#absolute dumbasses

[quicksilversquared]

Since my health insurance is through the state (because being a grad student doesn't get me health insurance and also doesn't pay enough), I have to report any change in income when it happens, which as of the last time (at the start of the summer contract), has become even more stupidly difficult, because I have to call it in instead of them having a functional website that can do things like that (which is how it has been), but they've gone from hours of (I think?) 8-5 to instead 9-3, and every. single. fucking. time. I call in, I get a message of "I'm sorry, we're experiencing an unusually high call volume right now" followed by automatic hang-up.

YEAH NO SHIT YOU'RE EXPERIENCING UNUSUALLY HIGH CALL VOLUME DESPITE IT BEING NOT RENEWAL SEASON, YOU'VE CHOPPED YOUR FUCKING HOURS AND I WOULDN'T BE SURPRISED IF YOU CUT YOUR STAFF, TOO.

anyway, got through that, figured that I was done with that until late August, when the school-year contract kicks in, and then they sent me a letter wanting me to submit proof of income. Submitted copies of my previous school year's contract along with the summer contract. Got another letter, dated after I already submitted my fucking documents. They still want documents. Now I'm trying to call again to force them to admit that my contracts are perfectly fucking valid forms of proofs, and I am once again getting the "unusually high call volume" message.

IT'S NOT UNUSUALLY HIGH CALL VOLUME IF THE CALL VOLUME IS ALWAYS THIS FUCKING HIGH-

[xfctes]

She CATCHES that blush on his face, and at the feeling of his hand grazing hers, she finds that a dust of pink spreads across HER OWN face. "MHMM-- they have a LOT of options! That's why I love them so much." She had heard the chatter of their guildmates, and even some of the female members in the guild had tried to get her to ask him to go on jobs with her. But what was their ALTERIOR MOTIVE?

@foxborn

[spkyart]

Specialist

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[afterartist]

IVE DONE IT!! (not exactly sure what it is in this situation but it sure is done)

Rumble n Frenzy would bully screamer any chance they get

Soundwave on the other hand needs payed vacation because that man has to put up with so much crap

[egophiliac]

so on the subject of the "Crowley is secretly Revaan/Laverne/Levin/please Twst give us his name" theory, I think my feelings are best summed up as "I don't really buy it, but it's funny". like, in all seriousness, I'm not opposed to it; I have enjoyed the writing in Twst so far and I'm willing to trust that whatever happens will, you know, make sense and not be terrible. but I'm just not really convinced by the current evidence! maybe that'll change once we learn more, we'll see!

with that said, may I propose a few alternate theories about the possible Crowley/Revaan connection:

[lycandrophile]

some people will really see elliot page simply existing and feel like it’s their right to say the weirdest shit about him. it’s really incredible (and i mean that in the most literal sense of fucking unbelievable) how openly these people admit that they think we exist solely to benefit them — no lives of our own, no autonomy. as far as they’re concerned, we’re just here to look pretty and have their babies, to decorate and populate their world.

this is why i really just have to laugh when someone tries to argue that transmasculinity is anti-feminist. can’t you see how much our mere existence makes the misogynists short-circuit? how much our transitions go directly against all of the expectations they put on us? transmasc transitions are in such direct opposition to their worldview that they resort to just treating us like we’re dead because our lives simply are not compatible with their version of how the world should be. we make ourselves so egregiously and irrevocably unfuckable to them that they’re actually going around unironically mourning the “loss” of our bodies.

[essektheylyss]

I'm also still laughing that he really showed up, introduced himself as an Archivist of the Cobalt Soul, and then insinuated that they were going to go extrajudicially hunt down, capture, and "interrogate" a Cerberus Assembly Archmage. Sir, archivists do not do that kind of thing, least of all on their own, LEAST OF ALL with a bunch of random hooligans they were just sent to collect for an unrelated excursion. Quite honestly, that was the thing I kept going back to in evidence of, there is absolutely no way this is a legit archivist.

[clearnachopirate]

DBD True Crime AU

Charles and Edwin's bodys are burried together.

Someone is investigating Charles' death, eventually it gets enough steam that they get permission to escivate his grave... except there's two bodys there.

No DNA match, but its way older than Charles' body, from around the time another boy disappeared... so they track down the Payne family and see if they can match the DNA.

Of course, it does.

This, of course, spurrs a massive conspiracy that the school snuck the other boys remains in Charles's casket to cover up Edwin's death.

The Payne family pays for a proper burial for Edwin, but Charles, liking that he and his best mate have been together forever literally, moves the body back, much to everyone's confusion and shock.

Que a series of more bizarre ways people try to keep Edwin's bones in place, and the boys (to Niko's amusement , and Crystal's headache) keep moving them back. Sometimes they lay the bones next to eachother, sometimes they're high fiving. Charles likes wrapping his arm around Edwin's shoulder.

On one memorable occasion, Charles was so annoyed they kept being separated, he jumbled their bones around.

Now the bones are in the British museum on display with a few words about each of the boys, (there's an excerpt from one of Edwin's journals from when he was alive. There's a quote from one of the boys who attacked Charles about what a good mate he was.)

Charles and Edwin go and visit the bones sometimes, rearranging them again and again. They eventually leave the bones behind after having them hold hands.

(Edwin defacing museum property bc 'that is embarrassing, Charles. I hardly thought anyone would ever read that.' He also obviously crosses out what Charles's "friend" had to say.)

(There's one podcaster who is convinced the two met time travel style and fell in love, and they can't even be separated in death. She's practically laughed off her show, but Niko loves the show.)

[ruenii]

tbh if cumplane were to date in their original world do you think you Shen Yuans family did the K-Drama thing and offered Qinghua thousands or a million RMB to stay away from their child?

I think Shang Qinghua would have just took the money to take Shen Yuan and him out on a nice lovely vacation around the world (or buy so much fandom merch that they have to build separate rooms for their own beloved fandoms respectfully.)

[fatedroses]

Two former military elites taking merc jobs perform absolutely hellish battle tactics together.

[krazieka2]

FE Houses Doodles

[crazylittlejester]

Time: *sighs* We can’t manipulate, mansplain, malewife our way out of this one, Captain

Warriors: *loosening his scarf just a bit* Manwhore it is

[lesbianjamies]

Making up for lost time 💖

Bonus: Fuyu just a few weeks ago (lying her ass off)

[lotus-pear]

what do you call this specific flavor of dynamic