#THE WORST IS OVER

[elejahfanfic]

Fides Cordis |

_Del Shepard

Lt. Malcom Reed_

*

@darknightfrombeyond

[benegesseritofficial]

I'M DONE

JESUS CHRIST I'M DONE I DID IT

I SUBMITTED THE LAST OF MY COURSEWORK IF THEY DON'T LIKE IT I DON'T CARE THERE'S NOTHING MORE I CAN DO

[zeledonia]

yknow, im not gonna win any housing awards any time soon, but im pretty happy with how t'ren's home is coming along so far :3 now my real worry is that ill run out of furniture slots before i can get all the little details in

[elexuscal]

"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

[nando161mando]

There are now over 15 million empty homes in the US, and 650,000 homeless per the very bias official numbers, or 23 houses per person

[howifeltabouthim]

At any rate I've seen him, she thought. Something of the worst is over. That particular shock can never happen again.

Iris Murdoch, from A Fairly Honourable Defeat

[sirserpentine]

For the rest of the night, Pentious only stirs once, awoken from his unconscious state only to shuffle around slightly, barely even opening his eyelids as he falls into a proper slumber instead. Comfortably resting in the new sheets, in those fresh bandages. Not recalling what has happened for now.

He travels into a deeper into sleep in the early hours of the morning, into a scenery of dreams he has never seen before. He slithers into corners of the Earth he has never touched. He sees faces of people he doesn't recognise. He tries to talk to them, but whatever they say back isn't decipherable. They seem agitated. Scared. The feeling of entrapment engulfs Pentious as the dream shifts into another. And another, and another, until the pain stinging in his abdomen seeps into them and brings him closer to lucidity.

It's closer to noon when Pentious finally wakes up, slowly blinking in the pleasant light the bayou gives off. It would be more pleasant, if a headache wasn't thumping at his forehead. The bed is unlike his own nest, and that makes him remember that he spent the night in Alastor's room. Then he remembers what he presumes was a nightmare and feels relieved. There is no blood anywhere. The bed is perfectly clean. Everything is alright.

But as he slightly turns his head to try and find Alastor lying by his side, to smile and snuggle into him and tell him about his terrifying night terrors, anxiety strikes again. Alastor is not sleeping next to him. There is pain in his stomach. The headache thumps from a clear wound he can feel sting in his forehead. The borrowed shirt is gone. Pentious can feel the added weight of bandages over his abdomen, and his hand carefully trails over it, as if confirming that it's really there.

It is. It all is. It had happened. Something terrible had come over Alastor, and he... And they...

Where is he? Is Alastor alright?

"Al...?" Pentious softly calls out, voice laboured and weak from his earlier fright. From a slight fever in his overworked system. He tries to scoot up slightly, but decides against it after a moment.

"...Alastor?"

Alastor had never been witness to such a rapid and sudden transferring of souls before. Though he is not sure what there was to expect. The change in their appearance; their color is about the only thing that is expected. And absently, he wonders, what Pentious will choose to do with them.

He supposes it does not matter. Especially not in the moment.

Keenly aware that Pentious is only maintaining consciousness for a few more lingering moments, Alastor does not protest when it seems as though he loses it entirely, though he does hold his own breath for the briefest of moments to listen for the other's. To make sure that he has not actually died despite all of the radio demon's efforts. And he is only marginally relieved when he hears the steady breathing that reassures.

Into the bathroom, Alastor is hesitant to rest Pentious down into the tub, but he does. There is still blood - covering his midsection and his head. Both wounds, though no longer fatal, still are not exactly pretty. And it will take him some time to clean them, moving to first remove the shirt that Pentious wears to ensure that there is nothing keeping him from finding and addressing all that he has done.

So he works, taking advantage of the other's unconscious state to get the wounds cleaned - water and soap, though luckily it will not sting so long as the other is out. Enough to clean away the blood to reveal the torn flesh beneath. That is what he needs to stitch. Gathering materials to do so and doing so with as much possible care as he can muster. Much more than he ever bothers to offer himself. And so it takes time.

His emotions are shut off as he works, expression blank, save for the permanently scored smile on his face that cannot fade no matter what he does. But he cannot allow himself to feel while he does this. It is medical. It is necessary. It is factual. And even when things are cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, he is still not done.

The shirt is tossed - burned in the eldritch glow that illuminates the main room near the entry way. His own too is launched into the light and he watches with blank stare as it evaporates into flame. The sheets of his bed are next. Burned, just like the others. Any pillows too that have suffered his carnage suffer the same fate. And his bed is quickly adorned with newly manifested fixings. Like nothing has happened at all.

It is only then that Pentious is returned to it. Steadily and gently. Rested there, though unclothed, covered in a new blanket that shows no evidence of what he's done.

And Alastor retreats once he is sure that the other is safe and sound, to the bathroom to find the razors that he keeps handy. He knows they are old; rusted, even, in some places. But it does not matter.

The door is shut for the time being. So that he can repeat the old routine.

Of making her scars into his own.

[scuttle-buttle]

It's been a right fucking week yall 🙃

[kagoutiss]

i’ll take care of everything

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

[bluegiragi]

brief.

early access + nsfw on patreon monster!AU masterpost

[kaahmbem]

legend has it that the young witch circe and the once beautiful nymph scylla shared a complicated past...

[hollis-art]

i love tossing the muppets at various star trek crews, it's so fun

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

How much longer 'til your luck runs out?

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[choodraws]

🌱✂️ (crop from this month's patreon piece)

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[bigfatbreak]

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