your face. “why aren’t you happy? i thought you’d be happier…” your mentor mumbles, scratching the back of her neck.

“no… i-i… there’s just… a lot to unpack here, is all,” you decided to put some distance between you and jiwon for the sole reason that you didn’t want anything to distract you from putting the right words together. not her scent, not her eyes, not her lips, not her hands—nothing. you wished you could express how truly happy you did feel that jiwon believed in your abilities so much that she somehow got you admitted to the school that all the legendary witches graduated from, but there was just this one big question that you knew wouldn’t stop bothering you unless you asked… so you did. “are you… getting rid of me?” it wasn’t easy dragging it out of your throat.

“what? no, (y/n)... this is nothing at all like that.” jiwon replies. she tries to get close to you again but you raise your hand up, stopping her from moving. jiwon respected your wishes and kept her distance, though you didn’t miss the look of hurt on her face. “i understand how it might look and feel like that, okay? i’m desperate to cover everything up, i’m dragging my best friends into my mess, and now i’m sending you off to an academy—i get it. but i’m… taking care of you, (y/n). you want to be a witch, remember? i’m helping you get there. to your dream.”

“but you’re my…” you hesitate and completely halt your thoughts. it’s true that both potions were a pain in the ass to endure but at least it made you brave. it was annoying how you couldn’t just bring yourself to spit everything out, but this was hardly the perfect time for confessions of any kind.

jiwon shakes her head, “i’m really sorry,” her words were but a whisper. “the incident really opened my eyes to… the dangers of you having me as your mentor. i… i don’t know what i’m doing, or if i’m teaching you the correct things o-or if i should at all. magic needs to be handled like glass. it’s fragile, it’s unpredictable, and it’s deadly if not used properly. you’re not going to learn that from me, (y/n).”

you knew she was talking about her reputation and how she ‘unfortunately’ lives up to it. jiwon is no doubt special, perhaps one of the most special witches to have graced these lands, but all that talent, that hunger for knowledge, the ability to want to achieve everything and be willing to do anything for it all came with endless troubles, accidents, and controversy. she was never able to do anything in a simple way but hey, that was the best thing about her. if she hadn’t been a literal blessing to the mystic arts, she would be condemned to hell for all of the stupid and reckless things she has done.

so, you understand. you do, and it fucking sucks.

“i apologize if i’ve made you upset, but believe me when i tell you that this is a good thing. and don’t even tell me that you’ll refuse to attend the academy just because i told my teacher friend about you. some people get admitted for worse and dumber things. but you,” jiwon leaves your bed, moves in front of you and crouches down. she takes a hold of both your hands, and was visibly relieved to see you accept her affection. “you deserve to be there, (y/n). truly.”

your lips quiver and you feel a lump in your throat forming until you hold jiwon’s hands tighter and are able to channel just enough grit in your head to believe that yes. you can do this.

“okay.”

jiwon smiles, and at the very same second that she opens her mouth to probably tell you more about how amazing of a witch you’re going to be with proper training and whatnot, you pull her in for a warm hug. she didn't wait a second before hugging you right back, and it was healing. you would have pulled away a lot earlier if you didn’t feel jiwon gently threading her fingers through your hair and nuzzling her face closer to the side of your head. it didn’t feel like she was aware of what she was doing, but that was more than fine to you.

anything to be in her embrace for a little while longer.

it took everything in your power to not profess your love to her right then and there. you felt safe and secure… but you knew that those exact feelings were nothing but a trap and its sole purpose was to ruin everything good you and jiwon had built up in this one conversation. you keep your mouth shut, but you hugged the older girl just a tad bit tighter. maybe if you bring her heart close to yours, she would feel just how much it beats for her. you wouldn’t need to rely on your words, which you knew almost always failed you when it mattered most.

“i will see if gaeul and wonyoung had managed to get a hold of our friends,” jiwon says as she pulls away. you almost didn’t want to let go of her. “are you coming?”

you flashed her a brief smile, “do you mind if i joined later? i haven’t gotten a wink of sleep lately.”

there was a flash of concern in your mentor’s eyes—she noticed how your smile faltered, how you quickly looked away from her knowing gaze and how you scooted away from her touch. her heart aches at the thought of how she might have hurt you, but she had already said everything she needed to say. there was no use in apologizing to you again. so, jiwon merely smiles back at you, giving you a reassuring squeeze on your shoulder before leaving your bedroom.

instead of sobbing into your pillow like you expected yourself to do immediately once your mentor was out of earshot, you take a deep breath and slap your cheeks. perhaps a little too roughly than you should have, but the pain distracted you from the whirlwind of depressing emotions that wanted to take over your entire being and ruin your day even more. you figured you were well past the point, or age, of throwing a tantrum and crying over something so small. of course, that didn’t mean that you weren’t allowed to be sad about it all. in fact, you absolutely had every right to be sad!

but look at the bright side—you were going to become a witch! if there was anything you learned from jiwon, it was that every nice thing that might come out of a situation outweighs all of the bad. no matter how ‘bad’ it all really is.

plus, there was only really one bad thing that had been plaguing your mind this entire time. for every night that you have spent in this hut, you always went back to the day you ran away from home. you wondered if you had actually told your parents that you were going to seek a way, any way, to study magic with or without their help. would they have given you their support after years of stomping all over your passion? would your father finally stop being such a big obstacle in your path and just let you go on your merry way? would your mother take it upon herself to get you to your dream considering your entire life, all she ever wanted was for you to be content?

well, you’ll never know now. but you could make everything a lot easier for you, your parents, and everyone affected by your actions.

“i can’t see them right now. father would most likely be too angry to listen to me if i speak to them directly, and mother… well, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it,” you approached your desk. it was littered with parchment, spellbooks, and quills, much like all of the tables in the sanctuary. “a letter. that’s… something. i just need to tell them that i’m okay.”

you dipped the quill into the pool of ink and got to writing. greetings, explanations, apologies, promises, gratitude, love—everything you wanted to tell your parents not only for the past eight months but even your entire life! you were careful not to mention jiwon. you knew that your father would most likely overreact and frankly, your mentor had enough to deal with on her plate! you didn’t want to add ‘dealing with your father’ onto that pile!

as you were fully immersed in laying your heart out on the parchment, you hadn’t realized that jiwon had returned to your bedroom. she spotted your busy hand gliding across the pages and stopped herself from bothering you, opting to watch you from the doorway instead. from your less-than-healthy posture, the creasing of your eyebrows, the slight pout on your lips, and how your hair fell on your face, jiwon is reminded of all the countless nights she caught you studying up until ungodly hours, which would then lead to jiwon going to your room the next morning and seeing you passed out on your desk, drooling and everything.

it was strange—knowledge was everything to jiwon. she loved the hunt for the answers and the search for information that she needed and didn’t need just for the sake of learning more and more. but this… this yearning for your touch. your lips. your voice. your embrace… and your heart—pursuing forbidden knowledge was supposedly jiwon’s favorite thing but figuring out that her adoration for you was more than a teacher simply enjoying her student’s company… well, that was forbidden knowledge jiwon had wished was kept from her.

because looking at you now with all of this knowledge of her feelings for you without any way to express it, jiwon was in pain. and regretfully, she left. if jiwon can’t even handle seeing you with only a few days left until rei takes you to the academy, how would she fare with not seeing you for months? years? forever…?

meanwhile, your movements paused and you turned around, thinking that someone had been watching you while you got busy… but all you saw was a lone shadow retreating elsewhere. you don’t pay it any mind and continue on writing your letter with a heavy heart, but you wouldn’t dare address the way you felt disappointment towards your mentor, whom you expected to come running back into your room and right into your arms.

perhaps you should focus on more… attainable dreams from now on.

~

your mentor’s little troupe was not short of personality, you can say that much.

apparently, jiwon’s friends had insisted that they come to the hut on a long weekend to scope the situation as they were too busy with their jobs and thus, that wait until that weekend was the most anxious week of your life. you’d think there would be nothing for you to fear knowing everything that has happened but upon the realization your future professor might not even like you upon her arrival, you find that there are indeed some things left for you to have you pacing around the kitchen past midnight.

multiple midnights before that weekend, in fact. even cheddar had to intervene one night—aggressively hissing at you and hitting your ankles with her soft paws until you settled yourself back in your bed. and on another night, jiwon unexpectedly witnessed your pacing when she came out of her room to have a cup of water. she, too, nagged at you to go to bed. at least she was a lot nicer about it than her damn cat.

you made a joke about asking jiwon to cast a spell that would take you to dreamland but clearly it was in poor taste, what with jiwon now hating the idea of using magic to hurt you, physically or otherwise. especially otherwise. you made a different joke about casting it yourself instead, which jiwon liked even less.

safe to say you were able to sleep immediately after that encounter, wanting to erase it from your memory as soon as possible.

it wasn’t until you actually met rei that you could finally breathe—the woman was lovely! she approached you like a friend and not at all an instructor. you had been fearing that she would ask you to cast a spell or two as some sort of showcase for your talent and you knew you would have embarrassed yourself as well as jiwon, so you were thankful that all rei wanted to know about you was your name and your favorite color.

all of that led to you having a heliotrope colored bracelet adorned with the academy crest on your wrist. when you had asked rei about why she had given you such a nice little gift, you thought she would tell you that it was a way for the members of her special class to differentiate themselves from the rest of the student body… but rei was truly just a sweet, kind woman that wanted you to feel right at home with her as soon as possible.

and then there was ahn yujin. boy, was she a wonder. she could have been straight out of a fairy tale that you used to read when you were a kid—a rebellious noblewoman who left her family to pursue greatness she wouldn’t have achieved had she kept her head down and accepted her destiny—if she hadn’t also been… such a klutz. yujin looked dignified when she finally arrived at the hut on her horse. she even stepped off flawlessly and offered her hand to rei, who she had been riding with, to help her down. like a prince! but then she approached you, shook your hand, and what came out of those adorable pair of lips was a horrible, tasteless joke that only someone as strange as your mentor would laugh at. and did!

no wonder they were friends. no wonder they were all friends! they all laughed at yujin’s terrible joke!

still, you appreciated both rei and yujin for wordlessly assuring you that you can treat them like you had been treating jiwon, gaeul, and wonyoung. like friends. highly respected and powerful friends, but friends nonetheless!

it took the five of them three days to clear up the sanctuary. the failed potion was once again sealed back into its dastardly cage with wonyoung and jiwon now promising that they will never ever take it out of wonyoung’s dungeon for as long as they will live. gaeul and yujin made a bet that it would take either of those two ten years until they pull the potion out of the dungeon for something stupid. rei betted on eight. and you silently betted on twenty years because you didn’t want to be on the receiving end of wonyoung’s wrath and you do have faith that jiwon would keep her word this time around.

on the night jiwon decided to have a lovely dinner with her friends after successfully cleaning up what was essentially her workplace, you were deeply lost in your thoughts. all because of one naoi rei, who had informed you that very same day that the two of you would be leaving for the academy in two days. she also happened to tell you that right after you finally summed up the courage to send away your letter to your parents.

so, you had a lot in your mind and you wanted to process it all just to avoid another breakdown at night. you politely excused yourself from the table after you finished your food, deciding that the best course of action was to get some fresh air with cheddar in tow.

to be frank, you wanted to be alone but your mentor’s adorable familiar has been strangely attached to you these past couple of days.

“i’m gonna miss you, my best friend.” you say as you kiss the top of the cat’s head. cheddar only snuggles deeper in your chest, purring at the warmth your arms provided for her in the bleak, chilly night. you looked up at the stars (which you can now see after jiwon so kindly took down some trees nearby that completely obscured the sky—but don’t worry, she planted them elsewhere) and sighed, realizing that nothing could really help you clear your head.

the one thing that weighed heavily of course was how different things would have been today if you just stopped jiwon’s pursuit of making the love potion all those weeks ago. maybe the two of you would be having another stupidly fun broom race, maybe she’d be telling you more bizarre stories she has of when she was a young witch, maybe… you’d even be finding out about your feelings in a ‘normal’ way!

“ugh,” you groaned. “is this really how i’m going to live from now on? pathetically dwell on what could’ve been?! i mean—come on! i have a brighter future ahead of me now! this is no time to think about other things!” you shouted at absolutely no one.

“oh, cheddar… did jiwon tell you? i’m going to that fancy school of witches and wizards-to-be that i’m definitely a few years too old for. not to mention how bad i actually am at spellcasting… wait… jiwon wouldn’t send me there just to embarrass me, right? she couldn’t have!” you start panicking. it wouldn’t be totally impossible. every single person in your life has always discouraged you about your dreams—why wouldn’t this time be any different? just because jiwon is your teacher?

the thought of it all just added yet another layer of bitterness to this… parting of ways.

the doors beside you swing open with a gentle creak and out comes jiwon wearing a pretty coat that was vaguely familiar to you. it was perfect for the night air. her blonde locks glisten underneath the moonlight, some lighter streaks made it look like she had glitter in her hair, making her shimmer more than ever. once her warm eyes land on your own, you turn your head away, heart fluttering slightly.

“i-i’m not here for another pep talk. i just… well,” jiwon seems to ponder her next choice of words before she takes the space beside you. “i’m just here to make the most of your company before you’re gone.” she admits.

her honesty surprises you, making you look at her with slightly widened eyes. jiwon doesn’t say another word, however. nor does she even look back at you—she just stares off into the distance, into the fireflies waltzing underneath the trees and around the beautiful flowers that you and jiwon have grown together in this backyard.

unlike the many periods of silences you have had to suffer through with jiwon after that fateful day, you were too annoyed with being sad to mope under the moon with your mentor. instead, you decided to actively look for something to do… and it just so happens that you noticed something worrisome on jiwon’s hand. it was slightly red and angry, as if it had been… burned?

“are you hurt?” you reached for the older girl’s hand. 

she flinched at your touch, but doesn’t pull her hand away from your grip. jiwon smiles sheepishly, “ah… i must’ve had a minor incident while cooking our meals with gaeul tonight. no worries! i can just snap my fingers and it’ll be like it didn’t happen at all!”

you don’t allow jiwon to move an inch away from you, “let me.” you boldly uttered under your breath. with a quick incantation, green light emerges from your palms and within a few seconds, jiwon’s hand was completely back to normal.

the blonde girl grins at your success, having remembered your previous unfortunate attempts at the basics of healing magic before. “i see you’ve gotten good at that.” jiwon says. she doesn’t let go of your hand, and neither do you let go of hers.

you raised your joint hands to your chest, exactly where your heart lay swelling with pride and pain at the same time. a bittersweet smile spreads across your lips as you speak with barely contained tears in your eyes, “i had a good teacher.”

~

…that should’ve been the end of it all, really.

you’ve said your goodbyes, had your final time together, and by the end of that conversation in particular, you were ready to leave everything behind and start looking forward like you were always meant to! but somehow, here you were in your bedroom struggling to drag one last baggage out of the hut due to an… ongoing distraction.

at first, it was just the impatient tapping against the floor as you packed up the very last trinkets scattered about in your bedroom, then it was the low hum of magic as your doorframe is sealed off from the rest of the world, and now it was your beloved mentor’s lips working feverishly in sync against yours.

in your defense, jiwon’s lips were the best you’ve ever tasted, so can you really be blamed for allowing her to pull you onto her lap for the second time in your life?

but jiwon seems to have caught herself off guard by her own actions, judging by how she suddenly froze and disconnected your lips from hers in record time. her eyes were wide with regret, but with the tiniest bit of desperation that let you know that whatever excuse she was about to spit out is, as the young—younger—ones are saying nowadays, bullshit.

“sorry… i’m sorry, i just w-wanted—”

you cut her off, too blinded by your desires to really care anymore, “save it. we’re already here.” and within a second, she was kissing you again.

now one would think that something diabolical would occur in that bedroom now that both of your feelings were all over the place in this very last day that you would see each other for however many years to come, and truth to be told, you thought something akin to that night would happen… but when jiwon lays you down on the bed in the most gentle manner, you found yourself wanting nothing more than to stay near her warmth just like this. her touch felt electrifying, just enough to incentivise you to take it a step further… but you don’t.

you keep still underneath jiwon with your hands sitting idly on her back, making extra sure to not ruin her clothing too much to avoid suspicion. you were certain that your inevitably messy makeup would give it all away later on but that’s very obviously a problem for later!

“i will miss you dearly,” every ounce of sincerity dripping from jiwon’s words and as well as the look of pure, precious love in her eyes melts your delicate heart. there was the familiar sensation of burning in the back of your eyes that you refused to acknowledge. this was hardly a time to start sobbing! “i have been wanting to tell you… but i was afraid. can you believe that?” jiwon laughs, you do too.

“i suppose it is quite difficult to grasp the concept of you being fearful of anything at all when i’ve watched you take down monsters of every kind right in our backyard.” you smile at the memories, and it seemed like jiwon thought of them too with how her eyes lit up like a blanket of stars in the night sky.

“banishing and eliminating cursed creatures is completely different from confronting the inner workings of my own heart!” jiwon says. upon hearing her words, your heart skips a beat. maybe two or three, really. it should go without saying out loud that jiwon very obviously feels the same way as you do… but any verbal confirmation, no matter how big or small, was always going to make you lose your composure. this instance being the very first didn’t help either!

you were so hung up on jiwon’s tiny confession that you didn’t realize that she had left the bed, pulled you up, ushered you out of your now deserted bedroom along with your luggage (that she made sure floated right behind you as you mindlessly walked in the dining room), and dropped cheddar in your arms. you pester yourself to return to reality as you hold your furry best friend, who seems to have gained a bit of weight in the last two days all because of your departure, allegedly!

“oh, don’t you worry about me, cheddar. i’ll make you proud.” you mumbled into the cat’s thick fur before giving her a quick kiss on the top of her head before putting her down. the cat rubs her face on your ankles before scuttling away, making you feel just a tiny bit worse about leaving. 

but everything else is quickly forgotten when you feel jiwon take a gentle hold of your hand and give you a kiss on the cheek, “come. rei has been waiting.”

exiting the hut, you were met with the image of your future teacher standing by a massive carriage as she gingerly commanded the driver and his help to put your belongings in the vehicle properly. your last baggage zips away towards the carriage immediately, and you don’t even hide your amazement with the fact that rei probably saw you coming before you even knew she was outside the hut.

rei waves at you, points at the carriage, winks at jiwon before disappearing inside the vehicle. “i’ll let you have your moment,” has never been screamed so loudly… and silently at the same time.

a beat passes. you feel reluctant to release jiwon’s hand and yet you say, “i shouldn’t keep her waiting even more…” your mentor merely hums. you weren’t looking at her, you were afraid of what you might end up doing in front of people, but you see her nod her head in agreement. slowly. she was reluctant herself.

you feel jiwon loosen her grip on your hand, which you took as your cue to start walking away but she immediately stops you. she grabs your arm, effectively halting your steps, and her face was beet red as she could barely stammer out, “s-say… after you have finished your studies and become the best practicing witch in that academy—second only to yours truly, of course—and served your time as rei’s most gifted apprentice… would you return to my side?” jiwon asked. easiest question of your life, but the older girl doesn’t let you speak. “not as my student… but as an equal. m-my… partner.”

an overwhelming wave of joy washes over you, and you nod eagerly. you wanted to hug her, you wanted to kiss her until the day ends and another begins but you were able to calm yourself enough to stay where you were standing. and you don’t try to hide the tears that built up in your eyes this time, “of course. just don’t go anywhere.”

jiwon raises your hand to her lips and kisses it like it was the most precious thing she has and will ever hold, “i wouldn’t dare.”

when the hut and everything that surrounded it was nothing more than some figures in the distance, and when you started to see very clearly what future has in store for you and your magical dreams, it was safe to say that you were now less troubled about your ‘grand plan’ from all those months ago getting derailed by becoming the apprentice of an odd, but loveable, misfit of a witch.

[leonardcohenofficial]

please share your antonin artaud opinions he is my little french freak (affectionate) but im not all that involved in theater theory i just like reading his stuff. one time i wrote a play for class that my prof called brechtien and that's the extent of my engagement with brecht's work so

there's a quote about john cassavetes attributed to peter falk that says "somebody said 'man is god in ruins,' and john saw the ruins with a clarity that you and i could not tolerate." i think that artaud was able to see the ruins of the world with such a clarity that he was desperate to find a way to express. i love that his work is unapologetic and caught up in violence and danger and a determination to escape what he viewed as false reality. i love that he put it so clearly and so plainly when he stated "no one has ever written or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, except to get out of hell." i love (and find funny) that he hated politics because his work with all its surreality and transgression is so politically active and alive to me. how could one read "van gogh: the man suicided by society" and not trace the seeds of antipsychiatric thought in the work, especially knowing that he himself was continually institutionalized and begged to end the electroshock treatments he went through? i love that his work and theatre of cruelty is sometimes considered "impossible theatre" because i think it inspires a challenge to consider what that untouchable metaphysical "impossible" thing can reveal in performance, even if we cannot ever fully articulate it, the attempt to reach it (like the lacanian real) is worthwhile. i think that artaud was failed by capitalism and institutions and being deemed "mad" and i think that his work is understudied even among theatre and performance studies circles. i think that the mother courage silent scream and the jet of blood are doing the same thing

[dwcmarshalarts]

Something I constantly notice in your work is the obvious fascination with elements of the Soviet times.

If it's alright to ask, why is this the one inspiration so ubiquitous and unending throughout your works?

I've never seen another thing like it, especially in the furry art spaces.

Good question!

I suppose I should start with the idea that the Eastern-Bloc inspired motifs and subject matter really mainly comes specifically from my story, In the Red. In the Red was the first real story I started to write sometime back in 2018-2019, before leaving it dormant in favor of my science-fiction series The Percivals, which highlights more personal stories, devoid of Soviet influence or Soviet-inspired worldbuilding. Point blank, you basically see none of it in The Percivals, which I’d say is still my flagship project. As such, it really isn’t as ubiquitous in my works as it could be.

The only area outside of ITR the Eastern-Bloc theming can be found is, in part, some of the advertising material for my commissions (ironically) or through the graphics of my official statements/releases as far as updates from me go. The reason there is simple: old East-bloc propaganda/the visual language of publicly managed economies translates surprisingly well to marketing, and I suppose announcing the start of a quarter can be seen as a kind of mini, three-month plan.

That said, ITR works have kind of seen something of a resurgence on my part as of recent, and I’ve never forgotten the worldbuilding I’ve done for it.

I guess the initial thing that got me interested in it was the idea that there was this historical precedent for a society that was, at least nominally, dedicated to the idea of an alternate economic organization. This was years ago, and of course when you’re young and foolish, you kind of get fascinated by these comparatively eccentric states and how they did things, and believe that they stood for something.

This carried over to when I began writing the initial drafts for In the Red, when I populated the descriptions of how the government of the Vulpiet Union worked and this and that, etc, but it kind of ran dry when I 1) found the whole exercise to be fairly regurgitative 2) ceased viewing the USSR, off of which the Vulpiet world building was based, with some special pedestal.

So I took a break to focus more on my personal, character-driven stories, disillusioned and not exactly interested in writing something with a “top-down” view of things.

I’ve come back a bit to In the Red because I feel like I’ve learned a bit more about story writing, and handling narratives and worldbuilding with a purpose. I feel like I understand the implications of the various systems at play better, and have a purpose to writing a story mired in the politics of a dead empire, resurrecting it for what is ultimately a tale about the futility of fighting against a system as one person.

Outside of that, I still have a pet curiosity/fascination for what life was like in the Soviet Union, mainly for what I had said before: things were different. Not necessarily better, but different. And people lived through it! Not just through the obvious points of political repression or a stagnating upper-crust of geriatric bureaucrats, but through more grounded and surreal moments you wouldn’t necessarily. The monolithic blocks of socialized housing and the dingy rooms that were just barely enough but housed millions, the cheap consumer goods raised during the Brezhnev years that nonetheless colored the lives of many, the Soviet space program that was the spearhead of a national propaganda push for scientific progress that ultimately gave way to its Western counterparts. Life in the USSR was most certainly complicated, and its effects went beyond the ideological implications, which is one of the most interesting things to me. The Soviet Union was most certainly an ideological project, but it’s a case study of how so many who grew up during that time, in retrospect, don’t think of it as ideological. It was just “their youth.” And all those weird Lenin statues, cigarette smoke choked Khrushchyovka stairwells, and the truly omnipresent Party propaganda posters, were not particularly weird to those growing up with it, it was just “life.” And, resultingly, fascination in how to wrap my head around that.

What I’ve done so far with the Vulpiet Union/ITR is just a scratch of the tip of the iceberg on all that, and I hope to eventually capture the depth of life in this fictionalized version of the Soviet state. Not just with the kind of media the government would put out, but life for the average Vulpiet citizen. Surrounded by reminders of the ubiquity of the Party and State, but simply living your life as is.

I will say as an addendum that remotely worldbuild-y art isn’t new, or uncommon either. @kvernakamudra does an excellent job with pure historically-based worldbuilding, I’d say far better and more indepth than I do (I guess I’m more focused on the meta-narrative and have been busy haha). Nakamudra is not only a talented artist, but clearly does an immense amount of research to base off his fictional nations, which I respect plenty. His contributions to furry art space through the lens of taking worldbuilding as a historical project seriously is really a model of how one *should* approach research with nuance.

I guess the only thing that I *would* say does separate my stuff from other historically-adjacent furry worldbuilding, especially with newer folks and folks suspiciously obsessed with the 1870s-1950s, is that I do have a imminently critical take on the the kinds of systems that occur in ITR, while a lot of others do tend to lean to much into the tendency that I originally fell into years ago, which is worldbuilding only for worldbuilding’s sake, or worldbuilding without a point/a misguided point. I see a lot of folks do the regurgitative thing where “x real world phenomenon happened, let’s copy it into our setting just because” instead of investigating why it happened/what circumstances brought it to happen, and importantly, whether or not it was a good thing. I think, the honest test of a real-feeling world built is whether or not you’re willing to engage with the events of the story in an objective fashion, or if you’re just there to glorify the existence of the nation you’ve built from scratch. From my own works, what happens during the events of In the Red, serve as an indictment on badly set up systems: in the mid-late part of the story, Vulpiet Union crushes a student uprising in a neighboring country, and it is unambiguously portrayed as a bad thing. I’m just curious as to how many folks who write similar worlds would go through writing an event like that and making it an indictment on their fictional nation, and not as a glorification of violence. From what I have seen, I’m concerned that the number wouldn’t be so high.

Anyway, good question! And thank you for the food for thought.

[trans-axolotl]

(Described in alt text)

okay I don’t always share photos of me on here but I graduated!!!! despite everything that happened in college (a year of online school, getting institutionalized for four months, almost getting kicked out of my university, becoming homeless, becoming a wheelchair user in the middle of writing my thesis, getting arrested halfway through my senior finals, etc etc etc) I still did it and I actually cannot fucking believe it. graduated magna cum laude with honors for my thesis, got inducted into two academic honor societies, and won the Dean’s award for commitment to social Justice.

I am so fucking grateful for everyone who helped this happen, especially to my comrades and fellow seniors who disrupted grad events with me.

when I was 18 one of the reasons I got diagnosed with psychosis was because I told the psychiatrist that I had just got accepted to university and he didn’t believe me. he told me I was severely mentally ill (true lmao) that I would never be able to live outside of an institution (less true) and that there was no way someone like me had been accepted to college, so the only explanation was that I was delusional. I wish I still had his contact info so that I could send him my diploma as a fuck you. a large part of why I graduated was BECAUSE of my schizoaffective and how that’s shaped me, the community I’ve found, the topics I chose to study, the way my mind works and builds connections. it feels deeply surreal to have actually graduated university as one of only two wheelchair users at my university and as part of the 1% of college students who have psychosis. most of the people in my family did not have the opportunity to attend college and it still does not feel real to me.

fuck my university and fuck admin for not divesting and fuck the discrimination I’ve experienced here over the years. I finished and I’m so fucking happy that I don’t have to come back!!!

[maxdibert]

Lately, I've been thinking about the possible descendants of Severus. In fanfics that talk about Severus being a father, they always show him raising a wizard boy or a witch girl, and that's great—it's entertaining to see him raising a magical child. But what if the child didn’t have magic?

Imagine Severus marrying a Muggle; there’s a high probability he could have a Squib child since Severus’s father was also a Muggle. The combination of his father's Muggle blood and his wife's might result in a Squib child.

If that were the case, I imagine the child would grow up as a Muggle, knowing about the magical world, of course, but still being just another Muggle in society. If the child were a wizard, I suppose their education—both academically and culturally—would be guided by Severus since he’s the only one in the family familiar with the magical world. However, if the child were a Squib, their upbringing would likely lean more toward the Muggle side, guided by their Muggle mother. Without magic, they’d need to integrate into Muggle society. So, I imagine their education, sense of humor, way of speaking, clothing, and everything else would be influenced by Muggle culture. Once they grew up, it would be evident that they were raised in the Muggle world, for example, the clothes young wizards and young Muggles wear are very different. (It’s highly unlikely that a 20-year-old Muggle would choose to wear robes to a party they were invited to.)

I really enjoy thinking about the cultural differences between wizards and Muggles. It’s so fascinating—the technology, the fashion, the humor, the way they speak and interact. It’s interesting to reflect on how wizards and Muggles can differ in ways that, at first glance, seem so simple.

(Severus might actually prefer having a Squib child raised in Muggle culture to spare them from carrying the burdens of his past. It’s just a thought I have.)

One of the most surreal things about the world created by Rowling is how she establishes that most of the population is made up of muggle-borns and half-bloods, yet wizards seem to have no idea how the muggle world works. Even those who are fascinated by muggles, like Arthur Weasley, get lost in absurd things like rubber ducks. Many don’t know what electricity is—like, what?? What sense does that make? There are so many muggle-borns, children of muggles, or half-bloods with a muggle parent, and you’re telling me they don’t know the most basic things? Even societies that are isolated or remote, like the Amish, know the bare minimum about the outside world. It’s absurd and unrealistic, honestly. And the way they treat muggles as if they are one or two steps below the evolutionary chain?? Come on, wizards don’t know democracy, they have archaic political systems, no sociological or philosophical studies, they’re totally illiterate on an intellectual and technological level. Sure, they have magic, but they’re completely unaware of fields like physics or chemistry, there’s no modern engineering for them, nothing. And as for weapons or war strategies... Yes, wizards are more resilient and have protection spells, but would they even have time to protect themselves if someone suddenly pulled out an automatic weapon and shot them in the head? Nuclear bombs? I mean, I’ve always thought that Voldemort’s idea of conquest was quite delusional, because a muggle with good aim could shoot him in the head and bye-bye, Tom. How can they genuinely see themselves above muggles, especially those who come from a muggle background, who know the muggle world and can compare?

I understand that Severus would want to distance himself from his muggle side because it represented poverty and violence from his father. The muggle world was never something good for him, but what about Hermione, for example? Her parents are dentists, she comes from a middle-class family, she’s an only child, and her parents seem like good people. Why do we never know anything about her life? We know everything about the Weasleys but nothing about her parents—not even their names. And she always makes excuses not to visit them, which is something that stands out to me because, in the end, she was raised among muggles. Is it really necessary to sever all ties with that world? It doesn’t make sense, I’ve always found it quite incoherent.

I really like the Severus x Muggle idea (which is why I decided to write a fanfic with that prompt) because I find the dynamic between wizards and muggles so interesting (as you rightly said) and also because it seems like the best way to explore the contradiction he must feel in having grown up between two worlds, and despite years of rejecting his non-magical side, trying to eliminate it entirely, and even hating it for being seen as a weakness or a source of shame, in the end, it is part of him. Not only that, but he grew up as a muggle. His cognitive development took place in a muggle environment, and his emotional and affective foundations were shaped in a muggle setting. His life before Hogwarts was entirely muggle because we know his father didn’t like magic. His inner child lived and was raised as a muggle, and the inner child in all of us is the cornerstone of our adult selves, and he has a huge dissonance with this. In an AU where he survives the war and has no purpose (because he has achieved his goals) and feels completely lost because, in both camps, many people despise him, because he has become a celebrity—and that’s something he detests—where half the community knows him for having been a professor, and one who was quite a jerk, and where he’s never going back to Hogwarts because by now it’s a place he detests for what it represents to him, I imagine him terribly depressed, locked in Spinner’s End, not wanting to see anyone or be found, in the house of his childhood that represents the duality between his magical self and his muggle self, not choosing either world because he feels like he doesn’t belong to either. In fact, I start my fanfic this way because it’s the vision I find most coherent.

That said, I think being with a muggle would make it easier for him because it’s someone who doesn’t know him and won’t judge him, and it’s probably someone who wouldn’t care about his past. “Oh, you were in a war? Just one? But there are like twelve happening around the world, lol.” A guy who wanted to dominate the world? Just another Tuesday in the muggle history office. I mean, the things that seem super dramatic to wizards are actually just everyday occurrences for muggles, especially in terms of political violence. In 1991, the Gulf War ended; from 1990 to 2000, there was the Balkan War; Pablo Escobar wasn’t assassinated until 1993, and the Cali Cartel remained active until 1996; the FARC, the National Liberation Army, the Bosnian War, the ETA terrorist group in Spain, child soldiers in Sierra Leone in the 1991–2002 war. Muggles aren’t scandalized by violence; it’s just part of their daily news. Severus having a muggle partner who finds out he was in a war would likely find it pretty normal, lol. He wouldn’t have that pressure of hearing, “Oh my god, you were a dark wizard,” in a world where murders and crimes are on the news every day. I think that would give him a lot of peace, not feeling constantly judged and pointed out, and having a partner who couldn’t care less about people like Harry Potter, Dumbledore, or all those famous figures in his world who’ve shaped his life—his partner wouldn’t care at all.

That said, let’s talk about the kids, hahaha, sorry for going on, but this topic really interests me for meta.

I think the idea of Severus having a Squib child is quite interesting, but in the end, it would be like you said—they’d end up having a muggle education and culture, belonging to that world. I don’t think it would be a huge drama. Squibs who have issues usually struggle because they are born into fully magical families, immersed in the wizarding world, while they have no powers. A kid with a wizard father and a muggle mother would have a reference point outside that world, so it wouldn’t be a problem.

That said, I like the idea even more that he might have a child with magical powers, but the kid couldn’t care less about the wizarding world. Like, his child would be a Gen Z kid born in the 2000s, probably raised among muggles because obviously, we believe in equality within the couple. If the kid is going to spend seven years in a wizarding school like their dad, it’s only fair that they learn how the muggle world works until they’re 11.

I imagine this 11-year-old with their laptop, mobile phone, Discord account, favorite streamers, TV series they haven’t finished, TikTok account full of random videos, all their pop culture references, music, etc., and suddenly being told, “Hey, you have to go to a boarding school for seven years where none of these things will work because magic interferes, and you’ll have to leave all your tech behind.” That might have worked in the 90s when there were no mobile phones, but in the 2010s???

But honestly, being Severus’ kid, raised in a healthy and loving environment, that child probably wouldn’t be brewing potions but might be creating muggle tech adapted to magic—just to be able to watch the last season of Cobra Kai on Netflix, lol.

Honestly, the idea of Gen Z kids with muggle heritage going to Hogwarts cracks me up.

[mariacallous]

“You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three years into Mussolini’s dictatorship. Gobetti, twenty-four and hailed as the most brilliant liberal writer of his generation, hoped to prevent Malaparte, then twenty-seven, from throwing all his talent behind the Fascist cause. “Don’t you understand that you’re wasting time, that the Fascists are playing you, that in the party you’re a fifth-class man, that your writings for the past year haven’t been worth a damn?” he wrote. Gobetti died the next year, from injuries inflicted by Black Shirts. Malaparte, by then, was making his name as one of Mussolini’s highbrow henchmen. During the Second World War, he became the regime’s star foreign correspondent, mobilizing the techniques of surrealism to evoke the era’s savagery. Malaparte rode to the Eastern Front with the Wehrmacht and toured the Warsaw ghetto with Nazi commanders and their wives. A fabulist whose medium was reality, he assembled his impressions into a nightmarish triptych—“The Volga Rises in Europe,” “Kaputt,” and “The Skin”—which forms the basis of his reputation today. With their uncanny sang-froid, their suave delight in ripping off the skin of experience, they leave no reader unmarked.

Malaparte writes about spilled guts of civilization, but in the manner less of a medic rushing to the scene than of a connoisseur savoring a spectacle. His waltz through the twentieth century combined an unabashed taste for strongmen with a keen interest in history’s losers. Malaparte himself was exacting in matters great and small. A puritan who abstained from coffee, bread, and spirits and watered down his Chianti, he spent three hours on his morning routine—which included shaving his chest and the backs of his hands and greasing his jet-black hair into place. In the late thirties, he bought a plot of land on a cliff on Capri and worked with a local mason to build a bunker-like house that is still regarded as a modernist masterpiece. He preferred dogs to people and claimed to speak their language; he tenderly examined battlefield corpses and translated Emily Dickinson. He moved between high society and low, with little interest in the middle. He knew how to hire a hit man and could spot a Hohenzollern at a glance. “An unrestrained social climber, excessively vain, and a chameleon-like snob,” the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci wrote of him, judging him “capable of any villainy.” The Italian Right, too, came to distrust him, suspecting that he was a fair-weather Fascist, ready to bolt when opportunity called. And so he did, in 1943, ingratiating himself with the U.S. Army after its landing in southern Italy. Nor was that the end of his transformations. The writer who once shared a sauna with Heinrich Himmler ended his days cozying up to Mao Zedong.

In the decades since his death, in 1957, Malaparte has attracted a rogue’s gallery of admirers. Che Guevara and his wife studied a manual he wrote on coups d’etat, while the right-wing colonels who seized power in Greece in 1967 also looked to him for guidance. Milan Kundera credited Malaparte with reinventing the novel. The Polish chronicler Ryszard Kapuściński tried to do for the age of decolonization what Malaparte did for the Second World War, though without winning the same indulgence for fabrication. The great film editor Walter Murch became so taken with Malaparte that he learned Italian just to translate him, while the Czech astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová named an asteroid in his honor. Rather generous—given that Malaparte saw homosexuality as a kind of moral contagion—are the plaudits he earned from downtown New York writers like Edmund White and Gary Indiana, who marvel at the sheer transportive energy of his baroque, proto-camp prose. Their first encounters, like those of Malaparte’s other early American readers, came via pulpy Signet paperbacks in the nineteen-fifties.

A Malaparte revival currently taking place in English is of a different order. Several of his works have been reissued by New York Review Books, which has now also brought out a biography by the Italian diplomat and historian, Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley. The book celebrates Malaparte as one of the “most singular interpreters of a twentieth century whose anxieties live on into our own” and “one of the least decadent and most vitalistic authors in all of literature.” Its charge is to convince us that, whatever the “beautiful souls” may hold against him, Malaparte is a writer for the ages—especially ours.

Any account of Malaparte must begin with his last name, a pseudonym he adopted in his late twenties. Born Kurt Suckert in 1898, in Prato—the “Manchester of Italy”—he was the son of Erwin Suckert, a German immigrant who married a Lombard and ran a textile business. Amid rising nationalism, young Malaparte wanted a name that sounded less German. “I would have called myself Bonaparte,” he once told a friend, “but the name was already taken.” “Malaparte” means “bad side” in Italian and may also echo prendere in mala parte (to take offense), a fitting nom de guerre for someone who set himself against the society around him.

At a young age, like a nobleman in earlier centuries, Malaparte was dispatched to be raised by others—in this case, a metalworker’s family on the city’s outskirts. The outsourcing had unforeseen results. Malaparte absorbed his foster family’s proud, proletarian values, and developed a lifelong fascination with street fighters—all of which set him apart from other middle-class writers. One of his fondest early memories was “getting a deep cut in the palm of my hand; the sight of my blood gave me a stunned, happy shock.”

In 1918—out of loathing, he claimed, for his domineering father—Malaparte chose the most extreme rebellion available to the son of a German, enlisting in the French Army to fight in the First World War against the German Empire. He was in France just in time to join the first major offensives, and later entered the Italian army for the Alpine campaign. “In command of the Ninety-Fourth flamethrower section, I managed to do a bit of good,” he wrote home after one Alpine battle. “The hand grenades hanging from the German soldiers’ belts, in contact with the flames, exploded.” During the conflict, Malaparte began contributing to military bulletins and newspapers. “I was born to write beautiful pages, not to die in war,” he confided to his journal. Within his first year at the front, Malaparte was exposed to mustard gas, leaving a pulmonary lesion that, nearly forty years later, contributed to his death.

Unlike contemporaries such as Ernst Jünger or Erich Maria Remarque, Malaparte did not produce a great book about the Great War. Nor, as with Hemingway, did the experience mark his style. He hadn’t yet surrendered to literature; his ambition was to become a statesman. After the war, Malaparte’s diplomatic career got off to a promising start when the Italian Army assigned him to their delegation in Paris. The Treaty of Versailles put him—if only peripherally—at the center of the world. Serra suspects that he spent most of his time there studying the languages he thought he’d need later in life: English, German, Russian. After the conference, he was transferred to Warsaw, where he claimed to be Italy’s youngest-ever diplomat. In reality, he was a glorified factotum, fencing in his free hours with Monsignor Achille Ratti, the papal diplomat who would become Pope Pius XI, and having his first love affairs. (Malaparte never married and liked to conduct liaisons with well-connected, wealthy women, though rarely for very long.) Still, Warsaw made an impression: he acquired a taste for the Polish aristocracy and a mounting respect for the Soviet Union, whose Red Army under Trotsky nearly took the city during his time there.

When Malaparte returned to Italy, in 1921, his career as a diplomat stalled. The monarchy’s days were numbered, with battles in piazzas between Socialists and Fascists. Malaparte briefly worked in the war ministry, then tried law school, before eking out a living as a journalist among Rome’s bohemians, mingling with artists like Giorgio de Chirico. “What attracted him to Fascism,” Serra writes, “was a profound social transformation in which he saw himself reflected.” Malaparte was slightly late to the Fascist movement. He did not, as is commonly believed, participate in the March on Rome, in 1922, which put Mussolini in power. But he turned out reams of propaganda, volunteered as a tribune, and briefly led Florence’s Chamber of Labor before being ousted by more militant rivals.

Malaparte soon took on the grand-sounding position of Fascist Party Inspector, which mostly meant spying on Italians in Paris. He started a magazine, La Conquista dello Stato (The Conquest of the State), where he continued to produce high-toned justifications for Mussolini rise. But his most valuable service was more devious. After the Fascists’ victory in the 1924 elections, a Socialist deputy named Giacomo Matteotti presented evidence of ballot-rigging and violence. Ten days later, a Fascist gang led by Amerigo Dumini—Mussolini’s “hit man”—kidnapped and killed Matteotti. The murder is often considered Italy’s version of the Night of the Long Knives, the Fascist point of no return. Mussolini, still not fully secure, needed distance from the crime. Malaparte served as fixer and helped clear the thugs of premeditated homicide. In court, he testified that Dumini had told him that he meant only to rough up Matteotti, even suggesting Matteotti himself had been involved in other political assassinations. The result was a light sentence for Dumini—Mussolini granted him amnesty a few months later—and increased clout for Malaparte, who had successfully laundered the murder of one of Il Duce’s most nettlesome public enemies.

“Malaparte would never again sink so low,” writes Serra of the Matteotti affair, as if it were an aberration in his subject’s career. Serra never tries to exculpate Malaparte, but there are points where he presents him as having a mind too fine for ideologies, who did not need Fascism as much as it needed him. Malaparte himself, however, does not make this kind of defense easy. It is not simply that he was a cynic, politically unreliable, saturated with racial prejudices, and monumentally selfish. It is that he wrong-foots his audiences by tempting them to reach for the word “despite.” We are often told that the triumvirate of Fascist masters of prose—Céline, Jünger, and Malaparte—are great “despite” their politics. Yet, like it or not, what made them so exceptional was inextricably intertwined with their ideological position. It is this difficulty about Malaparte that Serra prefers to sidestep.

Malaparte vaulted to international fame in 1931 with “Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution,” a slim volume purporting to be a how-to guide for seizing modern states. The aspiring putschist’s mistake, Malaparte argued, was relying on gunmen; what really mattered were squads of electricians, railway workers, and telephone operators, who could commandeer the machinery of state. Once you had the technical apparatus, the rest followed. Reviewing the coups of the interwar years, Malaparte awarded top marks to Trotsky and Mussolini. Hitler—still two years from power—was dismissed as a dithering amateur, reliant on speeches, crowds, and parliamentary niceties. “Hitler is merely a caricature of Mussolini,” Malaparte wrote, psychoanalyzing him as a closeted woman. “The feminine side of him explains Hitler’s success, his domination of the crowd and the enthusiasm he rouses in the youth of Germany.”

As a tactical manual, the book was severely deluded. Hitler, like Mussolini, prevailed precisely by first working within parliamentary structures—until they could be discarded like spent rocket boosters. What made “Coup d’État” a best-seller was its breathless, eyewitness tone, the sense that Malaparte had observed the dictators up close. The book blends minute reportage with bombastic analysis—a style he would later perfect. It was not well received by its subjects, however: Hitler banned it in Germany, Trotsky called it idiotic, and Mussolini, the main beneficiary of its praise, recoiled at being reminded of his origins as a Socialist journalist.

Malaparte’s misunderstanding of his relations with Mussolini cost him much hardship in the following years. He was sent to detention many times in the late thirties and early forties, at Mussolini’s request. The most serious offense was in 1939, when Malaparte plotted against Italo Balbo, an Italian ace pilot of the First World War who was tipped as Mussolini’s successor. Malaparte couldn’t resist trading on his notoriety, often surfacing between sentences for parties in high society. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is your convict!” he’d announce. In the postwar years, Malaparte claimed that his imprisonments by Mussolini were proof of his anti-Fascist credentials—or, at least, his irrepressible nonconformity. He liked to tell a story about the time Mussolini summoned him to his headquarters to complain about criticism of the regime and mentioned that he knew Malaparte mocked his ugly ties. Malaparte apologized, then departed with a jab: “You’re wearing an ugly tie today as well.”

In 1941, freshly out of prison, Malaparte reported for Corriere della Sera on Italy’s and Nazi Germany’s early advances. His first lasting book, “The Volga Rises in Europe,” was written as dispatches from the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht pressed through Ukraine in its doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. Reporting from scorched villages, Malaparte became more than a propagandist or an impressionistic observer, determined, as he wrote, “to grasp the underlying significance, the hidden meaning of this singular war.” Embedded with the German army, he realized he was witnessing “a conflict not of men alone but of machines, of techniques, of systems of industrialization.” As Malaparte saw it, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had produced a new type of worker-peasant, more at home with tank turrets than with plows. To the frustration of his Italian editors, who wanted tales of German prowess, Malaparte grew increasingly in awe of the Red Army. The book is filled with brushstrokes that would become his hallmark:

Beneath a tree we see two German soldiers washing their feet in a pool of muddy water. Their great toes are swollen and deformed by long marches and by the heat. Their feet protrude, white and enormous, from their grey-green uniforms like tree-branches from which the bark has been stripped. It occurs to me that the feet of Daphne must have looked like that in the moment of her metamorphosis.

In such vignettes, nature is played off nature and made strange. Although Malaparte can be garrulous and showy, capping a scene with five classical references where one would suffice, at his best he is a shock technician who knows how to manipulate his readers with passages of beauty and horror and when to twist them together.

On the Eastern Front, Serra writes, Malaparte “developed a conception of war as biblical scourge, such as would swallow up in its bath both victors and the defeated, men and animals, nature and technology.” This vision finds its fullest expression in his masterpiece, “Kaputt,” which roams from the Finnish forest to Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and the German home front. We watch German soldiers fire at dogs that the Soviets have fitted with explosives and trained to crawl beneath tanks. Horses freeze into statues on Lake Ladoga, the ice locking around their legs. After a banquet with the Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić, Malaparte describes his host unveiling a basket of what seem to be mussels and then saying, “It is a present from my loyal Ustaše. Forty pounds of human eyes.”

The book’s most indelible scenes unfold in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where Malaparte dines with the high command and elicits the most horrific utterances from his hosts. Over roasted venison branded with a swastika, he gives himself the best lines, provoking uneasy German laughter as he rehashes his thesis that Hitler is a woman. His host is urbane Gauleiter, Hans Frank, who pivots from the subject of Chopin to that of the Jews:

German children play: they have dolls, rubber balls, wooden horses, tin soldiers, air guns, trumpets, music boxes, tops; they have all that a child needs for play. Jewish children do not play; they have nothing to play with, they have no toys, moreover, they do not know how to play! No, the ghetto children do not know how to play. They are truly degenerate. Disgusting! Their one amusement is to follow the hearses heaped with dead bodies . . . to go and see their mothers being shot. A fit amusement for Jewish children.

Malaparte's method is to charm his interlocutors into relaxing and casually exposing their monstrous selves. On a Nazi press junket through the Warsaw Ghetto, Malaparte steps over corpses: “They were still and hard, they looked like wooden statues. Just like the dead Jews in a Chagall canvas.” He startles survivors by saying “I beg your pardon” as he squeezes past—his courtesy too exotic to be comprehensible. At the ghetto wall, German soldiers shoot at Jewish children who had tunnelled beneath to find black-market exchanges. “A black tuft of tangled hair popped out of the hole,” Malaparte writes. “Then two hands appeared and rested on the snow. It was a child. Another shot and again the bullet missed its mark by a few inches. The child’s head disappeared.”

The immediacy Malaparte conjures is unmatched by any historian of the era, whether he’s inventing scenes (the Lake Ladoga horses) or embellishing real ones (dinner with Hans Frank). Much of “Kaputt” is Malaparte rushing with a cup to catch the runoff of Nazi table talk. In perhaps its most haunting scene—a high point in postwar Italian literature, Serra suggests—Malaparte sees two girls in the Warsaw ghetto fighting over a raw potato. When one is left empty-handed, he offers her money, which she refuses. He then offers her a cigar from a German officer:

The girl gazed uncertainly at me, blushed, took the cigar, and I understood that she was only accepting it to please me. She said nothing, not even thanks; she walked away slowly without turning, holding the cigar in her hand, bringing it close to her face from time to time to inhale its scent, as if I had given her a flower.

Serra contrasts this cigar with the curtained-off chamber pot in Primo Levi’s account of Jews packed into cattle cars—their last scrap of dignity. But Malaparte isn’t after dignity. In the girl, he sees a doomed freedom: the freedom, even briefly, to be frivolous.

In 1943, after a final stint of house arrest on Capri, Malaparte switched sides, falling in with the victorious Americans. “The Skin,” his account of the U.S. occupation of Naples, finds him competing with an all-star cast of writers drawn to the city: Norman Lewis, John Horne Burns, Melchior Wańkowicz, and Edmund Wilson. In Malaparte’s account, Staff Colonel Jack Hamilton—a South Carolinian and a Pindar devotee—serves as a sort of inversion of the Nazi Hans Frank. Hamilton is a man of civilization, but of the wholesome, invigorating variety. “The goodness and innocence of those splendid boys from across the Atlantic,” Malaparte writes, “who had landed in Europe to punish the wicked and reward the good—could redeem nations and individuals from their sins.”

Yet most of the book is devoted to puncturing this redemptive vision. The entire female population of Naples, and even children, seem to offer themselves to the Americans for sex. Malaparte describes Black enlisted men paying Italian women to don blonde wigs over their pubic hair, and gay orgies among officers. When an American tank crushes a bystander, Malaparte writes, “the outspread legs and the arms, which were a little apart from the torso, were like the trousers and sleeves of a newly pressed suit, stretched out on the ironing board.” Even as he longs for the Americans to cleanse Europe of the stain of defeat, Malaparte harbors no illusions about what follows. “Capitalist society,” he writes, “is founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions and his happiness.”

“The Skin” is the most self-conscious of Malaparte’s books. The people the author encounters tease him about the way he will likely transfigure their experiences in his next book. “Judging from Kaputt,” a French journalist remarks, “one would say that Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales’ hearts, served on plates of old Meissen and Nymphenburg porcelain at the tables of Royal Highnesses, Duchesses and Ambassadors.” When “The Skin” appeared, in 1949, it became a sensation in Italy. As the historian Sergio Luzzatto observes, it’s unlikely all its readers shared the narrator’s voyeuristic fascination with the dead and the unborn. Instead, they were attracted to what Luzzatto calls the book’s “anti-anti-Fascism.” While ex-Resistance fighters clung to a strict ethic of sacrifice and political purity, Malaparte championed an “ethic of survival,” encouraging Italians with mixed war records not to dwell on their lack of purity.

Serra, whose father fought in the Resistance, but in a non-Communist brigade that never reconciled itself with the more hard-line postwar Communists, admits more than a measure of sympathy for Malaparte. (This sympathy includes an over-identification with his subject’s prose, which he sometimes imitates unnervingly, with overwrought descriptions and needless authorial intrusions.) In a revealing footnote, he mentions being snubbed as a young man by the novelist Alberto Moravia, a former Malaparte acolyte who became a champion of the Italian left and assumed Serra was a retrograde bourgeois from the way he dressed. It’s a minor echo of what Malaparte experienced after the war. When he moved to Paris in 1947, hoping to rejoin the city’s literary scene, he met with contempt from the existentialists, who could not forgive his wartime past. In a memorable scene in “Diary of a Foreigner in Paris,” Malaparte describes his disappointment with Albert Camus, who made it clear that he wouldn’t have minded seeing Malaparte shot for his crimes. “I imagined the scene,” Malaparte writes. “Me blindfolded, tied to a chair or a stake, and Camus alone before me, with a rifle in his hand, a steady gaze, an expressionless face, a bare head.” But the fact is that Malaparte was never the same writer after the eclipse of European Fascism. Mussolini’s regime had lent his prose an aura of transgression, which he channelled for artistic effect. His Paris diary, by contrast, is a jumble of clichés and misfired provocations. By the nineteen-fifties, he was scheming to be sponsored by Coca-Cola.

Malaparte’s last bid for glory as a foreign correspondent took him to China in 1956, where he claimed to meet Mao Zedong and played the diplomat, pleading for the release of European priests from Chinese prisons—which, to his surprise, he found more humane than the Italian ones he had been in. But his literary pulse was gone, and his dispatches show no awareness that Mao was about to unleash the Great Leap Forward. In China, Malaparte’s damaged lungs finally took their toll. Flown back to Italy, in a Soviet plane, he converted to Catholicism and died.

In the end, Gramsci’s description of Malaparte as a chameleon is less persuasive than the underlying consistency his old friend Piero Gobetti had seen: Malaparte worshipped force wherever he found it. The inconvenience for his detractors is that, instead of being compromised by his Fascism, Malaparte’s writing thrived off it. But he was a paradoxical Fascist who had trouble with movements larger than himself: his was a Fascism of one. Serra thinks that today it would be impossible to match what Malaparte set out to do. I wonder. One can picture a Malaparte of our time sliding into a party at Mar-a-Lago to enjoy burgers made of undocumented flesh; trading barbs with Palantir’s board as talk shifts from critical theory to A.I. surveillance of student protesters; shooting into drone-infested skies alongside North Korean troops in Kursk; wandering Gaza with I.D.F. soldiers who try on looted lingerie as they order buildings blown apart. Depravity is hardly in short supply, and any contemporary Malaparte would not lack material. Malaparte himself was not concerned about being on the right side of history. It didn’t matter whether or not time pardoned him for writing well. “Personally I don’t care whether some American journalists think I am a fascist or an anti-fascist,” he wrote to his New York publisher after the war. “The question is, whether their opinion can trouble or not the success of ‘KAPUTT.’ ” 

[sicdicitnequamdeus]

anyway, for the sake of covering all bases, i think it's really important to have a post i can point to as to what absopro actually fucking is, until i'm ready to release it.

ABSOLUTION PROGRAM, commonly shortened to absopro, is a 2012 multimedia webcomic about some kids in a fucked up, surreal magic users' society that make deals with demons for magic powers in return for fighting aliens. the absolution program, as it's termed, is intended for teens and young adults who feel trapped in their current life situation, for one reason or another, as a way of "redeeming" themselves. ABSOLUTION PROGRAM: 13th Anniversary Edition, however, is the true story at play here: AP13AE (as is shortened when distinction is necessary) is a character study of its (deceased) author lucas through the lens of the comic. it has multiple layers of narrative: in-universe, popular fanfic writer turned official absopro team member ghoulishtemperance has taken it upon himself to archive the webcomic as it existed pre-death of flash and recreate it while also adding real-world context and his own commentary when appropriate. the result is typically the webcomic itself being sandwiched in between the author's own commentary, the state of the fandom at the time, and GT's own interpretation of what the fuck is going on. why is this necessary? because lucas is a fucking murderer.

despite the other, surviving author's assertions, absopro does contain wild amounts of subtext about lucas's moral philosophy that can't be ignored. this is why the comic is so polarizing. as the story goes on, GT realizes this is true and wonders if it's right for the team to continue on with a murderer's comic. is it okay to still be a fan of lucas's work, even if he's not hurting anyone anymore?

as for absopro itself, it does seem unassuming at first glance. it's not a deconstruction of mahou shoujo or even a dark mahou shoujo, but a very earnest one that just happens to have darker things in it. while Being a Magic User absolutely sucks, the comic tends to shrug this off as a "yeah, it just be like that." and focuses more on the systemic abuses perpetuated both by the society and the real-world society that pushes these kids into thinking their only option of turning their life around is becoming a magic user.

the first two parts, written by lucas himself, focuses on the main team and their struggles with completing their first few missions and becoming "official" magic users, until something goes completely awry and exposes them to how corrupt the society is. the third part, released ten years after the comic's indefinite hiatus, shows them just what happens when you dare to question it. also, the main villain is a tumblr sexyman and totally not a self insert of lucas. that's probably relevant.

i sure hope GT doesn't fuck up the chapter chronology or anything. that would suck.

[aventurineswife]

Dr. Elke Laurent had dedicated her life to studying the universe’s mysteries, but nothing could prepare her for the silence that spoke back.

Alone in the observatory on the outskirts of the Andean plateau, Elke gazed into the data stream—signals from the Vela Pulsar, an object she had long admired for its rhythmic brilliance. Yet tonight, the pulses faltered. The oscillations blurred, forming patterns no known physics could explain: recursive fractals interwoven with impossible geometries.

She leaned closer, heart racing. A creeping pressure grew behind her eyes, as if something watched.

Her screen flickered. The air hummed. The shadows deepened, stretching toward her like fingers of a cosmic abyss. A voice—not spoken, but felt—whispered inside her mind:

"Do you see now?"

Elke recoiled, knocking over her mug. The black liquid spiraled upward, floating like ink in zero gravity before vanishing—consumed by an unseen force. She felt the urge to look outside.

Through the observatory dome, a shape writhed in the sky: an outline of a being, vast and undulating, composed of shifting constellations that rearranged themselves in real time. Its form was impossible, a cascade of eyes that blinked in non-Euclidean cadence, watching her across all wavelengths of perception.

A deep, resonant knock echoed inside her skull. Elke fell to her knees, clutching her head.

Meanwhile, across the galaxy...

Herta, the self-proclaimed genius of the Genius Society, sat in her lab, legs swinging, bored. She flipped through the latest research reports until a peculiar dataset caught her eye—an anomalous pattern in the Vela Pulsar’s emissions.

"What's this mess?" she muttered, enlarging the waveform. Her eyes gleamed with sudden interest.

A pause.

Her mind raced. Non-linear signatures across multiple dimensions… quantum fluctuations beyond baseline variance…

"Wait." Herta's face lit up.

"Hey, you!" she called to the nearest staff bot, who scrambled over. "Start a new project file. We’re naming this anomaly The Laurent Echo. I think someone just stumbled into something fun... or dangerous."

She grinned, her curiosity piqued. The Herta Space Station would definitely need to investigate further.

------

This is just part one of a small series i'm doing, trying to tap into Herta's more mischievous personality while staying true to her interest in anything that'll keep her entertained. Obviously taking liberties with how Herta is aware that Earth exists, since we don't really know if anyone (aside from Welt) knows it exists.

Elke is going to be a wreck during most of this, as it should be honestly.

I'm trying to mix more scientific aspects with occultish themes. It's an interesting clash that i'm hoping I can capture, what with my interest in cosmic horror and the fact i'm going for (in my third year, seven more to go🫩) a Ph.D in astrophysics I think I'll manage but we'll see! I'm excited for this!

This is incredible, genuinely. You've managed to thread that needle between grounded science and the creeping unease of cosmic horror so well—Elke's descent into this unknowable phenomenon feels earned, atmospheric, and chilling in a quiet, cerebral way. That line—“Do you see now?”—hits like a tuning fork to the spine. It's exactly the kind of dread that doesn't need screaming monsters to linger.

And bringing Herta into the mix? Inspired. Her playful detachment is such a sharp contrast to Elke’s unraveling, and it works beautifully—almost like she's an impish Greek chorus watching the threads of sanity snap with amusement. The “Laurent Echo” naming moment genuinely made me smile. It's so her.

Also, the way you describe the anomaly—recursive fractals, non-Euclidean geometries, the liquid spiraling upward—feels like you're speaking the language of someone who understands both the poetry and the brutal math of space. That shows, and it grounds the more surreal parts.

And if you're only in year three of your PhD and already writing like this? Honestly, you're in for something amazing.

It's got serious potential to explore not just cosmic horror and science, but humanity’s fragility in the face of the vast and uncaring universe—with a side of mischief from Herta to keep it sharp.

[aneurinallday]

Today I was thinking about documentaries, so here are some of my favourite documentaries:

Fire of Love (2022) - the love story of two volcanologists, set against the fiery backdrop of our planet's awesome and terrifying destructive power. The awe-inspiring scale of volcanic eruptions is juxtaposed with the personal, intimate story of these two soulmates.

Into the Inferno (2016) - a study of volcanoes and the way they shape the cultures and societies around them, told in Werner Herzog's usual profound and existentialist way

The Dawn Wall (2017) - the odd and amazing story of a man who decides to scale a 3000-foot cliff with his bare hands

Touching the Void (2003) - the thrilling survival of two men who climb up a mountain, and the harsh choice that is made when one of them gets injured

Man on Wire (2008) - a portrait of an eccentric and unusual man who decides to perform an illegal tightrope-walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007) - a captivating portrayal of the daily life of scientists in Antarctica. Werner Herzog transforms the bleak and frozen environment into a surreal and mind-boggling alien landscape.

The Deepest Breath (2023) - the story of a record-breaking female free-diver (someone who swims as deep as possible then returns to the surface with a single breath)

Last Breath (2019) - the story of a diver carrying out deep-sea repairs when his umbilical cable gets cut off, leaving him stranded at the bottom of the ocean

Sherpa (2015) - a depiction of the injustice faced by the Sherpas of Nepal, who have the thankless job of helping rich tourists climb up Mount Everest. The filming of the documentary is interrupted by an avalanche, throwing the crew and their subjects into chaos.

Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake (2022) - a similar documentary about a devastating earthquake and the Nepalis, foreign tourists, and Everest climbers who were impacted by it. I cried a lot.

Take Care of Maya (2023) - the devastating story of a young girl with a rare neurological condition, who is wrongfully taken from her parents when they are falsely suspected of abusing her. I cried A LOT.

Abducted in Plain Sight (2017) - a true crime documentary about a predator who worms his way into a family. Some of the most staggeringly clueless parents I've ever seen in my fucking life

(disclaimer these shitty blurbs were written by me)

[daughterofheartshaven]

I had to take a bit of a break from Doctor Who novels to reread my Becky Chambers books this month, and next month I have several books written by friends lined up, but AFTER that I’m going back to reading Doctor Who.

I tried starting last time with the vna where Benny shows up (Love and War, I think?) but I was getting bored with it so now I will ask my better-read friend: where do you think I should start with reading eu books? To date I have only actually finished a few novelizations, some meta books, and Prisoner of the Daleks

I have no idea what your Doctor Who book taste is likely to be, and given that you liked Prisoner of the Daleks and I didn't and that you got bored with a book by Paul Cornel, I can conclusively state that we have very different tastes. So I'm going to recommend a bunch of Doctor Who books with a brief blurb about why I'm recommending them so you can make an informed decision on if you might like them. For the record, I have read pretty much all of the Virgin Doctor Who books (I skipped a few ones I knew I would not like), but have read less than a quarter of the BBC Doctor Who books, so this is going to be a very Virgin-Books oriented reccomendation.

So whenever I talk about the Virgin New Adventures, I will say that Theatre of War, Human Nature, and The Also People are in a three-way tie for my favorites of the range, so let's start with those.

Theatre of War: This is the book that introduced Braxiatel to the Whoniverse. Sometimes when a character gets introduced, it takes them a bit to find their feet and get their characterization nailed. This is not one of those times. Also notable for pulling off the best plot twist I have ever seen anywhere. The basic plot revolves around a theatre-obsessed empire funding an archeological dig to find a theatre machine, but the machine goes haywire and starts becoming actively dangerous.

Human Nature: The story that inspired the Tennant two-parter. It's not as focused on the tragedy of John Smith, but in exchange it has a very fleshed out cast of super interesting characters (the Family of Blood equivalent are now six fully fleshed out characters, as are several of the students and a few people from the local town) and focuses more on the futility of war. Timothy is also much more layered character here. We actually get a lot of lore about Gallifrey. One of the most emotional books I've ever read. I will say this is written by Paul Cornell, same guy who wrote Love & War, so if you don't like his prose or something be aware of that.

The Also People: A murder mystery set on the most realistic depiction of a utopia I have ever read. Unlike most Who books, the threat is on the back burner for almost the entire book, so while there is a mystery at hand, we get to just explore the setting and learn about how it works, and it's wonderful. This is a book about how society functions once it is truly post-scarcity, and the worldbuilding is so rich and accessible and wonderful.

And now some other more random books.

Festival of Death: The best Four/Romana book out there. Period. Also if you like time travel stories, this is for you - this makes Steven Moffat's stuff look simple. But the book does an amazing job of guiding the reader through the whole convoluted plot, so I never felt lost. The Doctor arrives on a space station, then discovers that yesterday, he stopped a zombie apocalypse on said station. So he has to go back in time and do that. That's how it starts, anyway - it gets so much more interesting from there.

Timewyrm: Revelation: This is another VNA, and while it does kinda close an arc, you don't need to understand the arc to make it work. A brilliant character study of both the Doctor and Ace that really understands both as characters. The plot isn't dependent enough on anything that came before, and is kind of a multi-Doctor story without actually being one. That'll make sense if you read it. It's very surreal. Also written by Paul Cornell, if that's a problem.

Blood Harvest / Goth Opera: Two connected books (one with the Seventh Doctor, one with the Fifth), that are notable for explaining how, when, and why Romana returned to the universe and sets her on her political path. They're both vampire stories - Blood Harvest is very tonally similar to State of Decay in your old classic-style horror, where Goth Opera is a much more sleek and modern take on the vampiric concept. Goth Opera is another Cornell book.

The Gareth Roberts books: Three very-well written, Douglas-Adams-esque books featuring the Fourth Doctor and Romana II. I bring them up because I know you really like the Fourth Doctor and Romana II, and these three books do replicate that era very well. Unfortunately, they had the misfortune to be written by Gareth Roberts, who was kicked out of being a Who writer in 2019 for being transphobic. The books are The Romance of Crime, The English Way of Death, and The Well-Mannered War, and while I do think they are well-written, I totally respect if it you'd rather read something by someone who wasn't an asshole.

All-Consuming Fire: The Doctor Who / Sherlock Holmes crossover, and it is glorious. The first third of the story is just a Sherlock Holmes story that happens to have the Seventh Doctor in it. The last third of the story is a standard Doctor Who story that has Sherlock Holmes in it. The middle is an equal mix of the two. Narrated from the diaries of Doctor Watson and Bernice Summerfield. I also do need to state that the story does do the Really Bad Thing of claiming that a Hindu god is an alien, and the way that is handled is just... so problematic. I love this story, but I cannot in good faith recommend it without that caveat and not wanting to see that is a valid reason to give this one a pass.

Dreams of Empire: This is my nostalgia concession - while it was not strictly speaking my first piece of Who EU, it was certainly the first one I loved. It features Second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria, and uses a sci-fi setting to basically explore "what would have happened if Julias Ceaser had been peacefully removed from power"? Nice political intrigue piece set inside a prison in space. I know you're not as much about the Second Doctor as I am but the writing really does nail him here.

Cold Fusion: Probably my favorite multi-Doctor story in any medium. The fifth Doctor (with Tegan Nyssa Adric) meets the Seventh (with Chris and Roz, who are a pair of cops from a thousand years in the future who realized that ACAB still applies and ran away from their jobs with the Doctor). This one is one of the fastest-moving Doctor Who books, and while it has a lot of depth, it doesn't really front-load anything. Really solid character work with all seven returning characters, explores the setting (a human fringe colony world) really well, and has some good Gallifrey lore.

Lungbarrow: I... actually don't think you should go with this one. At least not at first. Now, its really good! Don't get me wrong. But it is also very dense in its prose and I suspect would be a lot harder to get into than most of the other books I've rattled off, and it does assume you've been reading Doctor Who books. I wouldn't call it a good place to start. But I would be doing you a disservice to not include it, because Lungbarrow is one million percent the precursor to the Gallifrey series - we have Romana and Leela in their familiar roles, with Ferian standing in for Narvin. The dynamic between the three of them isn't, like, what Lungbarrow is about, but it is there. Given how much you love Gallifrey, I can't skip it. Just maybe save it for once you've read a few virgin books and gotten used to how dense their prose always seems to be (Lungbarrow is by far not the worst at this, but I would argue it is probably one of the worst that is still very much worth reading. Marc Platt and Kate Orman have this annoying tendency to write truly amazing books that also have very dense prose).

[saint-starflicker]

5 Dark Academia Movies That I Don't Find Too Many Other People Posting Very Frequently About

Note my definition of Dark Academia: dark because somebody dies (at a stretch, the darkness can be oppression or abuse from which no one necessarily dies but it still gets pretty dark—or if someone attempts suicide or murder then I count it as dark); academia because they go to uniform school or prepster university (the academia part can be an intense study, discussion, or research of a subject even though they are not at a campus.)

1. The Moth Diaries 2011

The book was better, more detailed, but the movie is still pretty good. The campus is peak neoclassical splendor, the uniforms are on-point aesthetic, and the darkness is gruesomely bloody and also it's on fire. The book is set during the school year of 1970 to 1971, but the movie is set in 2010 thereabouts.

2. "O" 2001

A modern retelling of Othello by William Shakespeare set at a prestigious boarding school. Adapting classical literature in a high school was trendy at the time, trying to capture the magic of Clueless 1995, and in my opinion "O" was the most glammed-up production with the most dark academia atmosphere out of all of them.

3. Educating Rita 1983

A working-class British young woman takes a social enrichment outreach education opportunity to study literature, in hopes that a study in the humanities will give her a better sense of self. Her tutor is a "failed" poet who struggles with substance addiction. Unbeknownst to them, both their lives are at the crux of change. In their consistently non-romantic conversations together, they unpack class discrimination in academia and society, as well as argue about the meaningfulness versus empty pretensions of studying humanities.

Nobody dies, well all right somebody almost dies for pretentious academic reasons...but the conversations leave a lot between the lines.

4. Private Romeo 2011

A modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare set at an all-boys military school. Sure, it's not the Oxbridge-Camford or "Hollywood New England" collegiate aesthetic...but it is very gay, a feature that I hope lends the movie some compensatory merit in this context. Juliet's a boy. Romeo is still a boy. Nurse is a boy. Juliet's mom is a man. Paris is an abstract concept. They are studying Romeo and Juliet at the military school English class at the same time that they are living and speaking the lines in Romeo and Juliet, so it gets surreal and I recommend getting more into the emotion of it than get caught up in what the lines they're saying are supposed to mean.

This should be chaotic academia or frenzy academia, but there's homophobic hazing and bullying so I think that's pretty dark.

5. Bare: a Pop Opera ???? There was supposed to be a movie but I deduce that it's stalled in development purgatory. I have not liked a movie adaptation of a stage musical since Chicago 2002, so I guess I don't really like movie adaptations of stage musicals—but I definitely want my current hyperfixation to be more accessible than a Spotify album oh hey while waiting for this adaptation to happen you can listen to the Spotify album. It's an operetta, so it's sung-through and you won't miss out on any story dialogue unlike with other musicals. Here's my argument for B:APO being Dark Academia.

DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE #5 SPOT ON MY LIST DOES NOT EXIST...WHAT DARK ACADEMIA MOVIES DO YOU THINK SHOULD BE IN THIS SPOT IN THE MEANTIME?

I CAPSLOCK IN ANGUISH THAT THE B:APO MOVIE DOES NOT EXIST YET AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL.

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS ARE CONSOLATION.

Honorable Mentions:

The History Boys 2006 had one subplot I was bothered by at first and then grew to despise which is really too bad because this movie had racial diversity, directly addressed misogyny in academia, and had canon gays in a love triangle — but it is dark and it doesn't really seem to know that it's dark.

The Children's Hour 1961 "dark academia is mlm while cottagecore is wlw" WRONG watching this movie to consider evidence of dark academia wlw is part of your yuri duty! remember our history!

Never Let Me Go 2010 I can't describe objectively because I read the book at a time in my life that I was having a time at that time. The movie is a faithful adaptation. I re-read it recently and I think it's more Dark Academia than I gave it credit for, but if you're not into Contemplative Dystopia then I completely understand it not being your thing.

Like Minds 2006 — Huh, so 2006 was a busy year for this genre that did not yet exist at the time. Witness the folie à deux of 21st century teenaged Templar Knight kinnies who are also homoerotic serial killers. (Waves to the people that introduced me to this movie, who—contrary to the header of this post—actually do post about it.)

Rope 1948 does have some activity that I've caught recently enough, but I thought maybe it wouldn't be considered Dark Academia right away because it doesn't take place at a school. It takes place at a dinner party where ex-schoolfriends talk to their philosophy professor who they remain well-acquainted with after graduation, an interrogation of putting this professor's morally heinous philosophy into practice. Also there is a corpse at this dinner party. There's your academics and your darkness, so there's your dark academia.

[gravesung-moving]

DRAKARTH CONSERVATORY for Arcane Excellence and the Drakarth Archival Preservation Society (called the Archive for short) are technically one and the same. The Archive came first, with the Conservatory built next to it by arcane researchers who wanted to mold from each generation an upper echelon of societal perfection: soldiers, politicians, researchers to lead the charge into every new era. Drakarth, crowned by its star arete student and its globally-recognized faculty, stands as an institution to strength that, if you can survive it, guarantees a successful life.

Key phrase: if you can survive it. Not all is well here, and the people who uphold Drakarth's ideals would do just about anything to keep their secrets buried.

Be careful, now, and don't follow the moths.

STRUCTURE & EDUCATION.

Honor, virtue, reason and might are the four tenets of what Drakarth sees as excellence. Each class attends three years of school: the honing year, the building year, and the trial year. The honing year is spent on basic training, though its true purpose is weeding out those with outstanding potential from the crowd. During finals at the end of the year, all of the freshmen are pulled solo, in pairs, or in threes for individualized Surprise Tests made to test their weaknesses and push them to their limits. These can be anything: 1v1 tournaments, grueling survival challenges, written exams, dungeon delves... the list goes on.

By the end of year one, less than ten percent (80-100) of the students pass their trials and continue on. The rest are shunted into Drakarth's sister schools and outer universities for lower-intensity studies. The ones who pass are called CENTURIONS, and even if they don't graduate top of their class, the title in itself is incredibly prestigious.

Year two, the building year, is spent exploring what makes each student special. Their advisors craft and constantly adjust custom curriculums that balance the student's strengths and weaknesses within the four tenets.

It's supposed to be individualized, that is. The academic system fails so many young people, and Drakarth is not only no exception to this, but a stunningly cruel example of it. (hiii jupiter.) Some of the students who are rejected, or who drop out mid-year, are literally never seen again by their peers. No clue where they went, no contact, nothing. No one seems to think this is weird. They just couldn't cut it, you know.

Third year: tournament arc! Students spend their time fine-tuning the skills they have built over the last two years and training for a schoolwide capstone tournament after finals. These serve as a display of Drakarth's newest exceptional stock to interested parties: military, government, scientific agencies, like sports recruiters coming to games.

Being top of the class each year is a high enough honor in itself. At least, from an outside point of view. Those in the school, the faculty and staff, and the attached families know the truth: there is one particular honor that everyone is chasing.

There is an opportunity every year for someone to be awarded the title of ARETE. For the last two decades, that opportunity has come and gone: the Conservatory and Archive staff simply haven't seen a student who exemplifies the four tenets at an outstanding, better-than-perfect level.

That doesn't stop every student from shooting for it, though.

Drakarth's arete is treated somewhere between a political hero and a messiah. They become the face of the Conservatory and, to an extent, the country it resides in. They attend conferences and war meetings, make speeches to young hopefuls, fight in wars — essentially, they go where the society needs someone to look up to.

LAYOUT.

The Conservatory itself is built from a set of old stone buildings, their architecture Gothic with a twist of occasional surrealism and a focus on open space. At the entryway, flags bear the school crest: two eagles locked in combat in front of a crossed pen and sword, framed by the area's native wild roses. The eagles represent might, the pen represents reason, the sword represents honor, and the roses represent virtue. 

The ballroom, where public-facing functions and schoolwide formals take place, resembles a modified cathedral without pews. Along the back wall, where altars may sit, the leftmost refreshment table bears stacks of wine glasses filled with red, white and bubbly varieties. The center table is adorned with savory hors d'oeuvres, and the rightmost table shows off sweets and pastries of many types: tiny cakes, croissants and canele and cups of custard, spiced honey cake and filled buns, and more. The food and drink items seem to replenish themselves. 

The Archive, directly adjacent to the ballroom, is two floors high and three floors deep. The ground floor acts as a public library for basic arcane knowledge. The second floor acts as the Conservatory’s private library and study space. Underground levels are for artifact storage and Archive property that is only accessible with a research permit and an approved written request detailing what exactly will be used or studied. 

There is definitely not an ancienty secret society involved. There is no eldritch deity of forbidden knowledge sealed under the Archive. Don't follow the moths.

The school training grounds take up about a football field's worth of outdoor space, different sections of the field set up for different types of training. A large dirt square provides space for hand-to-hand combat; dummies of different materials provide resistance to elemental damage for spellthrowing; one entire half of the field is for sports rather than combat. Things do get mixed up sometimes. 

This field is also cleared out when it comes time for end-of-year trials, challenges that test the might, honor and knowledge of each year's students. Most don't make it out of them alive. That's just how things are. The trials with the most fanfare are Tournaments, which are the capstone of Drakarth's graduating class. The students are placed in small groups and pitted against what is essentially a public dungeon crawl. Those who succeed receive a magical artifact and graduate from the Conservatory, some with honors and some simply good at surviving. 

And, of course, there's the college town. Drakarth is out in the countryside, but establishments, homes and businesses have been built around it over the centuries as many alumni and their families end up teaching after they graduate. Favored by Conservatory students is CODA, a lounge that transitions from a cafe to a classy bar in the evenings.

Questions?

graphic template credit

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Artificiality

The Philosophy of Artificiality explores the nature, meaning, and implications of that which is man-made or synthetically constructed, as opposed to what is considered natural or organic. It raises deep ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical questions about the human relationship with reality, technology, creativity, and authenticity.

Core Questions

What is "artificial"? At its core, artificiality refers to things made or altered by human design rather than arising spontaneously in nature. But philosophically, this distinction can be blurry. Are artificial things less real or authentic?

How do we value the artificial? Some traditions view artificial constructs as lesser than natural ones (e.g. artificial beauty vs. natural beauty), while others celebrate human ingenuity and artificial enhancement (e.g. transhumanism).

Is artificiality opposed to authenticity? Existentialist and phenomenological traditions often associate authenticity with being true to one’s nature, while artificiality may be seen as performative or contrived. Yet, some argue artificiality is intrinsic to human culture.

Does artificiality distort or reveal reality? In postmodern philosophy, simulations and hyperreality (e.g. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation) suggest that artificial constructions can overtake or replace the real, raising questions about what’s “true” or “genuine.”

Related Philosophical Themes

Techné vs. Physis: The ancient Greek distinction between art/craft (techné) and nature (physis) is central. Artificiality is linked to techné—the human capacity to shape the world through skill and artifice.

Artificial Intelligence & Ethics: As we create entities capable of learning and decision-making, questions about consciousness, moral responsibility, and personhood arise. What ethical status does a synthetic mind have?

Artificial Environments: Architecture, virtual reality, and synthetic biology all raise ontological questions—what kind of reality do they create, and how do they shape human experience?

Aesthetics of Artificiality: In art and design, artificiality can be embraced (e.g. surrealism, modernism), or critiqued for creating inauthentic experiences. This challenges traditional aesthetic values.

Human Identity: Are humans themselves artificial beings in some sense—culturally, psychologically, or technologically constructed? From social roles to prosthetics, artificiality becomes a way of defining identity.

Philosophers and Thinkers

Martin Heidegger: His critique of technology as enframing offers a caution against reducing the world to resources.

Jean Baudrillard: Explored the dominance of simulations and the loss of the "real."

Bruno Latour: Argued against strict separations between nature and society in science and technology studies.

Donna Haraway: In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she embraces hybridity and artificiality as liberatory.

Plato: In The Republic, he warned that artifice (e.g. shadows on the cave wall) can deceive us into mistaking imitation for truth.

Conclusion

The philosophy of artificiality challenges us to reconsider the boundaries between natural and constructed, real and simulated, authentic and artificial. It is a vital area of thought in an age where synthetic realities—digital, cultural, and biological—are increasingly dominant.

[wiseoldmage]

@diamonddomain liked for a starter!

It had been a long couple of days in this strange new place! Elminster had met people and creatures of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and personalities. He was no stranger to the surreal- after all, nothing widens one's perspectives more than stepping out of your own plane of existence and wandering others like one would travel to other countries- but this one had been exceptionally taxing! It was as if this was not just a place for different creatures to come together, but also people from different times, different realms of existence entirely... to say that it was bizarre would be putting things mildly. Yet as he walked the bustling streets en route back to the room that seemed to belong to him, he couldn't help but continue to study each person and thing that he walked past. He had taken for granted just how much he missed the hustle and bustle of crowded cities like Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, the many performers looking to make a touch of gold, peddlers with their goods, children making merry with the most common household items. But things were different here! People were different. El couldn't help but stroke his long white beard in contemplation. In making a realm where all people are unique, he thought to himself, It is as if the mundanity of society is in its very lack of mundanity! Curiouser and curiouser...

His thoughts were temporarily paused as he came across someone else that caught his eye- someone that looked even more extraordinary than those he'd seen before! Resplendent gems and shards reflected on this creature like an approachable golem, yet it was a moving, living thing! El tried to approach, peering down with an inquisitive (if not slightly overbearing) look. "How peculiar..."

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

TYO Essay

A while back, I mentioned I wrote an essay for my previous uni course where I used TYO as a source to look at the early 1980s. @a-a-a-anon expressed an interest in reading it, so here ya go! The quality of it is seriously iffy (I was 18/19 when I wrote it and had no idea how to actually write or reference academic essays yet, and just the quality of the writing makes me cringe a bit). There was also more I wanted to say but couldn't due to the word limit (don't remember what these other things were now). Despite all that, the lecturer liked it, and it was cool I got to write about TYO for uni.

The Young Ones as a Cultural Source for Early 1980s Britain

Although today in Britain the future often feels uncertain – the global pandemic notwithstanding, Brexit is still looming on the horizon – the Britons of 40 years ago doubtlessly felt similarly, albeit for different reasons. In the early 1980s, the threat of nuclear war was palpable, as the existence of Protect and Survive[1] attests to. Nuclear war paranoia influenced British culture in the 1980s, with bleak examples such as the BBC film Threads (1984) and Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows (1986) still remembered keenly today. Both fictionalisations of nuclear war featured material from Protect and Survive and highlighted the message of contemporary nuclear disarmament protestors: no one can win a nuclear war. Of the less apocalyptic issues, unemployment hit 3 million (about 11.7%[2]) in 1983 – for comparison, in 2019 it was estimated to be at 1.281 million (about 3.6%[3]). The Thatcher administrations’ efforts to break from the post-war consensus and embrace neo-liberalism created divisions in society. Yet, amidst threats of nuclear war, mass unemployment, the decline of British industry and the growth of individualism, a cultural revolution in comedy dubbed “alternative comedy” was fast taking hold in Britain – and in much the same way Thatcherism’s impacts can still be felt on society today, so too can alternative comedy’s.

Running for 2 series (12 episodes in total) on BBC2 between 1982-84, anarchic and slightly surreal sitcom The Young Ones epitomised the break between older styles of comedy and the new wave. Although The Young Ones has been called ground-breaking and classic, it is also now regarded as somewhat dated for its jokes pertaining to current events. Therefore, its scripts are an interesting source for an insight into the time in which it was produced and based: early 1980s Britain.

Firstly, it is important to understand what The Young Ones actually was. Written by Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer[4] and with additional material provided by Alexei Sayle, it followed the misadventures of four vastly different university students at the fictional Scumbag College in North London. Whilst the four were never seen doing anything remotely akin to studying, it aimed at being representative of university life, students and the squalor they lived in. The show was not a conventional sitcom in that it did not pertain to a family and it featured a musical act in every episode so that it could be classified as “light entertainment”, as the BBC had no further budget available for sitcoms at the time. Because many of its principal actors came from the stand-up comedy circuit, there was an emphasis on excitement and unpredictability over discernible plots and many memorable scenes featured characters injuring themselves and others, destroying bits of the set and crashing through walls, as well as randomly interspersed and unrelated cutaway gag segments. There was a cartoonish level of slapstick violence, swearing and toilet humour, which appear milder to today’s palate than 40 years ago.

British audiences were divided by The Young Ones mostly along age lines, with younger viewers engaging readily with this new style of comedy and older viewers seeing it as unnecessarily vulgar and silly. Indeed, the characters that had been transplanted from their actors’ stand-up routines were deliberately disgusting, exaggerated caricatures and horrible to one another. Mayall himself played wannabe lefty anarchist Rick, who frequently came to rather explosive blows with the violent punk medical student, Vyvyan (played by Mayall’s comedy partner, Adrian Edmondson). Also featured was badly done to, depressed hippie Neil (played by Nigel Planer) and the mysterious leader and straight man of the group, Mike The Cool Person (played by Christopher Ryan, the only one of the core cast without a comedy background). Sayle too appeared in every episode as either their hated landlord Balowski or a member of his family, where he would deliver a short stand-up monologue to the camera. The show’s title (and opening theme) was derived from the Cliff Richard song of the same name, as Mayall’s character was a huge fan.

The Young Ones took on the issues of its day, perhaps none more so than the episode “Bomb”. “Bomb” uses dark humour to address fears over nuclear war by having an atom bomb land in the characters’ kitchen at the start of the episode. Even before the characters deal with the unexploded bomb, the script is already hinting at the theme of nuclear war in this cutaway gag sequence, featuring a family on a packet of cereal:

FATHER: Would you two shut up and keep smiling? We’re supposed to be the ideal nuclear family!

GIRL: Post-nuclear, more like!

Not only was this segment ridiculing the “ideal nuclear family” that was promoted by the Thatcher governments – none of the characters posing as a family get along at all and the “father” reveals himself to be gay, thus exposing the lie that there is truly an “ideal” family – it also managed to slip in a quick gag about nuclear war. This reflected a genuine belief by many at the time that nuclear war was coming, especially amongst the young.[5]

When the main characters finally become aware of the bomb in their kitchen, the script offers this response:

NEIL: I’m going upstairs to get the incredibly helpful and informative “Protect and Survive” manual! Nobody better touch this while I’m gone!

This reference to the Protect and Survive manual, which at the time and retrospectively has been regarded as useless in the event of an actual nuclear attack, appears for the purpose of ridiculing it. Having the character of Neil act as though the manual could help deal with something as serious as an atom bomb in the kitchen employs sarcasm as a critical tool. Protect and Survive featured suggestions such as painting the windows of the house white in order to deflect the heat from a blast, which The Young Ones also satirised:

RICK: Neil, can you lend me five- What are you doing?

[NEIL is reading his survival manual while painting himself white with a paintbrush]

NEIL: Oh, painting myself white to deflect the blast.

RICK: That’s great, isn’t it? Racial discrimination, even in death! What are these? [indicates a few lunchbags on the table]

NEIL: Sandbags!

The misinterpretation of the manual’s instructions, as well as the substitution of items deemed vital for items found in the house, reflects the feeling that most British households were simply unprepared for a nuclear attack and stood very little chance of survival. This is compounded later in the episode, when the four main characters resort to hiding underneath the kitchen table as a means of escaping the blast of the bomb – something many had resorted to in air raids during WWII but which was drastically inadequate protection against an atom bomb. This episode also portrayed the nihilism in British culture over nuclear war – a nihilism that can be found in other cultural sources, such as The Smiths song “Ask”[6] – through the character of Vyvyan, who spends much of the episode attempting to set the bomb off.

This show being the work of alternative comedians, The Young Ones also utilised its anarchic tone to critique the Thatcher administration of the time. This was usually done through the character of Rick, who blamed Margaret Thatcher for most problems faced by the group. Though his character existed to satirise upper-class closet conservatives as well as overzealous student activists, he was something of a mouthpiece for the left-wing writers. Some of his more memorable outbursts include:

RICK: We haven’t got any money! Vyvyan’s baby will be a pauper! Oliver Twist! Jeffrey Dickens! Back to Victorian values! [directly to camera, angrily] I hope you’re satisfied, Thatcher!

RICK: Neil! The bathroom’s free! Unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta!

Other characters were used to critique the government too:

RICK: School’s out forever! Yeah, come on everyone! Let all your hairs hang out! Do whatever you want!

MIKE: What’s all the excitement, Rick? Has education finally been cut altogether? That’s the only reason I voted Tory.

The first of these is a reference to the 1983 interview in which Thatcher endorsed a return to “Victorian values”. That is, a rolling back of the state to unburden the individual and set them free to prosper, should they put the effort in. This New Right attitude, combined with the high unemployment figures from that year, created the view that Thatcherism was about looking out for “number one”. This wasn’t aided by Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit’s “Get On Your Bike” speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1981. The Young Ones captured the mood of particularly the youth in such a climate – one in which many felt misunderstood and patronised – in a cutaway segment featuring the fictional TV programme Nozin’ Aroun’:

BAZ: Rol! A lot of my mates say to me, “Oh Baz, what is the point?” What would you say to them?

ROLAND: Well surely, Baz, your mates must realise that there definitely is a point!

BAZ: So a real message of hope and good cheer there – from Roland, a really ace guy!

To summarise; just as is the case today, early 1980s Britons were facing uncertainty. This was especially the case for anyone working in manufacturing industries, as the unsuccess of the Miners’ Strike of 1984 signified a wider trend in British industry. The government’s overarching aim of turning society away from one in which a “nanny state�� risked making people idle to one where everyone was free to accumulate wealth that would trickle down to the less well off was never going to be a smooth period to live through. The last tremors of the Cold War didn’t help make the period more bearable. Yet, it is often harder or uncertain times where laughter becomes more valuable to people and The Young Ones – though not to everyone’s political or cultural tastes – undeniably provided some release for younger generations. To call it an entirely accurate depiction of early 1980s Britain would be to forget that its primary purpose was amusement. Nevertheless, it does provide a colourful insight and one that is remembered with fondness by those who grew up watching it, even today.

[1] Protect and Survive was a series of government issued pamphlets, public information films and radio broadcasts produced in the late 1970s/early 1980s, to be distributed 72 hours before a nuclear attack was expected. Public interest meant they were released in 1980.

[2] https://countryeconomy.com/unemployment/uk?dr=1983-12, December 1983

[3] Office for National Statistics, December 2019

[4] All of whom are alumni of the University of Manchester.

[5] After speaking to some adults who were young during this period, Mr Smith revealed how (aged 11 in 1983) he told his class: “I want to be there when the bomb drops. I want to be right next to it so I’m disintegrated and don’t know anything about it.” Additionally, he was under the impression that a bomb would likely be dropped on Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

[6] “If it’s not love / Then it’s the bomb / Then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” – S. Morrissey & J. Marr, “Ask”, The World Won’t Listen, 1987

Bibliography:

Sources:

B. Elton, R. Mayall & L. Mayer, “Demolition”, The Young Ones, BBC2, 1982

B. Elton, R. Mayall & L. Mayer, “Bomb”, The Young Ones, BBC2, 1982

B. Elton, R. Mayall & L. Mayer, “Cash”, The Young Ones, BBC2, 1984

B. Elton, R. Mayall & L. Mayer, “Nasty”, The Young Ones, BBC2, 1984

B. Elton, R. Mayall & L. Mayer, “Summer Holiday”, The Young Ones, BBC2, 1984

Central Office of Information, Protect and Survive, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1980

Transcript of Brian Walden interview with Margaret Thatcher for BBC, 1983: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105087