#Trading psychology for success

[signode-blog]

Mastering Technical Analysis: Strategies to Reduce Noise and False Signals

Introduction Technical analysis is a powerful tool used by traders and investors to make informed decisions based on historical price movements and market data. However, amidst the vast sea of information, it’s easy to get lost in the noise and false signals that can lead to poor trading outcomes. In this guide, we’ll delve into effective strategies to minimize noise and filter out false…

[meghsatheartist]

Tips to master your trading mindset:

Active Income Source: 

Positive environment for trading:

Constant Learning: 

Motivation factor for trading mindset: 

The loop of Competence and Confidence: 

Trading Discipline:

The morning routine of a successful trader:

Patience

[captaingimpy]

The Generalist Mindset: Why It’s Better to Be “Good Enough” at Everything

In a world that constantly pushes for specialization, being a generalist—a “jack of all trades”—can sometimes feel like swimming against the current. That old saying, “jack of all trades, master of none,” often gets thrown around as a warning against spreading yourself too thin. But people forget the full expression: “jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one.” And that…

[cryptonewscentral]

🧠💎 Master Your Mind, Master the Market! Discover 15 game-changing psychology hacks that'll transform you into a crypto trading Jedi. 🚀 Learn how to conquer FOMO, tame your emotions, and make decisions like a pro. Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned trader, these tips will supercharge your mental game and potentially your profits! Don't let your mind sabotage your gains - click to unlock the secrets of unshakeable trading discipline. Your future wealthy self will thank you! 💰🔑

[allaboutforexworld]

Drawdown in Forex Explained

Drawdown is a crucial concept in forex trading that every trader needs to understand. It refers to the reduction in the value of an investment from its peak to its lowest point over a specific period. Understanding drawdown is essential for managing risk and developing effective trading strategies. This article delves into the concept of drawdown in forex, its significance, and how traders can…

[techmarkethunter]

Mastering the Art of Trading: Overcoming Greed and Impatience

Title: Mastering the Art of Trading: Overcoming Greed and Impatience Introduction:In the fast-paced and dynamic world of financial markets, successful trading is not just about analyzing charts and interpreting data; it’s equally about mastering the psychological aspects that can make or break a trader’s success. Two formidable foes that every trader must conquer are greed and impatience. In…

[mytradegenie]

https://tradegenie.com/ - Welcome to our YouTube video, "Markets and YOU." In this insightful and transformative presentation, we delve deep into the world of trading, unveiling crucial elements that separate the best traders from the rest.

Join us as we explore recent Calls and Puts trades, uncovering how they play a pivotal role in shaping your trading journey. Learn about the delicate balance between Responsibility and Success, and discover the single most important factor that can make or break your trading career.

The heart of this video is "YOU." We reveal the secrets of the top traders who unconsciously perform self-analysis, but more importantly, we equip you with the tools to join the elite 11% of traders who consciously engage in self-analysis. Understand the profound impact of your Beliefs, the Outcome Attribution Bias, and the interplay between You, the Market, Your Trading System, and Strategy.

Unlock the key components of successful trading, and learn how your contribution can significantly impact your journey towards becoming a successful trader. Dive into Risk Control Components, and understand their pivotal role in minimizing losses and maximizing profits.

"Markets and YOU" is not just about trading, it's about mastering the psychology, strategy, and risk management that can lead to success. So, join us as we guide you on a path to becoming a more confident and informed trader.

Stay tuned to the end, where we discuss "How I Feel Today" and why your emotional state is a vital factor in your trading decisions. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your trading skills and embark on a journey towards financial success. Like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell to stay updated with our latest content on trading and finance.

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[open-era]

The Psychology of Trading: Short-Term Tactics and Long-Term Vision

Finding the perfect balance between swift gains and enduring success is the trader's art. 🚀⏳ Explore the fascinating world of time horizons in trading and uncover the secrets to making the most of short-term gains while aiming for long-term triumph. 🌟💹

In the complex realm of trading, achievement stretches beyond mere market analysis and strategies. It is fundamentally intertwined with the trader’s mindset, an integral force that shapes every transaction. Each trade undertaken showcases not just financial savvy but also an individual’s psychological fortitude. Notably, two prevalent trading methodologies, short-term trading and long-term…

[vulpisnocturna]

Binding Vow

This is purely self-indulgent because I was consumed with the idea of Chrollo and specifically, Yandere!Chrollo. So here it goes. This is filthy and Chrollo is unhinged. Nothing new.

Read on AO3

Part II

Part III

I do not condone this behaviour in real life. This is purely fictional. Please read warnings and avoid if any of them are triggering to you.

Warnings: Yandere Chrollo, dom Chrollo, coercion, dub con (I mean it), psychological manipulation, kidnapping, captivity, possessiveness, obsession, fingering, oral sex (f!receiving), vaginal sex, creampie, praise, slight humiliation kink

Summary: Abducted because Chrollo could not steal your Nen ability, you are ready to give in and trade your power for your freedom. But the choices Chrollo decides to lay in front of you are wholly different. One would say, the illusion of choice. You make him swear a vow to let you go as you make your choice. But one should pay close attention to the words used in a binding vow...

Word count: 7k

One would think so many candles would be a fire hazard, to be frank. They were everywhere, on every wooden surface, on every shelf that wasn’t overcome with books of all sizes with leather spines, on the nightstands and even on the ground. It was as though the leader of the Phantom Troupe had an obsession with a certain type of aesthetic, and would not refrain from littering his surroundings with candles every time he found a new place where his gang could crash. Perhaps, he had a candle for every person he had ever killed.

Though you supposed one would lose count after a while.

If you were to ingratiate him, you knew what he would appreciate having as a gift; although who needed gifts when your profession was stealing whatever you wanted, whatever thing you had a passing whim for?

As far as you were aware, you were the last passing whim Chrollo Lucilfer had stolen. You had known of his power to steal abilities, and even though you had tried to escape when the Troupe had come to abduct you, it seemed he hadn’t been successful in stealing your power. Yet.

Your Nen power wasn’t meant to fight, really, so the possibility of forcing your way through the Troupe had been preposterous. Your ability was that of having regenerative power, to the point where you could heal fatal wounds to yourself and others. He obviously must have wanted it for himself, and you hadn’t exactly had any way of escaping his wishes.

After a month of captivity, though, you weren’t sure you could bear it for much longer. If all he wanted was your power, why not let him “borrow” it, as he so nonchalantly put it? So you could go back to your own life, so you didn’t have to be locked up in that house, so that he would let you go? Would he even let you go, if you gave him the ability? Or would he want to tie loose ends and get rid of you? You shuddered in the cold air of the bedroom you had been confined to in his absence. 

He had left you to your own devices that day for the entirety of the morning, whilst he had spent all his time with you previously. Studying you, asking you questions, letting you know between the lines that he knew who you were, who your loved ones were, where they lived. He had called you a “treasured guest” in the same sentence, with such audacity that you had been left stunned at the complete lack of morals that man had.

But then again, he also seemed to have some twisted attraction to you. They did say the forbidden fruit was always the sweetest, and because you knew of his power, he couldn’t get to your Nen ability if you did not reveal how it worked and fulfilled his conditions. In the last two weeks, he had taken to something you could only define as an attempt at seduction.

He would sit with you in the living room, inviting you to get closer to him, reassuring you he had no intentions of harming you. He would stare at you with those stormy eyes of his that seemed to burn through you like electricity, and his gaze would rake over your body like he was appraising some kind of rare, expensive object he planned to take for himself. Which he probably was.

Despite knowing who he was, despite knowing how sticky with blood his hands were, you were only a fallible human. And he was... a murderer, a manipulator, a thief; and he was also cunning, intuitive, soft-spoken, caring with you in a sick way, and the most handsome man you had ever met. Despite all of your efforts, it was not possible to deny the effect he had on you. And it was not possible to hide it from him. Observant as he was, obsessed as he was with watching your every reaction, every little twitch of your body, every time your breath faltered when he was too close, every time he commented casually how your pupils were dilating, every time his long, willowy fingers grazed your skin, he could see all of it. And all of it was a twisted game of cat and mouse to him.

Another heist, another plot to strategise and accomplish. He was always composed, always neutral, if not for his sly looks, wily smirks and piercing eyes. He always seemed to have the upper hand. It did not matter that he did not have your power, he seemed to be a patient man.

Until that day.

You had assumed he was waiting for you to break by keeping you captive, although treated with enough civility and never physically harmed, because he had not mentioned wanting your Nen power since the one time he had told you he wished to borrow it. In your mind, he was simply determined to stir the pot and then leave you to stew in it for a while, knowing at some point, your desire for freedom would overcome your attachment to your ability. Letting you run your mind wild with suppositions and conjectures that led nowhere as you tried to analyse his reasons and predict his behaviour. And it was working. You were almost done with it. If he asked you to choose between your power and your freedom, you knew what you would pick.

When he came back from whatever the hell he’d been doing that morning, his appearance was pristine. He was wearing his hair down, no headband in sight, a white shirt with the first two buttons undone and smart black trousers. All in all, he was the picture of what you could only define as sex appeal and sophistication mixed together in a heady blur of sharp eyes, chiselled, angular features and a mellow voice that still managed to sting.

He unlocked your door using a Nen ability he’d probably also stolen and closed it behind him, smiling softly at you as he appraised you.

‘Hello, darling. I hope you did not feel too lonely without my company’ he said easily, conversationally. You disliked the pet names he had started to throw at you in the last two weeks. They made it seem like there was more to this relationship than a prisoner and their warden. More he wanted. But not your ability. No. You. And it made your stomach churn every time. 

You decided to ignore him, because what else could you do? You were locked in a room with him, with no escape, and you had been held captive for a month now. What could possibly make it worse than it already was?

But you were so very naïve. You should have paid heed to his shrewd grey eyes, to the way his lips twitched as though he delighted in knowing something you didn’t, in watching you rack your brains in trying to figure him out.

You had been so naïve in thinking that he had kidnapped you and held you captive to steal your ability. After all, he could torture it out of you. 

Did he just enjoy the game? What did he want? Was there another condition that needed you to be willing to share it with him? That must have been it. He needed you to give it to him willingly, that was why he was going after your mental sanity instead of torturing it out of you.

‘You seem quite tense. Sit with me. I have a proposition for you’ he said, gracefully stepping to your side, brushing his fingers on your lower back, sending shivers down your spine just as your nose caught a whiff of his expensive cologne. His scent was just as intoxicating as he was, something masculine yet refined, a blend that made your lower stomach hot. You fought to keep eye contact as he sat on the plush loveseat by the fireplace, tapping the empty space right next to him, his eyes boring into you with curious amusement. 

You grimaced, feeling weak and dizzy as you sat down on the armchair, the only other surface available to you aside from the bed and the loveseat, which was out of the question. Chrollo’s lips twitched in amusement, his eyes glinting with interest as he rested his cheek against his fist. 

‘I have a few choices for you. I assume you are quite unsatisfied with your current predicament, therefore, I am giving you the chance to escape all the doubt that must be swarming your mind by now’ he said calmly, that little smirk still on his lips. You did not give way to hope. You did not lower your guard. Thieves did not return goods. If they got rid of them, it was after getting something else in return. So what was he playing at? What was his angle?

‘Your distrust is quite strong, dearest. You should learn to hide your emotions more, if you plan to attempt to play me. Though I must admit the thought of it is quite thrilling. So feel free to try it. Your first choice is to give me your Nen ability in exchange for the end of this predicament. Your second choice is to give yourself to me now. I trust you understand the meaning behind my words. If that is your choice, you can start by getting up and walking over here’ he said, smoothly, easily, seductively, his eyes mischievous. 

You blinked, swallowing heavily, your lips parting. He… was making you choose between your Nen ability or having sex with him in exchange for your freedom? The choice was not really that. It was an illusion of it. Perhaps he merely sought to humiliate you, because of course, the reasonable choice would be to get it over and done with, have sex with him just that once and walk away with your life and your ability intact. Who in their right mind would pick the first choice? 

He was hot, charming, attractive. So long as you could separate the part of you that knew what he was, what he did, and the shame that came with prostituting yourself to your captor, it would not be that bad. It would be over quickly, you only had to focus on his physical attributes, shut out his horrid persona.

‘You want me to prostitute myself to you’ you said, your cheeks burning with humiliation. He let out a wilful sigh. 

‘That is an uncouth appraisal of it. It is quite clear from your reactions to me that you desire me, too. Is that prostitution? More of a mutual desire, I’d wager. Rather a small price to pay to retain your power, is it not?’ he asked, smiling sweetly, smugly. You ground your jaw, your whole face feeling hot, your eyes stinging with the embarrassment of your current predicament, as he loved to call your captivity.

‘Why would I want to... have sex with someone like you? A... murderer- a thief, a kidnapper?’ you spat, repulsed, sitting rigidly in the armchair, quite the opposite picture to his nonchalant lounging. He let out a soft laugh.

‘Oh, darling. Are you pretending to have steadfast morals now?’ he crooned, voice soft and mellow. Completely unbothered by your accusations.

‘What are you trying to imply?’ you chewed on the corner of your bottom lip, a movement he followed with a hint of ravenousness in his silvery eyes.

‘Your morals seem somewhat flexible to me. You have been eating food paid with stolen money for a month, sleeping in a stolen mansion, wearing stolen clothes. I trust you were clever enough to know this from the beginning of your sojourn here’ he said casually, seeming almost enthusiastic about debunking every argument you could bring to the table. It was as though he found pleasure in discrediting your beliefs and making you vacillate. Perhaps it stroked his ego.

 ‘I had no choice about sleeping here. Should I have starved? Should I have wandered around naked for a month?’ you snapped, regretting your words immediately when you saw him look at you so intensely. As though he was undressing you himself with his eyes.

‘Well, you certainly could have tried to starve yourself. I would have admired your efforts to cling to your pride and ethical dilemma, and you would not be in this moral conundrum now if you had. You would be able to blame me for it. As to your last point, that would have certainly been a sight. Again, the choice was there. I would not have stopped you’ he said slyly, his voice getting lower and more seductive, like a caress on your spine. You bristled.

‘Those are not choices. Like these aren’t’ you pressed, and he sighed, still smiling like nothing could make him waver.

‘Are they not? You have two paths before you. Every human being is offered choices. Now, be a darling and make one. What will you choose?’ he mused. You closed your eyes, your fingers curling on the fabric of your skirt.

‘You will not steal my power if I- give my body to you now. Right?’ you asked slowly, trying to find a loophole in his words.

‘I will not. If you choose to indulge me now, I will not steal your power’ he said. You gulped. You did not want him to lose his patience and take away your opportunity. You also wanted his word that you would be let out alive and unharmed.

‘And this- this predicament will be done once I do that too. You will not kill me- nor harm me after that. I will be allowed to leave this place alive’ you said cautiously, weighing your words. He smiled.

‘Of course. In order to ease your worries, why don’t I make a vow with you? A condition, if you will. And if I break it, I will die. If this is your choice, and you want reassurance before you continue with it, I will of course be willing to ease your worries. Stand up and come closer’ he said, and you tried not to show your relief. If he was promising, there was nothing to worry about. You could do this, keep your life and your well-being, leave with your power. It was not a bad deal. Not a bad deal at all. You should be happy that he seemed to be attracted to you. That he was even giving you a choice in the matter.

You slowly got up, and your legs felt weak as you stepped closer to him, feeling like his gaze was burning through you. You stopped in front of him, tense like a violin string as a grimoire appeared in his hand.

‘Sit on my lap, darling’ he murmured, and you found yourself feeling all kinds of things in your body, from nerve-wracking anxiety to butterflies in your stomach to warmth in your gut and weakness in your legs. You inched closer to him, gingerly sitting sideways on his lap.

You were immediately engulfed by his enthralling cologne, and his arm wrapped around you, fingers curling on your waist to keep you in place. You squirmed, gulping when he dipped his head to breathe against your neck, making goosebumps appear on your exposed skin.

‘Your scent is intoxicating, dearest’ he breathed, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear to expose the side of your face to him. You could not deny how seductive he could be, how tantalising his touch felt. But you would not be swayed from the promise he’d made.

‘The vow first’ you said somewhat nervously, and he smiled, nodding and keeping an arm around your torso as he picked up his book of stolen abilities and flicked through it, stopping in front of a binding vow.

‘Now, I vow that I will not make your Nen ability mine and steal it from you. It will remain yours. I vow I will not kill you, nor will I ask anyone else to do so for me. Should you respect the terms I have presented to you, you will leave this place unscathed within a day, with your power still in your hands. Should I fail to respect these terms, I will die on the spot. Do you accept?’ he said, and you tried to find any loophole that would allow him to kill you or steal your ability in his words, even though his fingers stroking your ribcage were distracting, but you could not find anything. You nodded.

‘I accept’ you said, and he picked up a small dagger from his pocket, shushing you when you gasped and tried to get away. He pricked his thumb, showing you the small droplet of blood that was forming on the surface of his skin.

‘I won’t hurt you. I just need a drop of your blood. Your hand, if you will, darling. Or the vow won’t work’ he said, and you gingerly let him lift one of your hands and prick your thumb. He pressed yours against his, and you could see the aura surrounding your fingers working. You relaxed a little when he threw the dagger away, supposedly letting it pierce the wood of the highest bookshelf so you could not reach it in an attempt to attack him.

He wiped your thumb and his with a handkerchief, tossing it on the table and letting the grimoire disappear.

‘I hope I was successful in easing your worries. Now, where were we?’ he murmured, round, pretty eyes heavy-lidded, lust-laden as they scanned your face. You felt as though you were in the lion’s den for the first time, or more fittingly, a small butterfly trapped in a spider web. Just waiting to be devoured.

He cupped your jaw, stroking your cheek with the pad of his thumb, leisurely taking his time in savouring you. Part of you wished he would just get it over and done with, another part of you, a shameful one, burnt at every action he took, at his stifling seduction. You might as well enjoy it and hope he was good at the very least, right? No one could blame you for it. Your survival was at stake, after all.

You stopped thinking altogether when his lips grazed your jaw, your cheek, the corner of your lips. He was slow and sensual in all of his movements, but there was something that slipped through the façade, something possessive about the way his fingers curled around your throat, trapping you in place as his lips pressed against yours.

They were soft. Soft and smooth, warm and demanding. You could not deny the pull they had. You were coaxed into seeking them out whenever he pulled away slightly, pressing them against you again, more and more passionately each time, almost manipulating you into wanting him to get rougher.

And he did. His teeth sank into the pliant flesh of your bottom lip, pulling lightly, and his tongue was quick to soothe the sting, taking advantage of your little gasp to slip in your mouth and lay siege on your tongue. It was all akin to a game of pull and push with him. He wheedled you into letting go more and more with each time he gave you something only to take it away and revel in how you sought it again. Just as he had presented the illusion of you wanting this from him, he was now making you act on it as though you had always desired nothing more.

Until your fingers were tangled in his soft raven hair, pulling lightly at it, and you were seeking his soft lips and their taste reminiscent of rich red wine to suck on his bottom lip languidly. Until his teeth nipping at your bottom lip had you mewl in his mouth.

‘Eager, are we? How sweet’ he breathed, and you felt the trap snap, the mechanism trapping you like a helpless doe caught by pincers. All of his teasing had led to this, to making you see that you wanted him, wanted this to happen. And as much as you could deny it, your actions spoke loudly, and your body’s reaction did too. The knowledge that you were already turned on and that if he decided to reach between your thighs he would see just how responsive you were to him made the mortification burn in your chest.

You had wanted to keep your dignity and show your distaste for what was happening, but he had managed to reduce you to a docile doll just by kissing your lips. And his sardonic smile and eyes told you that you were right in that assumption.

And before you could hope to collect yourself, his mouth was on your throat, hungry but still slow, leaving you wanting more. He licked a long stripe along your pulse, making it shoot up as his fingers curled around the roots of your hair and pulled, exposing your vulnerable neck to him. You could not restrain the whimper that escaped you as he kissed and started sucking a sensitive spot between your neck and your shoulder, sure to leave a mark to remind you of what you had done, of your flexible morals, as he’d called them.

His fingers clutched your side, wandered down to your hip and the swell of your ass, grazed your thigh and snaked under your skirt to grope at the plump flesh of your backside. You were too lost in the pleasure of his mouth and tongue on your throat to truly consider your situation and who it was that was touching you so possessively, so greedily. If anything, it only stoked the fire within you.

‘Good girl’ he crooned, sending a jolt to your clit with the dirty praise. You squirmed on his lap, eliciting a soft chuckle from him and a graze of his thumb over your stiff nipple. You were wearing a simple satin shirt with a flimsy bralette, and the friction of the material was torturous against your nipples.

Chrollo pulled the shirt out of your skirt, making quick work of the buttons with one hand whilst the other was still kneading your ass and his mouth was still on your throat. He slipped the garment off you, pulling away to observe you. You gulped, averting your eyes at the sight of his hungry stare, quivering as his fingers ghosted your sternum, your ribcage, the swell of your breasts.

‘You are so beautiful, darling’ he murmured, his lips softly pressing against your collarbone, his fingers deftly lowering the straps of your bralette and unhooking it. He tossed it aside, groaning softly as his hand cupped your breast, kneading it in his fingers, pinching your nipple and rolling it between thumb and index finger.

You tried to stifle a moan, to which he seemed to take offense, because he stopped and bit down hard on your shoulder, making you whine in the process.

‘I want to hear you. The more you stifle your voice, the longer I will tease you. Understood?’ he said, and you meekly nodded, only to speak up when he gave you a meaningful glance.

‘Yes’ you hissed, and he seemed pleased, because he hummed and made you arch your back so that his tongue could lick your stiff nipple and flick it. You were careful not to stifle the small whine that left your lips, and he rewarded you by sucking your nipple in his mouth, scraping it with his teeth and making you cling onto his shoulders.

He bunched up your skirt up to your waist, leaving you exposed as he trailed his fingers to your inner thighs, in a silent request to spread your legs. You were not wholly aware of how swiftly you complied, you only knew that when he first cupped you through your panties, your eyelids fluttered and a soft moan poured out of you.

‘You are soaked for me, pet. Your morals do not seem to extend to your body. Try as you might, you want this, and you cannot lie to me’ he purred, dragging his fingers and pressing against your clit, holding you still when you squirmed away from his touch. You let out a loud moan, your hips jerking. He pulled your panties to the side, rubbing your clit and dipping two fingers inside you, curling them, making your head drop on his shoulder as you moaned against his neck, enveloped by the scent of his cologne.

‘That’s it. That’s my good girl. If I knew how much you liked being fingered on my lap, I would have done this much sooner. No matter. I’ll make it up to you, darling’ he breathed, voice slightly strained as though he was holding back something much more primal from taking over, but you were too dazed to take much notice of all the filth he was spewing and how he sought to humiliate you further, because his touch admittedly felt like heaven. His willowy fingers inside you kept pressing against all the right places, and you could not help but clench around them, your hips twitching into his hand every time his palm rubbed against your sensitive clit.

You were lost in the motion of his fingers as you rutted against his hand, shamelessly chasing your own high as he continued to praise you and kiss you, rewarding every sound you made with a curl of his fingers that had you melting in his arms. Until you could not take it anymore.

‘Can’t- ‘m close’ you huffed out, breathing erratic, chest heaving as his fingers pumped inside you, and he hummed, licking your neck and sucking on it again.

‘Cum for me, pet’ he urged, and your eyes scrunched up, a lewd moan ripping through you as you tensed up on his thigh, sound fading away as you came undone.

You slumped on him, breathing heavily, your cunt throbbing around his fingers as he lazily fucked you through your aftershocks, your hair clinging to the back of your neck from the light sheen of sweat that had formed there.

‘Suck’ you heard, and dazed as you were, you obediently opened your mouth when he presented his fingers, sucking and licking the pads of his fingers, tasting yourself. You had to cling to him as he stood up and walked over to the bed, lowering you on it and observing you as he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off.

There was no denying it, he was attractive. Lean but toned, with graceful abs adorning his flat stomach, jutting collarbones and well-defined biceps; with the way the candlelight danced on his pale skin, making it glow with soft orange hues, he truly looked like he might be a fantasy of sorts.

You supposed he looked like a fallen angel, as his name suggested. Like the Alexandre Cabanel painting of the fallen angel, dangerous but so tempting. It was unfair that he should also be able to make you come undone so easily, when you had vowed to not give him the satisfaction.

He smirked at you, undoing his belt, slipping it through the hooks, catching you staring first at the clear dampness on his thigh, then at the evident bulge of his erection.

You supposed he would fuck you now. If you were being honest, you had thought he wouldn’t have taken such interest in your pleasure, but now, it seemed only fitting: it was all to aid his game, to stroke his ego in humiliating you by showing you how you could not abide by your morals, how you’d moaned and whined to be touched by those blood-stained hands.

Instead, he kept his trousers on, only going so far as to unbutton them to give himself more space. He seemed... quite gifted in that area too, you thought with a grimace. Was there anything that did not favour him? It seemed that fortune graced the wicked in that nonsensical world, because he had it all.

He caged you underneath him, his hair tickling your face as he drew you into a heated kiss, his hands roving down your body, fingertips digging into your hips, tongue pressing against yours.

He was quick to unzip your skirt and slide it off you along with your panties, leaving you completely exposed whilst he still retained his power by not undressing completely.

‘You were so precious squirming on my lap, so good for me. You deserve a reward’ he crooned against your ear in that soft, melodious voice of his, making you swallow heavily as you wondered what he might do to you now.

He did not leave you guessing for long. His mouth traced your collarbone, his head lowering as he licked your sternum and left a dark lovebite above your nipple, another reminder that would bring you back to this room, to what he was doing to you for the following week. He seemed intent on marking you whenever he could, and until he had littered your chest with purple brushstrokes, until you were but a moaning mess, he refused to move on, no matter how much you tried to squirm away and whimper at some of the harshest ones on your ribcage.

He continued to kiss down your stomach, massaging your thighs, cupping your ass and lowering his head to kiss your thighs. You were rendered breathless and unable to stop thrashing and moaning as he sucked another lovebite on your inner thigh, keeping you pinned down and at his mercy. You just wanted him to bury his head between your thighs, you were close, close to begging for it, were it not for your pride. Were it not for who he was.

Fortunately, you did not need to stoop that low. His tongue flattened and dragged up your cunt, tensing and flicking your clit from underneath as he got to the top, tearing a breathless moan from you.

‘You taste so sweet’ he huffed out against your skin, blowing cold air on your clit and making you whine and scoot away. He dragged you back, a wicked light in his stormy eyes as he glanced at you and licked your clit, rolling it on his tongue.

‘F-fuck’ you breathed, your hands shooting to his hair, pulling lightly, trying to ground yourself as he continued to toy with your clit, sucking it and licking it fervently. You could not hold yourself. If he was amazing with his fingers, he was incredible with his tongue. Judging by how he seemed to have a way with words, you should not have been surprised that he was so maddeningly good at pleasuring with his tongue. It was making you lose your mind.

Even if you had tried, you would not have been able to restrain the need to keen, whine and moan every time he sucked your clit, dipped his tongue inside you or drew figures around your clit.

He was insatiable as he flung your thighs on his shoulders, seemingly unbothered with the way you trapped his head and rutted against his face. In fact, he seemed thrilled to follow the movement of your hips, giving you more and more until you were babbling and keening incoherently, unable to even speak.

‘Fuck- Ch- Chrollo...’ you whined longingly, unable to realise your slip of moaning his name in the throes of pleasure. But he heard you loud and clear, because he groaned, and his name on your lips only seemed to spur him on. In a few seconds, he was sucking on your clit, giving you more pleasure than you’d ever thought was even possible, until the torturous knot in your stomach snapped and released and you came with a cry, tears prickling the corners of your eyes, your hair tousled and messy on the pillow, your muscles tensing, toes curling and fingers clawing at the sheets.

You kept your eyes closed for a while, easing into your breathing, feeling as though your body had completely melted, feeling as though you couldn’t even move.

‘You can still take my cock, can’t you, darling? After all, I have made you feel so good. It’s only fair. Do not worry, you will not mind. You seem to love being fucked by the one you spoke of with such revulsion. It’s quite endearing, watching you struggle with your morals’ he crooned, and you opened your eyes, watching him stroke his cock a few times. It was quite long and fairly thick, slightly tilted upwards.

You were too fucked out to consider his taunting, but you knew he was right. Both mindsets could not peacefully coexist in your mind: how could you be so willing and find so much pleasure in someone like him? How could you hate him and love what he was doing to you? It might have been an involuntary physical reaction, but you should have had more resolve, more restraint. Otherwise, what did that say about you?

Chrollo lined himself between your legs, rubbing his cock along your labia, on your clit, instantly making those thoughts fade in the haze of pleasure as you let out a soft sigh and automatically tried to hook your legs around his slender hips.

He gripped your thigh, pushing the tip of his cock inside you, easily slipping inside inch by inch with how shamefully wet you were, and yet, you already felt so full, like he was stretching you to the limit. You clawed at his back, raking your nails across his shoulder blades, gasping and whimpering along with his soft moan.

‘Fuck. So tight... so wet. Such a perfect little cunt’ he huffed out, his lips parting in pleasure, dark eyebrows furrowing. You tried to steady your breathing, tried to relax your muscles to accommodate his size, clung to his shoulders for support.

He wiped a tear from the corner of your eye, continuing to push inside you, albeit slowly, until he was buried to the hilt. You clenched around him, and the soft groan he let out made your stomach drop with a surge of pleasure. He bottomed out and slammed back in, tearing a broken moan from you as he set a ruthless pace, his eyes darkening with lust and the slip of his mask, hunger palpable in his every movement and the way he sought to fully claim you.

He lifted your legs higher up around his waist, his fingers tightening around your throat, not pressing on the front, leaving you room to breathe but making you even more dizzy than you already were.

His pelvis kept slapping against your clit, drawing out whines and pants from you, and with every thrust, he seemed to grow more accustomed to where you liked to be touched, because as soon as his cock pressed against your g-spot, your back arched and your head thrashed from side to side, a lewd moan echoing in the room as you clamped around him.

‘There, huh? Let me do it again, darling’ he breathed, one hand lifting both your legs and bending them at the knees, letting you rest them against his chest as he rammed into you, hitting the same spot again and again, relentlessly building the pressure inside you, making you see stars.

‘Mhh- too much... Chrollo’ you whined, trapped underneath him, feeling as though you might implode if he didn’t stop- or if he stopped, for what it was worth.

‘Moan my name again, pet. Let me hear how filthy it sounds on your lips’ he grunted, the sound of skin slapping against skin both enticing and dirty as he continued to fuck you into the mattress.

When you didn’t reply, suddenly aware of how you were moaning his name, reinforcing how you knew- wanted it to be him to fuck you at that moment, he let out a breathless laugh.

‘Looks as though you might need some convincing’ he said, slowing down and eventually slipping out of you, letting your legs down. You whimpered, desire clawing at your gut, your cunt clenching around nothing as you opened your bleary eyes and set them on him. He gave you a smirk, flipping you on your stomach and lifting your hips, spreading your knees with his and pushing on your lower back to make you arch into him. You lifted yourself on your elbows and heard his tongue click against his teeth condescendingly before he pushed your head against the mattress and smacked your ass with a resounding slap.

You yelped, biting down on your lower lip, mortification once again mingling with pleasure as he pushed his cock back inside you, letting out a soft groan.

‘Use your hands one more time and I will tie them up behind your back. It will feel better like this. For me- and for you’ he said, fisting your hair and gripping your hip, starting to pound into you from behind once again.

It did feel better like this. Deeper. Unbearable. He stimulated your clit with every thrust, the tip of his cock kept pressing against your cervix, and you did not know if you could bear it much longer.

You found the bridge of your nose damp with tears, and struggled to recognise your own voice in the filthy moans you were letting out. It was humiliating and it was impossibly pleasurable, and the mix was somewhat addicting, tainting. It was ruining every shred of sanity left in your brain.

Until he got what he wanted. Because it seemed as though he always did. He could steal anything, including his name from your lips said with such want and bliss that had you not been fucked stupid, you would have wanted to die.

‘Ahh- Chr- Chrollo! Fuck. Gonna cum’ you screamed, sobbing, clenching around him, getting even closer to a mind-shattering orgasm with every moan and groan he graced you with.

‘Good girl. My girl. Mine. You love this, mh? Tell me how much you love this. Tell me how badly you want to cum all over my cock’ he urged, voice possessive and low, and you could not stop yourself, could not do anything but acquiesce, because you needed- needed to cum.

‘Yes! Please. Please let me cum. Please. Need it so bad’ you whined, sobbed even, desperate for reprieve, hoping he would have mercy on you, hoping he would let you finish. His fingers reached under you to rub at your clit, and you could hardly contain a sob of wild pleasure and the jolt of your hips.

‘Since you asked so nicely. Go on, pet, cum for me’ he huffed out, still thrusting inside you at that unrelenting pace, and as though he had power over your own body, you felt the release hit you like a wave of overwhelming pleasure that made your vision white and your ears fill with static.

He was quick to cum with a breathy moan as you squeezed his cock through your orgasm, holding you tightly as he spilled inside you. He continued to push in and out slowly, until you stopped throbbing and squeezing around him.

‘Fuck’ he breathed, letting you collapse on the bed and doing the same next to you. You both stayed silent for a minute or two, catching your breath, feeling the cool air on your feverish skin.

‘Let me clean you up, darling’ he said, and you didn’t have the strength to object as he got up and walked away, the sound of his footsteps quiet as you kept your eyes closed until he came back with a glass of water and a wet towel, his trousers back on, but still shirtless. He wiped your inner thighs gently, with more care than you wanted to admit someone like him could be capable of, and carefully lifted you up so you could drink the water he’d brought you.

You took small gulps, finding it felt amazing trickling down your dry, raw throat after all that crying and screaming. He only put the glass on the nightstand when you had finished it all.

‘Thanks’ you said absent-mindedly, your mind slowly coming back to you in coherent thoughts as you attempted to cover yourself with the duvet. He gave you a languid smile, tucking your hair away from your face and lying next to you.

But it was finally over now. You could leave. Your deal had revealed itself to be better than you wanted to admit, but now, you were finally free. You could put this all behind you.

You tried to get up and gather your clothes, but your body felt like a ragdoll. He had really done a number on you.

‘Careful, dearest. You should wait a little’ he said, smiling at you, his eyes soft, his expression unreadable. You let out a shuddering breath.

‘Want to get... my clothes, and leave’ you said, getting up and hastily putting on your clothes, feeling a little dizzy. You walked back towards the bed, retrieving your underwear and your skirt, putting them on, almost falling were it not for his arms catching you and holding you still.

You felt weird. It had surely been intense, but so intense that your vision was slowly darkening around the edges and your arms and legs felt as heavy as lead?

He pulled you on his lap, and you protested weakly when he started to stroke your hair and kissed your forehead.

‘No- you said I would be free after this. Let me leave’ you slurred, and he shushed you, tenderly stroking your back in soothing gestures.

‘Oh, darling, I never said you would be free’ he said softly, still holding you. You blinked, confused, his face blurry as you stared at him.

‘You said- I’d be leaving this place- with my power... un...scathed within... a day. What d’you do to me?’ your words were garbled together, slurred like you were drunk. And you felt so heavy and tired.

‘I put a few sleeping pills in the water I gave you. Nothing that will harm you, so don’t worry your pretty little head. I don’t need to steal your power if I keep you. You will leave unscathed, but I never said you would leave alone. You should really pay more attention to the words of a vow, my love’ he said, stroking your hair, his soft voice lulling you into sleep despite how horrified you were in your mind. He had tricked you. Had no plans of freeing you. You hadn’t considered he might keep you. Hadn’t considered the depth of his obsession with you. Hadn’t considered there was more than one reason why he had kept you captive.

‘I cannot be parted from you, my love. Your place is by my side. Now close your eyes. Sleep. We have a long journey ahead of us’ he said gently, soothingly. And you could not help but do as he said, your eyelids growing heavier and heavier, your thoughts muddying and fading away along with your consciousness.

Part II here

Part III here

[transmutationisms]

serious question but do you personally believe there is a way to approach psychiatry in a way that uplifts and upholds patient autonomy and wellness or is the entire trade essentially fucked haha. Btw this is an ask coming from a 3rd year med student—with a background of severe mental illness—who is considering a residency in psychiatry after receiving life-saving care in high school pertaining to said conditions. (I have peers who have been involuntarily hospitalized and treated horribly in psych wards, with approaches i patently disagree with, but was lucky not to experience. I don’t like modern american medicine’s approach to mental illness; “throw pills” at it to “make it go away” ie. a problem of overprescribing, inadequate and non-holistic approach to mental health, and i feel a lot of that can be attributed to the capitalistic framework. I also def agree with you that so much of what can be considered normal human responses to traumatic events/normal human suffering can be unnecessarily pathologized—a great example being the whole “chemical imbalances in the brain is the ONLY reason why im like this” argument that ive unfortunately fallen hard for when i was younger and am still currently dismantling within myself…and like dont even get me started on this field’s history of demonizing POC, women, LGBT, etc). Like i deeply love my psych rotations so far, and i utterly feel in my gut that this is the manner in which i would like to help people—a lot of whom are just like me—but im wondering if there is a way to reconcile these aspects in a way that one can feel morally okay participating within such an imperfect system, in ur opinion… ngghhhhhh i just want to be a good doctor to my patients…

(ps i love all ur writing and analysis on succession!! big fan mwah <333)

i don't mean to sound unduly pissy at you, specifically, but i do have to say: every single time i've talked about antipsych or broader criticism of medicine on this website, i immediately get a wave of responses like this, from doctors/nurses/psychs/students of the above, asking me to, like, reassure them that they're not doing something immoral or un-communist or whatever by having or pursuing these jobs. and it's honestly frustrating. why is it that these conversations get re-framed around this particular line of inquiry and medical ego-soothing? why is it that when i say "the medical encounter is not structured to protect patient autonomy or well-being," so many people hear something more along the lines of "doctors are mean and i wish they were nicer"? why is it that it's impossible to discuss the philosophical and structural violence of academic and clinical medicine without it becoming a referendum on the individual morality of doctors?

i'm choosing to read you in good faith because i think it's possible to re-re-frame this line of questioning to demonstrate to you the sorts of critiques and inquiries i find more interesting and more conducive to patient autonomy and liberation. so, let me pick apart a few lines of this ask.

"is the entire trade essentially fucked?"

if you're thinking of trying to 'reform' the project of medical psychology within existing infrastructures and institutions, then yeah, it's fucked. if you're still assuming that affective distress can only be 'treated' within this medical apparatus (despite, again, no psychiatric dx satisfying any pathologist's understanding of a 'disease' ie an aberration from 'normal' physiological functioning) then you're not challenging the things that actually make psychiatry violent. you're simply fantasising about making the violence nicer.

"I don’t like modern american medicine’s approach to mental illness; “throw pills” at it to “make it go away” ie. a problem of overprescribing, inadequate and non-holistic approach to mental health, and i feel a lot of that can be attributed to the capitalistic framework."

i hate when i talk about psychotropic drugs being marketed to patients using lies like the chemical imbalance myth, and then pushed on patients—including through outright force—by psychiatrists, and the discussion gets re-framed as one about 'overprescribing'. my problem is not with people taking drugs. i am, in fact, so pro-drugs that i think even the ones administered in a clinical setting sometimes have value. my issue is with, again, the provision of misleading or outright false information, the use of force and coercion to put patients on such drugs in order to force social conformity and employability, and the general model of medicine and medical psychology that assumes patients ought to be passive recipients of medical enlightenment rather than active participants in their own treatment who are given the agency to decide when and how to engage with any form of curative or meliorative intervention.

'holistic' medicine and psychiatry do not solve this problem! they are not a paradigm shift because they continue to locate expertise and epistemological authority with the credentialed physician, and to position patients as too sick, stupid, or helpless to do anything but receive and comply with the medical interventions. there are certainly psychotropic drugs that are demonstrably more harmful than others (antipsychotics, for example), and some that are demonstrably prescribed to patients who do not benefit from them and are even harmed by them. conversely, there are certainly forms of intervention besides pharmaceuticals that people may find helpful. but my general critique here is aimed less at haggling over specific methods of intervention, and more at the ideological and philosophical tenets of medicine that cause any interventions to be imposed by force or coercion on patients, then framed as being 'for their own good'. were suffering people given the information and autonomy to actually choose whether and how to engage in any kind of intervention, some might still choose drugs! my position here is not one of moralising drugs, but making the act of taking them one that is freely chosen and available as an option without relying on physician determination of a patient's interests over their own assessment of their needs and wants.

"so much of what can be considered normal human responses to traumatic events/normal human suffering can be unnecessarily pathologized"

true, but don't misunderstand me as saying that drugs or any other form of intervention should be forcibly withheld from those who do want them and are made fully aware of what risks and harms seeking them could entail. again, this would still be an authoritarian model; my critique is aimed at increasing patient autonomy, not at creating equally authoritarian and empowered doctors who just have slightly different treatment philosophies.

"dont even get me started on this field’s history of demonizing POC, women, LGBT, etc"

ok, framing this as "demonisation" tells me that you're not understanding that, again, this is a systemic and structural critique. it is certainly true that a great many doctors currently are, and have historically have been, outright racist, trans/misogynist, ableist, and so on. framing this as a problem of a well-intentioned discipline being corrupted by some assholes is getting it backwards. medicine attracts prejudiced people, not to mention strengthens and promotes these prejudices in its entire training and practice infrastructures, because of its underlying philosophical orientation toward enforcing 'normality' as defined by 18th-century statistics and 19th-century human sciences that explicitly place white, cis, able-bodied european men as the normal ideal that everyone else is inferior to or failing to live up to. doctors who really nicely tell you that you're too fat are still using bmi charts that come from the statistical anthropometry of adolphe quételet and the flawed actuarial calculations of metlife insurance. doctors who really nicely deny you access to transition surgery are still operating under a paradigm that gives the practitioner authority over expressions and embodiments of gender. the issue isn't 'demonisation', it's that medicine and psychiatry explicitly attempt to render judgments about who and what is 'normal' and therefore socially 'healthy', and enforce those standards on patients. this is not a promotion of patient well-being, but of social conformity.

"i deeply love my psych rotations so far, and i utterly feel in my gut that this is the manner in which i would like to help people"

let me ask you a few questions. you say that you like your psych rotations... but how do your patients feel about them? is their autonomy protected? are they in treatment by free choice, and free to leave any time they wish? are they treated as human beings with full self-determination? if you witnessed a situation in which a patient was coerced or forced into a certain treatment, or in which you were not sure whether they were consenting with full knowledge or freedom, would you feel empowered to intervene? or would doing so threaten your career by exposing you to anger and retaliation from your higher-ups? what higher-ups will you be exposed to as a resident, and then as a practicing physician? could you practice in a way that committed fully, 100%, to patient autonomy if you were working at someone else's practice, or in a hospital or clinic? could you, according to current medical guidelines, even if you had your own practice?

when you say "this is the manner in which i would like to help people", what do you mean by "this"? can you define your philosophy of treatment, and the relationship and power dynamic you want to have with any future patients? is it one in which you hold authority over them and see yourself as determining what's in their 'best interests', even over their own expressed wishes? have you connected with patient advocates, psych survivors (other than your friends), and radical psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists who may espouse heterodox treatment philosophies that you could consider? do you think such philosophies are sufficient for protecting patient autonomy and well-being, or are they still models that position the physician's judgment and authority over that of the patient?

"im wondering if there is a way to reconcile these aspects in a way that one can feel morally okay participating within such an imperfect system"

and here is the crux of the problem with this entire ask. you are wondering how to sleep at night, if you are participating in a career you find morally distasteful. where, though, do your patients enter into that equation? do you worry about how they sleep at night, after having interacted with a system of social violence that may very well have traumatised them under the guise of providing help? why does your own guilty conscience worry you more than violations of your patients' bodies, minds, and basic self-determination?

i can't tell you whether your career path is morally acceptable to you. i don't think this type of guilt or self-flagellation is fruitful and i don't think it helps protect patients. i don't, frankly, have a handy roadmap sitting around for creating a new system of medicine and health care that rests on patient autonomy. affective distress is real, and is not something we should have to bear alone or with the risk of having violence inflicted upon us. what you need to ask yourself is: how does the medical model and establishment serve people experiencing such distress? how does it perpetuate violence against them? and how do you see yourself countering, or perpetuating, such violence as someone operating within this discipline? what would it mean to be a 'good' actor within a violent system, if you do indeed believe that such a thing is ontologically possible?

[starleska]

Dollface - the Toymaker x Real Toymaker!Reader

As a toymaker, you are delighted when you stumble across MR EMPORIUM'S TOYSHOP. But when you meet its eccentric owner - one eponymous 'Toymaker' - you enter into an impossible game with higher stakes than you ever imagined…with the risk of your deepest fantasy coming true. Rating: Mature. Tags: Dollification; Toyification; Truth or Dare; Reality-Bending; Humiliation; Psychological Torture; Fluff; Teasing; Touching; Forced Dancing; Mentions of Neglect; Cosmic Horror; Horrible Fake German. Reader is presumed female, but has a complicated relationship with gender and enjoys feminine terms of endearment. requested by the lovely @chronicbeans!! whilst this was originally meant to be a few-paragraphs long headcanons bit...but then it sprawled into a 13,000 word fanfic. my apologies to yourself, and to any German speakers in the audience 🙈💖 you can also read this on AO3. i hope you enjoy!

Toys are your life.

For as long as you can remember you have been fascinated by all manner of toys: everything from teddy bears to zoetropes; spinning tops to yo-yos. As a child you weren’t just interested in playing with toys—you wanted to reach inside of them, pick them apart, and understand every little detail about how they worked. Much to the chagrin of your parents, you spent more time trying to put your toys back together than you did actually playing with them. 

But all of your alternative playtime paid off. Now, as an adult, you run a modest yet successful local toymaking business, with your own vendor stall at the market and a popular online shop. Much of your work is custom, using vintage materials to replicate toys of the past, and you occasionally trade and sell real old toys too. As a result, you have something of a monopoly on the local toy scene, and feel you know every single toymaker and toy-collecting enthusiast in a fifty mile radius.

That’s why it’s a real shock when you stumble across MR EMPORIUM’S TOYSHOP late one night. 

The storefront is a gorgeous assault to the senses. Parked in the middle of the cold, grey street, the toyshop beams out crimson and gold onto the snow drifts, with all manner of classic toys peeking out at you through the windows. You are delighted to see an assortment of downy plush bears and hand-painted model motor cars crowding the shelves: so many it feels like the toyshop itself might burst at the seams. Your giddiness only increases as you get closer to the window. You can make out all sorts of fun, bright shapes within: countless colourful toys beckoning you and begging to be taken home. 

Yet it isn’t these treasures which catch your eye the most. Right at the back of the shop, near the counter, you spy a shelf lined with dolls. They are beautiful even at a distance: likely from the early 20th century, masterfully painted and wearing a fine rainbow of little dresses. Even from your vantage point you can see the impeccable craftsmanship. There’s immense detail in their delicate hands, and if you’re not mistaken, each doll has a crop of real human hair.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is the eyes. Their glass sheen looks so sad and wistful…far more emotion than a doll should be able to communicate.

If you didn’t know any better, you would believe the dolls were alive.

Oh, I shouldn’t , you tell yourself. I’m much too old now to be playing with dolls…and I keep all my old ones locked up anyway. I shouldn’t deprive some kid of a toy. This is a deeply silly excuse, and a hypocritical one. The vast majority of your clientele are adults, as are the brilliant toymakers you’re proud to call your friends. This is the perpetual double-standard you constantly believe and are always trying to rally against: that you are uniquely strange, and deserve to be ridiculed for your interests. 

The curious thing is that this idea doesn’t apply to toys more broadly…only to dolls. You have made countless dolls throughout your career, and yet owning dolls and enjoying them is something you’ve long nursed a hang-up over. But that is a can of worms you refuse to open up today. No , you decide, today I am going to be a normal adult who is confident about their interests and doesn’t feel an ounce of shame! I am going to go into this toyshop and look at those dolls, and that’s that! With your mind made up, you shift your backpack onto your shoulder, take a deep breath, and push through the toyshop’s door. 

The door slams shut behind you with the tinkle of a bell. You are immediately enveloped in warmth, and the delicious scent of varnished wood enrobes you like a fine dress. You can’t help but close your eyes and inhale: somehow, the toyshop smells just like your childhood.

“Hallo, meine kleine Mädchen! Komm in, komm in, be ge-removings yourselves from dee kalt! It is ein horrid evenings, is it not?”

You open your eyes in surprise, and see an older, greyish-blond-haired man leaning against the counter. He’s dressed in a most whimsical fashion, wearing a soft white work shirt coupled with a maroon waistcoat, and a brown apron stuffed with woodworking tools. A spotted ascot around his neck and a pair of pince-nez balanced at the end of his nose complete the look.

The man smiles at you like he’s known you all his life. You feel like you’ve been transported to another time.

“It is,” you agree, as you shake the snow drifts from your boots. “So sorry for dropping in so late—I’m surprised you’re still open.”

“Ah, but I am always having times for dee beautiful Fräulein,” says the man with a coy wink. “But vot is it zat is ge-bringings you here?”

You have to stifle a giggle. You know enough of the language to know the man’s German is terribly off, and his accent is borderline offensive. However, you also know that folks in the toymaking community tend to be eccentric, and you can forgive a corny, theatrical accent for the wonderful atmosphere of this shop. Who are you to judge if he wants to LARP as a Bavarian thespian?

Before you can reply, the strange man is suddenly beside you…although you don’t recall seeing him move. He has also removed his pince-nez. You blink, a little taken aback. How did he move so quickly? You wonder if you’ve eaten enough that day.

“I’m…a toymaker,” you say, trying not to sound freaked out. “I’ve never seen your shop before, and I thought I knew everyone in town who makes toys. What’s your name?”

The man’s eyes are blue, you notice—terribly blue, and sparkling in the soft light with unspoken mischief. “You are beings ein toymaker? Vy, zat is a coincidence…” He taps the side of his nose. “Many peoples ge-calls me by many names. But zey most oftens call me the Toymaker, und nothing else. It be gettings dee point across, nein? Und was ist your name?”

You tell him, and the Toymaker’s mouth splits open in a wide grin.  

“Das ist ein schöner name!” he says enthusiastically. “Truly, a magnifizent fit. It is not often zat I am gettings other toymakers in mein shop…I vonder, vot does your eye ge-fallen upon? Could it be mein cuddly collection of teddies? Oh, ja, I sees you are ge-needings ein soft companion for dese frosty nights. Or could it be mein train? Choo-choo! it goes, round and round all dee livelong day! I am ge-havings many customers mit ein eye for dee train.”

The Toymaker’s voice is smooth as butter, rich and inviting, and each word he speaks seems to add a little more colour to his delightful environment. You look around in awe at all of the toys, unable to comprehend the sheer scale of the place. Just moments ago the shop seemed so small, with the abundance of toys seriously crammed in on the shelves, but now it looks impossibly vast: a veritable sea of playful delights. The little choo-choo train in question chugs along on its rails and moves past the doll shelf, drawing your eye back to their pretty little figures.

“Ah, dee Katze hast gotten your tongue,” says the Toymaker. He gestures to the dolls, and the gold ring on his right pinkie finger catches the light. “I too ams often becomings stricken by dee beauty of mein dollen…zey took me many nights to make, ja. Oh, but ge-look! Eins ist out of place. Zose fingers are so fiddly! Und dee hair…zo many eveninks ge-spended brushing out zeir tiny curls."

You watch as the Toymaker reaches up and begins deftly rearranging the dolls. His fingers are long and nimble, and they move with such care and attention, placing each doll’s tiny hands neatly in their laps and smoothing down their dresses. When you’re a toymaker, you grow to appreciate a pair of well-practised hands, and there’s something undeniably… charming , about this Toymaker and his cartoonish whimsy. It’s silly, but you feel a little heat rising in your cheeks. The attention he’s paying to such small, delicate objects…

…well, it’s only natural that your mind should wander to more practical applications of such hands.

“The dolls are gorgeous,” you say. “Do you offer any toymaking classes? The dolls I make have a bit more of a modern touch.”

That’s when the Toymaker laughs, and it is a strange laugh: it tinkles out of his mouth like a jingle, in a musical, ‘Ha ha ha HA ha ha ha!’

“Oh, mein dollen are sehr modern…moreso zan you sink,” says the Toymaker. He gives you another wink, as it seems he likes to give them out for free.

That’s when you feel the little clench in your chest. Oh dear, he really is quite handsome. This wouldn’t be the first time you’d caught feelings for a quirky, attractive stranger, and they were often not as well-dressed as the Toymaker. You have a tendency to get caught up in the realms of imagination, and have thought up more than a few daring trysts with pretty-faced people with whom you’d only exchanged a couple of words. You ought to grab a doll, leave, and have a quiet little panic attack about this interaction at home.

You force your eyes away from the handsome man and back to the shelf.

That’s when you spot her.

Somehow, a doll had escaped your notice. Right in the middle of her sad-looking rainbow sisters is another doll, simply and prettily done up in a powder-blue be-ribboned frock. Unlike the other dolls, this one is smiling in a dimpled way, and her eyes sparkle with a magical sheen not unlike that of the Toymaker’s. You note with some amusement that the doll has the same eye colour as you—hair colour, too. This isn’t strange on a doll, but it gives you the same jolt of satisfaction and déjá vu you get when meeting someone who shares your name.

“Ah,” says the Toymaker (now on your other side). “Dee dollen…zey speak to you, ja? Zey are ge-having ein chitter-chatter, all high up on dee shelf. Vot fun games zey have ven I ge-leaves the shoppen!”

Dollen isn’t even the German word for dolls, you know—it’s Puppen. But you get the sense that the Toymaker’s German accent is less an earnest recreation (and it’s certainly not his natural accent), but a pantomime version intended to amuse and entertain.

“I’m sure they do,” you say, but you’re distracted from the Toymaker’s little act. The longer you look at the doll, the stranger you feel.

You move closer to the shelf to get a better look, and are startled by what you discover.

It isn’t just that the doll on the shelf has similar hair and eyes to you: they’re both the exact same shade, even down to the imperfect flecks in your irises. 

You study the doll intently for a moment, blink, and— what? The doll’s hair is now the same length as yours. Was it always? No, you could have sworn just a moment ago it was not just a completely different length, but style.

You rise up on your tiptoes to get a better look at the doll, and are baffled by what you see. It’s as if detail is stacking on the doll right before your eyes, the way some video game maps load in piece-by-piece. You watch as texture is added to her hair, and light pools in her eyes. This level of craftsmanship is uncanny; it’s as if the Toymaker went out of their way to create a doll which resembles you.

“How did you do that?” You turn to the Toymaker, confused. “Did you know I was coming here?"

The Toymaker’s mouth contorts into an offended pout. “Now, you ge-vounds me. It is ein special privilege, having another Spielzeugmacher in mein shop. Tell me, vot do you sink of her hair? Es ist pretty, ja?”

“But that doll looks exactly like me,” you say.

You can feel your heart hammering in your chest. Suddenly the warm, cosy atmosphere of the toyshop feels more claustrophobic and oppressive. The Toymaker looks unbothered; he rests his chin on his hand and contemplates the shelf. 

“Zere ist ein…certain resemblance,” says the Toymaker, with an unusual, almost French affectation on the last word. “But you are just ge-havings, as zey say, ‘von of zose faces’. Ja, das ist richtig: ein dollface. Puppengesicht. All smooth und sveet. Vy, vot a lucky lady you are! She simply must be goings home vith you.”

You’re scrambling to work out what kind of practical joke this is, and how the Toymaker was pulling it off. You’d met a few eccentric toymakers with God complexes before, as they tend to go hand-in-hand: you’d briefly dated one who designed escape rooms in his spare time. But this is on another level…creating a doll which can be imperceptibly altered to resemble a person in real-time? You’d never heard of such a thing, and you can’t think of a non-creepy reason why someone would go to the trouble of making one.

Oh, hang on a minute, you think. This guy might just be a genius. “This is a marketing trick, isn’t it?”

You pull away from the Toymaker and lean against his counter, feeling terribly smug for having figured it out.

The Toymaker puts his head on one side, quizzical. Playing dumb, you think.

“I am not ge-followings you,” the Toymaker says. 

“You make dolls of the people you see ahead of time,” you explain. “People you know who will come in here at some point…collectors, other toymakers. Then you wait and put them on the shelf when they come in, maybe behind some hidden panel so you can spin them around when they get close. Then when they come in, it’s like they’ve found the perfect toy!” 

You’re so proud of yourself for having cracked the case, you want to pump your fist in the air. For a moment, you envision yourself wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a pipe. Go me! But your victory is short-lived. During your diatribe, the Toymaker’s bright, childish grin had frozen on his face, and remained in place even during your brief mental celebration. But now the smile slowly slips like a mask peeling away from too-tight skin. In its place sits a stormy frown: one which clenches the muscles and wrinkles of the Toymaker’s face into an expression which says ‘insulted’.

“For shame,” says the Toymaker. “That’s twice you’ve accused me of cheating now. You really do me a disservice. I am bound by the Rules of Play, and would never resort to such cheap tricks.”

What the hell…? The Toymaker’s accent is completely different. Where before his voice was a thick soup of faux German, now it is a soft British breeze: a proper, formal accent which speaks the way trees rustle. You gape at him, dumbfounded. 

“Your accent is different,” you can’t help but say. You’re no longer just leaning against the counter—you’re actively pushing into it, with the edge of the countertop pushing into the small of your back.

The Toymaker raises an eyebrow at you, and smirks. “You are not half as stupids as you are ge-lookings,” he says, slipping the German back on like a heavy cloak. “But zen, I know you are playing ein game mit me, aren’t you?” 

You stare at the Toymaker. Something has shifted: the air is thick with a tension you cannot identify, but which you want to run away from. You keep staring, thinking that if you look away from those too-blue eyes for even a moment, you might just lose your grip.

You know for a fact that if you look back at that doll on the shelf, it will look even more like you than before.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say, and you wish you weren’t lying.

The Toymaker laughs his musical laugh and wags his finger in your face. “Sehr naughty!” he says. “Oh, how natürlich dee lies kommen to sie, mein Schatz. You be ge-knowinks how to play games…zis ist ein lecker human mind game, und you are ge-tryings to deceive me.”

His voice slips smoothly back into the British:

“Do you think I don’t know all about your little fantasy?”

Your eyes go wide, and a choked noise escapes your mouth. No. There is no way that this man…this impossible toymaker could possibly know. You were always so careful, so sure to keep it all to yourself! Familiar shame and embarrassment wash over you in a hot wave as the Toymaker looks at you, looks into you, as if he can see the inner workings of your mind. Your mind grabs at the old, familiar justifications the way one might grab a newspaper for modesty if they found themselves naked on a bus. It’s perfectly normal to have fun little flights of fancy. Everyone plays make-believe sometimes, right? “But zey are embarrassing, zese thoughts of yours,” the Toymaker giggles. “Not dee kind of thoughts you can share mit deine Mutter. I am not ge-thinkinks zat you have shared your desires mit ein Partnerin…” There goes the eyebrow again, cocked sardonically to match the wicked curl of his lips. “Is zis true?” You feel nauseous. The firm pressure of the countertop underneath your palms is all that stops you from shaking. It feels as if the Toymaker is probing the inside of your skull, and using those skilled fingers to strip back the whorls of your brain and grab at the fleshy thoughts inside. 

“Get out of my head,” you say quietly.

“Oh, but zis is dee game I ge-likes!” says the Toymaker. “Humans mit zeir internal struggles. Desires mit dee most fun ideas, but you are too ge-frightened to say vot you vant. So you play games mit dein loved ones…dee hunting und dee exasperation. Oh, you simply vill not communicate!"

You don’t know when the Toymaker got so close to you, but now he’s towering over you, with his hands firmly planted on either side of the countertop. You’re close enough to count the spots on his ascot, and examine the year-lines etched around his mouth and eyes. When he smiles those lines crinkle, but not naturally: it’s the way a puppet’s arms reach for the stars when the marionette twists them upwards.

“Okay, you’ve had your fun,” you whisper. “I’ll buy the doll and leave.”

This close, the Toymaker radiates heat. He smells like rose petals and Christmas.

“You could…but zat vould be no fun,” says the Toymaker. “I propose ve solve zis in a more interesting vay…”

The Toymaker waves his hand across your field of vision…and transforms the centre of the toyshop. A small wooden table complete with chairs has popped into existence just in front of the counter. You gape at the sight. How did he do that?! “Let us play ein game,” he says. “If you vin, you can take dee doll free of charge. But if I vin…”

The Toymaker’s smile cracks like the earth preceding a quake.

“You vill stay vith me und play mein games forever!”

You have to give yourself credit for reacting as well as you did. Most people, if they were faced with a crazy fake German man who seems able to read your mind, may have had a breakdown or made a run for the door. But you’ve seen a lot of anime, and you understand that if you are challenged by a handsome, powerful man with magical powers and a delightful hairstyle, you cannot refuse the call. Your brain has shifted from This should be impossible, to It’s game time.  “Alright,” you say slowly. “You’re clearly very powerful. It seems like if I play a game with you, you have far more to gain than I do. A doll isn’t a good enough prize.”

The Toymaker smiles at you. “Ein girl after mein own heart,” he says. “How about zis: if you vin, I vill show you exactly how I make mein dollen, complete vith a demonstration. Zat is generous of me, nein?”

His words are laced with sinister venom, and it’s all you can do not to be poisoned.

“And I’m guessing that if I refuse your game, something terrible would happen to me?”

The Toymaker hums low in his throat. “Hm…not accepting mein game is always ein option…ja, you could do zat. Und yet…” 

You inhale as the Toymaker brings his face terribly close to yours. The skin of his cheek brushes your own. You can feel his soft breath as he whispers into your ear, British once more:

“I know you are so curious as to how I make my dolls. If you leave now, you’ll never know. And I think if you wanted to leave, you would have done so already.”

The Toymaker pulls away from you, leaving you with your face on fire. He’s right. In less than ten minutes, the Toymaker has sussed out your fatal flaw: your damned unstoppable curiosity. There have been countless times where your life would have been improved if you’d kept your nose in your own business…but this is different. The Toymaker isn’t just dangling a carrot: he’s already dug his hooks in you, and you are being reeled in with every second you spend looking into those impossibly blue eyes.

When you next blink, the Toymaker has moved again. He is sitting in one chair, his hands folded primly in front of him.

“Name your challenge,” he says.

You weren’t expecting this: you thought he would have a game in mind. “Any game at all?”

“There isn’t a game I don’t know,” says the Toymaker coolly. “It is common courtesy to allow the guest to pick the party game.”

You can’t help a nervous giggle. “This is a weird kind of party,” you say. 

The Toymaker acknowledges this by inclining his head. “Choose.”

Your mind scrambles over dozens of options. There are so many games…board games, card games, strategy games. Do we need equipment? How long does the game have to be? What games can you play with just two people? That’s when your brain starts to run in a very different direction, and a variety of… game positions …flash through your imagination with impunity.

A flush scalds up your neck. You look at the Toymaker, who raises his eyebrows in a knowing way.

He knows exactly what you’re thinking.

You want to scream.

“Truth or Dare!” you blurt out.

That gets his attention. The Toymaker leans forward, his eyes quizzical. “Zat is non-traditional…yet apt,” he says. “Could it be zat you are ge-vantings me to force zat fantasy out of you, meine Liebchen?”

“No,” you lie. “I want you to tell me what you are, and why you’re doing this to me.”

“Then let’s get down to business,” says the Toymaker. “We take it in turns to ask each other Truth or Dare. A Truth corresponds to a question which must be answered truthfully, and a Dare is an action which must be carried out. The player earns one point for each Truth or Dare successfully completed.”

The Toymaker steeples his fingers together. You can’t pull your eyes away from them.

“If you refuse to complete a Truth or a Dare, or you contravene the rules of the game, you lose a point…and must complete a forfeit.” 

The way he says ‘forfeit’ sends a shiver down your spine. “What kind of forfeit?”

“Oh, dee usual,” says the Toymaker casually. “Somesing difficult or humiliating. I do not ge-liken to pre-plan zese things…I am preferings to be spontaneous.”

You are starting to regret your choice of game. This is a man who knows more about you than you’ve ever told your closest friend…surely a game like Truth or Dare would be pointless for him? So you ask: “Why would you want to play this if you can already tell what I’m thinking?”

The Toymaker frowns. “A good question,” he says. “The Rules of Play prevent me from having any unfair advantage over an opponent. Although my abilities will remain intact, anything which would tilt the game in my favour is out-of-bounds. I am physically incapable of cheating, and would thank you not to bring it up again. There are only two states of being which matter: winning, or losing. I intend to win.”

Fair enough , you think. “And what if I cheat?” you say. “I have a pretty good poker face. If you can’t look inside my head during the game, what if I just lie to you? How could you tell?” 

The Toymaker chuckles, bearing his mouth wide. To your horror, you see there are far, far too many teeth in his mouth.

“I can always tell when someone is lying to me.” 

“Six turns,” you counter, voice trembling. “Whoever has the most points at the end of those turns is the winner. And…you can’t choose Truth or Dare more than twice in a row.”

The Toymaker seems impressed by your game-making skills. “Agreed,” he says. “Let us begin.” 

He snaps his fingers, and all the lights in the toyshop go out. Above, a stagelight snaps into existence, pouring heat and light onto your scalp in a cascade. The Toymaker’s striking features are illuminated by this shift in lighting, casting the lines of his face with the severity of stage makeup. You swallow: he looks divine.

“Would you like to go first?” he asks politely.

“...No,” you say after a moment. “I think that honour should go to the house.”

Your gamble pays off: you realised that the Toymaker is a man with great respect for the rules of the game, and this offer makes him smile.

“How generous,” says the Toymaker. “Truth or Dare?”

“Dare,” you say. 

The Toymaker taps his finger to his lips, considering. Then, he says, “Destroy something precious to you.”

It takes a few seconds for you to really process the Dare. When it hits, you are baffled. What kind of Dare is that? you want to say…but you don’t bother saying it aloud. What kind of toyshop is this—and what kind of ‘toymaker’ is he? All you need to know is reflected in the sadistic gleam in the Toymaker’s eye. This wouldn’t be an ordinary game, and contesting his requests would be fruitless. All you can do is make your move.

You take a deep breath, and reach down into your backpack. You didn’t leave the house this morning planning to bring anything precious to you, but you are a sentimental person by nature, and know you have one item which fits the bill. It’s with great sadness that you pull out a small, ratty teddy bear and place him on the table. The bear is old and beige and dressed in a crimson band leader’s outfit, complete with a hat and red-laced riding boots.

“Oh, ein teddy bear!” laughs the Toymaker, delighted. “How charming. He is quite dee looker, isn’t he?”

“He’s the first bear I ever made,” you say. “I was listening to some 90s British pop music, and the idea for his design just…popped into my head. I scribbled it down and pulled him together from scraps of fabric and repurposed stuffing in just a day. His name’s Neil…I keep him with me for good luck.”

Something about what you said is terribly amusing to the Toymaker, but you don’t know why. “Ein handsome name indeed,” says the Toymaker. “But I am afraid zat vill not be enoughs to ge-save him. Poor Neil. Now…vill you complete your Dare?” 

You take a deep breath. There was no turning back now; you’ve accepted the Toymaker’s game, and the predatory sheen in his eyes tells you that you can no longer just walk away. So you pick up Neil, grab hold of his little teddy bear ears—

And tear his head off, sending stuffing careening all over the table. 

“Oh!” says the Toymaker with a false gasp. “Vot an unfortunate end for poor Neil. I did not know zat you have such ein cruel streak.” 

“Shut up,” you say, trying not to look at Neil’s decapitated corpse.

Even though he’s just a teddy bear, you feel like you’ve just killed a defenceless animal. Neil’s lifeless button-eyes gaze up at you imploringly, as if asking why you’d do such a thing. You knock Neil’s head off the table and focus back on the Toymaker.

“That’s one point to me,” you say. “Truth or Dare?”

The Toymaker grins at you like a shark. “Dare.”

There are a thousand questions ricocheting around your head, but you ask the one which you know will keep you up at night: “Tell me how you did that thing with the doll.”

The violence of the Toymaker’s laughter makes you jump. He actually covers his mouth to quieten himself, but his shoulders shake even so. “Oh nein, nein, nein, you are ge-makings ein mistake!” he says. “You cannot be askings a question ven I have chosen Dare. Oh, meine Schatz, you have your lost your point…and must receive ein forfeit.”

Your veins run cold. “What? No! That was never in the rules!” 

“It is a common rule,” says the Toymaker, suddenly serious. “What is the point of distinguishing between a Truth or Dare, if a Dare can be a Truth?”

You want to protest…but his logic is infuriatingly sound. It’s exactly the kind of argument you could see yourself making if you were playing the game against a friend. You try to think of some other get-out-of-jail-free card—anything which would allow you learn how the Toymaker made that doll look exactly like you—but you come up short. You slump in your chair, and resign yourself to waiting for the next round.

“Oh, do not ge-look so sad,” says the Toymaker. In mock sympathy, he makes a little tutting sound against his teeth. “Now, about zat forfeit…ah! I am ge-knowings just dee sing.”

The Toymaker snaps his fingers…and your clothes burst into a flock of doves.

You scream and leap up from the table, batting away at the birds scrambling over your skin. They coo and and flap in your face before struggling upwards and flying into the rafters. Shocked, you look down to find yourself still fully clothed…but with a wardrobe change. You are now clad in a beautiful, powder-blue dress. The fabric is inhumanly soft and threaded through with white ribbons.

“Oh my God!” you yell. “What did you do?!”

The Toymaker is doing his best to stifle a giggle behind his hand. “Do you like it?” he asks. “I think the colour is rather fetching on you.” 

You clutch at the skirts of your dress, wishing the floor would open up and swallow you whole. There is no way this is possible…you hadn’t felt anything, not even a shift of your own clothes or the sliding of new fabric against your skin. One moment you were wearing your own clothes, and the next you weren’t. It’s as if your clothes were merely a covering, and when they transformed into doves and flapped off, they left only your dress behind. 

You move your legs under the layers of fabric, and blush when you discover you’re wearing a pair of frilly stockings. As you stick out your feet, you can see your feet are clad in a shiny pair of Mary Janes. It’s with a sick feeling in your stomach that you realise what the dress is.

It’s the same dress that the doll on the shelf is wearing.

"You're sick," you hiss.

The Toymaker cocks his head to one side. “Indeed?” he says. “How odd. I thought I was being rather generous, giving you a helping hand towards becoming your true self.” He snickers at you. “If I am sick, then I do wonder what that makes you. My mind is full of games, but the inside of your head is full of so much more.”

You ignore the Toymaker and hold your own arms, shrinking back down into your chair. Yet as you look down at the dress, you can’t help but feel a pang of longing. The dress is a perfect fit, one which could have been custom-designed, and the fabric is truly stunning in appearance and quality. With its puffy sleeves and shapely waistline, you know if you were alone you would have given your new skirts a twirl.

But you can’t let yourself get lost now. This is as much a mind game as it is a real one, you realise. The Toymaker is eyeing you like a piece of meat, and it’s clear that he is capable of so much more than a costume change. You must press on with the game. 

“I want to keep playing,” you say.

“Wonderful,” says the Toymaker. "We’re currently still at zero points each, with two turns down. Unfortunately, your turn was taken due to the forfeit. I must ask you: Truth or Dare?” 

You don’t allow yourself time to think about it: “Dare.” 

The Toymaker’s smile is knowing. “It is a fool’s errand, trying to delay the inevitable. I believe my initial suspicions were correct…you do want the Truth to be pried from you, don’t you? Perhaps that makes the shame a little less potent. After all, the mean, scary Toymaker made you dress this way. It wasn’t your fault…you couldn’t help it. Am I getting warmer?”

Your face is getting warmer, and it’s getting increasingly hard to meet the Toymaker’s gaze. “It isn’t my fault that my opponent is insane,” you say, with venom. 

Somehow, the Toymaker’s laugh is German. “Ah, zere is zat fire. You are quite dee entertaining playmate, meine Liebling. I am not ge-xpectings you to verstand games of dee mind…but I do find zem exhilarating. Dee expressions ge-crossing your face right now…I vish you could see zem.”

You scowl at the Toymaker. “Just give me your Dare.”

The Toymaker shrugs at you. “If you insist. I Dare you…to perform a dance befitting a fine young lady such as yourself.”

Oh, God, no. This is a nightmare of a Dare. “I—I’m not a dancer,” you say. You can feel your blush crawling up your neck. You envision yourself prancing around in your new dolly-dress, and the embarrassment makes you physically cringe.

“Oh, zat is not ein problem!” The Toymaker beckons you to look under the table. When you do, he taps his own shoes against the floor, performing a rhythmic tap-step. “Zose lovely Schuhe I gave you vill ge-helpen sie along. Provided you are villing to perform dee dare, your tanzen is all taken care of. All you are ge-needings to do is stand up, und take drei steps backwards.”

The Toymaker leans back in his chair and looks at you expectantly. The list of excuses which blossomed into your mind when he first suggested the Dare are dwindling rapidly, each one seeming more pathetic than the last. But…maybe there is a way out of this?

“What about music?” you ask. “Surely you can’t expect me to dance without music.” 

The Toymaker shakes his head at you. “Do not ge-worry about dee musik! I have it all covered. Unless…you vish to forfeit once more?” The idea of any other part of your body spontaneously transforming into an animal is enough to make you scramble to your feet. Immediately, you are self-conscious: the dress is equal parts beautiful and ridiculous, and is so poofy and frilly that it gives your lower half the shape of a bell. You haven’t felt this kind of embarrassment since you were in school: the dry throat and sweaty palms before getting up on stage for assembly. Feeling like a silly child, you can’t help but look at the Toymaker, searching those mirthful eyes for guidance. But the Toymaker simply shoos you, indicating for you to step back.  Hesitantly, you take one step away from the table. Then another. Then, one final, gentle step.  Without warning, the floor of the toyshop erupts! From beneath your feet a wooden stage springs up, unfurls around you and traps you like a box. You shriek and try to stumble away, but your new dancing shoes root you firmly to the spot. A spotlight bursts into being above your head and illuminates your frozen self in all your newfound frilly glory.  You look down from your new height to see the Toymaker sitting in what is now the front row of a vast auditorium; the toyshop’s interior has vanished. He whoops and grabs a fistful from a cartoonishly large bucket of popcorn. You open your mouth to yell at him, and maybe call him some horrible names you haven’t thought of yet. But before you can, music starts blaring from all sides of the auditorium. It’s a grating, repetitive tune: some ghastly combination of twee guitar and twinkling piano…and it’s so familiar . You know this song, but what is it? And why does it sound so…childish?  The music hits a powerful note. Your mouth opens unbidden, and from your vocal cords a voice which is decidedly not yours belts out the opening lyric to a familiar nursery rhyme:  “I’m a little teapot, Short and stout!” Your voice is loud and beautiful, and you project better than any Broadway singer. You can do nothing but watch yourself in abject horror as your knees bend in time with the music, and your shiny shoes send you toppling along the stage in time with the song.  “Here is my handle Here is my spout!” You try to scream and stop, but your body is no longer in your control. Your arms bend at frightening angles, and your hips send your neck careening to the side with a crack . A rictus grin is firmly plastered onto your face, and your mouth stays open and singing: “When I get all steamed up, Hear me SHOUT!…” Your hands flap and your toes point and you screaming on the inside, begging for this to stop, stop, STOP ! But the infernal music is inside of your head and it’s pushing in on all sides, and no matter how much you cry and beg and plead your mouth won’t work except to belt out the final words of your song. “TIP me over and POUR. ME. OUT!” At the last line, your knees give out and you collapse face-first onto the stage. A grand cheer goes up from the auditorium. You twist around, trying to see if the Toymaker has conjured up an audience to witness your humiliation—but he is the only one present. The Toymaker is on his feet and giving you a standing ovation. “Vunderbar!” the Toymaker cries as he claps enthusiastically. “Oh, you are dee most darling little teapot, ja. Zis is a fine game we are ge-havings!”

“What—did—you—do?” you gasp on the floor. You feel like your lungs have been crushed. Something the Toymaker did seized up everything inside of you and folded them up like paper. Now it’s as if you really are a doll: crumpled up and discarded in the corner when your owner is finished playing with you. Although you’re quite sure the music has stopped, the melody is blasting in your head in a maddening loop. You try to move, but your legs won’t work. 

“Oh, don’t be zo dramatik. Eversing I ge-make brings viele fun,” says the Toymaker. “Herzlichen Glückwunsch …das ist ein point to you.”

You don’t see the Toymaker get up on the stage, but the next thing you know, he’s crouching down next to you. Without warning, the Toymaker lifts you up under the arms and pulls you to your feet as if you weigh nothing at all. You try to stand but your rigid muscles struggle with the task and you stumble, falling right into the Toymaker’s chest. He chuckles, and you hear it rumbling softly in his chest. His skin is impossibly warm…and you can’t hear a heartbeat.

The two of you stand like that for a long moment, with you enveloped in the Toymaker’s arms. When pressed against his waistcoat, the maddening song infesting your brain quietens, and is replaced with an easy sort of calm. It’s strange…all the questions and anger and terror seem to just burn away. They’re forgotten in the simplicity of being held like a doll.

Eventually, your senses kick in. You manage to pull yourself away from the Toymaker, and you refuse to look at his face. “I just want to get on with the game.”

“Of course.”

The Toymaker waves his hand and the stage and auditorium vanish. You are transported back to the interior of the toyshop, with its familiar cuddly audience and the table taking centre stage. You sit back down at the table shakily. You know when you look up the Toymaker will already be sitting across from you…and you’re right, even though you didn’t see or hear him pull back his chair. His eyes are bright and curious. 

“Okay…Truth or Dare?”

The Toymaker places his hand on his chin and pretends to be deep in thought. After a while, he says, “Truth."

You very nearly ask him the same question you were denied just before: how was he able to make that doll look exactly like you? But the momentary calm offered by the Toymaker’s embrace has had a quieting effect on your mind, and a spike in your critical thinking skills. You have to think strategically; if you want to win, you need to ask him a question which will throw him off-guard. Asking him about the doll wouldn’t be a challenge because he likes to gloat, and to tease. But if you win, you can have your answer to that question and an actual demonstration…

…plus, you get to keep your freedom. Don’t forget that.

So you stare at the Toymaker and wonder…what causes a man (creature, entity, etc.) to end up this way?

“Tell me about your childhood,” you say.

The smile is wiped from the Toymaker’s face in an instant. His mouth twists in discomfort and anger. For the first time since you’ve met him, you feel a pleasant curl of satisfaction in your guts. The game is on, you think.

“What’s wrong?” you ask out loud. “Do you have a problem with the question? Because you can always forfeit—”

“I. Will. Not. Lose.”

The Toymaker’s fists are on the table now: they’re clenched and shaking. Although he’s looking at you, his mind seems far away, trapped somewhere else. After a beat, he leans forward, grabs your head and brings your foreheads together so they’re just barely touching.

“You asked for this,” says the Toymaker gravely. “I will do more than give you the answer to your question. I will show you. Close your eyes.”

The closeness is invigorating: the Toymaker’s hands are strong against the sides of your head, and you wonder for a second if he could pop your skull like a balloon. You consider saying no and demanding he just tell you the answer, but the look on the Toymaker’s face is so intense that you cannot refuse. It’s that terrible curiosity in you, willing you to stand at the edge of the universe and take a step off the cliff.

So you do as your bid, and close your eyes…

…only to awaken in a void.

To say there is nothing around you is an understatement. Your idea of nothingness is very particular: blackness; emptiness, an absence of sound and light. But this is something else entirely. You can’t even feel the lack of something in this place because there simply isn’t anything to feel. From the moment you open your eyes you feel the contradiction of yourself as a physical being, standing in this vacant not-space. There is less than nothing here. There is zilch. There is negative zero. There is null.

You try to get your bearings by looking around, but there are no bearings to get. This is a nothingness which exists beyond your comprehension. Just standing in this nothingness makes your jaw tighten and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. This is a phobic realm which is the antithesis to life.

And it is so, so cold. 

“This is where I grew up.”

You jump. The Toymaker is standing beside you, arms folded behind his back. He surveys the nothingness with humble respect, the way a weary sailor surveys the ocean.

“How?” You try looking around again, but without anything to anchor gaze on, your eyes just swing back round to the Toymaker. “There’s nothing here.” 

“Nothing except for me.”

The Toymaker sits down on the emptiness, cross-legged. Feeling discombobulated in the lack of space, you sit down too, next to him, and wonder how that’s possible. You hug your elbows, trying to fend off the omnipresent cold.

“We are outside of your universe,” says the Toymaker quietly. “Below it, as a matter of fact. We are in a pocket realm, like the hollow in a tree branch. Here there was nothing for a very long time…so long, that I do not know how to count it. The void is indifferent to such concepts.

“I was a child for an eternity, and many more eternities after that. Merely a conscious speck suspended in forever. At the time I had no form. No body, no face, and not really a mind. I was a collection of distant ideas and fraught, base emotions. There was no reason for me to have either a solid shape or a brain. I existed only in relation to the void, and the void went on forever. All I had to entertain myself were my games.”

With a flick of the wrist, the Toymaker conjures a ball into existence. Then another. Then another. He does this over and over again until he is juggling at least twenty balls. His hands move in a blur as he juggles the balls effortlessly. He tosses them higher and higher, so high that you have to crane your neck to see. Eventually you lose sight of the balls in the nothingness.

But then, the Toymaker sighs…and you notice that the balls are disappearing. This continues for about a minute, the balls growing fewer in number until he’s down to just three…and then there’s only two, so he’s not really juggling at all.

Finally, the Toymaker catches the last remaining ball and holds it up to your face. A frost has grown along its leathery side.

“Playing games can keep you warm,” says the Toymaker, “but only for a little while. Eventually, the cold gets in. And the cold devours everything."

“How did you survive here?” you ask quietly. You can’t raise your voice above a whisper: it feels disrespectful.

“Death isn’t something I am capable of experiencing,” says the Toymaker. “I can never die from the cold. But I can still feel it.” 

The Toymaker looks at the ball in his hand, and it catches fire. You gasp and pull away, but the fire only burns for a few seconds: the flames are quickly extinguished by a new crop of frost, growing over the ball’s surface like a disease.

In moments, the Toymaker is holding nothing but a ball of ice.

“I’m…sorry,” you say.

It’s a feeble reply, and you know it. The cold here is wrapped into the environment itself. This no-space could well be made of nothing but a creeping, insidious chill. It’s worse than the kind of cold which slams into you, like the jump from the shower to a towel on a winter night, or the way your cheeks are slapped when stepping outside on a snowy day.

This cold is sinister. 

It waits.

It seeks out warmth wherever it can, wraps itself around that spark of heat, and crushes it frozen.

The Toymaker runs hot, you remember with a shiver.

No wonder. The Toymaker fends off your weak sympathies with a shake of his head. He stares off into the nothingness, and continues to speak.

“I thought it would just be me and the void forever. But then one day, I heard laughter! It was a sound utterly foreign to me. I was so frightened, I spent millennia curled tight up into a ball, cringing away from the sound. But I could hear them now…beings, with shape and light and thoughts. As the epochs stretched before me and the void remained still, I found myself drawn to their laughter.”

The Toymaker’s eyes glitter with recollection. “I learnt how to poke small peepholes into the fabric of the void, and peer through at the shapes. And oh, the things I saw! These beings, they played games , just like me! Games which used pieces and strategies and all manner of wonderful toys. I wanted to have them all. Needed to have them. So I did. I fashioned myself fingers, and with those fingers I fashioned toys and toys and toys, enough to fill up every child’s toy room in every universe!"

You watch as the Toymaker trembles with excitement. His voice has swollen to fit the void: a rallying cry against the darkness. He looks so proud of himself…but only for a moment. 

“After a while, my toys grew old,” he says sadly. “They say a boy becomes a man when he must throw his toys onto the fire in order to keep himself warm...and the cold never stops. I realised that wood and string were all well and good, but they had no personality of their own…and I had no opponent.”

The Toymaker turns to you then. There’s a manic look in his eye. “So I began to lure in the flesh-and-blood creatures,” he says. “It was easy enough once I learned to assume their shape…especially the early ones, who weren’t so bright. And what shapes I would become! I enjoy this shape so much that I’ve decided to keep it permanently, with the odd touch-up every half-century or so. Being handsome helps bring in the players.”

There goes that easy wink again, smooth and charming and drawing you in like the lure on an anglerfish.

“And…that’s why you’re here today?” you ask. “You just want to play games with us?” 

The Toymaker’s laugh is mean. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. “All that exists is to win, or to lose. I don’t want to play games with you. I simply want to win.”

The two of you stand in silence for a while, contemplating the nothingness. The longer you stay, the more you can feel the chill sliding its icy fingers over your flesh. It crawls up your socks and settles into the gaps behind your knees. It causes wet, cold dew to form at the edges of your eyelashes. It even seeps into the spaces between your skin and fingernails.

You wish you hadn’t asked for this Truth.

“One point to you, Toymaker,” you say through chattering teeth.

The Toymaker starts: clearly he’d forgotten all about you. The void has a sobering effect on him, it seems. How did a little boy manage to have any imagination in this place at all? “Yes,” says the Toymaker with a worn smile. “One point each.”

The next time you blink, the void is gone. You are returned to the familiar warmth of the toyshop, and are still sitting at the table across from the Toymaker. But now, even as the cold sloughs off your skin and your cheeks begin to heat up again, you can see the toyshop for what it is. The bright lights and colourful attractions are nothing more than decorative wallpaper for a frozen, ephemeral darkness, ever-creeping in on the corners of your vision.

When the Toymaker speaks again, his German is back in full force, and you wonder if he’s trying to stave off how frightened he really is.

“Zat is vier turns down,” he says. “Mit only zwei to go. I ge-believe it is my turn, ja?”

Oh, hell: he’s right. You’d gotten so caught up in the impossibility of the Toymaker’s mind that you’d forgotten you’re playing a very dangerous game. But the Toymaker’s smile looks fake now, and the way his eyes glimmer seems less like mischief, and more like withheld tears. For the first time you want to stop this game…not just for you, but for the Toymaker too.

But that’s not how this would be played. The rules are fixed, and you’ve seen what the consequences could be. Worse, you only have one response left to give. By the way the Toymaker is grinning at you, you know he’s remembered this rule too.

“Truth or Dare?” he asks.

You swallow, before giving the only answer you can: “Truth.”

The Toymaker laughs a little too loud. “Now, you had better nots ge-try to get out of zis one,” he says. “I vant you to tell me dee truth: vot exactly is your fantasy? I vill be requiring details.” 

There it is: the question this whole game has been building up to. This situation is impossible and ridiculous. Here you sit, surrounded by beautiful toys in your gorgeous dress, playing a game with an unbelievable, broken man who can rewrite your entire reality with nothing more than a thought. Yet you still can’t just open your mouth and give him the answer. Somehow, even in the face of impossible adversity, you are still beholden to your human embarrassment.

“If I tell you…” you say slowly. “...Do you promise not to laugh?” 

The Toymaker’s eyebrows knit together. He looks distressed by the question. “All players should be treated with respect,” he replies.

That’s not the answer I want, but it’s the only answer he can give , you think. But maybe that’s the key here. You would never willingly part with this information…but the Toymaker just did the same thing for you. He didn’t have to show you where he came from. He could have talked around it, given you the crib notes, and you would have been none the wiser. The Toymaker showed you vulnerability just by allowing you into his history.

You owe him that same level of respect.

“I didn’t get much attention when I was growing up,” you say. “It wasn’t a bad upbringing, but I was just kind of…left, a lot of the time. I wasn’t looked after. There was always some sort of problem that needed fixing, and my parents never had time for me. No one bothered to check on me, so I just had to figure things out for myself. I spent most of my time alone in my room…just me and my toys.”

“That sounds familiar,” says the Toymaker, and the sympathy in his voice is real. “How did you pass your time?”

“I took my toys apart,” you say. “I think my parents felt guilty for leaving me alone a lot, so there was never a shortage of toys. But I wanted to figure out how they worked. That seemed much more interesting than actually playing with them, you know?” 

The Toymaker smiles with approval. “Dee keen eye of a toymaker is a gift,” he says. “But I sense you are delaying your real story…” 

You curse inwardly: again, he’s right. You cannot hide any longer.

“I took apart all of my toys…except for my dolls.”

That gets the Toymaker’s attention: those bright blue eyes light up with interest. “Go on.”

“I had a set of five dolls,” you say quietly. “Generic dolls. Sparkly, brushable hair, and little swappable outfits. Nothing special. But even when I was really small I couldn’t hurt them. I was terrified of damaging them in any way. There weren’t any other kids around to talk to, and my parents weren’t home, so I just…talked to the dolls instead. I knew it was weird, but in my head the dolls were more sentient than my other toys. I thought they could really understand me.”

The Toymaker starts back up in his German voice: “Ah, zere is nothing more ge-saddening zan a lonely Kind. Zat is why decapitating poor Neil vas being no problem for you, zen?” 

“Yeah. It still hurt, but not for the reasons it would hurt most people.” You swallow; this is the really difficult part. “The older I got, the more toys I had, but I never added to my doll collection. My parents would joke all the time about how I was becoming a ‘little lady’. When I became a teenager there was so much pressure to be pretty, and girly…and it made me feel sick. So I tried to fight back against it. I cut my hair, I swore off pink, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress.”

The words stick in your throat. You look up at the Toymaker, hoping for some kind of mercy, but you don’t find it. But he isn’t mocking you, either: he just sits and waits for you to continue.

“I locked my dolls away,” you say. “I pretended I had thrown them out…but secretly, I’d sneak them out, and play with them. I’d brush their hair, and mend their dresses. I still do.”

The Toymaker leans in. “Why?”

“I…I wanted to be like them,” you whisper. “They are so pretty. The long, flowing dresses and the perfect makeup…they’re dazzling in a way I could never be. I can never, ever be that beautiful.”

You twist the fabric of your dress between your fingers fitfully, and force yourself to say it: 

“I always wanted to be someone’s favourite doll."

There’s silence in the toyshop. You stare down at your lap, your heart pounding and your face flushed. Stupid, stupid…! Your eyes well up with hot tears. You can’t bring yourself to look at the Toymaker.

“Und zen you arrive here,” he says. “Meine beautiful dollen drew you in.”

“Yes,” you say quietly. “If I can’t be loved like a doll, then at least I can give them love instead. If I were a doll, maybe things would be easier, you know? Maybe…”

You can’t help the little choke-sob which escapes your lips.

“...maybe someone would take care of me."

The tears fall freely into your lap now and stain the beautiful fabric of your dress dark. You feel disgusting: worthy of ridicule. I deserve whatever happens to me now, you think, your brain awash with old, dark feelings you’ve kept locked up just like the dolls in your closet.

But it’s the Toymaker who snaps you out of his reverie. You didn’t hear him move, but you flinch when his fingers slide under your chin and tilt up your face towards him. Your tears cast him in a watery halo.

“Mein Liebling, stop ge-crying,” he says. “I have made sehr many dollen over dee years, und many of zem have been beautiful. But you are somesing else entirely entirely. Ein living, breathing, villing doll, so cute und poseable. Oh, you und I vill have zo many adventures together! You could be mein prized possession, und I vill hold you and play vith you from dawn zu dusk.”

The Toymaker’s words send a shudder through your body. Blood thrums at the surface of your skin and pools in your cheeks and neck. The Toymaker leans in until your noses are almost touching. He’s so very close to you now…close enough that he could kiss you. 

But just before he reaches your lips, the Toymaker moves to the side and whispers into your ear:

“Dee game is not yet over, meine schöne dollen. You have one final question to ge-ask of me. Do it, und zis vill all be over…one vay or another.”

You can feel him smiling gently against your hair, and it makes you want to sob. Oh, please let this torture end…! But you’re in the Toymaker’s grasp now, in the final throes of his game, and you know you have to finish this or your suffering will never be over. There is only one turn left. You have to try, one last time, or you would spend the rest of your life at the beck and call of this madman.

“Truth or Dare?” you manage to croak out.

The Toymaker lets your face go. “Dare."

You take a deep breath. This is your last chance.

“Let me go.”

The Toymaker takes a long, long moment to process your answer…and then he starts to laugh. Really, really hard. The tinkling arpeggio of his laughter builds and builds until it seems to shake the very walls of the toyshop. For a moment, you are terrified that it’s all going to come crumbling down like a house of cards.

“Oh, perhaps becoming ein dollen hast eroded deine brain, ja?” says the Toymaker, the arrogance flashing in his teeth. “I am not ein genie you kann outsmarts. I am afraid zat since letting you go ist your prize, you cannot request it of me. So, you have lost ein point, putting us at a tie…und you must complete ein forfeit once more.”

No. No. NO! “That’s not fair!” you yell. The tears are streaming down your face in earnest now; all of the distress of this game and the Toymaker’s psychological torment can no longer be contained. 

“Oh, und here comes dee tantrum,” says the Toymaker with a sigh. “I hates it ven zey get like zis. You must have ein forfeit…und I think I have dee perfekt idea to stop your ge-crying.”

The Toymaker snaps his fingers again. You open your mouth to scream at him…but nothing comes out.

You try again, but your mouth just flops open like a fish, with no sound attached to it whatsoever.

The Toymaker has stolen your voice. 

“I have assisted you in another core aspect of your doll transformation,” says the Toymaker, the British swooping in over his tongue with ease. “I do not think most dolls can talk, do you?”

You awful…! But the words can’t even die on your tongue, because they never reach your tongue in the first place. There is a total disconnect between your mouth and your brain. Although you can fashion your lips into the correct shapes and try to push the air into forming syllables, none of them can escape your mouth.

The Toymaker has silenced you, taking away perhaps your only remaining asset in this game.

You mentally tally up the points, and realise he’s right. You are now tied, and six turns have passed. 

“But I cannot tolerate a tie. Dee rules dictate zat ve must perform a tie-breaker challenge…” His accent ripples between the German and British easily, as if he can’t decide between childish delight and cool professionalism. “Do you have any suggestions for a tie-breaker?"

The devastation of losing your voice almost made you look over this detail. Yes, he’s right: for all of your suffering, the Toymaker hasn’t actually managed to get a point over you. That means all is not lost.

That means you still have a chance to win.

But you cannot strategise in a vacuum: much less when you can’t speak. The Toymaker looks at you in amusement, as if expecting you to try and talk anyway. You could have written a message down on a piece of paper, or typed it on your phone, but you decide not to give him the satisfaction. The Toymaker has already gotten you on the rules twice: you are going to play within his boundaries and win fair and square. 

You don’t see where he produces the hat from. A flourish of the arm, and it’s suddenly in his hands: a beautiful top hat which would have gone perfectly with a tuxedo. The Toymaker flips the hat over and proffers it to you.

“Ladies first,” he says with a sly smile. 

You reach into the hat and are surprised to find a variety of small, paper tickets. After some rustling around, you pull one out and read it. When you do, your eyes go wide.

WHOEVER HOLDS THEIR BREATH THE LONGEST IS THE WINNER.  “Vot fun!” exclaims the Toymaker, clapping his hands together in excitement. “I must ge-varn you, I am a very gut schwimmer, and kann hold mein breath for ein long time.” 

But do you even have a lung capacity?! is what you would have asked if you could. How was this fair? The Toymaker is clearly an extradimensional being, and his physical body doesn’t seem to conform to the laws of physics, space or time…anything that would put a real challenge to this game. But you can’t say so: you have no way of telling him.

Besides…is it cheating if that’s just how he is? Is it cheating if he’s just better at the game?

A loud tick-tocking draws your eye to the right side of the toyshop. Against the wall (where it definitely didn’t exist before) is a grandfather clock. Both of the clock’s hands are almost at the 12. This was news to you; you’d arrived at the toyshop sometime around 8pm.

“Ve vill begin when ze clock strikes twelve,” says the Toymaker. “Zere are no fancy rules…ve just start ge-holdings our breath, until eins of us cannot anymore.”

The grandfather clock ticks closer to your demise. You look at the Toymaker in desperation, clasping your hands together in a silent plea…but he just looks at you coolly. Now, you are nothing but an opponent to defeat. You are an obstacle ready to be demolished. 

Well, I am not helpless. If anyone is going to decide the winner of this game, it’s going to be me. With only thirty seconds remaining, you fish around in the pocket of your backpack and pull out your phone. You set up your video camera, prop the phone up against a toy monkey holding a pair of cymbals, and hit the record button.

“Ah,” says the Toymaker. “In case of ein photo-finish. Gut idea.”

There’s a cold fire in his eyes now: something which ignited when he took you into his personal void. You have no moves left, and no gameplay strategies to implement. It is clear that he is the master of games, and you may as well already be his doll. 

But hell, you are going to try your best.

The grandfather clock strikes twelve with a loud, booming chime, and you suck in the largest breath of your life. You don’t balloon out your cheeks: instead you opt for a subtle approach learnt from musical training, where you draw in the oxygen deep into your lungs and will it to sit there for as long as you can handle.

By comparison, the Toymaker doesn’t look like he’s holding his breath at all. You merely hear him stop breathing. He looks totally at ease.

The first ten seconds are child’s play.

The first twenty seconds are fine.

The first thirty seconds are acceptable.

But by the forty-second mark a playful fire start to burn in your chest, and the urge to take a breath begins to beg. Inside you curse yourself, wishing that you’d practised— but why on earth would I have practised such a useless game?! You look at the Toymaker. Big mistake. He waggles his eyebrows at you silently, rippling them in an over-the-top-sultry manner. You feel your lips quirking up into a smile…You can’t believe it! He’s trying to make you laugh!

So much for respecting the rules, you think to yourself. Your chest is really starting to hurt now. But then you wonder, is that really cheating? If the Toymaker can try to make you laugh, what if you can make him laugh too? But you shut down that idea immediately: if you prancing around in a frilly dress singing I’m A Little Teapot didn’t make him laugh (just clap!), you didn’t have a chance in hell.

Oh no. What is he doing now? While trying to focus on holding your breath, the Toymaker had conjured two familiar puppets on the ends of his hands: Punch and Judy. With a final, victorious wink, the Toymaker begins a silent, over-the-top slapstick routine with the puppets. Even without dialogue you recognise the beats of the show; Mr Punch is a mess of a man, overwhelmed by the demands of his wife and baby (the latter brought into being with a tiny, adorable puppet the Toymaker wears on one of his thumbs). His hands move with such finesse that the puppets almost look real.

Such a gaudy routine wouldn’t have been enough to make you laugh by itself, but the Toymaker brings a whole new dimension with his wonderfully expressive face. Each time the long-suffering Judy begins a voiceless tirade of her husband (i.e., throwing little puppet-objects at his face), the Toymaker supplements Punch’s depression with a frown worthy of a theatre mask. When Punch manages to land a hit on his wife or baby (My God, were these shows always so violent?), the Toymaker grins with such deranged glee that you can’t help but find it hilarious.

Oh no. You look at the clock: it’s been a minute, and your chest is really starting to hurt. The Toymaker and his puppets make your cheeks puff out with the effort of not laughing.

He smirks at you as Punch picks up his wife and baby and tosses them into the air, punting them like footballs. It’s so absurd and ridiculous that you can feel the giggle rising up in your chest. You desperately want to open your mouth and suck in oxygen but you can’t, you simply can’t, because if you do you’ll lose the game and he’ll keep you here forever…!

As your remaining seconds tick closer to your inevitable failure, you close your eyes. You want to have one last moment to remember yourself as you are, because you are sure whatever the Toymaker is going to do to you will not be pleasant.

Your chest aches. Your cheeks bulge. Your will starts to unravel.

And then, you have the idea.

It’s a stupid idea, and with barely any seconds left to execute it, you have no guarantee that it will work. But as you open your eyes and look at the Toymaker’s smug ‘I’ve already won!’ expression, you know you have no choice but to follow through with your mad plan.

So, holding on to every last bit of breath you have, you lunge at the Toymaker—

—and envelop him in a bone-crushing hug.

Several things happen at once:

The first is the Toymaker exclaiming in surprise, his breath clearly lost, and dropping his puppets, which dissolve into ash as soon as they hit the floor. 

The second is your desire to breathe finally overpowering you as you collapse against the Toymaker, and the two of you tumble to the floor. 

The third is the grandfather clock exploding. Just as you hit the ground the clock bursts apart, firing out wooden shrapnel with a horrifying bang! On reflex you huddle yourself against the nearest form of safety, which in this case happens to be the Toymaker’s chest.

You weren’t expecting him to hold you back.

The two of you stay like that for some time: you and the Toymaker, on the floor together, breathing heavily and wrapped up in each other’s arms. Despite your own adrenaline, you can’t understand the Toymaker’s terror: surely he caused the clock to blow up? He certainly wasn’t in any danger.

But then you hear a sound you couldn’t hear before. It’s the thrumming of the Toymaker’s heart, loud and insistent and desperate to survive. You hear it through the fabric of his waistcoat, and feel it in the pulse of his neck. For just a moment, the Toymaker seems to be just as human as you.

You wonder if the Toymaker’s mortality is contextual.

Eventually, you manage to disentangle yourself from the Toymaker’s limbs. You peek at the smoking remains of the grandfather clock, and are relieved to see that nothing has caught fire: there’s just a scorched, black mark where the clock once existed. The shards of wood which exploded out from the clock have disappeared.

Thankfully, your phone is untouched! You pick it up, pause the recording and watch it back. A smile stretches across your face.

“Oh, Toymaker!” you say, and you are so very pleased that your voice has returned. “You’re going to want to take a look at this.” 

When the Toymaker climbs to his feet, you are immensely amused to see that his perfect curls have been knocked a bit by the explosion. For the first time since you met, the Toymaker is dishevelled and confused. It’s a cute look on you, you think.

“You broke my game,” says the Toymaker incredulously. “How did you do that?”

“No idea,” you grin. “Maybe it was an unexpected outcome. Still within the rules, still a valid way to win, just…unorthodox.”

You show the Toymaker the recording. You watch as his expression turns from bafflement, to despair, to outright blazing anger.

“No!” the Toymaker cries. “You can’t have beat me!”

But the camera never lies. The footage on your phone clearly picks up the Toymaker gasping in shock as soon as you hit him with your hug…whilst you don’t gasp for air until a few seconds later, just before the grandfather clock explodes.

“Seems like I have!” you say happily.

“But I…you…” The Toymaker’s fingers flex in the air meaninglessly, as if looking for a straw to grasp. “But that’s cheating!” 

“No it isn’t,” you say with confidence. “There was nothing in the rules about us not being able to make each other lose our breath. If you making me laugh was a valid strategy, then me hugging you was too. Either we both cheated, or no one did.”

The Toymaker looks like he’s been slapped, and it is a delicious feeling. You almost want to pinch his cheeks. With a pout fixing his lips, the Toymaker snaps his fingers…and your clothes return to normal. Your dress is gone, replaced by the clothes you entered the shop with.

(Is it a little silly to be regretful of that fact…?)

“I still say that shouldn’t count,” says the Toymaker sullenly. “That was an underhanded tactic. I’ll be writing that into the rules next time.”

But you’ve turned away from the Toymaker now—he obviously needs to work through his sore-loser feelings in his own time. You trot over to the doll shelf, pick up the beautiful doll in the powder-blue dress and cradle her in your arms. She truly is a wonderful prize.

When you turn back around, the Toymaker is sitting on the floor with his hands hugging his knees. You feel a pang of sympathy for the man…it seems this really is his whole life.

“But why did you hug me?” the Toymaker asks, baffled. “That’s not a winning strategy. You just surprised me. You were so…��

The Toymaker looks up at you with shining eyes. This time, his eyes really are wet with tears.

“...Warm,” he whispers.

The triumph of your win quickly sours on your tongue. The way the Toymaker is looking at you gives you a powerful feeling…and it’s not one that you like. Even though every part of you is telling you to make a run for the door while you have this post-win window…you don’t.

Instead, you sit down cross-legged on the floor next to the Toymaker, just like you did when in the void. You even bump your shoulder against his.

“I’ve been sad a lot in my life,” you say. “But I’ve never felt as much sadness as I did in your void. And it made me wonder if…you’d ever been held before.”

The Toymaker looks at you with flashing eyes. His bottom lip trembles as if he’s trying to hold back a lifetime of grief. He doesn’t say anything, but those eyes tell you all you need to know. 

“I wouldn’t mind coming around here sometimes,” you say gently.

The Toymaker looks at you like you’ve got two heads. “You would voluntarily subject yourself to my life-or-death games?”

“Maybe not the life-or-death part,” you say hastily. “But I had fun today. Weird, horrible fun. You’re kind of a weird and horrible guy…and I’m pretty weird too.”

To your surprise, the Toymaker actually laughs at that. “You are unique, meine Liebling,” he says, German once more. “To out-ge-smart me, you must be.”

“Well…maybe it’s a good thing we met,” you say. “Maybe you don’t need to keep luring in suspecting people to your shop, Toymaker. Some of us might actually want to stick around and play. And maybe…”

You rest your head against the Toymaker’s shoulder.

“...Maybe I could help keep the cold out for a while.” 

The Toymaker and you sit in silence for some time, listening to the gentle whirs and clicks of the toys going about their business. You keep your new doll tucked between your legs, and your cheek resting against the Toymaker’s shoulder. He’s so warm that you find your eyelids fluttering: you could easily fall asleep right here.

It’s a surprise when you feel the Toymaker’s fingers sliding into your own. You look at him, and see those telling blue eyes alive with fresh excitement.

“It’s a deal,” says the Toymaker, with an enormous, brilliant smile.

You let the Toymaker pull you to your feet. To your amusement, he grants you a deep, formal bow.

“Run along now, meine Schatz…today must have been ge-xhausting for you. But I shall be seeing you again soon, ja?"

Other people would not have caught it, but you know what loneliness sounds like: you hear the edge of desperation at the edge of the Toymaker’s voice. You take a step back and return the bow with a curtsey.

“Ja, genau,” you grin.

The Toymaker’s smile could have outshone the sun.

That night, when you return home, you take all of your dolls out of your closet. You line them up with care on your shelf, making sure to pose them prettily and smooth out the creases in their frocks.

But you keep your new doll in your hand, and clamber into bed with her. Before you turn out the light, you look one last time at her perfect, dimpled face.

Oh, what games will you and the Toymaker play next?

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

An interesting thing about Kaz is the way he views a hierarchy within everyone he meets, an attitude probably defined in him by the Kerch culture of trade and the environment of Ketterdam. Kerch is a country that in many ways is designed to reflect the American Dream as it is portrayed in classic literature such as The Great Gatsby: as an ultimately unattainable and useless lie, designed to control and quell the masses in the danger of extreme capitalism. The social hierarchy in Ketterdam is well-established and discussed throughout the novels, though mostly in Crooked Kingdom since the plot stays almost entirely within city limits, and the attitude of viewing a miniature hierarchy amongst those around you as part of the overall societal structure is evidenced in Kaz, and possibly reflected in Wylan; a link both to their different upbringings within the Ketterdam social structure, and their position as literary foils. (I wrote a whole long thing about how Kaz and Wylan had/have the potential to become each other, so feel free to check that out for more detail if you want it). The city’s hierarchy and the unattainability of joining the rich upper echelon of society is cleverly hinted at from the very beginning of Six of Crows, when Kaz is jumped and then wakes up in what he expects to be the deb of a rival gang. He instead finds himself in Councilman Hoede’s Manor House, which I believe is on the Geldstradt, and the way he makes the distinction is by realising that the decor in the room he’s in “takes real money”. We know that people like Pekka Rollins or Tante Heleen have become truly rich from what they do in the Barrel, and so it’s strange to suggest that you’d need “real money” for this since we would generally use that phrase to refer to a large amount of money. What Kaz actually means here is “old money” or “family money”; you need the kind of money that the Merchant Council have been hoarding for generations, making supposedly risky trades when they have millions of savings to cushion the blow if things go wrong, not the kind of money that comes from the popular gambling dens and brothels of the Barrel. He means the kind of money that Daisy and Tom have in Great Gatsby, people who’ve never worked a day in their lives and yet like to think of themselves as very successful at life when all they’re truly succeeding in is spending their parents money, not the kind of money that Gatsby scraped and saved and began to chase through undisclosed illicit means. Even when men like Gatsby and Rollins make their money, and their name, they are never equal in the social hierarchy to people with old money. (To be clear, not that this is a defence of either character, I have criticisms of both, especially Rollins).

But the hierarchy Kaz places upon himself and upon the others is slightly more subtle, and arguably subversive. He looks down on Matthias because he “stinks of decency” and because he supposedly hasn’t struggled, arguably gaining slightly more respect for him when he learns of him losing his parents and baby sister but still maintaining the idea of ‘everyone has a sob story and you were clearly more lucky in your options to deal with it than I was, it’s not my fault if you made the wrong choice’. We as readers obviously know that Matthias had no options but to go with Jarl Brum and spent the next 6 years of his life (I think that’s the right amount of time, please correct me if I’m wrong) being emotionally manipulated and abused by him, but Kaz simply refuses to accept has suffered because it would be psychologically damaging to him to admit that Matthias was able to go through that and still come out a good person, when Kaz sees himself as having become truly demonic. Matthias looks down on Kaz for the exact same reason, unable to understand - especially since he knows far less detail about Kaz’s trauma - how someone who ever had a core of decency couldn’t maintain it through their pain, he assumes Kaz was never a good person, or never had the potential to be one. Kaz also looks down on Wylan, arguably far less for his attempt to maintain a core decency but because he views Wylan as having had the option to do so. Kaz seems to have more respect for Wylan in Crooked Kingdom than in Six of Crows, when he knows more about (but never, it should be noted, the full extent of) Jan Van Eck’s abuse to his son, once again showcasing that he struggles to accept the idea of someone feeling bad when they have supposedly suffered less than him. His trauma has clearly warped him in many ways, and one of them is losing the ability to see relative pain and how different things can affect different people in different ways; he effectively views everything in the manner of ‘I had it worse, and I’m fine so you need to get over yourself’. He labels Nina “a snob” for staying away from the Crow Club and the Slat despite being a Dregs member, and her response is “she didn’t much care what Kaz Brekker thought”. I think that Nina is possible the person Kaz holds the most respect for in his platonic relationships, and that is mostly because she simply couldn’t care less whether he respects her or not.

His relationship with Jesper is more complex; he judges Jesper for his addiction and yet continually eggs him on, giving him a line of credit to play cards at the start of Six of Crows and having the first step of his planning in Crooked Kingdom to make Jesper play all night, although it’s unclear whether Jesper has ever shared anything about his mother if anyone knows then the most likely parties are Kaz or Inej and yet Kaz forces Jesper to give up his revolvers in Crooked Kingdom, his most treasured possession and his constant connection to his late mother, he consistently infantilises Jesper, but mostly in his head and this is possibly an interesting link to the final nail in the coffin of their relationship; Kaz sees Jesper as a substitute to Jordie. I think it’s possible that he likes to see him as younger because that’s how he remembers Jordie - it’s also important to remember that Kaz is now several years older than his elder brother ever was so seeing him in someone his own age is possibly even more painful because that’s a point Jordie never reached (he was only 13 when he died). Jesper is someone that Kaz feels the need to keep at arms length, not because he doesn’t respect him but because he fears having a close relationship with someone who could so easily slip away from him like Jordie did. I think we can also arguably see aspects of Jordie within Jesper, the naïveté of thinking you can make it Ketterdam followed by the city swallowing you whole, killing Jordie and driving Jesper to his slow self-destruction - “I’m dying anyway, Da. I’m just doing it slow”. (If y’all have read many of my analytical posts you may have begun to notice that’s one of my favourite quotes)

Then we have Inej. Kaz places Inej on a pedestal whatever she does. I’ve spoken before about how she claims to be bad at picking locks whilst he claims to have done “a shoddy job at teaching her to pick locks” because he’s incapable of accepting that she is incapable of something; if there are flaws, they must be his because she cannot have any. In a lot of situations this can be harmful, going back to the romance of Daisy and Gatsby where Daisy is placed on a pedestal and idealised so much that she become more of an image than a person, so when she does not live up to his every high expectation Gatsby is destroyed by it. But with kanej this seems only to elevate their position, possibly because Kaz isn’t claiming that Inej is flawless, but rather that she is capable of working on her flaws in a way that he isn’t; it is almost a form of envy. For example, Inej also has a fear of touch and human contact, but she purposely forced herself to cope with small amounts of it, such as allowing Nina and Jesper to hug her even though it makes her flinch, because she fears it becoming a debilitating condition, as it has done for Kaz (not that she knows that initially when it’s first implied that she too fears contact). In the bathroom scene when she admits to him that she also struggles with touch, it has such a massive effect on Kaz not because he refuses to accept that she has flaws but because he sees her as so much stronger than himself and wishes that he could be more like her. Although both of them are ultimately unable to go any further than a few light brushes of contact, it’s suggested that what trigger Inej more than the touch itself is the sexual implications of those touches based on everything she went through at the Menagerie. Kaz doesn’t see Inej aligned with with himself or the other gang members, but as above them - and not in the way he labels Nina as a snob, but in a genuine manner he refuses to acknowledge her as low in society because he sees her as deserving of so much more. He notably never refers to her as “a canal rat” and he never even comes close to defining her by her time at the Menagerie, a start contrast between him, the supposed low of the hierarchy, and Van Eck, the supposed upper, he yells at her “you little skiv! You little whore!”. However, there is one way in which Kaz arguably looks down on Inej and it’s in a similar way that he looks down in Matthias: how dare she still try so hard to remain truly good, and decent, and to find her Saints and to politely ask them for forgiveness, when it would be so much easier to let the world beat that out of her? Arguably, it’s not that he judges either of them for their faith, but it’s that he fears them judging him for losing his, be that in religion or in the world at all. (I don’t think we know if Kaz was raised in a religious household or not, but based on societal structure in Ketterdam and the way most of the population in most of the countries are religious I think it’s safe to assume he at least grew up with an understanding of Ghezen). Kaz fears that they’ll judge him for failing to maintain his core of decency, which is exactly what Matthias does, and so he aims to offend or challenge them before they can him.

Ok I’m not gonna lie to you guys it’s like quarter past one in the morning as I’m writing this, and oh my god it just got so long out of nowhere… I might have lost my point somewhere in there, I don’t even know, this came from one quote I was thinking about and I’m not sure I even wrote that quote in there so, yeah, I guess. If you bothered to read this far the tysm I hope it made sense

[agatharkn3ss]

Why is Agatha lying?

Some spoilers!

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Ok, so it's getting more and more obvious that Agatha hasn't actually walked the Witches Road before. She always gives vague answers about it, almost like she recites them from memory (someone else told her these things?) and is surprised by the events and mechanics of the first trial.

Also, in one of the promos Teen asks Agatha why she allows people to believe these horrible things about her and she replies that the truth is far worse.

That makes me think that the rumour about Agatha trading her own child for a copy of Darkhold is also not true.

My theory is that her son must've been in some sort of danger and the only way to save him was for Agatha to walk the Road. She probably acquired the Darkhold by then - maybe she made some sort of deal with Rio, but my favourite theory is that Rio simply gifted her the book because they were an item back then. And/or maybe Rio wanted to trick her.

Either way, by the time Agatha's coven gathered, something went wrong. She got greedy/angry with the witches and instead drained their power (we see that scene in another promo). Alone, she could not summon the road so she failed and her son died/was gone forever.

To her this truth would be worse to Agatha for many reasons:

1) it would mean she failed at something and wasn't powerful enough. But she likes people to think that she's "exceptional" (this is the reason she gives Teen when explaining how she supposedly survived the Road) and she seems to derive her own worth from having the power and being "formidable". So in her eyes failure is not acceptable and something to be deeply ashamed for. Maybe that's why she craves more and more power, hoping it would fix her/make her feel better.

2) it would mean Agatha's own greed/temper/arrogance costed the life of someone she loved. We know Darkhold corrupts the mind, so she might be blaming Rio for giving her the book that affected her behaviour. But deep down she knows that Darkhold or not, she probably would've reacted the same way and she's ashamed of it

3) it makes her psychologically vulnerable and it scares her. She took the effort to point out to Rio that she's only "physically" vulnerable, but that's not what we saw in her "Agnes O'Conner' persona. Agatha likely never allowed herself to process the grief and doesn't know how to, probably still hanging on to the hope that one day she'll bring him back.

So rather than exposing the shame of all of the above, she chose to lie and tell everyone she did walk the Road and that the child was gone because she traded him for the Darkhold. She probably was telling this lie for so long - hundreds of years - that a part of her actually believes it.

Saying all of that, I don't like that theory and that the writers seem to be making Agatha's story all about her child. Because... doesn't that sound too familiar? Not being able to process the grief? Yearning for power to bring back her child? It feels like we're seeing just a re-write of Wanda, quickly falling into a trope that "every successful lady cop [witch] cannot have a healthy personal life" and must be longing for the fulfillment of motherhood...

So I really really hope that the writers don't go in that direction and that they stop making Agatha's entire arch all about child loss because that would just be so lazy and offensive - she's so much more colourful and deserves so much better.

I hope that all of that is just a bit of baiting to make us believe Teen is her son, when in fact he's someone else (Billy?). I mean it's Agatha's series and not Teen's or Wanda's!!! So maybe at one point the Road will make Agatha choose and she will give up the locket with (her son's?) hair and with that also the hope that she will ever bring him back. So it would stop holding her back and we can see her in all of her glory.

....And also so that she could shift all of her attention to a certain Green Witch.... *Pretty please*

[chvsire]

Zhys headcannons?👀 gimme

okay!! this gonna be a mix of general hcs for each of them and also together.

• Zhys’ rivalry is very one sided. Zane genuinely hates Rhys at first, while Rhys is just confused and a little upset that Zane doesn’t seem to like him very much just because the others think Rhys is more intelligent.

-> Rhys actually thinks Zane is much more intelligent than him and has a lot of experience, especially considering their both one of the oldest on the server and have progressed the most in their careers (yeah screw you im not working on their supposed ages, they are toxic old man yaoi to me). He just thinks Zane needs to learn to swallow his ego since it’s obvious his friends are just using him as the butt of the joke.

• Before Rhys met Zane, Aphmau talked about him like he was the world, so Rhys thought he was going to be this very sweet older man who shared some of his interests and would be a good person he could become with friends first.

-> Turns out that sweet older man only exists for Aphmau. Rhys thought the two had a thing for a while after (which wouldn’t be wrong…)

• When Rhys first joined, Aph made him stay with Zane for a while until they got his house built because “you both like smart stuff this could work.”

-> It did not work and Rhys got kicked out the first day after Zane tried very hard to do it “just for aphmau” as he kept saying for himself.

• Rhys ended up building his house right next to Zane’s since most of the plots were full and it also meant he’d be fairly close to Aphmau, who lives next door to Zane.

-> later when they get together, they build a little joint living area between their houses…neither of them want to get rid of their labs to move in with the other, so why not make a shared living space in between their own homes for the times they do want to be together.

• Rhys developed a crush on Zane fairly quickly, but he kept denying it. It started when in their fights Zane felt a need to be very up close and personal with him…and he quickly realized just how easily Zane could grab and move him around.

-> Zane actually scared Rhys the first time he picked him up by the collar in a fight, Rhys didn’t think Zane was very strong considering the others called him weak. It definitely got him feeling things after through

• Rhys may look small next to Zane, but he’s actually one of the tallest on the server alongside Pierce. Zane is just a beast compared to everyone else (save me 6’7 Zane save me)

• Off the server, Zane and Rhys both work in the medical field. Zane works as an ER doctor, while Rhys is slowly working his way into switching to being a psychiatrist! He worked in finance originally.

-> basically, I like them both being nerds but I think it would be interesting if they came from different STEM backgrounds. Zane is definitely more medical with some background in physics / engineering (he’s had a million jobs, he’s a Jack of all trades but anything science related is his prime work) while Rhys’ is purely mathematics with some minor interest in psychology.

• Rhys accidentally psychoanalyses Zane sometimes and it actually drives him up the wall because “I KNOW IM MENTALLY ILL DONT REMIND ME!!”

• Bc of their work hours, Zhys usually gets on the server after long shifts. Before Rhys joined, Zane would be the only one on while others were sleeping or at work (which left others to find his insane projects in the morning). He didn’t mind it at all, considering he would have 18 hour shifts where he’s surrounded by people and under stress, man’s needed the break !! But sometimes it was nice to not be entirely alone after Rhys joined.

• Rhys helps Zane with some of his projects. Zane ofcourse doesn’t really like the idea of their being another “smart” person on the server, but it atleast means someone can FINALLY understand his projects and his speak in his own lingo without him having to dumb down everything he says.

• Zane’s projects success rate surprisingly increased after Rhys joined. Everyone on the server thinks he’s maybe just taking himself more seriously now to one up Rhys.

-> Zane has too much pride when it comes to his work, always thinking that he’s got it perfect the first time and never takes the time to test anything or double check his work. (his doctor ego showing) He’s also the owner of the server and always OPed, so he knows he can just fix whatever he breaks. But having Rhys around atleast means someone will be making sure he put everything in place correctly and doesn’t accidentally throw the server into a disaster for the 10th time that month.

• Zane eventually starts to slowly accept Rhys once he realizes Rhys isn’t trying to take his place on the server and that they actually work really well together in a professional setting.

• Zane has always been the kind of guy to develop feelings and then shove it back down because “I can’t worry about that rn I have a job”, but it’s harder for him to ignore over time as Rhys really likes to stand close with the person he’s talking to and make good eye contact, which slowly starts to get Zane flustered once he realizes just how much Rhys really REALLY listens to him, and easily jealous when he does the same to other people.

• Their first kiss would definitely either be when they’re in a fight or Kim going “oh just kiss already” when they’re bickering and the two just pause and stare at eachother before Zane grabs his face.

-> No one thought they would actually do it and all of them scream in unison the moment Zane just kisses him aggressively bc they all just didn’t see the signs except for Kim. (She knew immediately when she noticed how the way Zane and her fight are not the same as Zane and Rhys…like why are you getting so close to his face like that? to kiss him?)

• Between the two of them Rhys gets the most flustered easiest, Zane can be a hard shell to crack sometimes and he definitely uses the knowledge to his advantage.

[paeliae-occasionally]

Who is your darkest oc?

Thank you for the question!

There are multiple, and all of them for different reasons. I will let you all vote for the worst among them.

Trigger warnings: Psychological and physical abuse, blood letting, slavery, mass murder… you get the picture.

The Avandil.

They are a family who run the most successful runic cult. Essentially to become a runic you have to be broken and rebuilt like Ezemhaziel was so this cult specialises in hurting people with enough manipulation to bring the children they abuse back to them. They redirect guilt for their pain onto the children and basically have this twisted psychological torture where they act like the saviours and protectors of the children after they hurt them so the children will come back and work for the cult when they learn runes.

Some of the older Haemocrafter sects

The haemocrafters of Korlan have a long history of taking captives to harvest blood from, but different sects went about this in very different ways, with some using blood as a voluntary currency for people who chose to live in their borders all the way to the treating people like captive animals to be harvested for their blood. The worst sects would essentially keep all manner of creatures in cages too small for them to move and let them out to entertain their nobles or boast of their conquests. Essentially had a large slave trade for blood slaves and it was really not good.

Pre-dissolution mind gods

So before the death of Rin, the gods essentially had free reign over their territories and mortals had no way of stopping them, so some of these gods acted as protectors and were worshipped as heroes, others twisted their gifts for their own pleasure. Essentially some of the early mind gods, including Kithaer decided their power was best used taking the minds of mortals and playing. They enjoyed shaping and moulding mortals to hurt those they cared about or making them go insane. There were also a few experiments with how far you could push human minds before their bodies gave out. Psychological manipulation and fear mongering to make the mortals worship the gods that hurt and imprisoned them. It was messed up.

The second Laith’Emeris revolution

Ok so I specify second for a reason here. The first revolution was led by workers frustrated by the wealth divide of the high mages in the city and the common farmers and practical workers who maintain the city but see none of their hard work repaid. This revolution was crushed but it laid the foundations for the second revolution. The second rebellion was run by the the former lords of the city, who were removed from their seats of power when Laith’Emeris was taken over by magic users. They called on the broken pieces of the rebellion to get back into power. They were utterly remorseless taking back what they thought stolen from them, killing any mages they could (mainly children and non-combatants) to draw a response from the high towers. This rebellion was also crushed by the mages, but not before its leader’s true motivations had been revealed and the people had basically left realising they had been used. The second rebellion was utterly destructive and caused more bloodshed than had been seen in years but it also tainted the idea of rebellion in public consciousness for years. This lead to the people not standing up for themselves as the mages continued to treat them even worse, because defying the mages publicly was such a taboo after this rebellion.

Honestly I am probably forgetting people but these are the ones who come to mind as the most actively intentionally sadistic or harmful characters.

The tag list:

@thelovelymachinery, @an-indecisive-nerd, @the-letterbox-archives, @oliolioxenfreewrites, @winvyre

@happypup-kitcat24, @wyked-ao3, @leahnardo-da-veggie, @alnaperera, @dearunreliablenarrator

@rumeysawrites, @urnumber1star, @seastarblue, @thecomfywriter

[spann-stann]

Setting Blurb: The Congressional Armed Freedom Fighters (CAFF)

CAFF terminology:

 “Clonscript” – Portmanteau of clone and conscript, referring to the cloned portion of the World Congress of Freedom’s military, known as the Congressional Armed Freedom Fighters (CAFF). WCOF citizens consider “Clonscript” derogatory; they prefer Combat Bioautomata. The Clonscripts were created following the end of the Human-Crystalline War, and the depletion of the WCOF’s non-Party population. Prior to the war, service in the CAFF was a requirement for entry into the WCOF Party. With the war’s end, virtually all of the population able to had already enlisted and earned their party membership. Attempts to recruit Party Members (veterans and fresh recruits) were moot due to the war leaving a bad taste in the populace’s mouth. Efforts into the creation of humans via artificial wombs gave the WCOF the means of rebuilding their military quickly. Every citizen is required to contribute genetic material (unless they volunteer to serve in the CAFF themselves), and there are rumors that the CAFF steals genetic material from promising enemy combatants killed in action. Clones are essentially homunculi, biologically “humanlike” with tweaks to their genome to allow their categorization as distinct from baseline humanity. All clonscripts are sterile, with aging accelerated (they grow up faster but live shorter). Clonscripts are placed into three categories depending on their age and experience:

Hastati – Clonscripts that decant successfully and survive their initial training are inducted into the Hastati. This third of the CAFF’s clone formations are given the most basic weapons and body armor. In combat, Hastati are sent in human waves to overwhelm the enemy (or expend their ammunition).

Principes – Hastati that survive multiple campaigns (physically and psychologically) are promoted to the ranks of the Principes. Principes are sent into combat after the initial wave of Hastati has either made an exploitable break in enemy lines, or to make one should the Hastati fail. Clonscripts that reach this position have access to higher quality equipment, and light combat vehicles.

Triarii – The senior-most (survived the most campaigns) of the CAFF’s clonscript forces are elevated to the Triarii. While Hastati and Principes operate in their own formations, Triarii are the equivalent of senior NCOs, assisting Party Volunteers in commanding their less experienced brethren. Triarii can also be seen in Party Volunteer vehicle crews and infantry formations (usually in specialist and advisory roles). To ensure their experience in the field is put to use beyond their modified life expectancies, Clonscript triarii are cybernetically and biologically modified.

Party Volunteers – Supplementing the Clonscripts are baseline human volunteers, either citizens already a WCOF Party Member, or applicants looking to increase their social standing. Members of the latter are rare after the Human-Crystalline War (hence the name Party Volunteers). In any combat zone, Volunteers are only deployed in the Clonscript wave attacks are successful. Volunteers may either serve as officers commanding Clonscript formations or serve in their own. Volunteer formations are classified as follows:

Equites – Party Volunteers, unlike the Clonscripts, have access to the CAFF’s complete arsenal of ground combat vehicles. CAFF vehicles are highly modular, allowing the WCOF’s small defense industries to produce “jack of all trades, master of none” combat platforms that can perform multiple roles on the battlefield (if the required loadout is available). Volunteers can also serve as aeroequites and pilot CAFF aerospace craft.

Velites - While the Clonscripts serve as literal cannon fodder, the Volunteer Velites are the CAFF’s elite infantry. Velites are deployed the moment Clonscripts punch a hole in enemy lines. It is only in rare occasions that Velites are deployed alone and without the support of Clonscript manpower (Imperial and UM soldiers joke that they only deploy alone when they know they’re already going to win). Much like their Equites comrades, Velites are trained to utilize modular equipment to alter their role on a changing battlefield.

Both Clonscripts and Volunteers used the following unit organizations:

Legionary Theaters – Legionary Theaters aren’t military units but are instead administrative divisions that subordinate units operate in. Legionary Theaters are made up of 12 Legios, and there are 1-3 Theaters on each planet with WCOF territory. Each Legionary Theater is commanded by a Revolutionary Prefect.

Legio – From the Latin “legion”, Legios are the largest military unit within the CAFF. Legios are made up of 3 Demi-Legios and are commanded by Senior Legate.

Demi-Legio – Inspired by CorpEmp Maneuver Forces, Demi-Legios are formations designed to operate independently from its parent Legio. Demi-Legios are made up of 8 Cohae and 2 Alae and are commanded by a Junior Legate.

Coha – Cohae are infantry formations in the CAFF and are made up of 8 Manii. 5 Manii in a Coha are made up of Clonscripts, and the final 3 are made up of Velites. Cohae are commanded by a Prime Centurio.

Ala – Alae are Equites (combat vehicle) formations subordinate to a Demi-Legio. Alae are made up 4 Equestrian Manii.

Mani – Manii are made up of 8 Contae regardless of their combat branch. Manii are commanded by a Senior Centurio.

Conta – Contae are the smallest unit in the CAFF and in the Velites are made up of 8 soldiers. Clonscript Contae are made up of 80 soldiers. Velites Contae are commanded by a Veles-Decan and Clonscript Contae are commanded by either a Junior Centurio or the senior-most of the Triarii. In Equites formations Contae refer to the crew and support personnel for an individual vehicle, and are commanded by an Eques-Decan.