#Through The Eyeball proportions flipped | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thepencilnerd · 4 years ago

Text

Pasta and Dinner Parties

"Edamame," Theo says.

"The fuck did you just call me?" Blaise’s face contorted quicker than a shifting boggart.

Another eye roll. “The pasta, it’s made from edamame.” Theo pronounces it with a certain twinge of pomposity that would have Percy Weasley reeling. Too many syllables. Vowels too lengthy. “Type of soybean, I reckon.”

"IT'S NOT PASTA!" Blaise’s roar shook the walls of the foyer.

Pansy snorts into her mug. “I don’t know about you, but I think this dinner will go swimmingly.”

Draco and Hermione have reached a domestic milestone. They've finally decided to move in together. Draco invites her over for dinner, but what would a little Slytherin hospitality be without some sugar and spice?

Rated M for language and discussions of heavy topics in future chapters

Full fic + updates on AO3

"Luna sent a box of these over, wonderful isn't she?" If lovesick eyes had a picture to accompany the definition, Theodore Nott’s face would be front and center. In his left hand, he held an empty cardboard carton with a sticky note adhered to the front flap.

Simmer for 10 minutes with a sprig of rosemary and a teaspoon of salt. Keeps away the balfspracks.

Blaise rubs his eyes. It’s half-past five and he’s already had it with Theo. Had it. Patience wore down to the bone. Basta. Finite incantatem. In all honesty, he’d gladly throw himself in front of a flying—

A shorter figure crept up from behind. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she gives her boyfriend a peck on the cheek, which seems to loosen the wrinkles settling over his forehead.

"Ladies," Pansy jests, mediating the arguments between the two as always. "I'm sure there's more than enough pasta to go around."

"Not pasta," Blaise muttered. He tried to concentrate on the lingering warmth Pansy’s lips left on his face. The poor bloke sounded like he was about to hurl.

At this, Theo rolled his eyes and waved dismissively. “Yes, yes, yes, you can flaunt your Italian heritage some other time, now let me work my culinary magic!”

Blaise takes a deep breath. High blood pressure, he remembered Pansy saying. Need to stay calm. "Mate, I love you, I really do, but if you don't tell me what those green things swimming about in my favorite crockpot are, you have another thing coming."

"You used a crockpot to boil pasta?" Pansy’s head popped up from behind Blaise’s shoulder. Her nose wrinkled like she’d caught a whiff of something foul.

“Not pasta.” Blaise was a broken record.

Draco groaned from the living room. The headache from earlier evolved into a full-blown migraine by the time lunch was over. His eyeballs were absolutely throbbing. He jammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets as if it would relieve any of the aching. To no avail.

"Granger's coming over in half an hour and we’ve yet to transfigure a dining table." He verbalized his misery in as simple terms as he could. Sitting on the living room couch, he calculated the farthest distance from the kitchen and found himself just a few feet away. Problem with having a small flat. He couldn't find it in himself to raise his voice. Not with the demon baby currently going stir-crazy with a gavel in his skull.

He questioned his level of sobriety when he agreed to this.

Meeting Hermione Granger’s parents had been less stressful than this.

Introducing her to his mother was a Christmas tree full of Christmas presents compared to this.

Sitting in a train compartment with 2nd-year Hufflepuffs sounded more bearable than this.

Why, oh why, did he have to open his big mouth that night?

“Seems proper that I’d at least get to share dinner with them before we move in together,” Hermione shrugged. Her hair was still damp from her—their—shower. Stray curls escaped, framing the curves of her face. Draco loved how her sheets always smelled like her soap. The scent of her shampoo was reserved for the pillowcases.

“Come over for dinner,” he suggested. Quite impulsively, really. “Allow me to treat you to an evening of... Slytherin hospitality.” Draco’s trademark grin served him well. Resting on his side, Draco was propped up on one elbow with no shirt and sheet draped over his bottom half. She wanted to believe he was wearing briefs underneath. He looked absolutely wicked.

Hermione scowled tentatively but surrendered with a smile. Her chest rose before she let out a sigh. “Well, I’d be lying if I said I’d experienced an inkling of that before.” Mirth graced her tone.

The embers from the fireplace bounced off of her bare skin like rays of summer sun; warm and welcoming. Draco’s fingers fondled the strap of her bra, the only thing she was wearing, and earned a breathy giggle from her. Tugging the lace down, he sat up and started pressing a trail of kisses along her skin. Goosebumps erupted where his lips traced her flesh. The bath had stained her skin; she tasted of rosewater and honey.

Hermione let out a hmph and tried to focus on the book she was holding. She developed a knack for knowing when he craved attention. Whenever Draco came over, he turned into a literal child. Always nagging and begging for her every time he got the chance. If she wasn’t superglued to his side, Hermione would bet a million galleons he’d throw a fit.

“Turn around and face me instead. I don’t fancy being smothered by your hair while we sleep.”

“How do you turn on the stove?”

“Granger, help me fix the antenna!”

“Could you take a look at this spot on the back of my head? I might be balding.”

“Granger, I think I nicked myself on the aluminium.”

“If you weren’t wearing so many clothes, we’d probably warm up faster. Becoming a pair of popsicles isn’t exactly on my bucket list.”

This time around, his demands were very clear.

“Pay attention to me.”

Hermione’s eyes shot up from her book. Shock painted her features like a splash of cold water.

She blinks once. Twice. Three times for good measure. And then, her lips break into a blinding smile, pearly whites and all. The corners of her eyes curl into half-moons and her whole body shakes with glee.

Sweet Merlin, he was fucked.

Setting her book down on the nightstand, Hermione sits up straight and looks at Draco expectantly. He sits unmoved beside her. Staring. Admiring. Waiting. The cheeky grin that etches into her face is one Draco would give the world to see every day.

Draco leans back against the headboard and stretches his legs out towards the foot of the bed. Scooting closer to her, she flips her leg over his awaiting lap. She’s straddling him in the span of two seconds. The feel of her bare flesh against his is utter bliss.

Her arms wrap around his neck like a koala bear and her head nestles into the crook of his neck. Despite lathering him in her soap, he still smelled like Draco. All these years of dating and she still couldn’t put her finger on the bevy of aromas.

Draco mirrors her actions like a reflection, one and the same. His arms make her feel so incredibly small when encased in them. Like a bear cub. Or a kangaroo in a pouch. Maybe mammals would be an appropriate term to generalize how warm and safe she felt in his embrace, but it wasn’t the most attractive or poetic—

“I thought we finished showering earlier,” he sighs into her hair. “Why is there steam coming off your head?”

She blows a puff of air into his neck and he jolts at the sensation. Ticklish. Draco knew that secret would die with Hermione and she was honored to keep it. Unless it served her in times of duress.

“I was just thinking about how safe I am when I’m with you.” The tip of her nose brushes against the junction above his throat and feels his heartbeat, delicate but strong.

Da-dum.

Pulling back, he slides his left hand along her cheek and she leans into it like second nature. Hermione raises her right hand and cradles it over his. The way it pales in proportion almost makes him break into laughter. When she presses open-mouthed kisses down his bare wrist, Draco resists the urge to take her right then and there. It’s too perfect of a moment to ruin. Not tonight.

She’s even more tender when her lips reach his scar. The marred flesh that takes him back to his inescapable past. A reminder of everything wrong he’s been taught since childhood; everything bad in this world; everything wrong he’s done throughout his entire life.

But more importantly, it’s a symbol of how much good was left in this dismal world.

It’s a battle scar that reminds him that he lived.

Something that motivates him to keep trying.

A reminder of how despite being swallowed by the darkness that plagued the world, he chose to hold onto light.

A reminder of how above everything, he chose Hermione and Hermione chose him.

He takes a moment to look at her, really look at her, and melts.

Hermione is a vision actualized. He sees the dreams and aspirations swirl about her irises in flickers. Roaming freely and always there when you needed them. He wants to bask in them. Relish in them. In her. For as long as she’ll keep him, no matter how infinitely small or finitely large. He’d burn through galaxies if it meant seeing her happy and safe. Anything and everything he could provide for her was his to offer. She need only ask.

Draco Malfoy was wholly and irrevocably head over heels for Hermione Granger.

Magic and might, save him.

No really, save him.

What the bloody hell was that infernal yapping?

"I, for one, thought it would be better to go to an Italian restaurant, but Blaise here," Theo quipped. “—wanted to dish out his non-existent cooking skills,” He paused to stir the pot. “At least Luna was kind enough to—”

Blaise stomped his foot on the kitchen tiles. Miracle they hadn’t cracked yet. There was no point in trying to hide his tantrum. “Just because my ancestors were Italian doesn’t mean I’m a master chef!” He narrows his eyes. “Honestly Theo—” The words die in his throat when Theo fishes out a noodle from the pot. Maybe it’s just his eyes playing tricks on him but he swears it flipping wiggles. “What in Merlin’s great magical kingdom is that abomination and why the ever-loving fuck is it green?”

Pansy gave his cheek a pat. “Colorful, Blaise. Truly”

"Edamame," Theo says.

"The fuck did you just call me?" Blaise’s face contorted quicker than a shifting boggart.

"IT'S NOT PASTA!" Blaise’s roar shook the walls of the foyer.

Pansy snorts into her mug. “I don’t know about you, but I think this dinner will go swimmingly.”

A crash echoes from the kitchen and Theo lets out a screech that rivals grindylows.

Pansy takes a long, calm sip. Likely pumpkin juice. Draco wouldn’t be surprised if it were laced with some pre-appetizer spirits. How she managed to deal with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum was beyond him. Hell, he needed some right about now. At least to dial down the nerves. Not to mention the spike in blood pressure provoked by his flatmates.

The remaining minutes pass like clockwork and before he knows it, the front door dings. Never has a bell sounded more menacing than now. Why is he so nervous? She’s met them a few times before and they’ve definitely shared rounds of drinks. No doubt, gone to Diagon Alley with Parkinson, Lovegood, and Weasley. The tolerable one.

Did he clean his room?

Theo promised to dust right after tea but the bloke was delusional about everything except Lovegood. A bit poetic, not that Draco ever cared to admit it.

Pansy and Blaise stopped by the market yesterday and restocked the pantries and fridge.

And then Luna dropped off her bag of goodies this morning.

“She’s early.” Theo stuck his head out from the kitchen. Why was he covered in flour?

So many questions. Draco didn’t even care to know the answers to half of them.

“She’s always early when she’s excited.”

The three stooges stand shell shocked and stare at Pansy. They just stare.

She blinks like an owl and shakes her head. “Honestly, are you three just going to stand there or is someone’s boyfriend going to get the door?”

Draco’s brain registers the words too late for his liking. He’s dead sober but his brain is all fuzzy. Just as she’s about to knock for a second round, Draco’s feet propel him to the door so fast a whip of apparition cracks.

The door clicks open to reveal a dazzling frame. Hermione Granger is, to say the least, an unreal figment of everything good in the world. War heroine, member of the Order of the Phoenix, magical, academic, and practical genius, pure in mind and soul, and his girlfriend. His girlfriend. His. Donning a pair of black leggings and a flowing cream blouse, she’s bundled in a beige trench coat and blush pink scarf. Dark mahogany brown ankle boots boost her height by a few centimeters. Draco still overshadows her by a good head or two. Nevertheless, it’s a thoughtful effort. She’s holding a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine.

“Hello—woah!’

Draco’s arms are around her instantly and she’s brought into the house. His broad shoulders envelop her into a cloaked embrace that lets his scent wash over her. He never wants to let go.

Initially surprised at the abrupt shift in balance, Hermione relaxes into his hold within seconds. He still smells like her soap and Draco and… smoking?

“Blaise!” a female voice shrieks. “Don’t just stand there Theo, do something!”

A cloud of smoke—contained by a bubble charm, thanks to Pansy—swirls above the stovetop, large and foreboding. The source? A deep green crockpot placed on one of the burners.

Wait. Why is a crockpot on the burner? Hermione wonders.

“I told you we needed to salt the water and add the rosemary! Now you’ve got balfspracks all over the bloody place!” Theo’s voice changed from panic to mockery. He turned his nose upright and growled in a nasal tone. “‘Oh, salt is acceptable, but rosemary? Unacceptable. A disgrace to all cuisine Italian. May as well—’”

Draco pinches the bridge of his nose. By the end of the day, he’d probably have to ask Hermione to heal his bruises. “Bloody hell…”

“Oh, it’s my fault now, is it?” Hermione realizes Blaise’s name suits him very well. Almost too well. In any other life, he might have been sorted into Gryffindor with that fiery temperament. “Next time we have a guest over, we’re ordering take-out. From Hogsmeade!”

“Someone help me get rid of this burnt pot of—whatever the hell pasta Theo was making,” Pansy gags while trying to contain the swelling bubble. The scent is overwhelming. Something between seaweed and polyjuice. Perhaps a vile mixture of the two.

“EDAMAME!”

“NOT PASTA!”

Draco can’t tell whether he wants to burst into laughter or cry. Maybe he’ll do both. Hermione was there to wipe away the snot or tears, regardless of whichever it would end up being.

Giving him a chase kiss, Hermione placed the gifts in his hands and made her way to the lounge. Draco was going to kill them. He was going to kill them dead.

She pulled out her want and raised it towards the giant orb of smoke, confidence igniting her eyes. Her wand moved as if it were on its own, guided purely by magic and intent with an undeniable essence of Granger. She draws a broad circle that covers the entire room and summons the wisps of smoke like a magnet. The ashy tendrils of burnt food claw their way out of the floorboards and ceiling cracks, latching on for as long as they can before they’re drawn out Aiming towards the ajar door, the coils of smoke and singe are thrown out the entrance with a deafening gust.

A single strand of hair falls out of her ponytail.

She blows it out of her eyes with a single, deliberate puff.

The corner of her lip quirks upwards the slightest.

It’s so fast you’d miss it if you blinked.

If Draco wasn’t so overcome with the urge to skin his friends, he’d dive in there right now and kiss her numb.

The flat has returned to an atmosphere of calm.

“Fucking finally,” Draco mutters out loud. Not intentionally but he doesn’t regret it one bit.

Pansy, Theo, and Blaise resemble owls; wide eyes, unmoving bodies, twitching necks that swivel side to side.

Theo breaks the silence with something along the lines of a chortle. “Welcome to our humble abode, Granger.”

“Pleasure to have you here,” Blaise adds. His hands are still clenched around Theo’s shirt collar.

Pansy is still trying to catch her breath having inhaled a hefty amount of the fumes. Blaise and Theo had probably tumbled around the living room enough to avoid the thick of it. Still, she refuses to let it impede on her hostess abilities.

“Hermione!” Pansy coughs. “Why don’t you and Draco check out upstairs while—” she pauses to glare daggers at the two boys covered in God knows what, “—we deal with the mess down here.”

Hermione draws out the excess smoke from Pansy’s clothes and hair with a swish of her wand. The next thing she does makes the three boys’ jaws unhinge. They bring each other into a warm hug and laughter rings in the air.

“It’s good to see you too, Pans,” Hermione breathes. Draco was definitely going to have a fit over this later.

Hermione gives Theo and Blaise a shy wave. Hopefully, they’d understand. In any other instance, she’d be more than happy to rid their clothes of the stench. They wouldn’t even have to ask. But this was Pansy Parkinson and if Hermione knew Pansy Parkinson, she knew that the Slytherin would want to drag on punishment as long as possible before even thinking of succumbing to forgiveness.

Hermione Granger’s stubbornness coupled with her Gryffindor loyalty?

She’ll be damned if she lets either waver when surrounded by friends.

Draco clears his throat forcefully and offers his arm. “Upstairs then, shall we?”

Hermione loops her arm through his and grins. It’s contagious and Draco already feels his anger ebb into affection.

She speaks almost as lightheartedly as the wand movement for a levitation charm. "We shall."

#dramione #draco malfoy #hermione granger #dramione imagine #draco x hermione #theo nott #blaise zabini #pansy parkinson #dramione fanfic #incorrect dramione quotes #hermione x draco #post wizarding war #crack fic #dramione headcanon #harry potter #hp quotes

64 notes · View notes

tiarnanabhfainni · 3 years ago

Link

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: Major Character Death Characters: Sam Winchester, Mary Winchester, John Winchester Additional Tags: Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dead Mary Winchester, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Banshees, Celtic Mythology & Folklore,Fire,Pre-Stanford Era (Supernatural), look fair warning there's a description of mary winchester dying in this fic so keep that in mind!, ghost mary who haunts her family, is something i hold very dear to my heart, also this started as a tumblr post but i have not got the strength to go looking for it on my blog,just know that it was basically just an outline of this, also finally i write something where sam actually gets to feature, bean sí is just the irish for banshee btw its pronounced the same

As the moon at midnight moves through the starry sky Out there in the bog land the Banshee's shrill cry The one seldom heard and that human eyes cannot see Some say the ghost of one who died in agony.

- The Cry Of The Banshee By: Francis Duggan.

For the Prompt: AU on Day 2 of @spnwomenweek

Fire. She is burning and it is pain like she has never felt. Her body is not her own, it is stiff, unable to even react to the agony. Strapped to the ceiling. The smell of her own burning flesh overpowers her. The pain from the wound in her stomach pales in comparison to the feeling of eyeballs boiling in her skull and the skin sloughing off her bones.

She should have known. Hunting is a black hole - an inexorable votex. How could she have ever thought she could escape? Even as her nerve endings fry and her limbs screech in agony, she finds it within herself to hope that at least her family might survive her.

The pain fades away, exceeding the limits of human comprehension. A single-minded purpose takes its place in her consciousness. Her sacrifice will be worth it if it protects her family, if her two beautiful boys never live the life that she has. The deal is done, the demon should have no more business with her family. In her death she can make sure they are safe.

The last thing Mary sees is the horror on John’s face.

------------------------------------------------------

There has always been a ghost in Sam’s life. A woman who exists in the corner of his eyes and flickers when he shakes his head. Her haunting screams are as familiar to him as led zeppelin tapes crackling through the car radio. Together they form the soundtrack of his childhood.

She is pale. Completely washed of colour. Limp grey hair frames her wan face and there’s a suspicious darkness that stains the front of her long white nightgown.

When he was younger he couldn’t understand her erratic and ever changing moods. She seems to flip between disinterested floating to terrified wails between breaths and he can find no rhyme or reason.

Sam would ask his brother if he knew the reason but Dean cannot see her. No one can. He tried to tell Dean - once - after the woman kept him from sleeping for eight hours straight with screams. The response kept him from ever bringing her up again. Shut up Sammy. There’s no one there. You’re imagining things. Don’t tell dad. I mean it Sammy. Keep your mouth shut.

Eventually Sam finds a pattern for himself. His teachers always tell him that he’s clever. She only ever appears when his father is gone on one of his trips.

-----------------------------------------

When Dean finally caves and tells him about the monsters, Sam finally understands the insistence on keeping the woman a secret from their dad. As a ghost she is a part of the supernatural that his father fights.

And since Sam is the only one that can see her then that means - What does it mean?

As soon as the library opens again after the holidays he’s straight in the door and into the folklore section. He needs to understand what (who) this spectre is. After hours of research, there is only one real conclusion to be made. She must be a banshee. A death omen.

Armed with the truth of his dad’s trips, he makes the inevitable connection. She is a banshee and she screams when Sam’s dad is gone. And yet his dad is not yet dead. She has to be screaming for the monsters at the other end of the knife.

An uncomfortable thought drifts into view. If she screams for monsters and he's the only one who can hear her then does that mean that-? No. He slams the book closed and shoves his pile haphazardly back onto the shelf. Dean is expecting home in an hour.

But even as these fevered thoughts rattle through Sam’s brain on the walk home, he still never connects this woman to the other ghost that haunts their family. Mother Mary. Patron Saint of the Winchesters. The spectre that pushes all of them forward on this reckless self-destructive odyssey of vengeance.

She is so changed after death as to be unrecognisable even to one raised on her legend.

------------------------------------------

Sam is relentless now. He sneaks off to study whenever he gets a minute to himself between hunting, training and research. No time to sleep - he just reads. Textbook after textbook until all he sees are diagrams and his dreams are drafted in legalese. Over dinner he scrawls as many practice essays as he can for his final exams and attempts to ignore the sniping from his dad

It’s a struggle to keep his grades up as he moves from school to school across state lines and curriculums and sometimes it’s all Sam can do not to cry. He knows his dad is annoyed that he hasn’t dropped out yet. Like Dean. That he wants a high-school diploma and not just a GED.

Sam doesn’t care. The banshee appears more often to him now. She stands in his line of sight and blocks his view of his family when they hunt. She screams and screams and drowns out all of his doubts. God only knows how his eardrums remain intact.

He knows more now than he did on that first day in the library. Has been on a million hunts. With enough time and research he could probably find her bones and shut her up for good. Salt and Burn. He never does. She is a reminder of all he wants to escape. An omen his dad cannot tell him to ignore.

--------------------------------------

Sam sits on the edge of his bed with his law school acceptance letter in his hands. He’d picked it up from the post office earlier that day. Compulsively, he smoothes the creases over and over again, listening with half an ear to his family clattering around downstairs.

This is a good day. Dad is cheerful. The case had been a simple one - a poltergeist - easy to get rid off. Another suburban home rid of the monster. Dean is happy too. He’s been talking all day about the steaks he’d picked up in the bargain section of the supermarket. Now they can have a small celebration before moving out to a new town.

Sam looks down at the letter and knows that he won’t be going with them.

-----------------------------------------

The fight is world-ending. Of cataclysmic proportions. Sam’s never seen his dad so angry in his life.

He sits on the lonely greyhound bus to California, his only possessions in the bag he’s clutching to his chest. His lungs are still burning, hours after the argument and he can’t tell whether it’s anger or choked back tears or if it even matters.

But even here, alone on the bus, his clearest memory is that of blessed silence as he walked out the door. The woman standing stock still in his path.

She made no sound.

Instead. For the first and only time that he can remember. She smiled.

#spnwomenweek #spn #fic #mary winchester #wrote this in a fugue state this afternoon #so there may be typos sorry

14 notes · View notes

prophecy-is-inevitable · 4 years ago

Text

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Richard x Reader Oneshot

Darklings have plagued Richard’s day- and nightmares for too long. Your companionship helps him overcome those fears and leads him home.

Warnings: Supernatural beings, supernatural violence, non-human characters, maybe a bit of angst, some fluff, not everything is what you might think (let me know if I need to add anything!)

Word Count: 2194

Here is Richard’s Halloween short! I hope you enjoy the little twist in here!

--------

The old behavioral health center was one of your favorite places to visit. Most people were friendly to you, especially around this time of year when the temperature dropped and the days stretched longer in darkness. It drew out the darkness in the patients, and you couldn’t deny the pull you felt to the building each autumn as the trees grew bare. The crisp kaleidoscope of leaves crunching under your feet and the wind in your silky hair added a bounce to your steps. It was all very refreshing outdoors.

You waited patiently for the door of the facility to open and then slipped inside. The woman at the front desk greeted you warmly, offering you a treat from the bag in her desk which you happily accepted. She recognized you from the previous years you had visited. There weren't many volunteers for this place, and they accepted you as an unofficial "support staff". Usually you made rounds between the rooms for the night to spend some time with each patient that didn’t chase you away. The receptionist opened the interior doors for you to reach the patient rooms and lounges, and you called back a quiet "thank you" over your shoulder before departing the foyer.

The halls still hadn’t been repainted since you noticed the crackling paint last Halloween. The distinct smell of sterile cleaners permeated every corridor and nearly overwhelmed your olfactory sense. Nurses and orderlies that spotted you greeted you with a soft smile, and the especially affectionate ones pulled you into their arms and stroked the hair down your back. You didn’t mind. Sometimes a little bit of closeness was all someone needed to hold themselves together.

Very few of the patients were ones that you remembered from earlier visits. Oftentimes, the turnaround was fairly quick for the poor souls that found themselves being treated here. This year, things felt different. An insurmountable feeling of danger had pulled you back to this place. The halls seemed a bit more empty and quiet now. They felt dark. It was a darkness that kept shadows safe from the light, safe from your eyes, even when you watched them carefully. Someone was not safe here… It agitated you and made you grumble softly as you turned the corner into the eerily quiet sunroom. The sun had set a while ago, and the white noise of the busted tv threw about garish light and static.

Why was it so much darker in front of the television? Your feet pattered quietly on the floor as you made your approach. The malicious, airy whispers and swirling clouds of shadow surrounding the oversized armchair made you stop in your tracks. A young man sat frozen in the chair, his eyes unfocused yet screaming for help at the same time, and the chocolate hair dangling in his eyes shook slightly from the tension in his body. Strangled whimpers and sickeningly shallow breath struggled to escape his closed lips. This was it--the reason you had been drawn here.

You ran forward prepared to pounce, shrieking for the darklings to leave him alone. They snarled and shrieked right back with their hideous faces shrouding you in their cold, decaying breath. Your nails scratched down one of their faces and made them draw back. There was no blood, just gray skin crumbling away like collapsing cinders of an old fire. The black eyes sparked wickedly, but you had distracted them enough to place yourself between them and their original prey.

“Leave him alone,” you hissed. “I won’t let you hurt him anymore.” Raspy laughter circled you.

“No.” Several voices echoed the word so quietly you almost thought it was in your head. “He’s been ours for far too long, little one. We’ll never let him go.” The word “go” lingered like a serpent’s kiss.

“Then I will make you.” The cackles that resounded chilled your blood, but you refused to back down. You reached out again to claw at the creature’s face. You found your mark and relished the cry of pain as your nail raked through a desiccated eyeball. You would keep your new charge safe at all costs, and that was a fact the darklings would quickly come to realize. Scuttling movements signaled their departure, and you happily perched yourself on the arm of the chair to be nearer to the young man.

His arctic eyes remained hypnotized by the snow on the tv. You were pleased to notice the now steady rising and falling of his broad chest as normal breath returned to his lungs. He didn’t seem to notice you hovering at his side quite yet. The darklings hadn’t left--they were just sulking high up in the far corner of the room--and you weren’t about to leave him either.

You were still reclining on the arm of the chair when an orderly with a cat ear headband came to return your patient to his room. They smiled at you when they reached an arm out to help the young man stand, and you reflexively stood as well.

“Come on, Richard. It’s time for lights out,” they said politely. So his name was Richard. The flash of fear that crossed his beautiful, helpless eyes nearly broke your heart. Sleep was a necessity of life, and one you couldn’t help but enjoy. To be afraid of your own wondrous dreams would truly be a curse. The orderly turned their attention back to you with another bright smile. “I see you have a new friend, Richard. If you’d like to stay with him a bit longer, it shouldn’t be a problem. What do you think, Richard?” Richard’s eyes remained fixed on the television and he gave no indication that he wanted you to follow, nor that he wanted you to remain behind. The orderly nodded their head for you to accompany them to his double room. You did so happily, relieved that you wouldn’t be left behind. Your eyes cast a glare to the corner of peeling paint that concealed the darklings. They didn’t dare come for him that night.

They didn’t come for him the next night, or the night after that, or the night after that. The first night you kept vigil from a chair in the corner of his room. Darkness loomed above the doorway, but it never descended. The second night, you took up the empty bed across from his. The creatures tugged at your limbs and at your hair to torment you in the night. You would fight them constantly if it meant that Richard would be able to rest throughout the night without these nightmares smothering him.

The purple bruising beneath Richard’s eyes began to fade by the fourth day of fitless sleep. He even welcomed you onto his bed that day and allowed you to sit beside him while he drew in his sketchbook. His artwork was very impressive. You could tell his moods from the weight of the lines and the steadiness of his shading. You reached over and shuffled the pages to see his other drawings. He tilted his head to look at you through the hair hanging in his eyes.

“What? You want to see more?” A small quizzical smile barely creased the corners of his lips.

“Yes,” you replied softly, thinking the answer to be quite obvious. His brow furrowed for a moment, and then his fingers were deftly flipping through pages. He faltered at the gruesome sketch of the night-creatures that plagued his slumber, and you quickly made an attempt to cover the image from his eyes. You would have torn it completely from the book if you’d been able.

“You’re not a fan of that one either?” You turned your back to him to emphasize quite how much you hated it, and you swore you heard him chuckle behind you. Your head turned sharply to look up at him, and you caught the remnants of a genuine smile on his ample lips. If there was any indication that you were doing your job well, that was it.

Richard flicked towards the end of the occupied pages, and he paused on the latest artwork he’d completed. It was a picture of you. Your eyes locked on the page and took in each delicate line and precise smudge. He had taken his time with this one. It wasn’t harsh scribbled lines and nearly ripped paper. The details were stunning. The way the light glistened off your hair, the shifts of color in your eyes shaded in grayscale, the perfectly proportioned curves of your body. You looked up at him with nothing but love in your eyes.

The doctor in charge of his case entered the room and stopped at the foot of his bed. The both of you looked up at the man expectantly as he glanced between the two of you.

“Richard...when did you get a cat?” The young man looked down at you and shrugged up at the doctor.

“They showed up a few days ago. Apparently they come around every year. Nurse Debbie said this is the first time she’s seen them here for more than one day.” His hand stroked down along your back, and you hummed at the affection. Richard was too afraid to say that he felt better with you around for fear that the doctor would refer to it as stupid or childish. Instead, the doctor offered a contrary point.

“Animals are often used quite successfully for therapeutic means. There is also supposition that animals, cats in particular, have a sixth sense for those in need of help fighting their demons. Perhaps we will see how this affects your treatment for the time being.” Richard’s mouth dropped open, but no words came out in his stunned silence. He settled for a nod. The ghastly chuckling under the bed made your hair stand on end all the way down your spine.

That night, the darklings staged an attack that you had not been prepared for.

Richard left you curled up against his side as he fell asleep more easily than he had in many months. His fears had begun to leave him in the darklings’ absence. They were determined to fix that and win him back. They divided their forces, one of the three closing a hand around your neck and another leaning over to begin stealing Richard’s breath. As soon as you heard the choked sobs in his throat, you began to flail. The darkling holding you extended you to a full arm’s length away.

“Richard!” you cried. It didn’t matter how far away you were from your tormentors. There was nothing that would stop you from protecting him. You curled around on yourself and sunk your teeth and nails into the wrist of your darkling captor. They dropped you with a shout, and you pounced on the back of the one hovering over Richard. Your loud cries and wails managed to stir Richard from the comatose state. Good, they hadn’t been able to pollute his mind in excess yet.

“I told you to leave. Him. Alone!” Your claws sank into the darkling’s back as you tried to force them farther away from your Richard. Their spindly arm cracked and twisted at an unnatural angle to grab you by your neck, and they flung you against the wall.

“No!” Richard’s eyes shot open and he turned his head to watch you crumple against the floor. All three darklings turned their attention to him. His movements were still sluggish from sleep. A darkling cried in anguish when you sprang back onto the bed, positioning yourself protectively on Richard’s chest, and ruthlessly batted at their face.

With surprise, Richard realized that he wasn’t afraid of these creatures. He was furious. His entire body shook with the rage tensing his muscles. One arm wrapped around you and held him close to his chest. The other shot out and grasped the closest darkling by the neck.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he sneered. The three night-creatures stilled. “I am not afraid of you.” He repeated. His eyes burned with pure hatred for every second of his life that he had lost to them. And now they had tried to take you, too. “I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU!” He shouted the words into the face of the darkling desperately trying to remove his hands from their throat.

As suddenly as they appeared, they vanished. There was nowhere for them to go, no fear to feed on from a soul made of bravery. Their bodies exploded into a thick black fog that dissipated before it hit the floor. The perpetual tension that had plagued the room gave way to relief. Richard had never breathed so easily.

“Thank you,” he whispered to you. He tucked you both back into bed, pressing a kiss to your head, and you nudged your forehead up against his chin in thanks. The contented purring in your throat lulled you both to sleep that night.

A couple weeks later, Richard was once again adding your drawing to his sketchbook, this time from the comfort of his own pillow-top mattress in his own bedroom.

#I'm so sorry if this is awful #I really wanted to get this out tonight #Richard (The Last Time I Saw Richard) fanfiction #Richard (The Last Time I Saw Richard)#richard x reader #Richard just needs someone (or something) to help him fight his demons #My Oneshots #Happy Halloween Richard

19 notes · View notes

cursewoodrecap · 3 years ago

Text

Session 23: Medical Ethics

Y’all ever been to college?

Our new friend Vigdor has just pulled a pale, twitching human leg out of a poster tube, sheepishly admitting to Valeria that it’s his own.

Valeria blinks at it. “Well, it doesn’t appear to be bleeding demons, so that’s good?”

Shoshana sticks her head in the door, and has to pause to take in the sight. “Uh, bruh? Bruh? I have questions. Is that yours? I mean, like, yes, you HAVE it, but was it attached to-“

“That’s a bit tricky? It was amputated twice.”

“Twice?!”

“Once from me, and then, well, um. Once from an amalgam of sewn together body parts?”

(Gral and Shoshana pile into the room, because Oh, Lore?)

“When I was in the swamp, we were fighting a bunch of zombies led by this particularly nasty undead guy. We called it the Wailing Wight. At first it was just the usual undead hordes, but then a local leatherworker was found, torn apart and harpooned every which way, half his limbs torn off and stolen. After that, we started getting attacked by stitched together abominations cobbled together from human and animal pieces. I was there just trying to help the villagers, being a doctor and all. But that’s when I lost my actual limbs.”

“They got stolen, like the leatherworker’s?”

“I had to chop them off. Which, for the record, is not a fun time? The Wight’s harpoon has a kind of poison that rots everything it touches. So I had to amputate or, like, die. So I cut them off and his zombies, uh, stole them. And I managed to get one back? Kind of a long story. I don’t know how I recognized it, but – I guess I know my own leg like the back of my hand? Now I’m taking it back to Sturmhearst. There’s a weird fluid inside it; I want to study what’s going on with that so we can take care of the nastyboy in the swamp.”

“Well, I am generally against nastyboys,” says Shoshana, poking his foot in the ticklish bit. It squirms at her.

We’re headed to Sturmhearst anyway, so traveling together seems reasonable. We think about taking Fun Key Shortcuts, but that could backfire spectacularly, so we’ll play it safe and go the normal, boring way.

In the morning, we head downstairs. The inn is trashed. The stalwart barkeep Rene is not there; instead there’s a young elf sweeping out what debris he can. As we grab breakfast and the young fellow thanks us over and over for saving his friend’s life, Vigdor awkwardly wanders around casting Mending on chairs and tables that got a little too close to the tentacles and chainsaws. Shoshana doesn’t really do non-destructive magic, but she slips the barkeep some gold for repairs.

Vigdor’s too lopsided for a horse, so he’s gonna hop on in our cart. He’s very taken with the Eyegis, poking at it with fascination. “You can see the blood vessels in the eyes, despite no source for a blood supply! Do they have tear ducts? Have you ever seen the shield produce tears? Can you make it cry?”

Valeria gets very uncomfortable with this line of questioning and turns the eyes back into painted ones, put off by a Weird Stranger gettin’ all up in her business. Gral distracts him by asking about his fancy metal limbs.

Vigdor goes full technobabble on how the runes and machinery work. “Well, there’s three different kind of magical actuators on each joint, and they act as conduits for the dilithium crystals-” He knows the details secondhand from Bjork and none of us speak robotics, so if he ever needs serious repairs he’ll have to bring them back to Sturmhearst for the engineers to take a look at.

Valeria knows a bit about Jotunn runesmithing, but she’s never heard of it working to this degree of precision; before, she’d only heard of stuff like boats that row themselves, or a peg leg that has a little extra articulation. These are fully actuated limbs!

Val checks if the limbs are the same metal as our space wrench, but nope, they look like completely normal everyday metals. She’s not gonna inspect further, because she has RESPECT, unlike SOME people.

(“Hey, I didn’t try to pry the eyes open or anything!” Vigdor protests.)

She does notice one thing, though: Valeria recognizes runes from most magic systems even though she doesn’t know them well enough to use; her sister studied magic for a long time, so she knows what they look like. There’s one elaborate rune that appears on both Vigdor’s forearm and leg that is of no origin she’s ever seen.

“How long’d it take Bjork to build this thing?” Shoshana asks, squinting at Vigdor’s kneecap.

“Well, I was unconscious for a good bit of it so…between a week and 2 months? He was already working on it when I, uh, had to amputate.”

“…did you KNOW you were gonna wake up with those things on?”

“Oh! Yeah, yeah. It took a while ‘cause the original blueprints they found were for somebody, like…really short for a human or really tall for a halfling? Something in between. Bjork had to resize the whole model to fit a human.”

“He, uh, FOUND blueprints?

“I can’t imagine he’d have made blueprints for a person who didn’t exist? It was all proportioned very strangely. I don’t know too much about it, you’d have to ask Professor Bjork.”

(One of the players asks if the strange rune, perhaps, says ISTC in a language the characters don’t know. It DOES, and we’re all very pleased with ourselves for previous-campaign references.)

The long road stretches on before us, and we have plenty of time to talk as we spend a week or two heading north toward the coast. We fill Vigdor in on the four flavors of Curse and the concept of the Prisoners, and that we suspect there’s major Key nonsense going on up at the university. (Heh heh, “major key.”)

Vigdor and Shoshana bond over being locals. Why are foreigners so weird about trolls?

Vigdor really, really wants to look at Twombly’s glasses. We explain to him that the Key could take his desire for knowledge and turn him into a cackling, dimension-hopping madman with a few extra eyeballs. He still wants to play with the glasses. Valeria protectively hides the Key map, just in case, flashing her Hunt fangs at anyone who asks about it.

After like a week of pestering everybody, Vigdor gets to look at the glasses. Disappointingly, when not looking at the Key map, the colorful lenses just make everything look slightly more those colors. Maybe Gral’s lutestrings look weird, but that could be the placebo effect. He tries flipping around the many lenses in different combinations, and finds that all of them make him look absolutely ridiculous.

Eventually after many days of travel, we can smell the ocean and the distinctive stench of a large number of humans living in one place. Vigdor takes in the familiar sight of his college hometown. Shoshana is dumbfounded that this many people can live on top of each other, while Valeria thinks it’s a quaint little town.

Up to the west, Sturm Castle squats on a cliff above the city, like a big hippo of knowledge. It looks like it was once a reasonable castle shape, but it’s had new wings and towers built onto it haphazardly until it’s a weird sprawling network of jammed-together architecture. By the edge of the cliff, in one of the more sensibly-built sections, a majestic lighthouse beams out over the bay. In the city below, the largest building appears to be a grand temple, with its roof carved in the shape of an open book. The perimeter of the city is outlined by strange wooden and metal towers, two or three stories tall with conical brass roofs.

Eh. It’s only got one castle, so it can’t be that good of a city compared to Aurentium.

Our cart is briefly stopped for a quick examination at the gate by a friendly city guardsman. He’s flanked by two of the same enormous owl-masked guards we saw accompanying Quercus and Ulmus. “Hi, welcome to Sturmhearst, folks! What brings you here?”

We all awkwardly try not to look at Vigdor’s leg bag.

“I’m, uh, here to visit Dr. Emily Thorpe?” he tries.

“Oh, visiting the university. Don’t need yer life story. Where you stayin’? I can recommend some inns. Oh, and check out the Scholar’s Temple while yer here!” He hands us a brochure from the Sturmhearst Tourism Board and steps back. “ALL RIGHT BIG GUYS, LET EM THROUGH!”

The owl guards don’t move.

“Oh, uh, I mean –“ He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a whistle. “Lemme see if I can remember how the doc told me to do this.” He blows a few sharp notes on the whistle, and the owl guards promptly step off the road to let us through.

Huh.

Vigdor makes an investigation check on those guards, who definitely weren’t around back when he was in school. They’re pretty bulky for humans – no, honestly, they’d be bulky even for goliaths. He’d heard a story from Professor Bjork that the school was hiring goliath mercs and dressing them in owl masks, but the professor had sounded like he hadn’t believed it much. Supposedly they’re silent because they don’t speak the language, but Vigdor’s pretty sure Bjork speaks Jotunn, so that excuse doesn’t quite hold up.

Once we’re out of the guards’ earshot, Gral pulls a huddle. “Vigdor, the Key’s a more recent influence, so let us know about anything new or significantly more abundant – that’s where we’ll need to search.”

Vigdor hmms. “The big brass towers weren’t here before. And the owl guys didn’t used to be a thing.”

Gral cuts another glance back to the owl guards, considering. “…How much of a faux pas is it to remove a Sturmhearst person’s mask?”

“I mean, if you’re dealing with the plague, it’s kind of a dick move? And dangerous? But most people – it’s like, the same rudeness of grabbing someone’s hat or jacket. For some people it’s badge of honor or superiority, y’know, how amazing they were to get through the gauntlet of Sturmhearst. But mostly it’s a practical tool of the job. We’re not, like, afraid to show our faces.”

Gral nods. “So you wouldn’t have to duel them, then.”

“W-what?”

“Oh, with bards it’s like ‘you are not deserving of your title’ and you have to duel about it. You know, like, how dare you slander my name, I’ll have to fight you for my honor?”

“Oh, uh, no, nothing like that. The mask is proof of office, that’s all.”

Before we get investigating, though, it’s late and we should rest. Vigdor wasn’t a palling-around-town type, but he rolls a nat 20 and knows the best inn in the city – not one of those touristy places on the square; the best-kept-secret on a side street that only the locals and regulars know about.

We have a lovely night around the docks of Sturmhearst. Shoshana spends like fifteen minutes just staring out to sea, because they MAKE boats that big???? This much water even EXISTS????? There’s a dragonborn ship from Aurentium, a goliath ship from Jotunhein, a couple of Galwan freighters, and even a ship crewed by colorful macaw aarakocra. (History check: while the Aquilians mostly died out, some of the ground-based aarakocra cultures survived. Valeria’s met macaw traders before in Aurentium; they tell lots of stories and do GREAT impressions.)

Valeria, meanwhile, holies some ocean water. They say Galwan clerics swear by holy seawater; salt repels demons, right? It’s gross harbor water but, whatever, it’s holy now. She also beats a sea captain at Man-go, presumably dock style. The inn’s equipped for foreign travelers, so it’s got a whole bar of draconic and goblin spices!

Gral, meanwhile, discovers the inn is near a bath house and enjoys finding out what a sauna is.

Morning comes, and Sturmhearst U awaits. Vigdor knows the main campus has the colleges of Engineering, Science, and Medicine, while the satellite campus across the bay houses the college of Ethics, which includes humanities like economics and history.

Valeria rolls for Order of the Rose knowledge. The Order actually has an arrangement with Sturmhearst when they’re working in Valdia – whenever the Order is sent on disaster relief, some Sturmhearst ethicists are sent to help coordinate. Valeria’s never worked with them personally, but the impression she’s gotten from her fellow knights is Not Great. From what she’s heard, they’re supposed to do triage and help direct the knights, but it seems like they spend the whole time sitting around debating absolutely horrible things. “Hey, if we brewed up some necromancy, could we use the skeletons of plague victims to transport supplies without spreading the infection?” Apparently they just sit around in corners debating whether that kind of shit is kosher or not, without ever actually DOING anything.

Also ethicists wear white instead of black like most Sturmhearst scholars, which is just pretentious. We then poke fun at an Order of the Rose knight calling anyone else pretentious.

Vigdor studied at the College of Medicine; he’s a doctor. But that’s not where he’s taking the leg.

“Why not Medicine? I mean, it’s a human body part, innit?” Shoshana asks.

“It’s…I have some concerns…regarding the, um. So, along with this leg, my arm was stolen, right? Not long after the arm was stolen, the sewn-together amalgams got a lot, uh, cleaner.”

We stare at him.

“…as if whatever stitched them together had my medical training.”

…oh.

“I’m a little hesitant taking that info to the College of Medicine,” he admits.

“Why?”

“There’s a lot of ‘for the greater good’ stuff with the College of Medicine sometimes. The College of Ethics keeps them in check. Anyway, there’s actually this thaumochemist I want to take a look at it.”

(We’d know the discipline as alchemy, but she hates that. She’ll go on a whole tirade about it. Somebody yells “Full Metal Thaumochemist” and we accidentally take a commercial break. We’ll never get tired of that joke.)

More of those owl guards are at the door, supervised by a businesslike white-coated member of the College of Ethics. His mask is a bit more abstract than the ones we’re used to; not modeled after a bird face like the regular scholars’. He lets Vigdor in with no problem, though he’s a bit suspicious of the rest of us. We’re with a doctor, though, so he’ll let it slide. “Welcome to Sturmhearst, may your visit be enlightening.” He does the same whistle we heard before and the guards step aside. Gral’s a string guy, he can figure out the notes easily enough but he doesn’t whistle.

“Nothing goes on here without Ethics knowing about it, huh,” Gral observes.

More owl guards are stomping around, some carrying heavy objects. Vigdor knows where he’s going, but asks an owl guard for directions, as an experiment. The owl guard doesn’t even notice him. He steps in front of the guard, who just steps around him very politely.

The castle is a nightmare to navigate, like Hoeska, but we have an expert tour guide. “The old keep, the part that used to be a castle – that’s where all the 101 classes are and the whole working hospital. All the additions are laid out super weird, and then there’s the tunnels underneath. The Chem students had WILD parties down there, they brewed up all SORTS of stuff. The lighthouse is a real lighthouse, but it’s also where admin is, and the dean’s and headmaster’s offices. Oh! DO NOT cross the librarians. Each college has its own library? Like, theoretically they share the whole collection, but which college keeps which books is kind of a blood sport…”

Shoshana and Gral hang back, feeling out of place. “Bards don’t really have a college, exactly?” Gral explains. “It’s more of a pilgrimage. I met the elders of each village and they imparted wisdom upon me?”

Shosh feels like an uneducated hick even by that standard.

We take a hairpin turn in one of the Science buildings and run into Professor Quercus! Or at least someone with a bird mask and a similar voice, chatting with some other masked scholar. “Ah! Yes! We made a lot of excellent discoveries before we started to run into problems – you see, there hadn’t been an event in some time, but if we could get in there to the source, we could really – well, my goodness! These are the people I was telling you about, who gave me such wonderful notes!” Quercus turns to us, sounding rather delighted. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here. Welcome to the world of knowledge! What brings you here? I thought you were having adventures and derring-do!”

“Well, it turns out our adventures led here!” Gral tells him.

Quercus nods enthusiastically. “I’d show you around, but I rather need to speak to the bursar! If you need anything, I’m sure you can find my offices without too much problem. And please, if you’ve encountered any interesting monsters, I’d love to hear details! Especially if you have samples!” Despite his keen excitement, Professor Quercus rolls a four and fails to notice our Shusva accessories.

“If you ever need a cup of tea and a biscuit, you’re welcome to stop by my office! I’d be more than happy to speak with you! And if you could do me a favor – well, I wouldn’t mind having you with me when I speak to the bursar! See, our expedition to Holzog has hit a bit of a snag. The events with that mist stopped happening, you see. Luckily, we managed to identify which house you were going to, and we were all set to investigate, but then the Baroness put a squadron of those damnable Condotierri to prevent us getting in – “

Gral shrugs, deliberately casual. “I don’t know why you’d go back; there’s not much to see besides what’s already in the notes.”

(Vigdor immediately rolls insight to see if Gral is lying. Unfortunately for him, bards are excellent liars.)

“Anyway. The bursar’s giving me an earful about continuing to fund the expedition. I’m considering withdrawing from Holzog and asking him to redirect the funds into a different project! For example, lots of interesting monsters have been seen around Barroch lately!”

Yes, definitely, we want him to go somewhere that’s not a Tempting Key Portal. Valeria and Gral tag-team Persuasion checks to sell him on interesting cases of monsters we’ve heard of around Barroch. If we’re fuzzy on the details – well, all the more reason to have someone get out there and take a closer look!

Quercus is rather taken by the idea. “If you would, Mr. Duu –“

“Um, actually, Duu is the tribe, my family’s name is-“

“-yes, if you could write me some letters, I might find it useful making the acquaintance of the locals while setting up camp. Sturmhearst hasn’t established an official relationship to your people yet’”

Gral agrees to write up a formal letter explaining the mission of Sturmhearst and the expedition to make introductions a bit smoother; the word of a bard will go a long way in gaining the cooperation of the orcs of Barroch. He’ll do a personal letter of introduction for Quercus, and a general letter to Shieldeater’s administration to explain who the heck these weird bird people are.

“Wonderful! Bring it by my office!” He gives us directions that make NO sense to anyone but Vigdor. We’re pretty sure several of those compass directions aren’t real words?

“Oh, and if you see an angry tall woman stomping around, tell her I’m not here! She’s mad at me for some reason I can’t discern. Good day!”

He scuttles off, presumably to hide.

We definitely want the gossip on that – Ulmus was mad at him about funding, and she definitely dissed his field of study. Is this what academia is like?

Vigdor confirms that the professors have all kind of weird beefs, interdepartmental politics, and personal feuds. “One of my professors gave me a B- in amputation – shows what he knows – purely because I was taking some classes outside the College of Medicine and he got all offended. It’s a lot of politics and bullshit, they’re all more concerned about their careers and publishing than actually important stuff.”

We find a door with a brass plaque: Dr Emily Thorpe, Thaumochemist. There’s a paper list tacked to her door with a list of courses: “Intro to Potion Brewing,” “Principles of Alchemy Thaumochemistry”

Vigdor knocks. “Yes, who’s there? Come in!” a voice calls.

“It’s Vigdor! Vigdor Gavril!”

“Ah, Vigdor!” A halfling woman in the requisite bird mask waves from behind a counter where she’s handling a set of proper Movie Science bubbling beakers and flasks. “Yes, you sent me that letter! You had something ‘interesting’ for me!”

“Yes, and you will see why I couldn’t be more detailed!”

She notices his metal arm as he starts pulling open his heavy waterproofed case. “Oh! I heard that Professor Bjork was giving you his prototype! How’s it working?”

“They’re loud and heavy and uncomfortable sometimes, but I have limbs! Can’t complain! But then I, uh, found one of my limbs again.”

He goes over to an open table and pulls out his entire-ass leg with a flourish, plus vials of hair and blood and strange unidentified liquids. Her eyes widen.

“Ah, this is yours!” She watches his toes wiggle. “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

“Yeah, I found it stitched to some kind of unholy undead abomination.”

“And that explains the Knight of the Rose. Hello, Kyr.”

“Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Dr. Emily Thorpe, at your service as well, I guess? Pardon the mess in my lab, it’s not much but it’s home. Hand me that vial?” She pulls out a syringe and takes a sample of not blood, but oily black liquid, from the leg. “It will take some time, but I can write up a thaumaturgical profile without much difficulty. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“You can hang on to it. But I would appreciate discretion.”

“Yes, this will stay between me, your friends, and – oh, this is Hugo, he’s my teaching assistant. He’s been helping since the school was mobilized.” She turns to Vigdor’s clearly uneducated hick friends (not you, Valeria, you’re very fancy) and explains:

“In times of crisis, the University turns from education to innovation. Were this a disease, we’d be researching cures! If demonic, we’d be researching weapons or dimensional banishment. We haven’t really received direct orders this time, so everybody is doing their own thing, which I can’t say I mind. Mostly I’ve been helping other researchers with the practical application of their theorems.”

She scribbles out a hasty list. “Hugo, if you can go to the library and put these books on order? The Vigmar and the Auspelius especially would be useful, but don’t let the librarians kill anyone over them. And the Principles of Advanced Anatomy – tell them I won’t ask. But I do need it.” The grad student nods and hustles out of the room.

(Shoshana insights, out of paranoia. Hugo’s a good egg, though he might refer to thaumochemistry as alchemy.)

“Now, Dr. Gavril, do you want this leg back? How intact-“

“Want it back? Like, in the abstract, or on my body?”

She pulls out a vial of bubbling acid. “I’d like to put some of this on it and I’d like to see what happens.”

He blanches slightly. “Uh. Um. I have some proprietary-“

“Aw, no acid then,” she grumbles, stowing the acid with an audible sigh.

“Only do something you would do to living person’s leg. That they would survive!”

“How would I know? I’m a chemist, this is only, like, my second dead person!” She pauses. “…well, fifth.”

Shoshana starts looking around at all the alchemy equipment curiously. Everything here is clearly labeled with numbers, and letters that feel like numbers, and complex formulae, which hedgewitch potionery doesn’t really account for.

There’s a knock at the door. “Ah, that must be Hugo. Come in!”

Valeria instinctively body-blocks the leg from view.

It is not Hugo. In walk 3 white-clad ethicists. The gentleman at the front is in fancier robes – we suspect he’s the kind of fellow who has tenure – and he wears a powdered judge’s wig atop his mask. We immediately don’t like it. His two companions peer around the lab – one has a jeweler’s loupe built into the lens of his mask, and the other is carrying a big chime with runes carved into it, clearly a magic item of some sort.

“Dr Thorpe,” the leader intones.

“Sorbus,” she replies disdainfully.

“I see you have guests, is now a bad time?”

“Is it ever a good time?” Emily makes a point of tending to her samples and beakers busily.

“I suppose not. We have come to ask a few follow-up questions. Have you been visited at all by Professor Matthias Macker? Has he followed up on the project you were working on together?”

“I told you, no! I had no potions strong or precise enough for what he needed, and he’s never spoken to me since. That was months ago!”

“And no one has seen him since then. You understand why we need to know what you discussed.”

“Yeah, not since you quarantined the whole surgical wing!”

“That is not what I’m asking about. Has Macker’s assistant Greta Ruble visited you?”

“No. She’s a good kid, though, don’t hassle her.”

“We are simply making sure she is not a danger.”

Emily sputters angrily. “A danger to who?!”

“I cannot tell you that.” He turns to Valeria. “Kyr, it is always a pleasure to see a member of the Order here. I suppose if you’re here we can be assured nothing… unethical is happening,” he says, unpleasantly oily. “I am Professor Rigmor Sorbus of the College of Ethics; I lecture on legal and judicial ethics. These are my assistants, Charles and Pippin.”

Valeria bows with the precise degree of politeness required. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. In these times of mobilization, it falls to us as ethicists to supervise our colleagues’ noble efforts. Please, I implore you: if you see anything untoward or suspiciously unusual, I request you report it to the nearest representative of the College of Ethics.”

Emily butts in. “What happened to Eric Pelbort, his other assistant?”

“Mr. Pelbort has transferred to the College of Ethics and is assisting us with some research. We will let you know if that changes.” He tells her dismissively. “Kyr Argent, the College of Ethics has always been proud of our long association with the Order, and I would like to extend our deepest condolences for the tragedy of the Crusade. Should you have need of any assistance whatsoever, do not hesitate to ask. Our offices are on the satellite campus across the bay. If you were to visit, I’m sure many would love to speak to a paladin of the Order of the Rose.”

“We have business here, but I might be able to make time to stop by,” she equivocates.

“Very well. I will let you all get back to whatever it is you’re doing with that leg,” Sorbus says, turning neatly on his heel and taking his leave, his toadies hurrying in his wake.

(Yes, you guessed it: That was Professor Rowan, with his Tort Wig and his assistants Pip Loupe and Chime Charles.)

“Those guys give me the creeps,” Emily grumbles. “They used to be fine, but lately they’ve been doing this whole inquisitor act.”

Vigdor’s always known these guys as douchey blowhards. But now they’re douchey blowhards with AUTHORITY.

There’s always been a divide between Ethics and the other three colleges roughly the size of the harbor! The sciences don’t believe in debate, they believe in experimentation! Anyone who can spend an entire week talking without action is wasting time and breath. The College of Medicine thinks even less of them – they just get in the way of progress!

(IRL we all respect medical ethics, but Sturmhearst WAS founded on a fine tradition of graverobbing and leeches.)

Vigdor is primarily a surgeon, or he was, when he had two fully functional hands. (Two players at once: “HE GOT DR STRANGED!”) He had quite a few classes with Macker, the chair of the surgery department. Most people didn’t like the guy, except his surgical grad students who would defend him to the death. A bit of a hardass about proper procedure, but that’s probably not a bad quality for a surgeon. He was a local institution, so it’s pretty alarming he’s somehow gone rogue.

“His whole lab was quarantined?”

“The whole teaching wing, actually,” Emily tells us.

“Are there people in there? Some kind of sickness?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Ethics just put guards outside the labs and blocked everyone from going in. They’ve done it to a couple places around the school recently. The excuse is that someone was doing ‘unsafe experimentation’ that’s ‘poisoned the area’ or something?”

Wack. “How long have these quarantines lasted?”

“They don’t really end? A couple stopped after a few months, but some have been there for a year! Nobody goes in or out. Sometimes the white coats go in, but it’s pretty rare and they don’t stay long.”

“Is that what all the guards are for? Where’d they all come from?” Vigdor asks.

“Medicine used to be the ones, uh, hiring them.” (A quick insight roll notes that she hesitates on the phrase “hiring.”) “Lots of them still answer to whoever they were originally assigned to. But recently Dean Chidor from the College of Ethics took over that whole program, so a lot of the newer ones answer primarily to the ethicists. I mean, they all dress the same, so it’s kinda hard to tell? I haven’t asked a lot of questions, I’ve been trying to keep my head down since the whole thing with Macker.”

“What actually happened with him?”

“He’d been acting weird for a while,” she confides as she starts sticking pins in the leg and wiring them to a voltage generator. “He’d been working on something, some kind of extreme surgery – I think he was looking into a method of surgically removing Curse corruption. He was hitting roadblocks, though; he called in me and Alma Ulmus, who’s a College of Medicine bigwig.”

“Yeah, we met her in Bad Herzfeld!”

“I heard she’s here again, stalking around the halls complaining about funding. She knows more about his project than I do. Anyway, Macker sent me requirements for a healing potion he was gonna administer as part of some surgical procedure. I couldn’t get anything as powerful or precise as he needed. I’m a thaumochemist; I don’t know medicine that well. So it was beyond me to do that amount of gross tissue damage repair as controllably as they wanted it. I mean, I made some pretty nice innovations as far as the theory of potioncrafting, I’m hoping to get published as soon as it goes to peer review.

“But I couldn’t do what he needed, and eventually I got shut out of the project. Then one day he vanished. Alma set off for Bad Herzfeld and Macker stopped coming out of his lab. His assistants were still going in and out, but not long after that, the ethicists quarantined the place.”

“Has anyone else been quarantined?” Valeria asks.

“People from all three colleges got hit. I dunno about other ethicists, I haven’t heard about them quarantining anything of their own. But everyone else has. A group of engineering students were building a defense system to be deployed out to the Scar, and all of them got quarantined. Here in my department, Dr. Vilman – remember him? Stupid goatee, did a lot of stuff with crystals? – got shut down. Sometimes they quarantine the whole lab; sometimes they just shut down a project and everyone working on it gets a ‘guest lecture position’ over in Ethics. Sorbus said they got one of Macker’s assistants, Eric Pelbort. He had another one, Greta Ruble, but I guess she’s given them the slip.”

Emily’s got experiments to do on that leg, so we’ll let her get to it. As we head out, Gral asks one last question. “What’s up with those guards, by the way? Why do they only respond to those whistles?

“Uhhhh,” she says, as we fail our persuasion check. “They, er, don’t speak very good Valdian. Mostly foreigners, goliaths, the like. The whistles get their attention.”

Gral sighs and doesn’t push it. Vigdor’s already making plans to pickpocket a whistle. Valeria, since she has a direct invite to talk to the ethicists, considers the unheard-of paladin approach of Just Asking Them Directly.

First, though, Vigdor wants to check out the quarantine of Macker’s lab; he knew that professor well, and we’re all curious what’s been going down.

We walk on over to the surgical wing to case the joint. There’s a single owl guard blocking the hallway, presiding over a small barricade. A pleasant sandwich board sign states “Area quarantined by College of Ethics, apologies for the inconvenience.”

We try to walk in and the enormous guard holds out a hand to stop us. Shoshana tries to wiggle around him, like a cat trying to get at your dinner, but he impassively blocks her every move.

Gral tries a smoother approach. He begins with small talk; the guard doesn’t even twitch. He starts asking prying questions about the surgical ward. No response. Fine, then: he switches to Orcish, a sinister undertone weaving through his voice as he uses Words of Terror.

An insight roll reveals completely unchanged body language.

“Either they’re immune to fear or not a humanoid,” Gral reports back. “Not a single emotion. Definitely not goliath mercenaries.”

“Tryin’ to talk your way into the surgical wing?” says another chatty passerby. “Good luck. They got all the medical cadavers locked up in there and they won’t let us in.”

(Cadavers? Oh shit, we bet that’s the guard factory, theorize the players.)

“Oh, are you a med student?”

“Yeah. I work with Professor Herberts, or I used to, anyway. We needed a couple cadavers to do this comparison study about spleens; we got some weird ones from out in the wood, we compare spleens to see if place with thing don’t worry about it; need control spleen. And then these BIG DUMB IDIOTS wouldn’t let us in, and Herbert got transferred to the College of Ethics all of a sudden. He’s been gone a couple months.”

“How long do professors usually transfer for?” asks Gral.

“I mean, they usually pop over to give a lecture or two and come back by the end of the day.”

(Vigdor happens to remember that the College of Ethics also runs an asylum. They live in a big spooky castle and do dissections with guts and stuff, it can do a number on your head! Some of the ethicists have branched into the field of psychology. No reason to mention this when people are having extended stays on the ethics campus, of course…)

The student shrugs. “I gotta get to lecture. If you manage to get in there, any chance you can bring me back a couple spleens?”

We wave goodbye noncommittally, though Vigdor insists he can pop a spleen out of a corpse like a yolk from an egg. He’s a good surgeon!

Anyway, Vigdor went to school here, and the dice are on his side; he knows a side path through an old abandoned classroom into the surgical suite. He pops the lock on the door easily; all the undergrads used to go this way when slipping into lecture late, to get past the TA keeping track of tardies.

The guard is in earshot but facing the other direction, and he’s not even blinking, much less scanning around. Gral casts Silence on us and our very clanky party slips by easily.

Shosh sticks her head into the TA’s office. Nothing really stands out, but she swipes some interesting-looking notes from the desk drawers to look at later.

Meanwhile, Gral and Vigdor go into Macker’s office. The desk is an absolute mess, which is very unlike the guy Vigdor used to know. There are wheeled chalkboards crammed into the office, covered in scribbles and anatomical diagrams. Paging through the notes and glancing over the chalkboard, Vigdor makes a decent medicine check and can at least figure out what problem Macker was working on.

Based on what Dr. Emily told us, Macker’s trying to develop a surgical procedure. The issue is that whatever he’s doing would cause so much physical trauma that it’d kill the patient, and he’s looking for some way to prevent that. There are lists of healing options: formulas, spells, potions, nonmagical stabilization methods to keep the patient alive while various tissues are extracted from the body.

Gral’s unimpressed. Healing methods? That’s pretty tame for forbidden knowledge.

To Vigdor’s experienced eyes, this stuff looks mega-advanced and highly experimental, but Gral’s right – it’s not anything you’d scramble to censor.

Weirdly enough, the place doesn’t look ransacked, only disheveled and a little dusty. Macker’s notes haven’t been moved since he was here. Maybe this isn’t what the ethicists were after?

We head to cadaver storage while Valeria keeps watch. Cadaver storage is creepy as hell, but only because it’s, y’know, a room full of cadavers. A lot of the bodies, kept stable with Gentle Repose, appear to be Cursed, but that’s hardly weird. What’s so crazy they’d keep it hidden from everyone?

Vigdor opens the door to the dissection labs, Gral’s Silence deadening any ominous warning he might have had from the room beyond. Yes, the table here’s been recently used, and the bizarre symbols scrawled on the chalkboards have spilled onto the surrounding floor and walls, but Vigdor’s eyes are drawn to where the chalkboard peels away like skin to reveal a strange, multicolored, impossible space. The floor begins to take the shape of a stone hand that projects out into the shimmering void, joining a daisy-chain of enormous hands that form a walkway out to a marble platform floating in space.

Gral takes his Silence spell with him and runs to get Valeria.

Eyes starry, watching entire worlds and impossible shapes spinning through iridescent mists, Vigdor takes his first heady hit of Key taint.

As we cut session, Valeria considers that the ethicists may actually have a point.

#the cursewood #Session recap #sturmhearst university #gral omokk'duu #valeria argent #vigdor gavril #shoshana bat chaya #The key

1 note · View note

canaryatlaw · 6 years ago

Text

okay. today was not bad. not sure if we reached good, but overall now bad, which for now I will take. My body decided to wake me up at 7:50 am for no discernible reason, then decided I wasn’t gonna be able to fall back asleep so I was up for the day. well, might as well make the best of it and be productive. I wanted to make m&m pancakes because I haven’t made them in a while, and I’ve been getting lazy about measuring out the right proportions because I tend to like the batter to be thinner than what the measurements they tell you to use produce (thinner pancakes are less likely to burn on the outside while the middle still isn’t cooked and that gives me anxiety) so I just kinda eyeballed it, but it ended up being a bit too thin and the pancakes would just die when I tried to flip them, so I added some more mix and they were then working just fine. Made my pancakes, sat at the table with my computer and got a jump on the lecture for trusts. it was like 2 hours and 50 minutes, not too bad. It was alright, I did already do the New York trusts lecture so I did have some concept of what was going on, so it wasn’t like totally brand new information to me. I’d wanted to marathon two lectures today so then I don’t have to do one Monday when I’m running around doing a million other things to prep for the bar on Tuesday, so now that I was up early I was gonna try to marathon the two lectures, the second being about the same length as the first. this one was on “commercial paper” which is literally not a term I’ve even heard mentioned once in my three years of law school, so I really had no idea what was coming. The lecturer started off the video by basically saying there is legit little to no chance this is going to come up on the bar but we still made the lecture to be thorough at which point I was like okay PEACE and left because I’m not wasting precious studying time on shit that’s not gonna be on the bar (one paragraph I was reading said fed tax, which is a subject they still teach, hasn’t shown up on the bar in decades. DECADES.) so that was one less thing to do. there’s only one more lecture to cover that I’ll do tomorrow, and it’s secured transactions, which I just took in my last semester and somehow managed to swindle an A- out of it, so I’ll definitely have an advantage with that as opposed to these other subjects I never touched in high school. So, what to do now. I started with some practice questions trying to go slow and analytically, following their step by step problem solving theory, and the first batch came back with really bad grades and I was super frustrated and wanted to bang my head against the wall, but I calmed down and tried another, and the grade went up significantly, so I did a few more with mostly good grades, so that was encouraging. I did some outline review after that, then started going through the essays by subject and outlining them, which is probably something I should continue doing tomorrow, because I’m not great with the specialty subjects essays being that I just learned most of them. Interspersed with all of this was of course news coming out of comic con, I turned the push notifications off on my phone because there was just way too much coming out to distract me, but I would occasionally check it and yeah, there was just a lot. Of course there’s the fact that Jess met the entire cast, which I legit am not even a little bit surprised at because I fully expected that to happen at this point, because that’s just her life. But yeah, that’s all kinds of awesome of course (goddamn bar exam keeping me from going....) and then I took a break to make dinner. I’m still on the trying to convince myself I like eating chicken train, and I had bought some ingredients for a recipe I later decided I didn’t want to make, but I could add a few things and use them to make one meal I know is really good, chicken roll ups, which is basically shredded chicken mixed with cream cheese and shredded cheddar cheese and then stuffed into crescent roll dough and cooked and it’s fucking heavenly. Well. I managed to fuck things up in quite a few ways that made them really not very good. First off, I was using leftover rotisserie chicken, which of course just had a different texture and taste, and was also a lot drier, and I didn’t measure how much it was and I think the ratio was too much so it through off the mixture. I also ended up not having enough cheese because the block of cheddar I had in the fridge had grown a really gross mold spot on it so I had to ditch that. And then, idk if this made any difference, but I didn’t have crescent dough but I had biscuit dough, so I figured if I just rolled it out it would work fine, and idk if that contributed to it not tasting right at all but it was at least one change. so I ended up basically eating the dough off of a few of those before tossing them because they were just not good. so that’s one more check in the “failed” column in this venture. Oh well. I did also watch videos and such out of SDCC as I could, I saw Caity’s IG live where she had the camera on the sizzle reel airing live, so that was a very cool way to get to see the footage for the first time. Everything that came out was so good, I’m so happy we’re getting soft AvaLance and so so much more. I’m so pumped for this season. But alas, I went back to my essays and was getting kind of frustrated when I had a bit of a moment. I had my pump up playlist on, which included a song called Meant To Be by Steven Curtis Chapman (if you’re unaware of who that is, he’s a Christian singer) which I had debated about whether I should add and then had debated again this afternoon if I should keep it as I was deleting some of them, but I did, and I’m just sitting there frustrated when I begin to focus on the lyrics, and in that moment they really spoke to my soul-

You were meant to be touching The lives that you touch And meant to be here Making this world so much more Than it would be without you in it

And in that minute, I was reminded of all of the reasons I am going on this crazy adventure, why I’m putting myself through all this stress and hard work. It’s because I care. It’s because I want to make a difference. I want to be the kind of person that has a radical effect on the areas of the world they worked in. I was meant to be here. I know I was. I may get frustrated sometimes and talk about how much I miss acting (which, to be fair, I really do) but at the end of the day, that decision wasn’t about me picking law because I didn’t think I could make it in acting, it was about me picking law because I wanted to be a lawyer more than anything else in this world. I had all of this in my mind and I walked over to the wall in my room where I have a picture of the little boy from the child death case I worked on. Manny. He will forever be an innocent four year old. He was denied the opportunity to grow up. And that is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I couldn’t save him, I wasn’t there. But I know there will be so, so many Manny’s in the future that I could be able to help if I worked hard and diligently and refused to back down when things get hard. That’s why I’m doing this. For all the little boys and girls who are facing potential deadly violence and neglect, innocent lives that can be saved, that can be spared meeting a grizzly death before they even get to kindergarten. Because I am so tired of hearing these stories. I. Am. So. Tired. So I’m going to do something about it. Alright, I think that’s enough of a rant for more, there will always be plenty more where that came from. I tried to do some more essays but my vision kept blurring on me which again idk if it’s a vision problem I’ve somehow developed or just a sign I’m overstudying, but it made it fairly impossible to work, so I gave up (I mean, it was also pushing like, 10 pm at this point, so it was probably a good cut off point). So I moved to the living room and watched Queer Eye, trying to unwind, which was helpful. And then I eventually decided I should go to bed, mostly because i’d like to not sleep the entire day tomorrow so I can actually get stuff done. And I am already very tired, my eyelids are actively trying to close on me right now, so I’m gonna finish here. Goodnight mah people. You da best.

#daily journal #July 2018 #Jess tag

2 notes · View notes

theoriginalkidwithapen · 5 years ago

Text

Principia – De Motu Corporum III

CW: Death, disaster

“The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.”

– Sir Isaac Newton, “Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”

Thirty-two minutes and fifty-seven seconds into her brachistochrone maneuver, Peregrine’s main engine shut down as scheduled, and with a sustained burst from her reaction control thrusters, she flipped around to face the opposite direction, beads of molten tin rolling off the face of her cooling whiskers as the force of rotation drew them away.

Once transposition was completed, Peregrine’s starbulb lit up once more, a jet of incandescent star-stuff erupting from the engine bell. Her whiskers began to glow a dull red as the streams of molten metal started to flow along their surfaces, cooling off as they radiated away their heat into the vacuum of space, and through exploiting the properties of liquid metal, flowed back to the roots.

In her control compartment, the situation was just as lively. The stress from 17,150 kilonewtons of thrust caused the entire room to rattle violently. Misty was unconscious, Jon was fighting his hardest to stay awake, and even mighty Tallen strained under this irresistible force. Peregrine had long since switched back to hands-off flight control, not that Jon had noticed.

“Contact detected, bearing 160 by 27, range 153,000 kilometers and closing,” Peregrine reported, “IFF reads as a CETU destroyer. Time to intercept: 58 minutes, 31 seconds.”

Jon tried to respond, but he had trouble focusing on the words. It didn’t help that his eyeballs were being squeezed into the backs of their sockets by seven gravities of accelerative force, or that it felt as if a couple large sacks of rice had been laid on top of his chest.

“Keep tracking and identify,” Tallen slurred, “How are the others doing?”

“Misty’s unconscious,” Peregrine replied, “I’ve got her on an intravenous steroid and oxygenation drip, and I’m closely monitoring her vital signs. Jon is still conscious, but I have another IV standing by just in case he blacks out, too.”

“Great. Time to destination?”

“32 minutes, 21 seconds.”

“Swell,” Tallen groaned.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

As predicted, Peregrine completed her deceleration burn precisely 32 minutes and 21 seconds later. The coronal plume from her tail was extinguished, and the crew could all breathe a sigh of relief.

Perhaps not a sigh so much as violent, gasping, sputtering coughs as the pressure lifted.

“OK, everything hurts,” Jon winced.

“Would someone please be so kind as to stop that disagreeable ringing?” Misty implored, her eyes squeezed shut.

Tallen, fearing that Misty had a concussion, freed himself from his restraints and made his way to the emergency medical kit. “Misty,” he said as he checked her pupils, “do you know who I am?”

“Of course, Tallen,” she replied, “Jon is behind me in the flight control seat, and Peregrine is the ship.”

“Lucky guess,” Tallen joked as he finished inspecting her, “The good news is that you don’t have a concussion. Here, take this.” He gave her a condiment-packet-sized pouch, which she tore open and, with practiced grace from a lifetime in microgravity, she squirted the floating globules of liquid painkillers into her mouth and dutifully swallowed them.

Tallen went to help Jon get out of his restraints, but Jon waved him away. “I’m not concussed,” Jon groaned.

“Let’s leave the diagnosis to the ship’s medic, shall we?” Tallen self-referred as he checked Jon out as well.

“I know exactly who you are, Tallen,” Jon moaned, “I just feel like I’ve got a hangover the size of Saturn – I half-expect to see rings form around my head.”

“Well, the bad news is that you won’t be getting medical leave for this,” Tallen joked, “No concussion for you.”

“Damn,” Jon exclaimed before gulping down the painkiller sachet Tallen gave him, “I could really use a couple dozen sols at the Delphic Ablutoria…”

“I thought you didn’t go for the whole… sex thing,” Tallen commented.

“I don’t,” Jon replied as lucidity returned to him, “but I do find Europan hydrothermal massages very… relaxing.”

“They really are,” Misty sighed in agreement.

“Peregrine, what’s our status?” Jon asked.

“We’re less than 5 kilometers from the remains of EML-1 Colony 7,” Peregrine reported, “The station is only rotating at 2.11 degrees per second. There’s a lot of debris in the direction of the spacedock, but it’s moving so slowly relative to the colony that it shouldn’t pose a hazard to navigation.”

“Give me a visual,” Jon ordered. What appeared on the monitor drew surprised gasps from everyone on the control deck.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The absolute devastation in the scene before them evoked the profoundly morbid eerieness of an ancient battlefield. Drifting detritus littered the space around the catatonic colony – while most of it was structure, goods, and equipment, there were many corpses among the rubble; bruised, bloated, and broken. They had to be those with the misfortune to be close to the spacedock when it exploded – those within would have been incinerated by the blast, while those on the colony side would have been blown into space when the bulkhead ruptured from the explosion.

The walls of the colony cylinder were left deformed from the blast, lending it the appearance of a deflated steel balloon. Twisted, melted steel cables wound about the void, making entry into the colony difficult. Peregrine swept aside the smaller debris with her navigational sweep – ablating them with a broom of coherent light.

She was able to negotiate her way into the remains of the colony’s spacedock. The hulks of sundered spacecraft stood silently secured in great gantries, waiting for launch orders that would never come. Scorched shells and shattered structure left a host of haunted hulls – a macabre mess of death and destruction.

“Could you come look at this, please?” Misty asked. What she had discovered perturbed them all. A gaping tunnel had been bored tangentially into the spacedock’s structure, penetrating through to open space beyond, illuminated by the faint orange glow of still-incandescent metal along its interior.

“Aperture diameter is approximately 21 meters,” Peregrine reported, “It looks like whatever did this cauterized its way through the spacedock’s hull on the way out.”

“Regardless, we’re here to see if there’s anyone who needs our help,” Jon declared, “Peri, can you get us any closer to one of those service airlocks?”

“Sorry, love,” Peregrine replied, “There’s not enough room to maneuver in here.”

“We could try the longshoreman’s gantry,” Tallen recommended, “Maybe the dockmaster’s computer will have something on what happened.”

“The dockmaster’s office might also be a good place to tap into station comms and internal sensors,” Misty suggested, “It would make it easier to locate survivors.”

“We’ll start there,” Jon decided, “Peregrine, what are the conditions like out there?”

“Ambient radiation level is 0.23 sieverts per hour,” Peregrine reported, “Radiation protocol level 4 is warranted.”

“All right, let’s do this one by the numbers,” Jon ordered, “Tallen, Misty, we’re going outside. Bring HSFH scrubs and dosimeters.”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The Ying-Zheng-class destroyer VSCE Ekaladerhan was ugly as sin and twice as graceless. Cursed with large, blocky construction, she would undoubtedly be less aerodynamic than the box she came in, if 5,500-ton warships were delivered from their shipyards in enormous crates.

As she cantankerously lumbered towards EML-1, decelerating on a lambent plume of incandescent deuterium, the ship’s Combat Information Center was abuzz with activity as the crew tried to make sense of the events of the past hour.

The Chief Intelligence Officer of Ekaladerhan was cloistered away from the bustle of the command center outside in his office, analyzing reports on the situation. The biggest stumbling block to getting a cohesive picture was the lack of useful information. Actually, that was the second biggest stumbling block. The actual biggest obstacle was that the captain expected a situation report in ten minutes to prepare for operations as soon as they arrived on site, and he didn’t have any new intelligence to give her.

A sharp knock on the door erupted from the cacophony on the other side of the bulkhead – the buzzer for that door hadn’t worked right since the Kala’s last refit 20 years ago. According to the Chief Engineer, fixing the buzzer meant removing the entire door mount and tearing up a meter and a half of conduit in order to splice in new wiring – because door buzzers were neither primary systems nor essential for combat operations, and as the only way in or out was through the adequately secure CIC, it would have to wait until the next refit or the CIC got trashed by hostile weapons fire.

“Come,” he projected. The percussive prattling of the outside flooded the room as the door slid open, and an Earth Forces officer in espatier gray fatigues stepped through.

“Crewman, shut that damn door!” the intelligence officer barked. “Sorry, INTO,” the interloper apologized, and then pulled the door shut. The noise quieted to merely distracting.

“Report, leftenant,” the INTO ordered. The interloper stood to attention.

“Sir!” the lieutenant said with military sharpness, “I’ve brought the report you asked for.” He handed a small tablet to his superior.

“Put it on the desk.”

“Yes sir,” the lieutenant answered and did what he was told.

“Well?” the INTO asked impatiently, “If you’re just going to stand there, make yourself useful and get me some coffee!”

“Yes sir,” the lieutenant answered again, “Sorry, sir.” He turned about-face and began to slide the door open again.

“Leftenant,” the INTO sighed, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that.”

The lieutenant closed the door again and turned back to face the INTO.

“May I ask what’s on your mind, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

“No,” the INTO began, “Yes. What do you know about EML-1 Colony 7?”

“Number 7 was an agricultural colony,” the lieutenant summarized professionally, “its sole export was bulk soybeans, no different than any of the eleven other colonies at EML-1, or a dozen others at EML-4.”

“My sister was a biologist there, monitoring the soybean crop,” the INTO admitted, “She was going to be married next month, to a water management system engineer on the colony.”

“And you’re worried that she’s dead, sir?”

“I’d like to believe that she was able to get to an emergency shelter, but I doubt it very much, given how quickly things happened.”

The lieutenant sat down across from his superior. “If you like, sir, I could say a prayer for her.”

“If you’re looking for something to do, you might help me make sense of these reports,” the INTO suggested as he dropped another tablet onto the desk in frustration, “I just don’t understand it – a nuclear shaped charge explodes in the dock of an agricultural colony, a civilian freighter under Martian registry disregards space traffic control orders and races to Colony 7 under the guise of rendering humanitarian aid, and no one seems to know anything!”

“Why EML-1 #7?” the lieutenant asked, “Why not the new space city at EML-5? Destroying Colony 7 couldn’t have killed more than a million people, while attacking Cockaigne could have increased fatalities by an entire order of magnitude. Colony 7 doesn’t make sense as a target for a terrorist attack.”

“It wouldn’t even have affected food production much,” the INTO agreed, “Apart from decompression and the structural damage, that colony is virtually intact. The Department of Space Construction could have it back in productive operation in six months. I fail to understand why anyone would have–” he paused as something on the tablet the lieutenant brought him caught his eye. Glancing at its contents, he came to a disturbing realization.

“Leftenant,” he said as he showed him the tablet, “what do you make of this?”

The lieutenant took the tablet. The INTO watched as the more he read, the more things began to click into place, and the more his realization grew. “Mars?” the lieutenant asked.

“Mars.”

“We’d better inform the captain.”

0 notes

badgerkick0-blog · 5 years ago

Text

What Wouldn’t You Do for a Homemade Klondike Bar?

[Photographs: Vicky Wasik. Video: Serious Eats Team]

We've all sat through the rhetorical questioning of a television commercial, numb to its effects. Do you happen to have any Grey Poupon? How many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Where's the beef? Got milk? Little did I know that one such question would lead me on a journey of self-discovery, and test the limits of my culinary skill: What would you doooooo for a Klondike Bar?

While some may cluck like a chicken or confess to a crime, I found that I would do something else altogether—make it from scratch.

The components of a Klondike bar seem straightforward enough—slabs of plain ice cream, coated in crispy milk chocolate. Yet that simplicity belies a curious complexity: Beneath a whisper-thin and explosively crisp chocolate shell is no ordinary ice cream, but a fluffy filling as light and pure as driven snow.

Those qualities made me think of fior di latte gelato, but as soon as I'd tackled that recipe, I knew it was going to be too rich for this filling. So I tried to lighten things up by using homemade ice milk, only to find it was far too lean. And neither could compare to the cloud-like softness of the inside of a Klondike Bar.

Texturally, the closest I came was with my no-churn vanilla ice cream, which owes its feather-light texture to whole eggs and sugar cooked over a water bath, then whipped until foamy and pale.

After I'd added whipped cream and frozen it overnight, the texture was about as close to that of a Klondike Bar as I'd ever come, but those whole eggs gave it a custard-like flavor and color. Perfect for old-fashioned vanilla ice cream, but not for a supernaturally pale frozen novelty.

This got me thinking: If egg yolks were all that ruined the flavor and color, why not leave them out? With egg whites alone, the sugar-and-water-bath technique would give me something ultra light, fluffy, and mild: Swiss meringue.

Because it's fully cooked, this style of meringue is extremely stable, and perfectly amenable to the addition of soft butter (at which point it becomes Swiss buttercream), so I had a hunch it would do well with whipped cream instead.

In fact, it did a little too well. My trial run of Swiss meringue folded with whipped cream wound up almost comically light, with an excessively soft, Cool Whip–like texture. Perfectly delicious, and Klondike-esque in its simplicity, but much more like whipped cream than ice cream, and not particularly amenable to being sliced into bars.

Fortunately, the fix was as easy as cutting the meringue with a splash of milk.

Aside from contributing a pleasantly milky flavor, the added milk deflated the meringue ever so slightly, giving it a more ice cream–like density, and provided enough water to allow the meringue to freeze hard. Not too hard—just hard enough to slice into bars.

For that, I scraped the "ice cream" into a square cake pan lined with two overhanging sheets of parchment, and spread it flat with an offset spatula.

The recipe can be scaled to accommodate almost any pan, but an eight-inch-square pan will fit into any freezer, and the nine-bar yield is supremely manageable in terms of the logistics of dipping as well as freezer storage. And logistics are indeed key—you'll need a good mise en place and efficient organization so that the dipping process can move along as briskly as possible, given that you'll be coating quick-to-melt ice cream in warm chocolate. There’s no need to rush or move at a breakneck pace, but nor should you dally around.

In that spirit, one piece of equipment that's a huge help in keeping the bars cold is a thick cutting board that's narrow enough to fit in the freezer. When the cutting board is chilled overnight along with the ice cream bars, it provides an ice-cold work surface to keep the bars cold during both the cutting and the dipping phases.

To cut the bars, remove the pan and cutting board from the freezer, and use the parchment flaps to tug out the brick of ice cream. Cover the exposed surface with a sheet of parchment, and flip the whole thing over to peel the parchment off the bottom.

Using a large chef's knife, cut the ice cream into nine squares. If you have a deep-seated need for precision, each bar will be 2.66 inches wide. But, especially given that you'll be in something of a race against the clock, it's okay to eyeball it.

Cover the ice cream bars in plastic to prevent odor absorption, and return them to the freezer. They can sit there for however long it takes to prepare the chocolate coating, but if you plan to leave them in there overnight for convenience, do be sure they're wrapped up nice and tight. Freezers are home to all sorts of stale, funky smells that this mild ice cream can soak up like a sponge.

For those looking to capture a true Klondike Bar flavor, reach for a relatively dark milk chocolate, such as Endangered Species 48% (my personal fave) or Whole Foods 39%.

Both are among my top supermarket picks and have a chocolate flavor that's deep enough to contrast with the filling, but not so potent that it completely overwhelms the delicate milky notes. Dark chocolate works on a technical level, but its flavor is so bold that the flavor of the ice cream is completely lost.

As with stracciatella gelato, I make the coating for homemade Klondike Bars using a combination of chocolate and refined coconut oil. Cutting the milk chocolate with oil lowers its melting point, so it won't sit on your tongue like a waxy lump when frozen; meanwhile, using a saturated fat like coconut oil helps create a crunchy snap.

Unlike the chocolate chips in stracciatella, however, this coating has a higher proportion of oil, for a super-thin, fluid consistency that ensures a light and even coating, rather than one that's heavy and thick.

After it's melted, transfer the chocolate mixture to the smallest bowl you have that can accommodate the ice cream bars—about four inches wide and three inches deep—and cool the mixture until it registers about 80°F (27°C) on a digital thermometer before dipping.

That temperature may sound a little warm, but remember that each ice cream bar will cool it slightly; starting with cooler chocolate will mean it's more inclined to lump and seize. Plus, a cooler coating will form a thicker layer around each bar, and, however tasty that may sound, it'll ruin the delicate snap of a thin chocolate shell.

To dip, use a spatula to drop one bar into the chocolate, then quickly dunk it under and lift it out with a fork.

Let the excess coating drip off, then return the bar to a clean patch of parchment on the chilled cutting board.

Think of it a little like a conveyor belt, with plain bars taken from the bottom and dipped bars placed near the top. As you work, the "naked" bars that remain can be scooted down to make room for the new bars as they're dipped.

Keeping both on the same cutting board means you can pop the board back in the freezer as needed along the way. If you have the freezer space for two separate cutting boards, though, by all means, spread your wings!

Once all the bars have been dipped, return them to the freezer until the chocolate has fully set.

Any leftover chocolate coating can be strained and spread out in a thin sheet to freeze for reuse as DIY chocolate chips for ice cream. Alternatively, re-melt it to use as a sauce for cake and ice cream, or as a dip for fruit like strawberries and sliced bananas.

It's perfectly normal to see a few blowouts here and there in your bars; the chocolate coating contracts as it freezes, which can force a little "eruption" of semi-melted ice cream. Don't sweat it if you notice a few imperfections, but an excess of explosions can indicate working conditions that are too warm.

Once the coating has set, the bars can be wrapped in plain or decorative foil.

This isn't a strictly necessary step, but it provides an extra layer of protection against freezer burn, and the act of unwrapping the bar makes it feel all the more authentic.

Protected by foil wrappers, these DIY Klondike Bars can keep for over a month in the freezer, if tucked inside a zip-top bag. Not that they'll actually last that long—between the super-fluffy ice cream and the snappy chocolate shell, this homemade frozen treat is as irresistible as the original.

This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.

Source: https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/09/homemade-diy-klondike-bars.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

0 notes

darkshreaders · 7 years ago

Text

a random stupid story “super mario 64″ how original of a name anyways enjoy this cringey story

I always liked Super Mario 64 when I was a kid. I remember playing it at my aunt's house all the time. Well, one day a pop-up appeared out of nowhere as I was watching gameplay footage on YouTube. I was a little startled, and was about to close the window, until I realized that it was a website showing of a mint condition copy of Super Mario 64 for sale. There was a picture and everything. I usually don't trust these things, but the feeling of nostalgia overpowered me, and I wanted to buy it.

The whole business was peculiar, seeing as how the owner of the game wanted the buyer to send an envelope containing $10 to and address on the site, instead of using something like PayPal. What made things even more strange was that when I tried to gain access to the website (I wrote down the URL) after encountering... problems with the game, the page was nowhere to be found.

A few days after the $10 was mailed, I got a package containing the new copy of the game. The first thing I noticed when I opened the small box was that the "official sticker" with Mario flying in the air was apparently peeled off or something. In its place was a piece of duct tape with "Mario" crudely written on it in permanent marker. I felt a little ripped-off, but as long as the game worked, I didn't care.

I got out my Nintendo 64 and put the cartridge in. The screen turned on with the familiar Mario face that you could stretch and twist aimlessly. I remembered laughing all the time at the results as a kid and decided to mess around for old times sake. I moved the cursor over to Mario's ear and pulled it to elven proportions. I was going to do the same to the other ear, when the TV suddenly produced loud static. Mario's whole head started deforming and twisting in ways that I didn't even know were possible for the model. Random sound effects from the game started playing along with the static. As all this was occurring, I could hear a faint voice whispering in Japanese. The voice was stammering and whimpering.

I immediately shut off the game and tried again. I didn't bother with the Mario head this time. Just selected a new file and started playing.

When I selected the file, the game skipped the opening monologue by Peach and the courtyard outside. Mario was just placed right inside the castle. Creepier still, Bowser didn't say anything either. I tried to ignore it and played anyway. However I also noticed that there was no music. Just dead silence. There weren't even any Toads around to talk to. The only door I could enter was the Bob-omb Battlefield. The other doors wouldn't even respond to my button commands.

The portrait to Bob-omb Battlefield wasn't the usual picture. It was just a stark white canvas. I was still trying to convince myself that these were just minor glitches, and that they wouldn't effect the gameplay at all. Once I entered the portrait, the image suddenly went from a blank canvas to the Lethal Lava Land painting. You know, that slightly unsettling image of the flame with the evil smile? Yeah, that's when I started getting really suspicious.

The mission select menu came up, and yet another weird detail was present. Instead of "Big Bob-omb on the Summit", the mission was called "TURN BACK". I have no idea what drove me to press A, but I did.

The level seemed normal. Everything was how I remembered it. I thought I could finally enjoy my favorite childhood game. But then I saw him. Luigi. I was absolutely shocked. He was never in this game. His model wasn't even a Mario palette swap. He looked like a completely original model. Luigi just stood there until I tried to approach him. He started running at unexpected speeds. I followed suit and went through the level. Strange things happened as I pursued him. Each time I picked up a coin, the enemies and music would get slower, and the scenery would look darker in color and more morbid. It kept gradually getting worse until I collected a 5th coin. Then, the music just stopped. The enemies laid down on the ground like they were dead. I was seriously freaked out, but I kept chasing Luigi.

I went up the hill. No cannon balls rolled down trying to knock me over. I really wasn't surprised at this point. Luigi was always just out of my sight as I ran. Once I reached the summit, I saw yet another object out of place. A small cottage was all that was seen on the top of the hill. Luigi was nowhere to be found. The cottage was certainly odd-looking for a Mario game. It was old, plain, and broken down. Regardless of my fears at that moment, I had Mario enter the cottage.

As soon as the door closed. A disturbing picture of a hanged Luigi immediately popped up along with a very frightening scare chord. It sounded like a violin screech accompanied by loud piano banging. Mario fell to his knees and sobbed for roughly 5 minutes, then the screen irised-out.

I returned to the castle. Mario just slumped out of the painting. The image switched from the Lethal Lava Land portrait to the image of Luigi hanging himself. The room was different this time. It was now a small hallway. Toads with blank expressions and white robes lined the sides of the hallway. There was another painting at the opposite end that just completely and utterly scared me. It was a picture of my family It wasn't even a photo from the time Super Mario 64 was released. It was a very, very recent photo. I remembered posing for it last weekend.

I reached for the on/off switch on the N64. There was no way I was going to play this anymore. However, when I flipped the switch, the game was still on. I flipped it back and forth, but to no avail. I tried unplugging the whole system, but it never left the screen. I was even still able to control Mario. I couldn't just leave it on forever... so I kept playing. I went to the photo of my family, and jumped in. Only one mission was available, of course. This one was called "Run, Don't Walk". I selected the mission. 'Let's-a-go'...

The level started in a flooded hallway with platforms floating on the water. Mario landed on one of these, and the camera turned to show what was behind. A silent black void was slowly approaching Mario. It didn't look like anything. It didn't even look like finished graphics. Just a giant, blocky, black blob. I started jumping from platform to platform. With no goal in sight, I kept running, the darkness slowly but surely gaining speed. This kept going on for what felt like hours. I was really doubting there would ever be an end. Mario was just going in circles. Finally, the black blob/void/thing caught up with Mario, and enveloped him in darkness. He didn't scream or resist at all. It just consumed him.

Mario fell out of the painting and back into the castle. I lost one of my 3 lives. The room was different now. Some of the Toads were gone, and the painting looked different. My family and I were in the same positions, but our bodies were partially decomposed. It looked too real to be Photo-shopped. It looked more like someone just took our dead bodies and posed them.

Regardless, I jumped into the painting again. Mario was in a small room. There was still only one mission available. It was called "I'm right here." spelled just like that. I selected the mission and prepared for the worst. Mario landed in a small, dark room. There no visible way out. The room was empty except for a piano in the corner. I knew what that meant. I was stuck in there with the Mad Piano. I approached it and it started chasing me as always. There was no way to damage it, so I had no choice but to let Mario take damage.

When he lost all his health, the usual death animation didn't happen. Mario just got mauled by the piano. He fell as his blood and guts spilled on the floor, and the camera panned to a top down view of his corpse. A distorted version of the merry-go-round music from Big Boo's Haunt played as the screen slowly transitioned from the in-game shot to a photo-realistic sketch of Mario's dead body in the same view as the shot. It was very unsettling. I was crying softly as I gazed upon the image. I lost another life.

The photo of my family was shown again. We were even more rotten then before. The view zoomed into the painting, like I was warping again. I was greeted with a shot of Peach's castle from the outside. The castle was crumbling in ruin. The fields were on fire. The sky was pitch black. Bowser's laugh played on a loop in the background as children mockingly chanted, "You couldn't save her!" This went on for a long time, until, a close-up of Peach's face accompanied by an extremely loud screech interrupted the loop without notice. Peach's mouth was wide open as if she was screaming, and her eyes were empty, black holes.

Suddenly, I was back in the hallway as Mario was once again ejected out of the painting. Now all of the Toads were gone, and me and my family looked positively repulsive. Maggots were wriggling around in holes in our flesh. Guts were spilling out of our bodies. My dad's eyeball was hanging loose from its socket. It was too much to bear, but something still urged me to trudge on. I jumped into the painting, with only one life remaining.

This time, there was no name for the mission. Just a blank space where the title would be. I selected the mission, and Mario landed on a very small island in the middle of the ocean. There was a solitary sign. It only read "DIVE." I did just as it said and entered the water.

The ocean was dark and empty. There were no fish. I wasn't even able to see anything in the water besides Mario. I swam downwards. I kept going for quite some time, yet Mario never ran out of breath. I counted roughly 10 minutes of swimming until I decided to go back up. Just as I turned Mario around, it came. A huge, and I mean huge Unagi the Eel came out of nowhere and swallowed Mario whole. I was dumbfounded. It went by so fast I wasn't even sure what I saw. The Game Over screen didn't show up. All that happened was a fade-out.

The photo of my family and I was shown again. We were plain skeletons now. Once again, it looked very real. I couldn't move the camera at all. It just stayed focused on the picture. I shut off the game and turned it on again. I chose my file, but it just went to the skeleton photo of my family. I tried this about three more times before giving up. I desperately wanted to stop, but some force kept me from walking away. I decided to select the only other saved file. The camera once again focused on the skeleton picture, but this time they were in a different position. As if they were a different family.

#mario #super mario 64 #nintendo 64 #creepypasta #2spooky4me

3 notes · View notes

coffeelevel8-blog · 6 years ago