#This is the exact kind of freaky I need

[saltstarzz]

“ 𝐋𝐚𝐩𝐝𝐨𝐠. ”

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐬: cultleader!geto x AMAB reader, SFW + NSFW. SFW: dark themes + stalking + manipulation + brainwashing + extremist ideology + cult activities + violence + mentions of violence + minor gore + possessiveness. NSFW: cock warming + leashes + extreme edging + BDSM + brief spit play + slapping + bondage + riding (power bottom!geto) 𝐚/𝐧: this one is hella freaky, and god bless bottom!geto.

・❥・ 𝐒𝐅𝐖

it starts off normal at first.

let’s say you’re like a grade two sorcerer who’s never even heard of cultleader!geto. you’re strong enough to be considered a sorcerer, but not strong enough to be respected by your peers. people don’t outright call you weak, but the suggestions to consider becoming an assistant manager are hard to ignore. you fight curses non-stop, and still can’t get any respect…

now imagine this handsome young man with the prettiest black hair and sharp golden eyes comes to you one day, singing your praises. you’re so distracted by his smile and the way he carries himself that you don’t even notice the groups of strangers that have been tailing you for close to an hour now.

“you’d be better off with me, where your talents would truly be appreciated.” and just like that, he’s got you hook like and sinker.

cultleader!geto has a way of making you feel special. hushed little whispers and tasks he entrusts specifically to you. quick smiles and sweet praises. you’re feeling so appreciated that you hardly even notice how he’s begun calling you “lapdog”.

and about those tasks… oh boy. you find very quickly that cultleader!geto has no interest in peace when it comes to “monkeys”, or non-sorcerers. one minute he’s preaching to a crowd, and the next there’s a room full of corpses aside from the three or four sorcerers who might have been able to fight him off. they’re usually indoctrinated and cultleader!geto tasks you the job of cleaning up his mess.

it’s okay though, it’s cultleader!geto. your talents are needed here. why else he keep you around?

soon enough, you’re his most devoted follower. you’re not the strongest, nor the fastest, nor the smartest, but you’re his and cultleader!geto protects what’s his. soon you’re his shadow, always by his side.

the only time you ever have second thoughts is only when cultleader!geto leaves a village near the coast of Japan is ruins. hundreds of people deceased in absolutely vicious states. men, women and horrifyingly, children. he barely bats an eye, and it keeps you up at night.

you confront cultleader!geto one evening. probably not the smartest thing, you know he could kill you easily for this kind of insubordination. but he doesn’t. when you rant and tell him how jealous you are, he smiles. the same exact smile he gave you all those months ago.

“they’re meaningless insects, you know that." he’d say. you know he’s telling you what you want to hear. you should leave, but he’s pulling you in.

“they mean nothing to you or i. you’re my champion. i need you, and you want to leave me?"

WARNING: NSFW AHEAD: MINORS DNI, Thank you.

・❥・𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐖

unsurprisingly, being cultleader!geto’s number one follower inevitably gets you into his bed. Such devotion should be rewarded, and cultleader!geto is an absolute freak.

absolute bondage warrior. red or black ropes, i don’t make the rules. cultleader!geto’s got you tied down, hands and feet to each bedpost, absolutely naked.

and all that praise cultleader!geto gives you during the day? gone. you go from his little ‘champion’ to ‘lapdog’ real quick.

“how pitiful, even in bed you’re nothing but a lapdog. aren’t you ashamed of yourself?"

and I feel like cultleader!geto is no stranger to roleplay, I mean this dude is freaky as hell, are we surprised 😭😭? he’s got this expensive black leather collar for you, equipped with a silver nametag with your name on it and an expensive matching leash. he tugs on the leash to hear you bark, whine and gasp for air like the lapdog you are.

and the edging… lord save you, he is a nightmare when it comes to edging.

cultleader!geto’s not the kinda guy to edge you with foreplay. sure, he’s got a cute little bullet vibrator nestled inside of you, but that’s not even close to enough.

no, this man is evil through and through. sat nestled on your cock, all the way to the hilt, and cockwarming you for hours at a time. cutleader!geto soft and warm and he knows he’s fucking tight and he takes advantage of that.

“oh, poor thing. look at you tearing up. you want to fuck me so bad, but you can’t. what a dilemma…”

and when you do get to cum, cultleader!geto makes a game out of it. in the hours that he’s sat on your throbbing cock, he’ll pound himself onto it, babbling hushed nonsense while you’re practically melting into the bed. just as you’re about to cum, cultleader!geto will slam himself down and look back at you as tears trickle down your cheeks.

absolute menace. life without parole!!

and finally, when a shred of mercy enters cultleader!geto’s heart, he finally lets you cum. facing you, riding your cock so hard the bed is creaking, he lets you cum. of course not inside him. never inside of him, you’re not worthy of that. no, he pulls off just as you’re about to cum and lets you paint your own stomach white. a mess.

“to think you’d last longer. a shame.” he’ll say, his own cock throbbing. such a liar.

there’s no aftercare. cultleader!geto is a busy man and these few hours together should be treasured. he’ll put his clothes back on, undo your bindings and leave you there like he’d never been there in the first place, fucking you silly.

“Please…”

You can hear the blood thrumming in your ears, and your bodies strung tight like a spring. How much longer is he going to toy with you like this? Bouncing on your cock, fucking himself down onto you like a toy, keeping you hard enough to touch every spot he fucking loves. While you’re suffering, Geto’s got his hands on your chest, mewling at how your cock stretches him, his hips moving on instinct, fucking himself onto you.

“Please, Geto, please—”

YANK!

The air in your lungs is forced out of you, your head lurching forward with a sharp tug as Geto pulls the leash back, sharp golden eyes trained on you like an insect crossing his path.

“Who said you could speak, dog?” he laughs, incredulous.

“No one,” you breathe. Anything to get this man to go faster. To let you cum deep inside of him like you’ve been dreaming of. If only your hands weren’t bound and getting bruised, you’d grab his hips and fuck him down onto you. Maybe fuck the cruelty out of him if you were lucky.

“Open your mouth.”

Your fingernails dig into the red ropes binding your wrists, and you peer up at him. He’s sparkly with sweat, just like you, his cheeks flushed and his lips bruised and raw from biting at them. Fucking sexy. If you could commit him to memory, you would in a heartbeat.

You open your mouth, watching him lean forward. And with little warning, he spits into your mouth, his fingers digging deep crescent marks into your cheeks, his other hand holding your leash.

And you cum like you never have before. Rope after rope leaves you, burying each pulse of his cum into him. Geto jumps, his eyes wild and alert. He pulls himself up just as you paint your stomach and his ass with your cum. You’re so dizzy from the heat, you don’t even realize he’s speaking to you.

“Consider yourself fortunate, Lapdog."

His hand slaps against your cheek, leaving a stinging blow that brings you back to the moment.

“Next time you cum inside me, we won’t be having a conversation…”

[harmonictechnicality]

*my humble offering to @steddie-week (and the s4 anniversary!) | ao3 link here*

Like most bad ideas, it starts with a question. Eddie is sitting on the ground, messing with the laces on his sneakers. Tying, untying. Mindless shit.

Steve is taking up the whole damn park bench, practically laying on it. Hasn’t said a word in the last ten minutes. 

And Eddie sort of hates the silence. Would like Silence to get decapitated with a chainsaw or something equally gruesome. Needs that particular volume to die the loudest death possible. For the sake of irony, of course.

So Eddie kills it - the silence, that is. The lull taking up all this air between him and Steve Harrington.

He kills it with a question:

“What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?”

Steve’s head snaps in Eddie’s direction. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“Fuck, I don’t know, man.” Steve sort of twitches, right between his eyebrows. Shoulders going lopsided, unnaturally angled. Uncomfortable.

Eddie shouldn’t be feeding off this tension so much. Judging by Steve’s body language though, the answer must be a good one. 

He leans forward, almost singing the words. “You sure about that?”

Pushing is fun, darkly playful. Eddie enjoys getting under people’s skin, crawling around till they shrivel up. Is it wrong? Morally unethical? Well… the verdict is still out on that.

Besides, he’s been around Harrington enough lately to know that it doesn’t take much to make him surrender. 

“Fine.” Steve huffs. He lifts himself to a sitting position, knees bobbing up and down. It takes all of Eddie’s leftover energy to not gloat about how easy that was - how quickly Steve caved. Teasing can (will) come later - right now, he wants answers. 

Secrets.

“So, Robin and I went to this party in the city… got pretty shitfaced.”

Eddie throws his head back. “Lame.” 

“Story’s not over.”

Oh? Interesting. Eddie places his hand over his heart, then waves it back at Steve. “My sincere apologies. Continue.”

Steve rolls his eyes, clears his throat (not that he needed to but whatever). “Anyways, she somehow convinced me to go to this tattoo parlor with her. Said her friend worked there and she wanted to visit them, so-”

“Wait wait wait. Don’t tell me this story ends with you getting a butterfly tattoo on your lower back.”

“Will you stop interrupting?”

There’s this serious expression in Steve’s eyes. A combination of dark colors and pure annoyance. Eddie is sane enough to know that annoyance isn’t something he should find endearing, but he does. On Steve.

Just a little.

He shrugs, and Steve continues. “Well, it turns out her friend wasn’t working that night. But the piercing lady was working and was like… superpersuasive.”

“Look, Munson, I don’t remember many details after that. Like I said, totally shitfaced. I just know when Robin and I woke up the next morning, we were so fucking sore. And not like, hangover sore either. We were sore in the same exact place. Right here.”

Steve’s pointer finger is gesturing at his stomach. Right in the center.

No. Absolutely not. Either Steve had severe stomach pains that night, or he’s suggesting that…

No.

“Yeah. There you have it.”  Steve says. Blankly nodding into space. “Stupidest thing I’ve ever done is get a matching belly button piercing with my best friend. Jesus christ, that’s freaky to say out loud.”

The Silence sneaks up on him. Stabs Eddie in the back when he isn’t looking because he’s too busy trying to imagine Steve Harrington with a piercing of any kind. Let alone the most famously slutty kind.

Wrong, so very wrong. He should never let the words slutty and piercing clutter up his imagination while thinking about Steve. The silence has been too long now. Gotta say something, anything.

“Bullshit.” His tone is harsh. Doesn’t mean for it to be. “There’s no fucking way.”

Steve pouts, crinkles his forehead. “I swear on my car - I’m not making this up.”

And see, here’s where the bad idea comes in. This stormcloud of pouting and piercings and chest hair, it’s all becoming dangerous. That urge to provoke is in Eddie’s bloodstream. He has to tip the scale, twist the knife of chaos as far as he can. Self control is out the fucking window.

“Prove it then.”

“Fuck off, Munson.” Steve laughs, maybe scoffs. Either reaction is a little confusing. “Seriously, this isn’t truth or dare.”

The truth is already out though. It’s the dare that Eddie is hungry for. “You can’t just drop a nuclear statement like that and expect me not to ask to see it.”

“Technically, you didn’t ask.”

Eddie clamors over to Steve, all theatrics and fake agony. “Please, Lord Harrington.” He clasps both hands together, rests his cheek on Steve’s knee. Batting his eyelashes till Steve cracks a smile. “Let me see the metal that has punctured thy skin. I beg of thee.”

Steve shoves him off. “You’re such a dork.” It’s lighthearted, barely qualifies as shoving. He’s become way too decent for actual aggression these days. 

A fact Eddie tirelessly clings to when Steve stands up. Lifts the bottom of his shirt and puts it in his fucking mouth.

“Holy shit.” Eddie mutters. No time to consider how pathetic it comes across.

In theory, this should all be stupidly unattractive. The way Steve holds his shirt between his teeth. The way he mumbles incoherent shit between the fabric in his mouth. The way he keeps pointing at it, poking it.

That shiny, teardrop-shaped metal. Just… hanging from Steve’s belly button, swinging slightly with every small movement. Eddie’s eyes start to swing with it, back and forth. Back and forth. Maybe those roadside hypnotists are onto something, because the dumbest piece of jewelry has Eddie captivated.

He could just be captivated by the guy attached to the dumbest piece of jewelry. Piercing.

Jesus Christ. Eddie really didn’t think his life could get any weirder. But here he is. Staring at Steve Harrington’s belly button piercing. Fucking mouth-breathing at the sight of it. Probably seconds away from salivating. 

He really should consider seeing a licensed psychologist. Fix his terminally horned-up brain once and for all.

“It’s…” Eddie swallows, his eyelids feel heavier than his stare. “Not what I expected.”

The fabric drops from Steve’s mouth. Unevenly falls around his waist... hips. “What were you expecting?”

To laugh. To mock. Threaten blackmail for six lifetimes, maybe more.

Instead, Eddie gazing at it the way people gaze through telescopes. He peers lower, tries to see if it’s silver or gold. Hard to tell at sunset. None of Eddie’s typical instincts are sinking in. All he wants is to feel the metal rolling over his tongue or get it trapped between his teeth. See how it tastes mixed up with Steve’s skin.

“Fuck.” Yikes. Eddie didn’t mean to say that out loud. Straightens up from his questionable position, does it so fast that his spine sounds like bubble wrap. “Sorry, sorry.”

What the hell is he apologizing for? Cussing? Having a skeletal structure? Christ almighty, he’s a mess.

Steve’s lips spread into a grin, doesn’t look like his own. Looks more like the kind Eddie might give after pulling off a successful decoy in one of his campaigns. “What’s wrong with your face, man?”

“My face?”

“It’s all…” Steve trails off. Sighs and sits back down on the bench. “Nevermind.”

Eddie reaches up to his cheek, understands exactly what Steve is referring to. He feels feverish to the touch, must be a shade of red that is so deep, it’s noticeable in the darkening sky. 

“Sorry… sorry.” Steve hangs his head. Seems troubled even though Eddie is nailing that particular routine all on his own.

“Think that’s my line.” Eddie jokes. 

“Right.”

Silence is lurking around them yet again. Eddie hates it, but he’s running out of steam here. The embarrassment is on display, his cheeks and neck covered in splotchy red patches. His voice is higher, somehow, as if his vocal chords are shrinking. He’s undergoing a crisis and crush simultaneously and it is not an attractive look for him.

“Just go ahead and get it over with.” Steve says. Interrupts whatever cynicism that’s currently brewing in Eddie's head. 

“Get what over with?”

“The teasing.”

“Oh that’s not… it’s um… you don’t…” Eddie can’t pick an appropriate response. They’re way beyond politeness and niceties. And any bullshit he tries to pull isn't gonna be convincing. So it’s best to stay honest. Embarrassing, but honest. “I think it looks pretty good.”

“You do?” Steve looks softer. 

“Yeah. I mean… Bowie probably has one, and he’s a fucking superstar so. Uh. Yeah.”

“Bowie, huh?”

“I like Bowie.” I like Bowie? What a beefhead answer. Eddie joins Steve on the bench, hopes it distracts from that very un-cool line. 

“I like Bowie too.” Steve messes with his hair a bit. Elbows Eddie in the side and chuckles. “You should get one.”

“A piercing?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t hold your breath, man. I’m not letting that nightmare creator you described anywhere near my lower abdomen. Not gonna happen.”

Steve reaches out, runs his knuckles down the bridge of Eddie’s nose. Stops at the crease of his nostril. “What about one right here?” His voice is even, calm. Too calm for what he’s asking.

His hand is warm, slightly calloused. The only two thoughts Eddie can process without going fully catatonic. Steve’s hand is on his face and it’s warm.

Slightly calloused. 

“Uh. Dunno.” Eddie says. A hoarse whisper in reply. “Probably not.”

Steve scoots in closer, never taking his hand off Eddie’s face. Just moving it around. Exploring. He brushes along to Eddie’s ear this time. Holds the edge of it between his thumb and index finger, looking straight at it. 

“What about right here?” Steve’s eyes stay fixed on Eddie’s ear. Every touch seems natural, just questions that involve connection or something.

Internally, Eddie is dousing flames. Fanning them left and right. Running in circles, fucking clueless on how to properly calm down. Be civil. Be Dude Civil. His breathing is so rapid, he knows it. Can hear it between them, collecting space. Decides it would be best to mimic Steve. Fix his eyes only on him, borrow the stability as much as possible.

“Mmm… maybe.”  Eddie gets stuck on the ‘mmm’ sound. That’s how good it feels having someone touch him like this. Careful, yet heavy in curiosity. Rolling the tip of his earlobe between two fingers, just enough pressure to create heat. 

It warrants that sound.

Steve’s glance drifts before his fingers do. Eyes landing on Eddie’s lips, slight hesitancy before his hand follows. Eddie has to hold his breath now. Minimal oxygen is the only way he’ll survive this moment, which makes no fucking sense, but it does all the same.

“Here would look really good.” Steve slowly traces the curve of Eddie’s bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. The back and forth pattern is disarming. Makes Eddie’s lips part, mouth slightly open.

Just enough to speak. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

If Eddie passes out from lack of oxygen, he’ll regret it. He’ll regret not taking the risk, finishing what Steve has started. Because this surpasses friendly touching. 

This is charged in electric shockwaves.

Eddie dips in, kisses Steve before he can move his hand out of the way. Steve makes a sound, not even a surprised one. It’s sweeter, laced in relief. Eddie pushes in, wants more, whatever he can get. Has his fingers wrapped around Steve’s wrist, the same hand that’s dragging down his face, his neck. Stopping at his chest. 

Every rumor is true, that kissing Steve Harrington is like the gates of heaven opening up. That his tongue could work miracles on amateur lips with a few licks and curls. But no one ever told him about the noises he makes - and those are the best fucking part. Heaving breaths, pleased whines, each one captured with Eddie’s mouth before they get any louder.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe those are just for Eddie. Reserved for kissing him.

Goddamn, he’s delusional. Completely delirious from kissing a dude with a belly button piercing.

There’s a light getting brighter, almost approaching them. Eddie opens his eyes, quickly backs off while Steve does the same. Has to literally detachhimself from wherever his hand was busy wandering all over Steve’s body. 

Headlights pull into the nearby parking lot. Eddie squints to get a better look at the car. It’s Robin and Vickie, showing up fashionably late as always. Sure, he’s grateful that it’s just them, the queerest people in his circle of weirdos. And while they’re reasonable people with shit like this, even they’dbe shocked to know that Eddie and Steve just sucked face for a solid three minutes. Probably best to not mention the gory details, not tonight. Eddie hopes Steve is thinking the same thing.

Both of them stand up, rearrange themselves to look presentable. Less tousled and kiss-bitten. Steve spends a few extra seconds with his hair before turning to Eddie, eyebrows high. Likely a non-verbal ask if his hair is looking as godly as ever.

Of course it does. Looks even better knowing Eddie’s nails were just digging into it.

Steve is a few steps ahead of Eddie, heading for the girls, when Eddie does it again. Kills the silence with a question. 

“Can we… do this again?” It’s edging on desperate, he’s so fucking aware of that. Self control really proving to be a major downfall with him tonight. Should definitely consider taking classes, train his willpower or some shit.

Steve stops walking. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t even look at Eddie as he speaks. “My place.”

Oh. That’s… wow. Unexpected. Eddie jogs up to Steve, beside him. Way too eager now, sort of buzzing for more information. Hints of excitement or maybe a smile. Anything, really. He’s at that level of weak for this guy.

Steve just keeps walking, but leans in, right next to Eddie’s ear. The same one he messed with earlier. His voice is quiet, but Eddie hears every damn syllable:

“I’ll leave the window unlatched for you.”

For him. 

Maybe Eddie isn’t completely delusional after all.

[joffyworld]

COTL Freaky Tierlist

ALRIGHT LISTEN UP CHUCKLEFUCKS

I'm about to drop some life changing lore and if you can't handle it, that's tough titties my brothers, sisters and theys. If you don't agree with this tier list, you're either a normal person (in which case why are you here run for the hills) or you're so damn freaky that God forgot that was possible when he made me.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, FROM LEAST TO MOST FREAKY:

F:

Kallamar - Need I say more? This loveable twink is soft as his husbands knickers and by God would we not have him any other way. This fucker can't even fathom anything beyond the most painfully dull missionary imaginable, and that's just as an excuse to cuddle more afterwards. "But Joffy" I hear you say, "He's a renowned slut he should be in A!" Wrong. He couldn't be more vanilla, it's all an act and anyone with more than 3 spouses is just fucking lying at that point. Cmon, he may be a God, but deep inside that cowards octopussy is a love for the mundane.

D:

Heket - Controversial I know. But hear me out here. Heket has spent all her life getting fucked by life, she has literally no time for your stupid fleshy appendages, and to top it off she's the most desperately useless lesbian this side of the lands of the old faith. Renowned from Darkwood to Anchordeep, this bitch is fucking stupid when it comes to "rizzing a shawty" and it shows because she spends all her time yapping about the good ol' days. She's only slightly freakier than Kallamar because she's probably into being burned by cigarettes or some shit, but let's face facts. Inexperience guides this poor phrog into the D tier, despite her aversion to "D" to begin with.

Leshy - This stupid dumb stupid worm barely knows that sex exists, and if you asked him what his favourite position is he'd say "1st" and then promptly challenge you to a footrace. The God of Chaos has no time for ropes and rails, but he's at least got a good heart and is pretty gay for that cat. I've watched this stupid fucker get divorced in two different AU's because he couldn't live with the guilt, you think he's surviving post-nut clarity? No. Enough said, he's keeping it clean and calm in the bedroom, and that cat couldn't be happier about that considering his daily life is fucking mental. Keep the Chaos outside, inside? Domestic worm only.

C:

Goat - Now this is where it gets tricky, you might think that the gruff exterior of a mass murdering psychopath is enough to demonstrate a willingness to get tied upside down and spank the monkey till the sun don't shine. But brother, let me tell you, it ain't fuckin true. Don't get me wrong, this goat can fuck, and boy does he, but most of the time it's all bark no bite in the flirting department. Easily flustered, puts up an external image of punk-rock to hide that he's an utter cinnamon bun, the whole works. That being said, with a long term partner? Buckle up. That crown isn't dildo-purple for no reason, prepare for bliss and potential bliss-ters.

B:

Lamb - OKAY HOLD YOUR HORSES this is gonna be a tough one. You've gotta be thinking, that's either wayyy too high for this silly lil fella, or wayyy to low for this absolute cock devouring demon, but let me remind you, this one here is subjective. This is the only character I've seen written as everything from an asexual to a violent and sadistic cannibal, so what fairer rating than the exact middle? It truly does depends, if you're on your "cannibalism is routine and fun" shit then you're gonna be rocketing right up there, straight to S baby, unless you have some kind of twisted mentality you need checked by a licensed psychiatrist to somehow think that's tame; not to shame it mind you. But if you're more on the side of the lamb's that typically get posted by a cuter artist, than you're gonna be rocking a D or even an F. This little fuzzy fucker is traumatized, some type of gay no matter what, and certainly a wildcard, and what better way to celebrate that then with a middle-of-the-road approach? Besides, their most famous partner is certainly a bit more repressed, which leads us to:

A:

Narinder - Are we surprised? This fuzzy little furball has been trapped in prison for 1000 years with his two kids and NOTHING ELSE to do except hope he can get back on the market. The moment he's freed, it's gonna be hell unleashed, but thankfully 99% of the time he's either so angry or so oblivious it turns into a slowburn of passion with his fuzzy lil sheepguy that he definitely "doesn't" have a thing for. But, as the well versed know, this motherfucker has seen shit, and being the God of Death is gonna give you a weird taste in, well, "tastes" than a normal life will. I mean really, the guys fuckin surrounded by miserable dead people all day, he needs stress relief and his enthusiasm for revenge borders on the horny-sided. This guy fucks, but mostly gets fucked, and remains The One Who Bottoms in almost every AU. Cmon people, if you've read this far you've fuckin seen it with your own eyes, do I really to lecture about it more?

S:

The Mura™ - The fucker that started it all. I bet until now you thought I wouldn't include this loveable spider and awful mother-sibling of 4, but here we are. This goddamn spider has single-parented a family of genocidal psychopaths since history started being recorded, and to match that then had to almost literally kill one of their own brother-kid-things to save the others. Stressed and in need of relief? Check. You know what makes a motherfucker freaky? Repression, and this spider is goddamn dripping in it (pun intended) and is ready to burst. I myself may be a Shamura aroace truther, but if I have to put a letter on it, it's 100% in the universes where this spider fucks. Copulates, eats your head, kills your family mid-coitus, the whole shebang, but boy is that gonna be the best last nut you'll ever bust. This spider's an expert, literally the God of War and by God are they gonna wage war on your holes, not to mention ALSO being the God of Wisdom? I mean come on, somebody had to write the Kama Sutra, and it was this horny bastard

And that's it

You may have questions, you may have alternative takes, to be honest I'll probably change my mind the moment I hit post and remember that actually Heket deepthroated a glizzy on the 5th of October last year, but honestly? Who gives a shit. These gods be gay people, that's all that matters.

Goodnight, Lamb Bless, and may you never encounter The Mura during ovulation. Godspeed soldiers, amen.

[frownyalfred]

i LOVED the new eye in the sky chap! of course, you have the soul-crushing rage-inducing angst pile on bruce's end, but i also really appreciated the duke-hal moment; he's so level-headed about the situation that you don't really build up too much stress over him, but then you brought in a different kind of heartbreak with the realization that he's been in this position enough times to know that the least provoking thing he can do is to do nothing at all.

and the FUTURESPEAKING jesus CHRIST — it’s a different type, but your time manipulation fuckery is almost equally as hard to wrap your head around as the stuff in tenet (the nolan movie), it's genuinely so impressive. (sorry, i'm just gonna run my mouth here for a minute, but the idea really caught me and now i Have to share all my thoughts just to get them out of my brain, though i hope that you'll be generous enough to weigh in as well😅) i'd imagine that there's actually relatively very few people, in-universe, who can do this so that duke hears it correctly, because you have to be able to focus your mind and put enough intent into the idea that you're about to say something that it "registers" as the imminent future—which means that you have to, at the same time, be completely repressing your knowledge that you're NOT going to actually vocalize whatever it is, because that intention would obviously counteract the first. and THEN, to make what's already quite a tough mental exercise even more impressive, bruce is: thinking of a futurespeak-response, putting enough focus/intent behind it for that future to crystallize (and again, it's a double-headed task, because of the repression required as well), and then cutting that off in order to think of and say something completely different, *all in about just the same amount of time a normal person would take to respond naturally in a conversation.* (also, slightly less mind-boggling but still quite impressive to me and i want to give him his props: duke, in that last bit at the end at least, is maintaining both his awareness in the present and the mental effort of using his powers to see the future, in order to hear the exact same voice say two different things at the same time, and is able to not only maintain the background effort needed to hear both things, but is taking in enough detail to see/hear/notice "both" bruces' tone and body language. ...i mean, maybe that's not so impressive to people without auditory processing issues lmao, but as someone who's constantly asking people to repeat themselves, or really having to focus on the sounds when somebody's speaking to me, even in one-on-one conversations, it certainly impressed me!)

anyways, yeah, this just inspired a lot of interesting trains of thought for me and i wanted to share lol. your fics are always such great reads, can't wait for your next update! Hope you're well💜

Thank you so much!!!! You absolutely nailed what I was trying to get at with Duke’s powers. I really didn’t want over explain it and have people roll their eyes, but I also didn’t want to leave readers mystified as to what he was doing.

Duke and Bruce are supremely well matched in this fic for that reason among many others — Bruce has a freaky brain and understands time/intention well enough to be able to think, speak, and re-speak that quickly.

He can compartmentalize like no one else. I am not obviously that smart, but the way I thought about it was playing competing melodies on the piano with two different hands - once you find the rhythm, the way they work off each other, you can maintain both easily. Where they gap, where they overlap, where they compete for your attention.

Duke is good at glimpsing a few seconds forward/back but definitely not for long periods. Like Bruce said, he’s going to need help to train that and avoid burning himself out! Luckily he’s just listening and not double speaking like Bruce is.

Someone on ao3 left me this in the comment section and they’re so right lol:

I feel bad for Hal, just a little, just like Duke does. He was tortured by Kal essentially, and where he does want to hurt Bruce (a lot) there are still some lines he won’t cross. I don’t know if that makes him redeemable or just not entirely beyond redemption. I think Bruce seems to know this too — teasing him with that moral code he used to hold so tightly to.

It was definitely a fun space to play around in! Writing this fic is difficult for me (agh worldbuilding) but whenever I try I’m pleasantly surprised by how much fun I have. Thank you so much for reading!!

[kingkatsuki]

i seem to remember on a reddit thread where the prompt was something like “weirdest and most unexpected things that turned you on” there was a guy was talking about how his half-awake girlfriend was pissing with the door open and he teased that he had to go too and she just kind of sleepily moved back a little and opened her legs so he could go at the same time and it did something for him.

idk which of your faves but i know somebody’s freaky ass would get hard over that.

I remember this exact post vividly haha😫

But I humbly offer you the concept of going to use the restroom at a party, with your fave walking you there like your own personal guard dog as you expect him to stand outside and wait for you but he’s stepping inside to close the door.

And he needs to pee just as much as you, but it’s always ladies first. So he tries real hard to hold it, he really does— but the alcohol flowing through his veins lowers his restraint as his bladder throbs and suddenly he’s standing in front of you with his pants sagging around the curve of his ass. Soft dick in hand as he tries to aim for the toilet.

But he’s drunk, and he’s barely standing straight as he practically curls himself over you. The stream of piss hits your pelvis and abdomen as you frantically try to pull your dress up more to avoid getting pee on it, but he only takes it as an offering like “That’s it baby, let me piss on your tits.” He’s slurring and sloppy, but the relief that floods through his features when he lets go is intoxicating as it has your clit throbbing with need.

[voltronimus-prime]

Murder Drones Hot Take

Oil does not equal blood 1:1 and worker Drones should not be freaked out by seeing or drinking it.

While we're not given an exact breakdown of how a Worker Drone's body functions, we know they've got motors, and we know they've got a lot of power running through them.

This means they need to keep cool, and they need to keep their motors and joints running smoothly.

While oil as coolant shouldn't require frequent top ups unless there's a leak, oil as lubricant can require refills as the old oil loses viscosity and as gunk builds up reducing its ability to properly keep things moving.

Worker Drones, particularly the ones on Copper 9, are in a very rough environment, where particulates building up would be a constant issue.

Combined with the temperature flip flops from going between a heavy work environment to the blizzards of the outside, and I'm sure there'd be some interesting chemical results.

Worker Drones would have to top off/change their oil semi-regularly. Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief(?), they wouldn't be able to regenerate their own, they're literally just robots.

Multiple stories have the Disassembly Drones feeding off of workers and simply stopping short of draining them, and then later on the victim is fine, but that only works in vampire stories because human bodies can replenish the missing blood. Worker Drones can't do that.

Worker Drones would have to have a supply of oil they use to keep themselves going, meaning there'd be options for helping Disassembly Drones with their artificially increased consumption without having to do worker blood drives, unless something really goes wrong at least.

On the topic of oil loss, it also wouldn't result in a semi-quick fatal error like a person bleeding out. The two main symptoms would be difficulties moving as the low oil pressure means delicate mechanisms start grinding due to lack of proper lubrication, and a slow increase in internal temperature due to lack of coolant.

However considering these are robots built for industrial use and not purposefully sabotaged robo-vampires, they wouldn't be as vulnerable to that since they wouldn't be generating the same kinds of heat anyway.

As great as the "Pushing through the pain, ignoring overheating warnings and fighting off lightheaded-ness as your cpu underclocks itself to keep the heat down." stories are;

there's a lot of untapped potential in "Pushing through the pain as your joints feel like they're tearing themselves apart, horrible grinding sounds as metal scrapes against metal. Fighting to take one more step as the joints start seizing."

I don't know, it just always bugged me when writers show Worker Drones as horrified or disgusted at the idea of needing to consume oil, usually in the context of getting solver powers and needing to drink oil to keep cool. Obviously the hunger and the predator instincts would be freaky, but seeing a can of oil and thinking "I should drink that." would not be weird.

I'll probably play with the formatting/add and remove things to try to make this more readable later but let me know what you think.

[targaryenofrph]

Short N Sweet by Sabrina Carpenter Sentence Starters

Some of these will be NSFW. Change the pronouns and tense as needed for your verses.

I leave quite an impression, five feet to be exact

Every time you breathe his air, just know I was already there

You can have him if you like, I've been there, done that once or twice

I know I have good judgment

I know I have good taste

It's funny and it's ironic that only I feel that way

I promise them that you're different and everyone makes mistakes

I heard that you're an actor, so act like a stand-up guy

Whatever devil's inside you, don't let him out tonight

Please, please, please don't prove I'm right

Please, please, please don't bring me to tears when I just did my makeup so nice

Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another

I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker

Well, I have a fun idea, babe, maybe just stay inside

I know you're craving some fresh air, but the ceiling fan is so nice

We could live so happily if no one knows that you're with me

Don't mistake my nice for naive

You should stay in my good graces

No one's more amazing at turning loving into hatred

I won't give a fuck about you

I know you're not the sharpest tool in the shed

Left me with a lot of shit to second-guess

If that was casual, then I'm an idiot

I'm looking for an answer in-between the lines

You're lying to yourself if you think we're fine

You're confused and I'm upset, but we never talk about it

You found God at your ex's house

Seems like overnight, I'm just the bitch you hate now

We never talk it through how you guilt-tripped me to open up to you

Without her even being here, she's back in your life

Last week, you didn't have any doubts. This week, you're holding space for her tongue in your mouth

Your car drove itself from L.A. to her thighs

Damn it, she looks kinda like the girl you outgrew

Who's the cute boy with the white jacket and the thick accent?

I can't relate to desperation

My 'give a fucks' are on vacation

Too bad your ex don't do it for ya

I'm working late 'cause I'm a singer

He looks so cute wrapped around my finger

You're so dumb and poetic

It's just what I fall for, I like the aesthetic

Every self-help book, you've already read it

Cherry-pick lines like they're words you invented

Just 'cause you talk like one doesn't make you a man

Fuck with my head like it's some kind of fetish

Guess I'll end this life alone

I am not dramatic, these are just the thoughts that pass right through me

This boy doesn't even know the difference between "there", "their", and "they are"

Don't have to tell your hot ass a thing, you just get it

You make me wanna make you fall in love

Wanna try out my fuzzy pink handcuffs?

I know you want my touch for life

If you love me right, then who knows?

One of me is cute, but two, though?

You make me wanna make you fall in love

I showed my friends, then we high-fived

Sorry if you feel objectified

Give me more than just some butterflies

Wanna try out some freaky positions?

Have you ever tried this one?

There's no need to pretend

I've never seen an ugly truth that I can't bend

I'm stupid, but I'm clever

Yeah, I can make a shitshow look a whole lot like forever and ever

We love to read the cold, hard facts and swear they're incorrect

We love to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest

Don't smile because it happened, cry because it's over

You think it's happy hour, for me it's not

I want you to miss me

Try working on you

I promise you'll be much happier if you do

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: 013-032

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy [all Flower posts]

Time for more flower...

...no, not that flower!

Unless...?

Welcome back to my liveblog of sorts for web novel The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere by @lurinatftbn! Shout out to the Flower discord for giving me such a kind welcome. You're making me want to go all out on this liveblog, but, I musn't...! So I'm going to try to just comment on things that jumped out as especially noteworthy rather than write down everything that went down.

Especially since... a lot happened in these chapters. We have a perfect androgyne tree thing! Magical duels! Questionable student/teacher relationships! Steamed hams! Intense political arguments at dinner! Metafictional assurance of fair play! Prosognostic events! Transgender AIs! And of course........

a murder!!!!!

...ok that one was kinda obvious. But the first body has hit the floor! I don't feel like I have nearly enough information yet to start speculating about who might have dunnit.

That's a lie. It was definitely Kinzo Ushiromiya. That bastard.

So, from the top!

We're introduced to a few of the members of the Order, with by far the most screen time going to Su's mentor and ah, kinda-girlfriend? Neferuaten. And like, damn, lot going on there!

Before I get into the meat of that - first the bit where I search a character's name on Wikipedia. Neferuaten's name is most likely a reference to an Egyptian female king/pharaoh (a rank that's apparently distinct, conceptually, from a queen) variously called Ankhkheperure-Merit-Neferkheperure, Waenre, and Aten Neferneferuaten. Most often shortened to just Neferneferuaten.

Her exact historical identity seems to be a little unclear - she may or may not be the same person as Nefertiti for example. Whoever she was, she apparently reigned for a couple of years around 1334–1332 BCE, and was then succeeded by the famous child king Tutankhamun. Or maybe Smenkhkare came in between them? Seems to be a matter of some debate. Girl really needed to leave a few more vast and trunkless legs of stone so we can figure this stuff out.

In any case, this version of Neferuaten goes way back with Su. Her introduction is to launch a magical attack on our poor girl while she's contemplating the 'everblossom'. One of those classic 'master surprise attacks the student to see how much they've learned' deals. This servers as a fine exposition for the exact mechanics of magical duels.

Zettai! Ummei! Mokushiroku!

Let's briefly note how magical duels and magic works here, since it seems like it will be very relevant later.

The more we learn about magic, the more explicit is that this system is not some natural property of the universe, but something that's designed by the mysterious Ironworkers. It seems like it's kind of an API to the Ironworker admin console. The Ironworkers wanted to make it difficult to do magic on human bodies, and therefore they designed a system for detecting what is 'human', based on three heuristics - anatomical, motion and neurological.

Humans, being the freaky little hackers that we are, of course set about figuring out how to bypass this system, and created standardised means, consisting of three spells, termed [x]-beguiling arcana. In a sense the three criteria are something like three 'hitpoints': the primary way to win a duel is to get all three spells off, thus making your opponent vulnerable to magic.

To achieve this, you can either speak the words of a spell or sign them by drawing them with your fingers - i.e. one way or the other express the appropriate string of symbols. This is risky because if you're interrupted at the wrong time, your spell can backfire and blow up, and getting a spell right requires precise pronunciation and also rapid mental maths. So the general 'gameplay' of magical duels involves attempting to disrupt the opponent's focus and aim, while fast-casting the spells that are most familiar to you.

We're introduced to a few spells that could be useful in battle, such as

Matter-Shifting (telekinesis spell with a geometric bent, used to move a cube of dirt to act as a smokescreen),

Matter-Annihilating (deletes stuff),

Entropy-Denying (essentially a shield that freezes objects and fluids in relative motion),

Air-Thrusting (creates a shockwave air blast),

Light-Warping (fucks up the light for visual cover),

World-Deafening (mutes all sound, which can interrupt casts)

Entropy-Accelerating (disrupts coherency, causing rapid aging-like effects - can be used on a 'higher plane' to disrupt all magic in an area)

Entropy-Reversing (rewinds matter along its path of motion - reference to entropy here seems a tad dubious but w/e)

It's clearly a pretty carefully thought out system - I appreciate that it's approached from the point of view of someone trying to exploit the shit out of the system and figure out what the real meta would be. It does kinda seem like if you got the drop on a wizard and shot them with a sniper rifle they'd be toast, but we'll see later that much more powerful weapons than mere chemical firearms exist in this world, and presumably in a combat situation everyone would have entropy-denying (or equivalent) shields up, so maybe that's a moot point.

Anyway, we are later informed by the closest thing to authorial voice that everything we're told here about magic can be assumed to be axiomatically true, similar to the red text in Umineko. Which pretty heavily foreshadows that this is going to be on the test, if you like!

the magical metaphysics

With apologies to Neferuaten, who will get more detailed comments shortly, there are some other big revelations about magic and the nature of this world that I should talk about while we're on the subject of magic!

In the last post I wondered whether casting magic is an innate quality or a 'skill issue' situation. It turns out the answer is sorta 'neither'. In fact, it's something that has to be unlocked, using special equipment and a particular ritual. The cost of this ritual is not yet entirely spelled out, but we definitely get an inkling. It's rather ominously implied by this exchange in chapter 22:

"We're supposed to want to save people, to make the world better. To defend a bunch of people who practically committed murder--" "You're a murderer too, dour girl." I stopped, and blinked. It took me some moments to process the words. They'd come from Lilith, who now seemed to have finished with her dessert. Now she was just slowly swirling her spoon around in the last remnants of the chocolate sludge on the plate and, occasionally, dipping a finger into her cream bowl and licking little bits of it up. Her expression was irritated, but disconnected. "All arcanists are," she said. "It's how it happens. So having fights over moral high ground like this is very stupid and annoying. Please stop."

In the same chapter, Su uses something called an 'acclimation log', in which she records her 'association' with a series of diary entries from her childhood self. It all suggests that Su's present consciousness has somehow taken over the body of another character, who we could maybe call original!Su.

A few chapters later, we find out what's the deal with prosognostic events. In fact we get a pretty extensive exposition. It turns out that iron is magical in this universe, providing access to higher dimensions, FTL and all sorts of shit. However, because the Mimikos and other worlds are running on a 'substrate' of iron - sort of like a simulation - we are told this is why they can't recursively include iron within. And since the human body includes a certain amount of iron (most notably, in the haemoglobin protein in red blood cells), it is not possible to fully realise the human body inside these artificial worlds.

a self-referential quibble

Here's how Su puts it:

A substrate cannot exist within itself. That sounds awkward when I put it so directly, but it's not too hard to understand if you think about it in abstract-- A foundation obviously can't support another foundation of equal weight and nature, because… Well, it would make nonsense of the whole premise. A book is a device for storing information, but it cannot contain within its letters everything about itself and what it contains, because that is already more than it contains. A box cannot hold another box of equal size, unless it is bent or otherwise changed. A mind cannot hold another mind…

On the face of it, this seems on the face of it... not entirely true, at least in some domains? You can run a virtual machine program on a computer, representing any particular combination of hardware and software, which is from the perspective of software 'on the inside', essentially indistinguishable from a computer running on 'bare metal' hardware. The only real difference is that operating the virtual machine has some computational overhead, so it will be slower. The more virtual machines you nest, the slower it gets.

But 'from the inside', the only way to tell which layer of virtual machine you're on would be to refer to some kind of external clock signal (which can trivially be spoofed) and notice that it's running slower than it should!

We could also mention here the subject of quines, which are programs which print their own source code.

Let's consider Su's examples. The book that completely describes its contents might be able to get around this problem in a similar fashion to a quine, by exploiting redundancy and self-reference.

For example, let's try creating a string that completely describes its own content, using a quine-style technique.

This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: "This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: " wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

In fact the '100 letter ws' could literally be the entire string that follows. Suppose the length of the 'real content' of the book is S, and the length of the rest of the 'metadata sentence' describing properties of the book is M; then the total length of the book is 2M+3S.

You can add as much additional information to the 'metadata' string as you like, provided you quote it again afterwards. If you don't like having a book be three times the length it needs to be, you could compress the 'real content' string using an algorithm like DEFLATE, and include instructions in the 'metadata' on how to decompress it. (Text tends to compress really well.) This is where we run up into notions probably all too familiar to rats, or indeed anyone who recently read Seth Dickinson's new novel Exordia, such as Kolmogorov complexity.

But... I think this might well be intentional. Given how common notions like 'stacks of simulations' and 'self-reference' are in rat space, I suspect we may be being misled! The 'rules' of the game - more on that in a moment - say that Su won't deliberately lie to us, and won't withold information without saying so, but her perceptions could be mistaken. Maybe she's been given a false explanation of why the world works the way it does.

It's also totally possible that while the general point (you can't contain a thing in itself) may have some edge cases, the specific instance - you can't build a universe on a giant higher-dimensional iron spike and still have that universe contain iron - may still be true. We don't know the first thing about building universes using magic iron after all.

anyway... the Deal with Prosognisia!

The Ironworkers had a hacky workaround to the 'no iron' rule: they had a few tens of thousands of preserved human bodies on board their Tower of Asphodel. Asphodel, incidentally, is a genus of flower, said to carpet the Asphodel Meadows, one of the three divisions of the realm of Hades. (In their game, Supergiant decided to convert it into a lava zone.) It looks rather pretty actually!

So, they were able to instantiate these bodies in their rebuilt worlds by sort of making them into a reference to one of these stored human bodies. Here's Su again, chapter 26:

Some human bodies, or at least the impression of them and the iron within, had been preserved as part of the Tower, frozen in a timeless place. And because of that, it was eventually discovered it was possible for them to exist in the artificed planes as a sort of stable paradox. After all, while a book can't exist within itself, it can still reference other stuff it does contain internally, even if it makes for somewhat awkward reading. A few tweaks and workarounds solved the problem of the iron associated with that human body staying a part of it, and just like that, human beings were walking something at least akin to the earth once again. However, this only permitted replicas of those bodies within the Tower to exist. The creation of new ones remained impossible, and births not incubated by anima taken by the same mechanism would inevitably fail. And there were far fewer preserved bodies than minds; scarcely more than ten thousand or so for each party.

So every human born in the Mimikos is forked from one of these human bodies. For... mysterious reasons, if you recognise that someone nearby is forked from the same body as you, you both straight up die. If you touch such a person (a 'contact paradox') it's even worse, and all the iron in your body disappears, leaving behind a 'greenish sludge', which seems to be a severe enough disaster to cause deaths of nearby people as well.

(This is a little surprising given that the iron in the human body is only about 60 parts per million by mass, but it would kinda destroy your blood's ability to carry oxygen, so it would definitely be pretty fatal.)

The 'distinction treatment' we heard about is able to mitigate the risks somewhat - with quick medical intervention and time magic, it's possible to allow the people involved to make a full recovery. An interesting wrinkle is that it's implied either Ophelia or new character Balthazar is trans, because normally people of the same gender can't share an upstream body.

That definitely leads to a very fascinating fucked up medical emergency scene, but the reason I'm discussing it now is because it's got bearing on this big-deal question of 'what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway'...

so what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway?

Having finally answered one of the major questions, we can start zeroing in on another. In a flashback scene in chapter 30, we learn that the 'original' bodies have innate access to the magic API, but when you're given a distinct identity at birth you quickly lose it. To have your sv_cheats 1 restored, you have to go through a process that, it would seem, downloads a new mind into your head from one of those original bodies...

The man sat back a little in his chair, crossing his legs idly. "It's intimidating in concept, but please do understand that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no observable effects whatsoever. Around half of the individuals who go through it don't even lose consciousness, and of the other, four out of five don't report any abnormalities when they reawaken. And even of the remaining 10%, the symptoms are negligible for nine out of ten-- Fleeting false memories, minor alterations in temperament that self correct, usually in under a day..." "And the others?" I inquired. "The remaining one percent." He considered this question for a few moments, obviously choosing his words carefully. "The technical term for the rare cases where confusion persists in the longer term is pneumaic assimilation failure. We have a program for treatment, using a combination of various phychological and medical means. It's time-tested. It brings people back to themselves quickly, usually within only only a few months at most." 'Confusion.' 'Brings people back to themselves.' I wasn't feeling fond of the way he couched everything in euphemism. It wasn't helping. "What do you mean by 'it brings people back to themselves'..?" I furrowed my brow. "They just... Forget everything?" "Not immediately," he said. "But they lose a sense of association with... Well, with anything that shouldn't be there, and that leads those memories and feelings to fade over time." He smiled. "The human mind is very adept at excising anything it judges to be out of place. All it needs is a push in the right direction."

The new mind tends to rapidly adjust to its new context, connecting to the memories stored in the body and assuming continuity of identity. But in rare cases it fails! Nuts! And we can infer poor Su appears to be one such case.

Presumably this is what Lilith is referring to when she says that all arcanists are murderers. It's not clear if there is continuity of consciousness when you get /mode +o'd - since you (usually) inherit the memories it is perhaps hard to say whether such a thing is meaningful.

In any case, Su's mega-guilt complex, the reason she seems to want to visit the mysterious egomancer Samium, seems to be at least partly that she's evicted the previous consciousness to inhabit this body. I don't think that's the whole story though! Her grandad seems to be involved somehow too. I don't think Su is literally the reincarnation of her grandad, because it seems unlikely that he'd be motivated to carry out ego suicide like this.

introducing teacher mommy

All those major revelations aside, let's get back to the subject of Neferuaten, aka 'Grandmaster', Su's old mentor in entropic thanatomancy. She quickly establishes herself as one of the most likeable of the inner circle of the Order - she's funny, understanding, generally affable and a little self-effacing. Su definitely puts her on a massive pedestal - though other characters such as Ran find her a little more sussy.

I gotta say, the author is really good at writing old academics. Each one of them comes across as strongly believable, distinctive, motivated and flawed characters. I'll talk a bit about the others in a bit but first let's talk age gap yuri! lmao

Anyway, at the end of chapter 20 we get this:

Then she leaned over and, in an impulsive, almost casual gesture, kissed me on the lips. Before turning, heading to the exit.

'Huh!' thinks the reader. 'That sure is an unusual thing for someone's teacher to do.'

It is quite a few chapters later before Su gets round to telling us a bit more about what's going on...

After that, we met outside of the university more and more often, her becoming sort of a source of emotional support. At some point, I became aware that what was happening was probably quite inappropriate. It's not like I was underage, having turned 25 two years prior, but she was my professor. But I'd been bad at making friends in both of... Well, in both my past contexts, and I'd felt so lonely living in Tem-Aphat, away from Ran and any reminders of the resolutions we'd made. And it all somehow felt so natural. Things got out of hand. One day, I'd had a fight with my father over the logic bridge, and had got a little drunk when I was due to see her. I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I did something uncharacteristic of me. Inappropriate. But she didn't respond in the way I'd expected. To my shock, she didn't act like it was inappropriate at all. It wasn't as if we ended up dating. That would never have worked, and I was pretty sure she was past wanting that sort of thing anyway. On some levels, she always kept her distance. But it became something we did together, an avenue of private expression that became part of her support for me - and mine, eventually for her.

Su then expresses a bunch of guilt over the whole thing. (Not least because it's a 'selfish' thing she's doing in a body that, implicitly, she doesn't think of as hers.)

The issue of age here is interesting lol. Definitely my gut reaction, and probably the one the story is aiming to elicit, is to be a bit 'wuh oh' by all this, maybe think of Makima wrapping Denji round her finger. That said, by vastly expanding the range of human ages, it's definitely poking pretty hard at our intuitions about what's 'appropriate'. The vibes are like... the students are constantly referred to as 'the kids' by the hundreds-year-old wizards. I don't think we're told Su's current age, but if she was 27 in this flashback, and in the present she says a 29 year old computer is close in age to her, so I would guess currently early 30s. Neferuaten's age is not stated at this point but given her position she's def a few hundred years up there.

The vibe though is that Su is infatuated with someone who has vastly more emotional maturity and experience of the world, not to mention social power over her, and that person is all too happy to encourage it.

The way Su tells it, it sounds like this fling went pretty ok for them? But I definitely feel like things are probably not gonna stay ok, given how clearly the 'inappropriate' nature of this relationship has been foregrounded!

Dark yuri is literally one of the things I'm here for, so I'm looking forward to the fireworks lmao.

Anyway, besides that, we get a bit of a sense of Neferuaten's ideology. She actually shares a lot of Su's skepticism about the viability of the whole immortality project. She makes a big point of making sure the gang get a sense of the order's culture and rituals, apparently viewing this as a chance for their project to be judged by outsiders for the first time. On a personal level, she raises the issue of if the project might be able to save only the young - whether they might be the last humans to not become immortal. Nef's attitude seems to be that she'd be good with that - something she clashes with Kam over.

Otherwise, she's kinda... world-weary, I suppose you could say. She seems to look at the firey youngsters with an attitude along the lines of 'wish I still had that'. She does love to perform to an audience, asking leading questions to set up some lesson or another.

She's a fun character, I enjoy reading her a lot.

Also she seems to have made a sapient AI in the basement! Only everyone says it's definitely not sapient - it is in some sense not agentic, it can't change its motivation, allegedly. Still, it definitely has a 'passing the Turing test' sorta vibe.

don't mention the war

Besides Nef, we get introduced to a few of the remaining members of the class, and also the masters of the Order. Of note is Bardiya, the former revolutionary. He's a very 'speak his mind without preamble' sort of character, which can land him in hot water.

So, returning to Chapter 22, we have a really juicy scene in which a dinner conversation gets very heated after Bardiya mentions his role in the war, provoking a political row with Durvasa, a member of the order. It's a really well observed social dynamics scene - the characters dancing around the topic and the way a row is almost avoided, and then it isn't - Bard's determination, Kam's brown-nosing, Su getting drawn in against her better judgement in a deeply relatable way.

Thanks to this convo, we get a sense of the events of the revolution! So, as @nightpool helpfully informed me, I actually got things a bit mixed up in my rough timeline last time. The 'gerontocrats' were not a feature of the distant-past imperial era - rather it's a figure identified as an oppressor class by a very recent movement, still within living memory for even the youngsters.

The events broadly seem to reflect something like the Paris Commune. There was a famine under the hand of a 'Meritist' city council, killing thousands, which led to a popular uprising let by a 'paritist' movement. The paritists executed a handful of people and redistributed property based primarily on age, intending to break the power of the 'gerontocrats' who had neglected the 'younger generations' by hoarding resources. The Administration overseeing the whole world alliance then cracked down hard - deploying a poison gas that, though it was intended to be nonlethal, turned out to have unexpected lethal side effects.

In the aftermath of the revolution, it seems many reforms were made - besides relaxing the rules on what magic is banned, they changed the equation of scarcity so that food could be replicated more readily? Little unclear on this part. Su mentions that the situation is different now than it was when the Alliance was built, with the material scarcity mostly gone, but clearly there was a famine in recent memory.

Anyway, there is naturally a big generational divide over this. The older generations lived through some pretty fucked-up sounding wars, called things like the 'Great Interplanar War', and in the aftermath built a political system that was supposed to secure peace. (c.f. League of Nations, UN). Although she broadly sympathises with the revolutionaries, Su seems to extends the older generation a fair bit of understanding for having built this system and fearing what would happen if it were destroyed. Though the most relativist view comes from the mouth of Neferuaten:

"I think a common problem with inter-generational communication is an inability to really convey context and scope," Neferuaten said. I noted she didn't actually convey if Kam's understanding of what her point had been was correct or not. "Someone who lived through the Interluminary Strife might tell a young person from the modern day that they have no understanding of hunger, only for the latter to stubbornly retort that they lived through that Ikaryonic famine that preluded the civil dispute… Except that one was a catastrophe that lasted decades and killed tens of millions, while the other slew less than a thousand." She sighed. "People try to relate the experiences of others to their own lives in order to contextualize their understanding of the world and how it might be bettered, but those second-hand experiences inevitably become caricatures, conveying no useful truths. It makes me wonder if human beings, both young and old, are capable of learning from history at all."

Around here is raised the question of a person's political development - the arc from a young person's anger at the state of the world and determination to tear it aside for something better, against the resignation of an older person who fears losing what is already there, however flawed. (We might note of course that there exist young conservatives and old radicals. Circumstances have a lot to do with it.)

Of course, with this whole 'gerontocrat' business at stake already, the mission of the Order hoping to achieve immortality is naturally cast in a dubious light. Fun conflict. On the one hand we have 'can immortality be achieved, and what will it cost', on the other 'who will benefit from it, if it is'! So much narrative force is obtained by politicising this, attaching it to characters with personal motivations and histories, instead of leaving it up to an abstract 'living forever good/bad'.

But it's not all political debates and shagging your teacher...

Over the course of these chapters we get a sense of what the order's been up to!

Let's talk flowers. Just prior to the meeting with Nef, Su comes across an enormous freaky plantlike thing. This turns out to be an experiment to create a being that can survive in even the most extreme environments, like the bottom of the ocean - an attempt to demonstrate that immortality is possible at least in principle. This lifeform is termed the Nittaimalaru or 'Everblossom'. It seems like a pretty good candidate for being the story's eponymous Flower - symbolically, the underwater immortality-granting plant that appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It's worth noting here that 'indefinite lifespan' is actually not entirely impossible in our natural world. I was talking about this with a friend who raised some interesting points:

reading the first post i wanna bring up that while the concept of cancer is fundamental to any multicellular organism the presence of cancer as a problem is actually pretty niche. same with telomere degradation, which is a purposeful anti-cancer measurement. like pretty much all perennial plant life is capable of absolute immortality. while the lobster grows forever until it can no longer use its legs to push its great weight along the sand towards food, if a tree overshoots its growth it's more than happy to break off its unnecessaries, though with both of them at a certain point it's always good to have help after a while. as mammals we're very obsessed with the concept of like ending death as this sort of ultimate goal, prime directive, whatever, when that shit was deliberately turned on in the first place (assigning intent to evolution sue me), because in terms of cost benefit it gave us something in return that we as students of medicine or biology are still not fully grasping.

After a little more discussion:

@play-now-my-lord wrote:

even if humans weren't causing climate change, climactic fluctuations over centuries upend a lot of what is normal in specific areas. if the people on a farmstead in bronze age sweden lived 500 years, the methods and habits they internalized when they were young would habitually be incorrect for the conditions as they existed, the weather, the soil

other friend:

that's how most trees die in the end the root system operates as a weak parallel to the tree's neurons, with a more physiological bent than say our chemical one. patterns around balance, nutrient access, hydrology, and wind are ingrained and learned over centuries and the more regular/consistent that cycle is the more a root will grow. if a tree's roots are built around buttressing from a wind tunnel due to forest conditions and the trees around it fall for whatever reason, it has to relearn what used to be a hundred year old certainty that it needs to lean against the westerly gale every winter, etc. - this is generally a pretty brittle process altogether when it comes to the base of the plant n stuff

some caveats:

should be noted i overlooked a lot of nuance about perennial mortality, like, some plants are more used to investing into survival than others i'm thinking of like how beech bark disease doesn't affect the roots of the beech, so the trunk dies but new shoots continue to grow out and eventually catch the disease and repeat, so the plant is essentially still immortal but forced into a perpetual state of adolescence. but i think for a great number of trees if the tree falls it just goes "eh the rot consumes us all " and dies

Among mammals, we could also note the cancer resistance of the naked mole rat, which loves to defy all sorts of generalisations (also one of the only non-arthropod eusocial animals). They're not exactly immortal, living around 37 years on average, but their chance of dying at any given year is pretty much flat rather than increasing with age.

Of course, longevity and resilience are different things. Nef mentions the resilience of tardigrades as an inspiration. As far as their experiment goes, the 'everblossom' is not an entirely successful experiment, requiring twice-yearly maintenance to address an imbalance.

Given how prominently it features, and the invocation of Gilgamesh, it seems pretty damn likely that the everblossom will in fact be a key to immortality, or something like it.

Religion exists after all!

Other parts of the facility are also pretty funky. We learn that it was patterned after the old headquarters of the Order, which was destroyed when they got found out; that headquarters was built in an old church compound. What sort of thing does a church worship in this world? Actually it's kinda goffic as fuck. Makes Catholicism look downright tame. It's a polytheistic religion and the deities involved are figures like this...

In the center of the circle was a statue, about 8 feet high, and of the kind of ornate-but-formulaic design that characterized art from the Second Resurrection. It depicted a tall, skinny woman, though her two sides, left and right, were very different in nature. The left was beautiful and youthful in a generic, almost ethnicity-less way, dressed in the most delicate of silk peploi, with long and unrealistically tidy curls falling elegantly over her shoulders. Her lip was curled into a gentle half-smile, kind but slightly mysterious, teasing. Her right... Well, her right, to say the least, was very different. On that side, she appeared to be skinless, although it was hard to tell with a statue; I recalled it being a matter of hot debate among the boys in my class back in secondary school. It was possible she was simply incredibly emaciated, or that there were supposed to be growths - like scales - erupting from her flesh. Her hair was made up of hateful, eyeless wyrms, biting and hissing at each other, and her flesh, which was naked save for a tasteful rag covering one area in particular, was covered in numerous stab wounds, bleeding openly. As for her face, it was grim and wide eyed. Mournful and contemptful both. I recognized the figure depicted at once; I passed one of her temples whenever I went to the distribution hall to pick up groceries. This was Phui, Dying Goddess of Love Given Way To Anguish, one of the eleven deities of the now largely defunct Ysaran-Inotian Pantheon.

In the stories, Phui was the third-to-last of the gods to fall during the end of the world, who attempted to take her own life after the death of her lover. But the breaking of the heavens had left her unable to die, meaning that no matter how she much she cut into her flesh, how much she starved herself of food and drink, reprieve would never come. Only relentless, unceasing pain, and grief for that which she had lost.

Metal album cover ass-religion, I'm into it.

The mysterious Ironworkers seem to have really drummed into the population of their new Mimikos that there was a very nice world once, and they'd better be damn sad about what happened to it. However, religion has waned in the present day, and it seems most characters are atheists of some sort.

What did happen to it, anyway? It's referred to as 'the collapse' with a lowercase c; I noticed an author's comment where the author says it's not a case of just a name for the apocalypse. A few people in the comments started speculating about false vacuum collapse. This is a physics thing. Basically, a remote possibility exists in the standard model of particle physics that the existence of matter in our universe could be in a kind of local energy minimum, but it would be possible for it to locally fall into a true minimum, creating a kind of bubble that expands at the speed of light and just deletes everything. We're pretty sure that isn't true though. If it did happen we literally would not be able to do anything... at least in a universe without FTL.

(Curiously, Su mentions special relativity at one point. With all the funky cosmology stuff I kinda wondered if special relativity is still real, but apparently it is! Electromagnetism has been mentioned as still being a thing a couple of times now, so rather than being totally absent it seems like the physics is a bit different, with an electric shock being sufficient to cause radiation poisoning.)

The fair play interlude

In between chapters 22 and 24 we get a curious little interlude called Intermission ∞ 1. The introduction presents it as something that is happening on one of the 'higher planes', translated into terms we can understand, which is grounds for it to get metafictional.

Two entities, calling themselves the Playwright and the Director, discuss the direction of the story so far before laying out the version of fair-play mystery rules this story will be operating under. They are as follows:

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PROTAGONIST IS ALWAYS TRUTHFUL

ALL EVENTS FOLLOW THE RULES OF CONVENTIONAL REALITY, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

ALL SYSTEMS INTRODUCED CANNOT BREAK THEIR OWN RULES AS DEFINED WITHIN THE NARRATIVE, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

I made them red because it feels like they would be red in Umineko.

Further clarifications and caveats allow that Su can withold information (for dramatic tension or whatever I guess) but she'll always tell us when she does, and an example of 'system introduced' is the magic duel sequence: the characters know accurately how magic duels work.

The two entities are performing this story for some sort of audience, and during their double-act credit themselves with control over the direction of the scenario, sometimes disagreeing. (Another one, the chorus, enters at the end.) Probably best not to think too hard about what that implies for our characters on the 'main' level of the story being 'real', it's probably just a cute bit to take the audience aside without completely breaking the fourth wall. Then again... who knows!

What this means is that my concerns about professed liar Su being an unreliable narrator are unfounded. It's still a limited POV, so Su could fail to notice things or be deceived, but she's not trying to pull one over on us.

I bring this up because...

There's been a mordah!

So, in the last chapter I read - strictly the beginning of a new arc - we find someone dead!

Well, this was kinda foreshadowed earlier. The chef disappeared, the assistant chef was knocked out by magic, and some kinda crazy time magic happened in the pantry - with the heavy implication that someone was trapped in some kinda hyperbolic time pantry for many years. At least they'd have plenty to eat..? The characters don't pick up on the implication of the tally marks and write it off as a stasis field malfunction.

So, it was natural to suspect the cook is dead. Indeed they are: Su finds a mysterious note in the book given to her by an academic at the school as a parting gift, warning her not to trust the inner council - inexplicably written two years prior and warning her to check the archive in a certain position. Investigating this, she and Kam find a secret armoury room. In there is a tunnel, and at the bottom, the cook appears to have committed suicide, leaving a suicide note vaguely implying the Order is up to some seriously sussy shit.

Of course, Kam and Su immediately suspect foul play. But they also both have ulterior motives for coming to this conference, so they agree to keep it hush-hush. This is definitely a great idea that won't get everyone killed by Beatrice... I mean uh. Whoever the murderer is.

The obvious question is, who dunnit? And why? Unfortunately, we don't really have alibis for most of the characters. Many of the inner circle haven't even shown up on screen yet. So there's a lot of people who it might have been.

More suspects! More suspects!

I haven't even mentioned several of the characters. We also have Sacnicte, steward of the house - she's an arcanist, and Su is kinda insanely horny for her aesthetically appreciative, in a way that the other characters notice and are literally like 'I don't see it'... which makes me wonder if we have a situation where someone has fucked with her perceptions. She's very down to earth and casual.

Her name is probably a reference to the Maya princess Sac Nicté, meaning 'white flower', who according to legend was involved in the migration of the Itza people from the Chichen Itza. Mind you the article I'm getting this from is kinda horrendous; the sole source is in Spanish and appears to be some random website from 2004.

Among the older generation, we have Theo's dad, Linos. He is a generally affable chap, kinda socially awkward (he's responsible for prolonging the political discussion by a botched apology) but otherwise not particularly standing out among the Order members.

Linos or Linus is another Greek name with a few referents.

The Order member who really does stand out is Anna, or in full, Amtu-hedu-anna. She's the one who's properly old, having dodged many of the 'kills people around 500' bullets of this setting, and not especially inclined to make nice. Very 'straight to the point' kinda lady. We meet her fairly briefly - Ran seems to have landed in her good books.

This one really took some digging! It seems to be based on Enheduanna, who was a Sumerian high priestess of Nanna and the oldest named author in history, credited for tablets like The Exaltation of Inanna, although it seems there's some debate over whether she definitely wrote them. Her rank in Sumerian was Entu, and I could fully believe 'amtu hedu anna' is a different transliteration of 'Entu Hedu Anna'.

As mentioned above, we're introduced to two logic engines, Sekhmet and Eshmun, built respectively by Neferuaten and (the as yet unseen) Hamilcar. Sekhmet has more biological components and wants to be a human. She wants to be human, and she's also expressed a distinct pronoun preference and gender id, which I suppose makes her trans. Eshmun is a more traditional logic engine with a lot of cogs; Sekhmet calls him 'big brother', so I guess he gets he pronouns from that.

Sekhmet is of course named for the Egyptian lion-headed warrior/medicine goddess. Eshmun is a Phoenician god of healing. Hamilcar was a name used by a number of Carthaginians, mostly generals.

Ezekiel is another one of the student gang. We haven't seen much of him yet, so I don't have a lot to say about him. Abrahamic prophet.

Balthazar is a student from another school - another thanatomancer in fact. He's something like the protégé of Zeno, and his presence is Zeno's condition for having this whole affair go ahead. He's got the same eyes as Ophelia, and Zeno failing to do his paperwork and allowing to happen is a big deal. But Zeno's kind of a bigshot so it might not come to anything. Anyway, Su is kind of suspicious towards Balthazar, but he takes it all in good humour.

Balthazar was one of the three magi in Christian mythology. There were a few Zenos, but the best known is surely Zeno of Elea, who came up with his famous "we need to invent calculus to solve this" paradoxes around infinite sums.

Yantho is a member of the Order staff, who was cooking when whoever did shenanigans in the kitchen... did shenanigans in the kitchen. His roast was ruined, but sadly he was too unconscious to order fast food and pass it off as his cooking. He can't speak and communicates by writing on his tablet.

The name crops up as an obscure Maya deity, part of a trio of brothers with Usukun and Uyitzin, but I can't find any source that seems particularly definitive.

Samium is an old egomancer, whose presence is a secret that only Su and Ran are in on. Su wants to speak to him, for reasons that are probably to do with finding out if he can restore 'original!Su' into her body, or maybe resurrecting her grandfather, or something?

...is that everyone? I think that's everyone. At some point I probably need to make an Umineko-style character screen lol.

can we solve anything yet?

Since this chapter is the beginning of the arc, I suspect there's more info to divulge before we can think about trying to solve this one. And, given the Umineko inspo, the problem to solve probably isn't simply 'whodunnit' but something more fundamental to the nature of this world.

Still, it seems all but spelled out explicitly that current!Su failed to properly assimilate into her body after she became an arcanist. Her grandfather's final 'kindness' is less clear. Her intentions with Samium... I've mentioned the obvious theories about already. She's mega guilty about overwriting this poor girl and has decided the only course of action is to try and restore the mind that inhabited her body originally. But I don't think we have the whole picture just yet, because I still can't figure out what her granddad did.

Given her discussion of 'dragon' vs 'phoenix' resurrection, and of how her meeting with Samium might change the order, I also theorised - before I really twigged the arcanist thing - that she was here to resurrect her grandfather in her own body. Body-hopping is like, the classic immortality strat after all. But... I'm less convinced of that one now? It doesn't seem like Su particularly liked the old man, she definitely doesn't want to follow in his footsteps, and 'saw him die unexpectedly during the revolution' does not seem like it would inspire the same sort of guilt.

Still, he surely did something to her, she's definitely cryptically alluded to that enough times.

Besides that?

Obviously really digging this story! Honestly, this one rules. It helps that the author is clearly into a lot of the same shit I am. All the long discussions and beat by beat narration could potentially feel a little dry, but honestly, I'm pretty hooked, it's definitely pulling me forwards. It's a fascinating, conflict-rich setting, that raises all sorts of interesting concepts. It's confident in knowing what it wants to be. Umineko is a hell of a tough act to follow, but this one has a distinct identity of its own. Can't wait to see what happens now the mystery seems to be about to kick off for real.

With that in mind, I'm sure it won't be long until the next one of these. I may have to dial back the detail a bit, this is kinda having a bad effect on my work right now. There's just so many fascinating corners to follow up ^^'

Anyway, I realise these posts are kinda massive for tumblr, so I'm gonna start copying them over to canmom.art soon. <See you next time>.

[acrsstheunivrs]

I Still Get Jealous (Part 1) - Reality Scenario ｡𖦹°‧⭑.ᐟ

cw: this is slightly freaky... honestly just mentions of sex.

I sat at my desk in the Starfield Library for 7 hours and 30 minutes. Shamelessly counting down the seconds until I could go home. I really enjoyed my job. However, this day was slow.

Slow days I usually sat there and picked a random book to read until someone came up to ask me for help. Today I chose Violets, an English copy. I was halfway through the book before my lunch break. Now, just moments away from finishing it–I heard someone walk up to the desk.

"Hello, Miss" A masculine voice spoke. I look up from my book to see a tall man in a very nicely tailored black suit holding a briefcase. "I was wondering if you could help me with something."

I immediately sit up from my slouched reading position, turning on my 'customer service' voice. "How may I help you, Sir? Can I help you find a book?"

"Actually," He paused ominously, "I was wondering if you'd want to play a game with me."

I (kinda freaked out as it seemed we were the only two in the building) respond slowly, "Uhm, what kind of game?"

"Just a game of ddakji!" He places his suitcase on the desk and spins it around to face me, lifting the latches and revealing a very organized setup of a couple ddakji squares and a couple stacks of money. "I figured since you aren't busy right now, maybe you could make some money. For every square you flip over, I give you 10,000 won. For every square I flip over, you give me the same. Does that sound good?"

I respond quickly, still slightly nervous, "I'm really sorry Sir, but I don't think I should be doing this while on the clock. I really should attend to others."

"Who?" He replies coldly, taking a quick scan around the building, "There's nobody here Miss, except you and I."

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. What would a little game of Ddakji hurt? Plus, I'm pretty good at it from Dae and I playing it all the time. I could make us some extra money for the week. I finally speak up. "Fine. I'll play."

A smile spread across his face, "Very good." I made my way around the desk so I was standing in front of him. He hands me the blue ddakji square, "Here, matches your hair."

He then places the red square on the ground. With a strong force, I throw my arm up and whip it down as hard as I can, letting go of the square halfway through. It hit his square with a *BAM*, and it flipped over.

Leaning over, I look up through my bangs and straighten myself out with a proud look. He claps slowly, "Very well." He took out the 10k won and slid it across the desk, insinuating it was now mine. "Now it's my turn."

He picks up the red square and does the exact same, flipping mine over. He smirks and I roll my eyes, pushing the 10k he just gave me back to the outer half of the desk.

After a few rounds of this back-to-back, neverending game, the streak broke and I didn't flip over his square. His next round, without fail, he flips mine over. I suck my teeth, "I-I- I don't have another 10k."

His smirk grew wider. "That's ok, you can pay with your body instead."

I look up sharply, my eyes wide. "Wh-What do you mean?" I say, now shaking slightly.

"I'll give you two options. One, I'll take 10k off each time you let me slap you. The second, I'll take away the 10k, and" he leaned in closer, bringing his hand up to my face to whisper, "I'll give you a bonus if you let me fuck you."

I slap his hand down quickly.

"FUCK YOU. I have a boyfriend, you fucking creep." I started to walk towards my phone to call security, but he grabs my wrist and forces me to turn and look at him. "Let go of me!" I screech.

"You have to pay your debt." He says, far too calmly. "I won fair and square."

"Fine." I yank my arm out of his grasp and straighten myself up. "Fucking slap me, but after that you need to get out."

"As you wish," He raised his hand. I closed my eyes tight and clenched my fists, knuckles turning white. His palm hit my face, and the impact echoed throughout the shelves. Fuck. It hurt, but I didn't care. Anything was better than the second option.

"Pleased?" I held my face, my face already starting to bruise because of how hard he actually hit me.

"Very." He says as he starts packing up his game.

"What is your deal man?" I ask him, "Is this your thing, playing stupid children's games with girls and then bribing them into having sex with you? What a creep."

"Jeong Kora, age 30, current debt ₩150m from attending The University of Seoul, now living with your boyfriend of 9 years, Kang Dae-ho, at Daelim Residence in Guro, Seoul." He states with a blank expression.

My eyes widen. Before I can say anything, he holds out his hand. In it, is a brown card with three shapes printed on one side. "There are thousands of people like you, in debt, who just need a miracle to pull them out of it. You can play more games just like these and make the money to help you. You are very good, one of the best opponents I've had, you should really consider it." He places the card in my hand. Takes his briefcase and with a quick wave, disappears into the dark rows of bookshelves.

I look down a the card and recognize the shapes, then flip it over to see a phone number. I look back up and once again notice a silent, empty library. I rub my cheek, still sore from the slap. I look at the time and it is now 5pm. Thank gods, my shift is over. I pack up my stuff, put on my hoodie, pulling up the hood so it covered the reddish-purple welt on my face, clocked out, and headed home. Wait until Dae-ho hears about this.

This is my first scenario type of thing! Please lemme know if you guys enjoy them or absolutely HATE them and think I should just stawp it. It's inspired by my moots @su11engrrrl & @armydreamerss. It was also proofread and edited by @su11engrrrl !

[ilions-end]

alright, touching base now that i've completed one third of aeschylus' oresteia

THE AGAMEMNON. THOUGHTS:

oh i AM ABSOLUTELY the kind of person who'll become a little too obsessed with the curse of the house of atreus. every time someone referenced it and how the sin is soaked into the foundations and passed from generation to generation i squirmed and cheeped like an injured bird

after reading so many inter-trojan-war plays where the violence is ever-present, to read a play from a perspective where there WAS horrible violence years ago, but now we're all WAITING FOR IT TO RETURN?? ahh. the building tension omg

i admit i'm too stupid to see the purpose of the small timeskip (seeing the beacons lit so they know right away that troy has fallen -> agamemnon returns some time later). it doesn't really seem to add anything except that we see the exact moment the people of argos learn that the war is over, something that i imagine could easily have been reminisced about in dialogue

i love how the herald is introduced. his joy at coming home and how he praises apollo (who he acknowledges caused them so much horror at troy) is so pure. like agamemnon's return is fucked up, and odysseus' is so complicated, and diomedes' is awful, and teucer's is catastrophic.... FINALLY someone's who's just like "OH MY GOD I'M HOME :D"

the herald is really mvp of the play. herald my beloved. he's seen so much pain and still he's gentle with cassandra. he BELIEVES her! (which confirms she's about to die but. he does really believe her)

i hope to have more sensible things to say about cassandra later because her parts made me genuinely distraught. i love her. i hate that the world did that to her. god how bravely she went to her death. the way she wanted to be transformed into a nightingale like philomela broke my fucking heart.

clytemnestra is... god what a character. dedicating herself to be the avenger of her daughter even if that dooms her other children.

aegisthus showing up at the end as THE most obnoxious fuckboy is so delicious. i hated him immediately he's both cruel and useless and EXACTLY what i imagined aegisthus to be, it's awesome.

pouring out a bottle for the watchman who never got to hold agamemnon's hand:

there's always that one servant who's a little too freaky about their master

anyway ONTO THE LIBATION BEARERS, i need to see this thing unfold. i don't know whose libations they are or who's carrying them. can't wait.

[markodragic]

B, K, U, Z

ty for the ask!! 💕💕💕

B - A pairing–platonic, romantic or sexual–that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind: I never really considered jo sawashiro x arakawa masumi from yakuza till I saw @todayisafridaynight's art and now I sorta like em sjgnfjgk sawashiro needs a doggie boyfriend to balance out how much of a big bitch he is

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?: its hard to pick a fave, I think jimmy mcgill/saul goodman has my fave character arc from anything ever but if I was to stick to mostly video games, then sadie adler from rdr2. bc she is so perfectly written, so tragic in the beginning and then so cathartic in the moments where she exacts vengeance but still full of that inescapable emptiness once its all said and done bc she has truly lost everything and it takes every ounce of strength for her to keep going. she lives in spite of it all and learns through necessity to be strong although that can border into self destructive tendencies or just coping through violence. but even still there is love in her heart for the ones who mean most, abi, arthur, john, charles etc. I just love her and her metamorphosis to what she becomes ❤️

U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites: in no particular order

#1 is gonna be ichiban kasuga from yakuza, and I love him bc he is so endlessly loving and cute and pure hearted and the entire point of his story is that its never too late to start living your life. he literally defeats enemies with the power of friendship, I would die for him 100x over, blorbo of all time.

#2 is kim kitsuragi from disco elysium bc frankly everything about him is a delight. he's a kind, patient, charming, funny, little weirdo that only appears normal when stood next to harry. and all his faults and neuroses make him just fascinating to dissect as a character

#3 is sorta basic bitch but its herbert west from re-animator bc I love mad scientists from goopy old horror movies and he is so freaky and cunty and cutes 💕 a long-standing all time fave of mine

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go! (Prompts optional but encouraged.): im trying to start an ichiban merch collection rn 🙏 got 1 figure and 3 plushies and some photocards so far but some stuff might be forever unattainable bc I dont have much disposable income sjshdjdjfk particularly the gorgeous etsy plushes and charms I've seen bc most are coming from the USA and boy oh boy are shipping costs to scotland high 💀

[veryaren]

UGHHH not to be a fag but I'm rereading one of my favorite books and. This line is so luchinini to me I know that this is so majorly faggy and loserly and poovepilled but HEAR ME OUT.

(Incoming luchinini rant ? -majority just luchino interp and analysis really but it can be inferred I am talking about luchinini-that gets progressively more off track)

(benjamin alire saenz.... the feelings you evoke)

to me. Luchino is anything but a normal lover. he loves in a very weird way. He is definitely in NO WAY a parallel to the main character of this novel but I do love the way this sentence is phrased. It is so raw and REAL I love it. I think luchino often makes odd statements.

example a.

(very disconcerting thanks)

example b

(when prompted to talk about his knowledge of berries for the fall???he's so strange.)

hes weird. And a D1 yapper very clearly. So it would not surprise me for him to have somewhat morbid thoughts and perspectives on love as well. he often makes comparisons or mental parallels with his knowledge of certain things etc etc. so I think his feelings toward love would be no different. by nature he is morbid and curious.

gahhh. THIS IS SO GAY but I'm having. VISIONS. his weirdness is probably worse when he's in love. not in the "em.. Heh!!! Oops!!! That was so embarrassing, sorry, ah!!!" Kind of way but in the "on late nights I will stare at you and observe you as you sleep and breathe and stir." kind of weird. And he doesn't even realize that it's just a little creepy. nor does he ever really Mena them in a sensual way I dont think. (goonchino interps scare me iykwim. like sometimes they just write him weird. TOO freaky.)

something something "I wonder what it might be like, to see you in the mundane of your day. where your idle mind goes, what you're conjuring in that head of yours when you've nothing but yourself."

I have. Sort of mentioned this before but I do think that sometimes these kind of thoughts just slio through too. And, again, when they do he CANNOT tell why it would be unsettling. IN FACT I THINK HE FINDS A BEAUTY IN IT. He does not have the clearest grasp on certain factors of societal norms but that is ok.

he clearly loves to talk. but never finds the right place to properly insert himself. once he is comfortable though with someone (cough Antonio...but again this is still more luchino centered than luchinini I am very much holding back) I think it would probably be habitual, to just say what is on his mind. something similar to the aformentioned novel quote. my brain is running low on words so feel free to imagine examples.

"beautiful, even in your unrest. it's wonderful to think, how you might gnash your teeth in frustration at a chord just an octave too low. How the tips of your fingers might grow pink in the way that they do when you grip your bow just that bit too roughly." Such and such (luchinini sneak)

ANYWAY. I need to sleep soon. but that's really all. quick tie back to luchinini premanor au because I am sick and twisted (read: faggot) but there is also something selfish about the way luchino lovesb(in the way I write him to clarify) . never intentionally of course, it's mostly due to his lack of etiquette in social scenes. but he shows antonio a love unlike any of his past.

it's alive. involved. difficult and strange but it grows him. antonio starts to love himself the way that luchino loves him, to live life in a way that makes him whole. The kind that makes him want to be worthy of that kind love.

and then, luchino leaves. and I don't think this is something he would regret. because he thinks it is the best option. it's visible in his own words (see luchino lore wiki. too lazy to site exact stuff maybe later) that he does not regret leaving, the farther away he is from anyone, the better. I dont think this factor is any different in premanor au. while yes it would hurt, and he knows it would hurt antonio, it is just what he needs to do. scientific brain seperating you from your beautiful t4t relationship with your hot Italian husband

Ill draw this later trust

[morlock-holmes]

I think I've finally thought of a way to put into words something I've been thinking about in conspiracy thinking.

Because there are, certainly, real conspiracies out there, but I'm more and more convinced that there is a kind of difference in mindset that characterizes what we call conspiracy thinking.

And that mindset is,

"Everyone believes the same things I do"

A completely batshit article by Rod Dreher crystalized this for me:

There's a Satanic convention -- SatanCon -- coming to Boston next month. Lucien Greaves, the founder of sponsor The Satanic Temple, is a master troller of liberalism. He tells the Boston Globe:

In 2016, TST requested to deliver an invocation before a Boston City Council meeting — a request that City Council denied. As a result, the dedication to Wu is an attempt to highlight what TST co-founder Lucien Greaves called “clear corruption on the part of the Boston City Council” for violating the religious freedoms of the Satanists. TST is also currently suing the City of Boston for denying their invocation request.

“The Supreme Court ruled in favor of such invocations of prayers being given so long as they are open and available to everybody,” Lucien said to the Globe. “They need to still respect pluralism and still respect people’s religious liberty and recognize that no government agency has the right to limit the civic capacities of any one viewpoint over another.”

He's right, isn't he? Isn't this what "religious liberty" means in a neutral public square? The Constitution doesn't say "but not Satanists," does it? That's because it never would have occurred to the Founding Fathers that this would be an issue. It probably wouldn't have occurred to anybody prior to the last few decades that it would be an issue. Now, the usual liberal suspects will tut-tut that Greaves is only trolling, and that this doesn't really mean that the most evil spirit of all is being honored and worshiped. I think this is nothing but liberal cope, the sort of thing right-thinking secularists tell themselves to calm themselves down when dark and freaky stuff is irrupting.

Emphasis mine.

Look, Satanism is not that new or that novel, you can read the Satanic Bible. You can read about their tenets on their website.

Rod knows everything that Satanists claim to believe is just a liberal cope; If they do things Dreher doesn't like it is not because they have a different set of beliefs which creates a different internal logic and thus a different set of behaviors than Dreher would prefer; the very idea is inconceivable and only a naïve fool could believe such a thing.

Instead, they actually believe the exact same things that he does. Therefore, if they do things Dreher doesn't like, it is out of a conscious desire to do bad things and to place Dreher and people like him in danger.

This is one of the main things that distinguishes this kind of thought from just believing in something crazy or weird.

[alrightbuckaroo]

Hello! I have a nice ask week ask for you: If you could write an AU in which Carlos and the 126 became the characters in Winnie the Pooh (ie. Freaky Friday/13 going on 30 style), who would take on the personality of what Winne the Pooh character and why?

Oh hello CIG this is a such lovely and fitting question!

I apologize for the full on essay you're about to get, but a ridiculous amount of thought ended up going into this hahah

Owen, without a doubt, would be Tigger. He's very energetic, can border on chaotic, but is also filled to the brim with optimism. They're both also extremely confident, though that can be to the detriment of those around them.

I don't know why, but I feel like Judd would be Eeyore. Maybe not to an exact T, and the comparison might be more apt for s1 Judd, but I think they're both very methodical about how they do things (I can not believe I just called EEYORE methodical oh my gosh).

While I don't think Judd is nearly as pessimistic and sad, I think they're both more a bit grounded in reality than the people (or animals) around tend to be.

I'm going to continue the trend of I don't know why I think this, but in my head, Carlos is Rabbit. Both very practical, well meaning but can lose sight of what it means to be a team. Not necessarily in a bad way, but just in the sense that sometimes, you need help; you can't do it all yourself.

I also feel like Rabbit reacting to the other animals of the Hundred Acre Wood getting into messes is how Carlos feels when the 126 tries to solve crimes without him or any police presence there.

Paul is Owl to me. I don't think he's nearly as egotistical as Owl can be sometimes (I get it, he's old and wise, you're gonna start patting yourself on the back at some point), but I do think they share a lot of other similarities. I think they're both very friendly and welcoming, and Owl's long-winded speeches reminds me of Paul breaking down everything he's noticed.

TK is Winnie the Pooh and I like to think that the way Winnie the Pooh feels about honey is how TK feels about love. Again, not the most direct counter-part, but they're both so lovable and loving.

Also, I feel like the other animals are always getting Winnie out of scrapes and really where does the line between constantly getting stuck in some type of hole and ending up in a coma begin and end?

Kanga is a hard one because I feel like it's a toss up between Nancy and Grace. I feel like they're both so similar to her and kind of in the same ways. Kind hearted, well meaning and oh so patient. It's funny, I feel like this is the one that makes the most sense, and for both of them!

Mateo is absolutely Roo. Energetic, bright-eyed and a bit green. Happy to jump (no pun intended, well, kind of intended) head first into anything even if it can be a little out of their reach.

Nancy and Marjan are hard to find similarities to, I'm not going to lie! I don't think there's any character that really captures Marjan's badassness enough, especially since all I'm left with is Piglet hahah.

I think Marjan might also be in the camp with Owen and be more aligned with Tigger than anyone else. Again, full of energy but can be a bit chaotic if left to their devices.

Nancy maybe has the smallest lit bits of sprinkling of Piglet, but only when it comes to playing softball. Other than that, I think she might be a bit more aligned with Rabbit in the sense she can be very practical and pull TK back down to Earth when he needs it.

[shana-reviews-tmblr]

I'm probably one of the few fans of the "Once Upon a Swap" episode and I will give it this, while I'm not a fan of the "Voices are mental" trope involved with Body swaps in most media I liked how The Owl House approached their swaps by having the characters faces swap even if the voices also went with them.

because of that i figured to try and do a few swaps with the renders to see some pairings.

Lumity Swap

Cause of swap: Accident when Eda tries pranking Lilith and the spell hits Luz and Amity. Hijinks ensues?

Lumity Swap (Time Skip)

Cause of swap: Amity needs to get a project done by a certain deadline for a client, however she was doing so much with Lilith and work on this project that she hadn't slept for days and is overworking herself.

Luz, being the loving GF she is tries to give Amity a hand and offers to swap places with Amity (Luz can nap in Amity's body to let it recover while Amity uses Luz's body to finish her work.

(not sure if Amity would know how to swap people since Eda is the only one who knows that spell)

CURSED!!! CURSED!!!

I don't think this is the kind of Freaky Friday Luz had in mind or wanted to be apart of!

Cause of swap: ever heard of the Grand Theft Me trope? that's about the only thing i could think of that would give a reason for this. maybe revenge against Amity by ruining Luz's reputation? maybe hijinking to escape from isles for supporting Belos? either way Amity is not going to be happy.

Freaky Friday gone wrong

Cause of Swap: let's face it Odalia pretty much wanted Amity to be an exact copy of her, this swap just means Odalia decided to go all in and just steal Amity's life and youth. either way we know Luz and Amity wouldn't stand for it.

Mom Swap

Cause of Swap: i don't know but Odalia is getting a slipper to the face for this one.

[barbreypilled]

hiii 16, 31, and 40 for the asoiaf ask game!!

16. favourite sibling dynamic

I love Asha and Theon obviously but I feel like they’re kind of the easy answer for this one but idc I love them. They remind me a lot of me and my brother NOT INCLUDING THE ESGRED THING but I love them also this question made me want to revisit that fic I left to die of neglect…hm

31. who would you elevate to a POV character?

we all know who. we all know I need TWOW to open w the exact length and girth of Brandon Stark’s tallywhacker and I need it to end with Roose dying because he hauved too much covid for a certain subway manager and didn’t notice her sneaking up behind him with a freaky medieval weapon

40. be honest, are you still waiting for TWOW?

only to manifest the aforementioned pov chapters (jk I am actually waiting for it but not getting my hopes up I’ve read enough fanfiction published in 2014 to connect the dots) (watch it drop the day I finish The Piss) (still have 64 chapters to go)