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woodswolf · 1 year ago

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You said on the other post that you’re open to disagreement or discussion, so hey, I’ll take you up on that! Sorry that this is terribly long; I didn't realize how much I had to say about my feelings about this game until suddenly almost 9 hours had passed defending it.

I agree with you on a fair bit of things here, but the places where we disagree could not be more pronounced. From reading what you said, though, I think we’re approaching the question of “is Talos 2 good” from different directions, and that at least contributes to our diversity of opinion. I’ve been concerned more with whether it’s a good game; you’re more concerned with whether it’s a good sequel. This isn't a bad thing.

To make my own stance clear is difficult, because I still don’t entirely know what I think of it (edit: at least until I fully wrote out my thoughts); I’ll probably have to go back for a few more playthroughs to really dig into things, especially some of the stuff that I could tell I missed (I’ll get into this in a second). For what it’s worth, though, I’ve very much enjoyed the time I had with the game, and while I very strongly agree with some of your criticisms, there are some that I very strongly disagree with, and some that I don’t think are criticisms at all as much as (often warranted) grievances about (likely) intentional design choices.

To start off, I might as well give my chops. I’ve also 100%’d Talos 1 and Road to Gehenna, and it’s also one of my all-time favorite games. Road to Gehenna is my favorite part of Talos 1 for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I find its story more interesting than the base game’s.

As for my path through Talos 2, it’s… interesting. Overall I chose choices that favored individual and societal freedom, preferring raw forward progress to most of the other alternatives presented (more on choices later). I ended up with Byron as my mayor, and Lynerks was present at the dam (though I’ll admit this felt a bit random, other than the fact that I regularly agreed with her in other conversations). I did all of the normal puzzles, all of the golden puzzles, and saved Miranda. For my final choice, I chose that we needed to keep and use the Theory of Everything.

As for the Somnodrome storyline: five people were interested in me from my answers to DOGE, but I was auto-matched with Helga. However, due to choice weirdness, I can’t say I can do an honest review of anything to do with the Somnodrome story because I unintentionally aborted it before I was able to make any meaningful choices in regards to it. Specifically, in the lab in one of the southern areas where Hermanubis talks to you about it, I chose that I was entirely uninterested in it, and the game interpreted that as “okay, you obviously want this technology basically destroyed, then”, and after that conversation it never came up again for the rest of the game.

This is one of the things that I agree with you about. While I don’t think Talos 2 is naïve, it very often conflated otherwise unrelated concepts, e.g. “society should embrace progress which means that life is inherently beautiful and space colonization/terraforming/bioforming(?)/etc. is inherently good”, or in this case, me being personally uninterested in the Somnodrome technology with wanting it disposed of or destroyed. From the prior conversations that had been had about it before I made this choice, I had come to interpret it as “psilocybin for robots”: potentially interesting or fun, but also potentially dangerous, and ultimately pretty worthless. However, Rand in particular kept insisting that this technology was the greatest thing since sliced bread and a lot of woo-woo bullshit that I found profoundly unconvincing and uninteresting, even as much as he tried to dress it up with “we’re built on an inherent moral logic and we can use this to solve it” and so on.

In the only real conversation I had with regards to it, I chose to “give it to the scholars” because “I literally don’t care, but since it has the potential to kill people at LEAST make sure they know what they’re doing before they do” was not an option. Then, in the lab with Hermanubis, I was presented with a choice of “use this untested drug technology right now” or “don’t use this drug technology, and if you insist you don’t want to, we’ll essentially destroy it instead, but we won’t tell you that we’re going to do that until after you insist you’re not interested”. Yes, it’d obviously be bad or unsatisfying game design to not give the player plot armor against any potential bad side effects of it (which definitely are very real, based off some of what Athena said in the ending), in a similar vein to how they’re able to do all of those datastream overloads just fine while Byron was taken out by just one, but I was still entirely uninterested in anything about the “psilocybin for robots” until after I already made the choice to “destroy” it and there was immediately a terminal entry saying “actually this could be a very useful control scheme for the Megastructure”.

It’s definitely frustrating when it happens, and it happens a lot, but not in a way that completely ruins the game, at least for me. Ultimately, there are a lot of sacrifices that have to be made in regard to choice-based narratives like this, and the moment you give the player a finite number of options, nuance will always be sacrificed, especially with the range of options it’s trying to cater to — trying to condense every range of viewpoints from expansionist progressivism to scientific liberalism to religious conservatism into three to six options will always fall short. Talos 1 has this problem as well, though it’s able to hide the seams better due to its smaller scale and more specific focus — there are many dialogue choices with Milton where the option I would want to choose isn’t there, or is interpreted very differently than how I meant it (and only part of that is due to Milton’s occasional less-sound criticisms); similar problems exist in Road to Gehenna. Could Talos 2 have done more to allow nuance and avoid conflating often very disparate ideas? Yes. Would it have been reasonable to do so within the constraints of writing everything else? Probably. Would it have been completely able to avoid this kind of thing? Definitely not, even in an ideal world, because there almost certainly would be at least somewhere that this would’ve gotten stuck.

Frankly, I think that the script would be perfectly fine as-is if it was a choice between factions instead of personal philosophy. It essentially boils down to this already, but making it that much more explicit would help for a lot of reasons. The only way you can be perfectly happy with your faction choice in Fallout New Vegas for instance is if you side with Yes Man, who will set out to do everything exactly as you please to — you’re almost certainly going to be compromising on something-or-other to side with any of the NCR/Caesar’s Legion/Mr. House. I think Talos 2 could have benefitted from having its characters more explicitly sided into factions at the beginning of the story like this, as it’s another alternate way to cover up the seams where there’s a lack of nuance: it allows the player to distance themselves from the things they don’t agree with and focus on the things that they do. It’d also lessen what you pointed out about the characters feeling like mouthpieces for ideas (though I personally don’t have much of an issue with this — I actually really like the main cast in particular, even if I don’t really agree with e.g. Yaqut/Miranda that the existence of life is inherently beautiful and that more life = more beauty and so on, and even if there were more than occasional moments that felt a tad preachy).

To sum up my thoughts on the narrative, I think Talos 2 would be an even better game if the Somnodrome plotline and whatever’s going on with secret societies was entirely cut. As soon as I saw in the credits that the “main story” and “Somnodrome story” were written by different writers, and how drastically things changed as soon as I said I straight-up wasn’t interested in the Somnodrome plot, it was very clear that it was the much weaker plot overall. Making this choice had a lot of effects on the ending that felt very odd as well — Rand was straight up gone in the finale, I never had any of a “secret society plot” beyond the initial interactions with DOGE, and being matched with Helga had no effect beyond one conversation shortly before I told Hermanubis no. If anything, when I do another playthrough, I want to see if there’s a way to say I’m not interested in it even sooner than when I did, mostly because it would be truly baffling from a narrative design perspective if that were the case — it’s already pretty baffling that the option to completely ignore it existed and that it had no effect (I was thinking I’d at least be able to have a conversation with Rand where he’d be mad at me or something, but nope).

That being said, I do like the main story a lot, and I’d argue that there’s a lot more depth there than you’re giving it credit for. While I don’t vibe as much with a lot of the Miranda stuff, I still don’t think it’s bad — but more importantly, I literally could not disagree more with you about the decision to make Athena a diegetic character and her role in the plot. In fact, I think it’s the most interesting choice Talos 2 made, and the most well-executed by a country mile. The player may not get to make (m)any decisions in her story, depending on whether you count saving Miranda or the final set of choices as such (I don’t), but they don’t have to — her story works entirely on its own merits, and if anything, it’s given me an even deeper appreciation for Talos 1’s base game.

I surely don’t have to explain that Athena and Alexandra Drennan are set up as foils or parallel characters; they’re viewed as more important than other characters, they’re both deeply troubled by the implications of the work they’re doing, they even have the same voice. This was even established in Talos 1, in RtG’s Jerusalem, with the three (primary) playable characters being Alexandra, Arkady, and Athena — allegedly the main character from the book we were given chapters of throughout World A in Talos 1’s base game, but recontextualized as Talos 1’s player character via Talos 2. (I’m going to try so hard not to turn this into a spiel on the parallels between Jerusalem and Talos 2, because Jerusalem is straight-up my favorite thing about Talos 1 and the ongoing parallels between it and Talos 2 made me INSANE through my entire playthrough.)

What’s interesting about Talos 2 is that, by making Athena her own character, they’re able to ask a lot of interesting questions about Talos 1 that it didn’t really have space to: about how an experience like the Simulation would affect the new humanity being sprung out of it. We don’t know what choices Athena made or how she ended up where she is — the only thing we know for sure about her experience is that she found the cat secret in B7 (and even that’s not necessarily the case; for all we really know, she could have found Milton the cat at some point afterwards rather than fresh out of the dam) and achieved the Transcendence ending. Everything else is left ambiguous about her specific experiences; all that the writers left themselves with to infer her character from were the more or less universal experiences involved in achieving that ending. What can you really infer about a diegetic player character from those, and from her experiences with life after the Simulation ended?

Turns out, they’re able to dig into a lot. Athena is a very deeply flawed character and at times even straight-up hypocritical. She herself started off as a very idealistic character, driven on by Alexandra’s hopes, to make the choices that she did. She’s always striving to move forward and discover new things, to build people up and move things always onward and upward, setting lofty goals for no reason other than to have a target to meet and (hopefully, one day) exceed. She wants there to always be something bigger and better, but in being such a powerful driving force for the new civilization that she helped to found, she accidentally trapped herself in a myth as the “ultimate savior” and “the only person who knows anything worth anything”. She trapped herself in the exact thing that she was running away from: an assigned role as one mean to overthrow every structure and carve an original path forward. An assigned role as the one meant to kill God and take its throne. Everything that the Simulation forged her and her ancestors to be.

Athena ran away and did everything that she did on the island for the same reason that all of the other First Companions more or less stepped down from public life (minus Byron, and even he has strong reservations; if it weren’t for his friendship with Alcatraz, who actively doesn’t mythologize him, he might not be involved in the game at all). The people of New Jerusalem stopped seeing them as people and only engaged with them as the only thing worse than celebrities: as a messiah and disciples. It’s set up such that the player will be inclined to see them as this, too, but like Alcatraz I simply don’t vibe with that for a lot of reasons, and I was rewarded for it in the ways that characters grappled with their preconceptions of her in one direction or the other was incredibly interesting.

By the end of the game, my own opinions on Athena were very mixed, because I could see how she got to where she is with all of the trauma and heartbreak along the way, but I also couldn’t entirely forgive her — because as much as she was a victim of mythologizing and deserved an apology for what New Jerusalem turned her/the Founder into, she (and the rest of New Jerusalem) owes an even bigger apology to Alexandra Drennan for doing the same thing to her in turn. Just because Alexandra is dead and can’t see the literal monument she’s been turned into doesn’t mean that she deserves to be deified, and Athena most of all should understand that. (I have a lot more thoughts on Athena and how she ends up being an incredibly interesting blend of Alexandra, EL0HIM, and Milton, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of what I want to say here and going into it would make me go insane again.)

The Talos 2 story we got, overall? It’s pretty good! I enjoyed it, and there are a lot of little things that offer more nuance to the situation — for instance, in Byron’s ending, Neith and Schuyler are able to avoid any personal introspection and growth about what they want to do with their lives, because they’re allowed to go back to doing the same things they were doing before. But if it really dug in and made its story explicitly about Athena and how the new humanity has been affected and essentially traumatized by their origins? That could have been literally incredible and played more with a lot of really fun themes, both originating in and expanding from Talos 1. If Talos 2 chose this plot, it’d be a perfect sequel; Talos 2’s actual story is also very faithful in my opinion, but even if it’s not as good of a sequel plot, it’s at least serviceable, and I’d say it’s a rather logical extension of Road to Gehenna.

As a final note on the story, I don’t see the fact that it involves a Theory of Everything as a flaw as much as just, well, a plot point. I also don’t think it detracts from the philosophy at all, and only serves to raise the stakes — Athena discovered something that could literally destroy the universe if used improperly, and that’s more than enough reason to be conflicted about sharing it with the world! Especially when New Jerusalem had already deified her to the extent they had. But I also really like more existential stories such as the Science Adventure series or Umineko where a Theory of Everything as such is actually rather trivial compared to the weight of concepts that are often thrown around. I have definitely seen cases where the inclusions of such weighty concepts are done poorly, but Talos 2 is very much not one of them — two examples I can immediately think of off the top of my head are the ending twists of Drizzlepath: Genie and Peregrin, two of my favorite games that I love to ignore the ending twists for. The difference in this case between these two and Talos 2 is that the Theory of Everything is introduced as a mid-story twist rather than a cop-out right at the ending, and that it serves to enhance the story rather than detract from the way more interesting stuff that it had going on. Both DP:G’s and Peregrin’s base narratives are so, so, so much more interesting than what their endings imply, because in those cases, the larger concept is used to break the foundation of everything that was established before; Talos 2 uses the Theory of Everything exclusively to add depth, and for a few players, the scale of that discovery could have changed their mind on whether using the island’s technology was a good idea or not. That is a good use of such a weighty concept.

As for the puzzles, I also agree that they’re often too “easy”, but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not — I’m very conflicted on it. On the one hand, something I found myself thinking for a fair number of puzzles in Talos 2 was that “this would not be worth a sigil in Talos 1”. The puzzle that specifically comes to mind as most emblematic of this is N2 Rainbow; it’s entirely trivial to solve even if you’re asleep at your keyboard, and that’s only a bit under halfway through the game. There were a lot of other puzzles that felt like this, too, it’s just that that one specifically stuck in my head due to exactly how trivial it is. There were almost never second or third steps in puzzles, except in a few cases towards the end of the game (and almost but not exclusively in the golden puzzles). I did get stuck a few times, but more often than not it was because I was overthinking the clear conditions (e.g. that I need to get an extra piece to the end when I didn’t) than because there was something I genuinely hadn’t thought of. (For instance, I kept thinking that I needed to open the laser gate in N1 Drilling Party from the back for some reason — I genuinely didn’t realize I’d already solved it by getting it open in the first place until I came back later.)

I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I was disappointed by the lack of difficulty in the puzzles — I never encountered anything that was “Talos hard” as I think of it, but when I was thinking of “Talos hard”, I was thinking of C7 Prison Break, which I always have to look up a guide for every time I replay just to make sure I don’t softlock myself and have to reset — but there were some puzzles that were acceptably difficult or required particular leaps in order to complete, and they can always add more difficult puzzles via DLC like Road to Gehenna did. It’s also a case of particularly high standards (as most puzzles in Talos 1 and even RtG are not anywhere near as hard as C7 Prison Break).

But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s a terrible change for three reasons. The first is that, in the cases where I really got into the rhythm of it, this faster, more frenetic style of puzzle solving is actually really satisfying. Just going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, one puzzle after the next after the next, is really, really fun. There were only a few instances where I really felt this, but when I did feel it, it was great. It felt really good to just immediately, intuitively understand the concept and go on solving a ton of puzzles back to back to prove that I know this mechanic really well. There were still less satisfying moments in there where the puzzles were too simple — again, N2 Rainbow — but when the puzzles were both fair and fast, it led to a state entirely unlike anything I’ve felt in, well, any game, really. This game would be extremely fun to casually speedrun, because it lets you do that.

Because the second reason I like it is that, while Talos 1’s puzzles were almost universally more complex than Talos 2’s, they were also a lot more bullshit in places, and Talos 2 fixes that. I’d always had the opinion that some of Talos 1’s puzzles are better than others (B6 Egyptian Arcade and A* Nerve Wrecker my be-loathed), but it wasn’t until I played Talos 2 that I realized exactly how bad both the recorder and mines were as puzzle mechanics. The recorder made it so much harder to experiment while solving puzzles, and as much as I miss the fact that the fun tricks such as duplicating items via recording are no longer possible with the new body-swapping mechanic, the body-swapping mechanic feels so much better to actually play with than the recording ever did. (Even though I know the solution to, say, B5 Alley of the Pressure Plates perfectly well, I still can’t help but groan every time I have to solve it on repeat playthroughs because the recording just feels so miserable to use.)

Mines, on the other hand, are completely gone in Talos 2 (except for the part where you save Miranda) and I honestly couldn’t miss them less. All mines ever really did in Talos 1 was slow you down and force you to wait for their cycles (or to create cycles via jammers in many cases, which just doubles the amount of waiting required). They never made puzzles any more difficult, only more tedious and frustrating, which felt like difficulty until Talos 2 showed that a puzzle need be neither tedious nor frustrating to be difficult, as in N2 Vantage Point, W2 Hollow, or S3 Thrust Vector. (Again, B6 Egyptian Arcade and A* Nerve Wrecker my BE-FUCKING-LOATHED. There are no words in any language strong enough for how much I hate those two puzzles in particular.)

And the third reason that I like it is because the decreased difficulty makes it easier (or will make it easier in my case) to replay the game and experiment with the narrative side of the story. This is where I think our differences in approach come out the most, and to really get into this, I want to step back and take a look at Talos 1 first.

I really like Talos 1’s story, both in the base game and in RtG, but one thing that sometimes frustrates me is that, past a certain point, its pacing is inherently tied to how fast you can solve puzzles. This is less of a problem now, since I already know how to solve every puzzle and have done it multiple times by now, but I remember on my first playthrough in late 2016 that it was really frustrating for me — I wanted to talk to Milton more, I wanted to find more barcodes, but past a certain point, if there were one or two puzzles that I was just stuck on and couldn’t manage to solve, I’d just get frustrated because I really wanted to see what else Milton had to say, or anything else. While Road to Gehenna always had something new to offer after every puzzle, on the other hand, the puzzles take too long to solve to really go through and see the consequences of your choices in an organic way.

Talos 2 offers much better narrative pacing. The easier puzzles make the lulls shorter, but there’s also the fact that Talos 2 has more story to offer in a lot of cases — there was almost always something interesting happening right after solving a puzzle, and there are interesting interactions that you can have with your companions on top of that. There’s a lot more story, and as someone whose favorite part of Talos 1 was the story and characters, all the better for me.

The final thing I’ll bring up is that I think a lot of our difference in opinion is due to differing expectations going in, as I slightly alluded to at the very beginning. From the beginning, I approached Talos 2 with a very open mind, and let it show me what it wanted to show me and so on and so forth. I came in expecting puzzles, and the demo taught me that dialogue choices would also be important and relevant, and what I ultimately came away with is that Talos 2 is less a sequel to Talos 1 than “an odd but compelling lovechild of Talos 1 and The Forgotten City/Fallout New Vegas”. I very much enjoyed it for what it was, but I don’t fault anyone for wanting more Talos from it — I very much realize that I enjoy Talos 1 and other chamber-based puzzlers for very different reasons than most people (namely that I almost always enjoy them more for their stories more than their gameplay).

Overall, I really, really liked Talos 2, and I think it’s about on par with Talos 1 in terms of enjoyment, with both having trade-offs relative to the other. When disregarding everything about Talos 1’s DLC, though, since Talos 2 doesn’t have any (yet), I think Talos 2 has a very slight edge for me, mostly because the game feels SO much better to actually play. Even if Talos 2 isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be, I didn’t even realize exactly how much the recorder and mines dragged Talos 1 down for me until I saw Talos 2 look at the same mechanics and entirely fix them. If I weren’t in the middle of a huge fanfiction project right now that I’m spending almost all of my time on, I would’ve definitely already jumped in for the rest of the achievements.

Here's my review of The Talos Principle 2. It's not a flattering one, but it felt like some things needed to be said.

First of all, let’s get all of ad hominems out the way. This is not a review in bad faith, nor is in written out of malice. I’m not politically opposed to democracy, liberalism, individualism, humanism and women’s rights. I’m somewhat a nihilist, yeah, but a rather practical one. Meanings can be constructed for ease of living and efficiency and all that jazz. I’m also not a puzzle genre hater. I’ve 100%ed Portal 2, and the only reason I do not have 100% at TTP1 is because I could never bring myself to kill Milton off. Who I am though is a huge fan of the first game. This is clearly affecting my perception of this one, so this is relevant, I think.

I’m a huge fan of TTP1 and I hugely disliked TTP2. Is this game a sequel, does it continue the story? Yes. Is it a spiritual successor, does it continue the _narrative_? No, not at all. It feels different, hits different, and for me it wasn’t in a good kind of way.

First of all, TTP2 is overwhelmingly naïve. I do see that this is a deliberate creative choice, but I strongly believe it does not fit the series. It was a bad idea to take a thought-provoking piece of art and continue it as a message rather than as a discussion. TTP1 had space within itself to engage with its ideas and to form individual conclusions. TTP2 clearly wants to tell you something specific, but to truly listen you need to suspend your disbelief a lot more than before. Where the first game would have tackled a question with some degree of nuance, this one tends to postulate an answer. Would like to explore space for some other reasons than our moral duty to light up the Universe with cognition and life? Do not believe in such things? Good luck. Do not think that beauty exists / is inherently good / matters? Good luck once again, now with a chance to disappoint your companions. The list goes on, and while I’m all for humanism, technocracy and progress, I still felt trapped in reasonings game offered me for it all.

There’s also a huge problem with the narrative as a whole – there is no whole. Plot seems strangely fragmented, with Somnodrome arc being a bitter mix of an afterthought and a cut plotline. What was it for? Same goes for the secret society plot. And the main story, including Miranda, is just flat. Writers want us to care for their characters, but with characters being mouthpieces for ideas this is rather hard.

Also, there’s a Theory of Everything is this game. It just is. With it, the Universe is _postulated_ as being fundamentally knowable and understandable, which is unsettling for such a huge philosophical debate. (Put your ad hominem down, I do believe that the world is cognizable, I just don’t think making this a knowable fact is a good choice for this particular game). Moreover, with the Theory of Everything the science is solved. By one person, who consciously excluded their peers out of scientific progress. One person solved science and nowhere in the game is anyone upset about it. Why? Because writers needed a magical solve-all-problems device, and without it nothing would work plot wise. But with it the plot just seems plastic and cheap.

This story has no room for me to challenge it from the inside, it forces me to go and start a one-sided conversation with its authors, which I do not like. In short, it feels rushed, naïve and incomplete. But this is a puzzle game, not a text adventure. So, are the puzzles any good?

Well, I did not like them. I’m not sure if it means that they are bad, but in my opinion, they are somewhat boring. Most of the time solving them feels mechanical, not that much of ah-a! moments for me. More of the “finally, get this, stupid new puzzle element” and “after 500 hours in portal my brain solves this without thinking”. The other category is “to convoluted to be interesting”. But there’s non zero chance this is me and not the game.

Really bad stuff happens between the puzzles, in those huge open spaces. They get old very fast, and fast travel option isn’t helping much. Some regions are almost impossible to navigate even with the compass, and solving for stars just becomes a chore.

Well, most of the game felt like a chore to me. There are other things I’m upset about, like making Athena, seemingly our main character from TTP1, a chosen-one with a God complex (she IS that even without the myth around her) or not including Milton, but otherwise good plot could have made it work. This one did not. It disregards a very personal thing for a fan of the first game – their unique experience. Maybe the new audience will find this alluring. I certainly did not.

#the talos principle #the talos principle 2 #my posts #the talos principle spoilers #the talos principle 2 spoilers

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myc-ology-whore · 3 years ago

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Mycology, Pt. 1

Myc x Fem!Reader (SFW)

This... This is 5.7k words. And it's part one of two (???), quite possibly more. I'm in too deep for an ask, folks.

Okay! So, I've been working stupidly hard on this ask for the last three days or so. I accidently deleted the ask, but thankfully I'd screenshotted it beforehand lol. So, I put a lot of effort into this, partially because it's an introduction to one of my favourite OCs, Leon, and partially because I really liked this ask and just couldn't stop writing. I think normally people would pay writers on Tumblr for this, but you know what? I like to write, and I had a lot of fun writing this. So, as sincerely as I can possibly say this, thank you for the ask. It may not be exactly what was asked for personality-wise, but I hope it satisfies nonetheless.

FYI, while this part is SFW, the second part will 100% be NSFW. Also, none of the side characters really matter much except Leon, lol. He's the only one I've really fleshed out and put heart into. Let me know what you think of him.

You'd been working at Cognito for some time when the mycelian had first found his way into your life. The lab you were given to study your specimens was several floors below the atrium, and you often left the building late because you got too caught up in your work, so you'd just never managed to catch a glimpse of him. You were well aware that there was a mycelian working in Cognito somewhere, because you knew that they were the source of the hyper-psilocybin samples that were sent to your office to be processed, but it wasn't your job to extract that from the specimen, so you'd never had any need to go see them.

That didn't mean you didn't want to, however.

You were checking on the growth of some of your psilocybe cubensis in their primordium stage when you heard a sharp rapping on your door. "Come in," you called, taking a few snapshots of the baby mushrooms. There was a click behind you as someone entered your lab, shoes tapping the tiles audibly as they walked up beside you.

"Hey, gorgeous," said a familiar smooth voice, prompting you to sigh and roll your eyes. It was your coworker, Shaun, a rather attractive man only a few years older than you. He was a bit of a womanizer around this section of Cognito, from what you’d heard, and in the past week or so he'd made it his goal to get in your pants. His attempts amounted to nothing, of course, as you weren't interested in someone like him, but he was friends with one of your nicer coworkers, Amelia, so you hadn't outright turned him down yet.

"He's really a pretty decent guy, if you give him a chance," she'd tried to convince you, but you weren't buying it. "Just once, you should come to McUltra's for drinks with us. It'll be fun! Plus, I won't be the only girl in the group anymore."

"Do you need something, Shaun?" You walked around the table where your specimens sat to pin up the photos you'd just taken onto your progress board. He leaned casually onto the table as he eyed you; you noted that he was dangerously close to your baby cubensis, but tried to ignore it in favour of not looking rude.

"Yeah, wanted to ask if you'd finally changed your mind on those drinks," he replied, a friendly smile on his face. "Amelia, Kaiden and I are heading to McUltra's after work again today, and--"

"Again? I've told Amelia I'm not interested," you grumbled, leaning against the wall with your arms crossed.

Shaun frowned at your disposition. "Ah, come on, (Y/n)," he insisted, standing up straight to step a little closer to you. "I thought Amelia said you were s'posed to be fun. I'd love to watch you drink her under the table, or you could play some pool with us. Whatever you wanna do, I mean, you could even leave early if you wanted."

Womanizer or not, he did look genuine. There must be some reason Amelia sticks around him, I guess... And considering she doesn't like guys? Maybe he really isn't so bad.

You huffed in annoyance, rubbing your eyes as you mulled it over for a second more. Finally, you looked up at Shaun, suspicion in your gaze. "Just one night, then you guys will shut up about it?"

Shaun grinned. "Mhm, promise," he confirmed, miming zipping up his mouth.

"Fine. But you're buying my first drink."

. . . .

Thankfully, Cognito was nice enough to allow their employees to wear casual clothes, with the exception of lab staff having to wear lab coats while working, so you didn’t look totally out of place for a bar setting despite arriving straight after your shift. It didn’t matter much anyway, you realised, as many people here worked nights or multiple shifts, and would stop in at McUltra’s in full suits or biohazard-wear before, after, or even during work. You were rather surprised at just how many people were in the bar, considering it was only four in the afternoon, but you knew running the shadow government could drive anybody to drink after a few weeks.

Almost all of the booths in the bar were already full, and so were two of the three pool tables. Even the drinks bar itself was pretty crowded, though there were a few seats open. “Welp,” Shaun declared, looking around the room, “let’s find somewhere to sit.”

“There,” Amelia exclaimed, pointing happily at one of the booths in the very back corner of the bar. “That one there is open!”

Your three companions, Amelia, Shaun, and Shaun’s friend, Kaiden, quickly made a beeline for the table while you sauntered along behind them, scanning your surroundings. There were some arcade cabinets in the opposite corner from your table; you might be able to kill some time there. You spotted one of your favourite coworkers, Leon, sitting up at the bar by himself, drawing a smile from you. That’d be where you’d head first.

You walked up to Shaun’s side, Kaiden and Amelia already having sat down. “Alright, is everyone good with beer?” The two at the table agreed, and Shaun turned to face you. “You want something different?”

“I’ll pick up the drinks, so you don’t have to worry about it,” you said, smiling politely. “I’m assuming a beer for you too?”

Shaun raised an eyebrow, a grin spreading on his face. “Yeah, sure,” he answered, “but I’m still keeping my promise of buying the first round. Just tell the bartender to put it on my tab, he’s a really nice guy.”

You nodded and turned to the bar, your eyes locking onto Leon. You narrowly avoided bruising your hip on some of the tables several times, and nearly tripped over the lengthy tail of a particularly iguana-like reptoid, but you made it to the barstool beside your friend without injury. When you tapped on his shoulder to get his attention, you were greeted by the bright pink nose and tiny, beady eyes of a moleman. He frowned for a moment, sniffed the air around you, and broke into a wide, sharp-toothed grin.

“Miss (Y/n)!” he greeted in his polite southern accent. “I ain’t never seen you here before, ma’am! What brings you here so early in the afternoon?” The older moleman was, ironically, the lab levels’ mailman. He was very friendly to everyone, but most of the scientists were cold to him due to prior disagreements between the mole people and humans. He was very interested in your work, however, and you were happy to tell him about it when you weren’t busy, which was how you’d become acquainted.

“Some coworkers of mine insisted I come hang out with them,” you huffed, sitting down beside him. “I’m still trying to figure out how to get away from them completely, but I saw you sitting up here and figured I’d come and say hi.”

“Well, as always, Miss (Y/n), it is an absolute deeee-light to see you,” Leon said, his nose twitching happily. “You gonna stay and talk awhile?”

“I don’t see why not,” you reckoned, “though I promised I’d bring back drinks first.” You turned and waved over the bartender, a tall Easter Islander fellow with a silver nametag on his chest that read Tony. “Hi, excuse me, Tony? Could I get three beers and a piña colada, please? Shaun over there said we could put it on his tab.”

“Of course,” he replied, glancing at your table before getting to work on your drinks.

“Christ, it’s been a while since I last drank,” you chuckled, watching as Tony filled three iced glasses with foamy beer from the tap. When he finished your piña colada, you slid it into Leon’s hands so he’d know where it was, knowing well enough not to depend on a mole’s vision. “Here, keep tabs on this, will you? I’ll be right back.”

“Your drink is safe with me, Miss (Y/n),” he assured you. You beamed at him before picking up the beers to take back to your party.

Everybody was already getting into an excited conversation when you stepped back up to the table, but Shaun frowned as he saw that there were only three drinks. “You didn’t get anything for yourself? You don’t have to worry about paying for it, remember?”

“Oh, I did,” you assure him, setting a glass down in front of each of your companions, “but I’ve got someone watching it over at the bar. I found one of my friends here, so I’m gonna go sit with him for a bit.”

Shaun and Amelia both looked aghast at your announcement, but Kaiden looked like he could care less. Amelia spoke up first, protesting, “You’re ditching us?”

“I mean, you guys wanted me to come out here,” you shrugged. “I’m just saying hello to a buddy, and after that I guess we’ll see what happens.”

“Well,” Shaun sighed, “if that’s what you really want. Enjoy your drink.”

You almost felt a little bad when you saw how upset he and Amelia seemed to be, but you couldn’t be bothered to care. Maybe you were a dick, but if you were going to allow yourself to be nagged into going out, you were going to do it on your own terms. “Yeah, thanks. See ya.”

When you came back up to sit beside Leon, he pulled your drink to his chest for a second to sniff at you, then passed it back. “Safe as a baby in a bunker,” he said cheerily, listening as you took a sip of the sweet drink. “That rum sure do smell strong, ma’am. I ain’t never tried anything like that, truth be told.”

“Mm, I can get you one if you want,” you say, slurping up the fruity mixed drink like a mosquito. “These things are sooo good.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t, ma’am,” the moleman dismissed, waving the thought away. “We mole people don’t have much of a tolerance like you humanfolk. If I have anything more than two drinks, I won’t be able to smell my way home.”

“Huh, I had no clue.”

“Our noses are a magnificent tool, ma’am, but alcohol messes with our sense of smell the same way it messes with your sight and balance,” he explained patiently, taking a small drink from his glass of whiskey as you listened intently. “This here is my first glass, however, so I’ve still got a ’ways ‘til I’m ready to pick up and leave.”

“I’ve always wondered just how strong your noses have to be,” you remarked, thinking aloud as you stared into your drink. “I mean, is it like echolocation? Like, you can pick out everybody’s individual scent and quote-unquote “see” where they all are?”

Leon chuckled in amusement at your inquiry, enjoying your interest in his species. “Somethin’ like that,” he confirmed, swishing his whiskey around. “Everybody has a certain smell, that much is true, but some folks got a scent so unique that we can pick ‘em out in a crowd. It don’t even have to be that special, really, as long as we been around you long enough to memorise it. Take you, for example.”

“Me?” You furrow your brows, unsure of what to think. Laughing awkwardly, you ask, “Are you trying to say I stink, Leon?”

The moleman lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, clicking his claws on the bar. “Not at all, ma’am,” he says kindly, shaking his head. “No, it’s your job that gives you your scent, Miss (Y/n). You’re ‘round all those fungi all day, and that rubs off on you. At the risk of offendin’ you, you remind me of home, Miss. Moist dirt, mushrooms, lichen, everything you takin’ care of in there; though the smell isn’t strong enough for humans to notice, it’s easy for us mole people to see.”

Your cheeks are slightly red as he explains this to you. “I’m flattered, Leon,” you laugh. “I had no idea.”

“Of course not,” he replied, polishing off his glass of whiskey. “You’d never have a clue if one of my people didn’t tell you themselves. Speakin’ of…” He lifted his head up in the air, nose twitching vigorously as he locked onto a smell. “I think one of ‘em’s comin’ close now.”

You frowned in confusion and turned to the wide entrance of McUltra’s. “You can pick out a mole person’s scent from pretty far off,” you mused, seeing no one else of his kind in the bar.

He shook his head with a small chuckle as he relaxed his posture once more. “Not one of my species, Miss (Y/n), but one of my folk,” Leon corrected. “One of the many peoples from below.”

You were about to ask what he meant when something brightly coloured slid into the corner of your eye, and you whirled around to see a neon pink and blue mycelian scuttling into the bar, his flashy colours indicating that he was a male. You found yourself entranced almost immediately, your eyes wide and scrutinising the way the mycelian moved as he approached the bar. Though you had no reliable way of knowing where his gaze was, you somehow felt like he was watching you as well, and when he ended up stopping right in front of you and Leon, you felt a strange sort of energy coming off of him.

“Well, look who it is,” the mycelian crowed, his voice loud and pleased. “Long time, no see, Leon.”

“Good to see you, Myc,” Leon returned, holding out a clawed paw to the giant mushroom. The mycelian took it instantly, pulling Leon in for a rather bizarre hug.

“I see you got a little lady friend,” said the mycelian, leaning in to get a good look at you. You didn’t shy away in the least, a childish grin on your face as you looked into his swirling orb. “You interested, hot stuff?”

“Myc, please,” Leon groaned, seeming embarrassed of his friend. “Miss (Y/n), I apologise on behalf of my good friend here. You’ll have to forgive him his crude nature, he doesn’t understand manners so well.”

“(Y/n), huh? You sure seem enamoured with me, dollface,” he leered smugly, and although you were about to defend yourself, you thought of a better idea. Maybe if you could get on his good side, he’d tell you a little bit about his species like Leon had.

“Well, you’re a very beautiful specimen,” you answered truthfully. The mycelian, Myc, seemed a bit taken aback by your choice of words.

“Specimen?”

“Miss (Y/n) here is a mycologist,” Leon said, sounding almost proud as he introduced you. “She grows all kinds of fungi down in the bio labs. Granted, she doesn’t grow anything quite like you.”

Myc laughed slyly, moving closer to lean onto the bar between you and Leon. “A mycologist, hmm? Sounds like I could teach you a thing or two, kiddo.”

Leon shoved him back, his mouth agape in disbelief. “Myc! That is not how you make a good first impression on a lady,” he reprimanded, holding a clawed hand out in front of you. Addressing you, he says, “Don’t pay this old man any mind, Miss (Y/n). He’s not so bad once you get to know him, I promise.”

“You think too highly of me, Leon,” Myc chuckled, his gaze still roving over you. “Besides, I think the kid here can speak for herself, can’t she?”

“I can, though I appreciate your concern,” you said to Leon, gently pushing his paw down. To you, this was an unmissable opportunity to get up close and personal with a mycelian, and you weren’t going to turn that down. “If you wanted to come down to my lab sometime, I’d love to take a closer look at you. I’ve always been interested in examining one of your species,” you offer, smiling kindly.

Myc seems to think that’s a grand idea. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that, kid,” he remarked, coming to lean in close to you again. This time, he stood on your other side, however, that way Leon couldn’t shove him back again. “Just promise you won’t dissect me, yeah? I like my flagella just the way they are, thanks.”

“Myc, don’t you try and pull any funny business on Miss (Y/n), y’hear? She’s a very nice lady, and I will not have you ruining her opinion of us for your own amusement,” Leon warns, pointing at the mushroom with one of his thick claws. Myc looked so soft and gel-like, you thought, that if these two were enemies, Leon would slice right through him.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it, Fuzzy,” Myc snickered, moving around you to rub the moleman’s head condescendingly. Leon took the teasing willingly, and you wondered just how long these two had known each other. Turning back to you, the mycelian asked, “So, can I buy you your next drink, doc? I got plenty of time to sit and chat. You know, get to know each other a little better before you… examine me.”

. . . .

As it turned out, Myc and Leon were pretty close. You found out that Leon hadn’t actually grown up in Hollow Earth but on a mushroom farm in Mississippi run by a kind human family; they’d found him rustling around in the brush and took him in, intending to keep him as a pet until he started learning to stand upright and talk. They raised him as they did their daughter, who was around his age, and taught him how to run the farm and dress properly and whatnot. When one of his adoptive sister’s schoolmates came over and spotted him, gossip led to Leon being found by Cognito.

“They asked me if I wanted to stay with my family or go back down to where I come from,” Leon recalled over his third glass of whiskey (Myc had insisted upon it, assuring the moleman that he’d get home safe). “I says - hic - I told ‘em, I ain’t goin’ nowhere if I can’t come back ‘nd visit my Ma and Pa and Mae. So, Cognito, they tells me that - hic - that if I come ‘nd work for ‘em, then they’d give me free passage from home to… to the Hollows.”

“Take a breath, champ,” Myc chuckles, leaning onto one of his flagella and watching in amusement as Leon swayed on his barstool. Continuing the moleman’s story, he says, “Kid had to come to Cognito and get settled before he could get onto the subway to Hollow Earth, and they figured he’d be more comfortable if he had someone from the Hollows to show him around. They didn’t really seem to take into account that he’d never been down there, meaning he had no clue what the fuck he was looking at when I came knocking.”

“I damn near screamed my head off!” Leon laughs animatedly at the memory, leaning back on his stool, and you smile fondly as Myc reaches around you to steady his old friend. “I was cryin’, ‘Alien, alien!’ Whoo, Myc sure got a kick outta that! He was shakin’ in the doorway like a leaf from laughin’ so hard, while I stood backed into the corner o’ my room, thinking he come to take my brain like in one o’ them zombie films. Ah, it’s funny lookin’ back, but I was terrified of ‘im that day.”

“Well, to someone who’s never even heard of them before, mycelians can be easily mistaken for extraterrestrials,” you reason. “How many years ago was that again?”

“Oh, that must’a been… why, thirty-odd years ago now,” Leon remarked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Myc.”

“Yeah, somewhere around there,” the mushroom confirmed. “You’re what now, fifty?”

“Yessuh,” Leon said with a grin. “You’re sharp as ever.”

“I went to your birthday last year,” Myc laughed, swirling a tendril around in his own whiskey. You watched absentmindedly as the liquid slowly disappeared, somehow being absorbed into the flagella. “If I couldn’t remember something as recent as that, they might have to put me in a home or some shit.”

“Wait,” you thought aloud, holding up a hand to halt him. “How old did you say you were again?”

“What, you can’t tell? I’m flattered,” the mushroom said sarcastically. “Four thousand and forty-one. I don’t look like it though, huh?”

He snickers as your mouth falls open, your eyebrows scrunched up in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all.” Well, now you were doubly - no, triply as interested in examining the mycelian as you were when he first walked into McUltra’s. His body had been moving, healing, and functioning on its own for several thousand years, yet he was as lively and visually healthy as a man in his twenties or thirties. “Soak in it for a minute, why don’tcha? Guess I can’t blame you for not knowing too much about us; you’re a mycologist, not a cryptobiologist.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn more,” you alluded, letting your hand slide across the bar to poke gently at the flagella curled around his glass.

“You’re pretty forward, for such a geek,” Myc chuffed, and you felt something ghost over your jeans before wrapping itself around your thigh. “Keep talkin’ like that, I might just have to visit your lab sooner rather than later.”

“You’ve always been such - hic - such a smooth-talker, Myc,” Leon said from your other side, and you turned to see him lying his head onto the bar, his small eyes beginning to droop. “Just don’t… don’t mess this one up. Hic.”

“I think it’s time to get you home, buddy,” Myc sighed, hopping off his barstool. He laid a flagella onto Leon’s shoulders to support him, making sure he wouldn’t fall if he tried to get down. “Wouldn’t want you to end up cock-blocking me, Fuzz.”

“Ah, I’m fine,” the moleman replied, swiping at Myc with his paw. You jumped a little and covered your mouth in worry at just how close he got to accidentally slicing the mushroom’s limb off, but Myc seemed unphased.

“C’mon, champ, you’ve had enough,” he held, grabbing onto the moleman’s bicep and yanking him down and onto his feet. “You’re gonna make a fool of yourself here pretty soon.”

Leon grumbled something unintelligible, but relented arguing. He looked like he’d just been told to go to bed by his father, reinforcing once more just how much older Myc really was. You watched as he wrapped a flagella loosely around Leon’s ribs to steady him, Leon grabbing onto Myc’s stem in return, reminding you of a passenger hanging onto the poles in the metro. When Leon was fully balanced, Myc turned back to you, looking at you almost expectantly.

“Well?” You raised your eyebrows at his implicative tone. “Are you gonna help me walk him home?”

“Oh, uhm…” You thought for a moment, glancing briefly at your original group playing pool in the corner of the bar. Ah, who cares, you decided. “How far is it?”

“‘Bout a ten minute walk and an elevator ride away,” Myc answered.

“Then sure.” You went around to Leon’s other side, letting him rest his other arm over your shoulders. Looking to Myc, you nodded. “Lead the way, cap.”

The three of you start walking toward the exit of the bar, making it just outside and onto the tile floor of the mini-mall before you’re stopped. Shaun’s shoes squeak as he slides out in front of you, holding his hands up to signal you to wait.

“(Y/n), hey,” he says, brows knitted. “Where are you going? You’re not going to come back and hang out with us a bit before you leave?”

You looked at your coworker incredulously, glancing between the moleman leaning onto your side and back at Shaun. “Um, I’m a little busy here.”

“Yeah, screw off, bud,” Myc grunts in annoyance, shifting impatiently as Leon swayed in between the two of you.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” Shaun gives the mycelian a once-over, taking in the strangeness of him. “I don’t think I know your name.”

“Good, ‘cuz I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“Now, Myc,” Leon slurred, leaning up to talk to his friend, “don’t you cause no trouble here, old man. I just - hic - need you to get me to the elevators, ‘nd I can take it from there.”

“Yeah, I got it, kid,” Myc said dismissively. He made a shooing motion at Shaun with one of his flagella, tilting his head toward the bar. “Run along now, princess. We got places to be.”

Shaun’s face lit up with anger and embarrassment at Myc’s treatment. He took a step forward, pointing aggressively at the mushroom. “Now, look here, asshole--”

“Shaun, just drop it,” you commanded, glaring at him. “I’ll be back later, alright?”

“Yeah, drop it,” Myc sneered. “(Y/n), can we please get moving now? My flagella are gonna start acting on their own here pretty quickly.”

“Myc, just hush,” you snapped. Looking back to Shaun, you said, “Sorry, but we have to get going now. Just go on and hang out without me, okay?”

Shaun hesitated, clearly not wanting to budge, but eventually seemed to cave in. “Just be safe, okay? You know these guys well, right?”

“Well enough,” you confirmed with a nod. “Thanks for worrying, but I know how to handle myself.”

“Alright,” he sighed. “I’ll… see you at work tomorrow maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe.” With that, Shaun finally relented, letting you pass. He gave Myc a side-eye as he returned to the bar, something that merely seemed to amuse the mushroom. As you began walking toward the elevators, you cleared your throat, catching Myc’s attention. “Sorry about that guy, by the way,” you said, glancing over at him. “He’s just… really weird.”

“And by really weird you mean a creep,” Myc replied shortly, looking back at you over Leon’s furry head. “That guy desperately wants to fuck you, you know that, right?”

A sudden laugh almost made you choke, and you coughed for a few seconds as you tried not to stumble with someone else’s weight on your shoulders. “H-How would you even know that?”

“Well, first of all, he was painfully obvious,” he snickered. “I thought it was pretty clear that part of the reason he didn’t want you to leave was because he was jealous. Can’t say I didn’t understand his worry though, seeing you walk off with two guys you didn’t walk in with. His motives weren’t entirely selfish, at least.”

“And how are you so certain of his motives?”

He scoffed at that. “Don’t you know anything about mycelians? I thought you’d be at least a little informed.”

“I only know what your excretions do,” you admitted in an embarrassed mutter. “They get sent to me for processing, and that’s about all the information I get. I don’t even know how they get the stuff, though considering how you’re walking around freely, I can thankfully mark torture off the list of possibilities.”

Myc chuckled slyly, tilting his head toward you. “You’re in for a big surprise then, sweetheart.” You gave him a curious look, but he said no more on the topic. “And for your information, we’re psychic. Y’know, like we can read minds and shit like that? I’ve been in your head since I first walked into the bar.”

“That’s amazing,” you marvelled, eyes wide. “Psychic abilities… I’ll have to write that down. And where did you say the hyper-psilocybin comes from?”

“You’ll probably find out soon enough,” he said vaguely. You reached the elevators at the edge of the mini-mall, and were pleasantly surprised to find that one was already waiting for passengers as you pushed the button to summon one. “Ladies first,” Myc stated, gesturing for you to step in. You did, backing in carefully so you wouldn’t put all of Leon’s weight onto Myc; the moleman was practically sleepwalking at this point. “Negative eleven, that’s where his apartment’s at.”

As soon as everyone was inside, the elevator began its swift descent to the residential level; Cognito had many employees that were better left unseen by the public, so they had two whole apartment complexes built into their facilities. One was aboveground in a nice, boring little neighbourhood in uptown D.C., while the other, the one you were headed to now, was an underground complex made for the workers who’d rather not see the light of day, if they didn’t have to.

You’d visited the upper complex before, but you’d never even seen these apartments before. Though the hallway you came into looked like any modern hotel, there were slight differences. The lights were much dimmer here than in the rest of Cognito, and the ground was made of some sort of packed dirt rather than carpet. It felt cool in the same way as a cavern, wet but not uncomfortably cold; you wondered what kinds of people lived down here, other than mole people.

Myc stopped walking in front of one of the many identical doors in the hall, distinguishable only by the numbers beside them; this one read 201. Leon mumbled sleepily as Myc reached into the pocket of his mailman uniform, pulling a small ring of keys from it. “You look like you’ve done this before,” you chuffed as he began fumbling to unlock the door.

“I’m not the best friend a guy could have,” he admitted, opening the door with a click and kicking it open. “This isn’t the first time I’ve ended up getting the poor kid shitfaced.”

“Well, you’re a good enough friend to make sure he gets home safe,” you countered. Myc gave nothing in response but a short laugh, though you felt that he appreciated the comment. You followed his lead as he dragged his friend into the apartment, and were surprised to see just how… burrow-like it was. It was clear that it was originally just a basic empty room with a bathroom and hallway leading off of it, but someone had gone to great lengths to cover every inch of the walls in dirt, piles of it remaining in the corners of the room. Lanterns and candles were the only source of light you saw, the original lights having been covered by the muck. Cozy-looking wicker furniture decorated the small living area, a thick red rug in the middle of a circle of armchairs, and a small wooden coffee table was atop the rug.

“Here, just stay put for a minute,” Myc said, hoisting Leon up enough so that his arm slipped off your shoulders. Heading for the hallway that broke off of the main room, he explained, “I’m just gonna drop him off in his bed real quick. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you had a look around.”

You nodded as he left and did just that, for several things had caught your attention. A variety of shiny objects decorated the dirty wall, pinned into the muck with wooden nails. Necklaces, rings, pocket watches, and coins galore were pressed inside of the dirt, and you felt like you were walking through some strange museum exhibit. You gathered that these must’ve been things Leon had found while digging around; it made you smile to see that each object was polished with love, making the artefacts look brand new despite being stuck in dried mud.

As you looked around, you found picture frames sitting throughout the room as well. You saw one placed on a small table in the corner of the room beside a bowl of peppermints, and you picked it up to examine it. It was Leon, though clearly a bit younger than the one you knew; he stood beside a very pretty young girl with a smile as bright as the sun, his clawed hand on her waist. On the back of the picture frame was the name Jeannie, a small heart beside her name.

“Whatcha got there?” You jumped as a voice came from right over your shoulder. Myc chuckled as you turned around to face him, setting the portrait back where you’d found it. He stretched upwards and over you to look behind you, looking at the picture himself. “Ah, doing a little snooping, are we?”

“You said it was okay to look around,” you defended.

“That I did,” he replied, leaning back to give you your personal space. He turned and scuttled away toward the open door of the apartment, looking back at you expectantly. “C’mon, let’s move,” he stated, setting Leon’s keys on a rack hanging from the wall and locking the doorknob lock. He waited for you to pass him before shutting the door and matching your pace as you walked back to the elevators. “Not the kind of place you expected him to live in, huh?”

“I guess it’s the kind I should’ve expected,” you remarked, stretching your neck out as you walked; your shoulders were sore from carrying Leon’s weight. “He is a mole, after all.”

“Well, don’t say it like that, you’ll get the guy fired in a place like this,” Myc jokes, eliciting a soft laugh from you. “By the way, you’re looking a little tense there, doll. If you want, I could help you relax a little.”

“With what, your psychic abilities? You’re not going to hypnotise me, are you?” Myc snorted, knowing you were fully aware of his implications. “If you want to go down to my lab now, I won’t turn down the offer.”

Myc tapped his orb as though in thought, a strangely human gesture you didn’t expect from him. “Well, if you’re so eager, why don’t we do it right now? The bio labs just seem like such a long walk away,” he suggests, his tone making it clear that he was ready to go when you were.

You shook your head, stifling a grin. “I think you’re misunderstanding what the term examine means, buddy.”

“And I think you’re underestimating my abilities to woo and persuade you into some additional fun, doc.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

“We certainly will,” he agrees, wrapping a flagella around your shoulders with a sly laugh.

#inside job #inside job x reader #cognito inc #myc #myc x reader #magic myc #magic myc x reader #inside job oc #mycology

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yeslieutenant · 2 years ago

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Did I just spend an hour and a half writing 3 pages of Jason Kolchek smut lead up? Yes. Yes I did. We’ll see how long it takes me to post this nonsense 😂🙈 1,400 words friends and I’m not even at the smut, all cause my friend gave me the prompt “Help Lieutenant… My panties.”

*Teaser below the cut*

Warning Unintentional drug use (The creatures have Psilocybin in their saliva. Reader accidentally got some in her mouth)

“Something funny, Y/N?” Nick asks, a small smile forming from my outburst. There is confusion there too I think, but all I see is the smile. It encourages me.

“Nope. Nothing Nicky.” I respond, almost too fast. The look he gives me at me calling him the nickname no one dared utter other than Jason forces me to laugh even harder.

Nick turns around and stops walking, and simply cause I wasn’t paying enough attention, I run straight into his chest. His hand grips my chin and leans in, his eyes searching mine. I laugh again.

“Don’t spit in my mouth like that monster, Nick.”

“Her eyes are dilated to hell, man.” He mutters, clearly not talking to me while also simultaneously ignoring my hilarious joke. I hear Jason’s voice drawl from behind me, and it sends a shiver down my spine.

“Think there was something in that fucker’s spit?” He comes around, and he is suddenly within my view. “Oh fuck, yeah she’s high as shit.”

“Keep talking southern to me, Jason.”

(GIF is not mine)

#jason kolchek x reader #jason kolchek #house of ashes fanfic #house of ashes

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chicchanmooshy · 3 years ago

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Shades of grey, chapter 17 - High on Leo

warnings: 18+, graphic and mental effects of drugs use. DO NOT use drugs unsupervised! Do not use drugs when it’s illegal in your country!

@leosgirl82 @thelaundrybitch @roxosupreme @mysticboombox @turtle-babe83 @angelcatlowyn @raisin-shell @donniesdove @pheradream15 @sewerninno

Hee lovelies. New chapter and it’s my birthday. Leveling up to 40 today!

“I'm going to shower, feel free to join me”, she said to no one in particular. 'I really need to get this fart smell out of my hair..' she thought, still a bit disgusted. After she grabbed clean clothes from her room she walked towards the bathroom and she felt weird, like a little out of her body. Shrugging she pushed the feeling aside.

Standing under a nice warm shower she felt it again and it changed to a different feeling. Now she recognized it; it was the lift-off feeling when she used some drugs, the psilocybine kind of drugs. Although she only had good trips on that sclerotia, she was wondering from what substance she started tripping now. 'I was sober, I didn't eat or drink anything since dinner last night. I only had a few drops of Leo's blood..' Her eyes shot wide open in that realization. 'How ironic, I'm tripping on Leo's blood while he disapproves drug use..' she giggled. And laughed.. and laughed.. and laughed...

“Hey Ishtar, can you fill us in on your joke? So we can laugh too?” asked Mickey from the shower next to her. “I feel a bit left out.”

“Hahahahahaha...”

“Come on, spill it!” asked Mickey again.

Laughing out loud she got down on her knees unable to stand up straight anymore and kept laughing.

“Uhm Donnie, I think we might need your doctor skills here..” Raph said. He crawled in front of her and tried to get her attention. “Do you feel okay?”

“I'm feeling fiiineeeee...” she snickered.

Raph looked at Donny, “something is wrong.”

“Yes, I can see that. Let me try. Earth to Ishtar, can you tell me what's going on?”

She burst in laughter again.

“Ishtar, are you high on something?”

“Yup.. hahahahahahaha...”

Leonardo looked both worried and disapproving. “Ask her what she took”, he said with crossed arms and his signature stern look. Donnie repeated the question.

“Hahahahahaha... Leo's blood is a drug... hahahahahaha..”

“What?!”

“What else can it be?” she laughed. “Think about it Donnie.”

“Oh shell..” Donnie's mind was racing a mile per second. “Ishtar, do you recognize the effects, to which drug do these effects belong?”

“Psylocybine...”she snorted.

“Okay.. interesting..” Donnie said lost in thought.

Although Mickey had seen this look on Donnie's face many times before, it did worry him a little. “Is this contagious? Donnie? Talk to me, don't act so scary”, he whimpered.

“It's okay Mickey, this is not contagious. I was just thinking about magic truffels. That's the kind of drugs Ishtar is revering to.”

“Well, care to inform us too?” Leo said. “How can we help her get rid of these effects?”

Donnie sighed and tried again. “If she had taken the normal stuff, I only have to give her some sugar and the effects were off quickly.”

“The easiest way is to let her ride it out. I don't know how to stop this. If she just took the normal drug..”

“.. plant medicine..” interrupted Ishtar.

“Crash land back on earth you mean! Please don't!” Ishtar said. She had closed her eyes and was swaying a little. She also had a euphoric smile on her face.

“I won't Ishtar, don't worry.” He directed the next words to his brothers. “The effects may be the same, but what caused it, isn't. If I really need to end her trip, I need to do some research, draw some blood. All that might take the same amount of time for her trip in total. And there may also be a chance she'll get into a bad trip if I do the tests on her. I really would like to avoid that. Best to keep our emotions in check as well. Negative emotions can trigger her into a bad trip too.”

“Tell me Donnie, how long does her trip last?” Leo asked.

“There are several kind of stages. Ishtar experienced the familiar lift-off and the giggles. When did you feel the first effects, Ishtar?”

“When I waaalked.. to-o.. the.. ssshooowersssss..” she slurred.

“Okay, and now you're already in the slow speech stage. By my calculations, it will wear off in two hours.”

“Ssshortesst trii-P everr..”

“Wow, how deep is she in it?” asked Raphael in amazement.

“No more than when she had the giggles. I suggest we get her dressed and keep her in the living room until all the effects wear off. Oh, and mind your words guys. Even though her speech is slow, she can still hear and think on normal speed. Am I right, Ishtar?”

Nodding she only said “yup” and giggled at the sound she made.

“Do you mind we get you dressed?” asked Leonardo.

“Nooo..”

“Do you want something to eat?” asked Michaelangelo.

“Nooooo...”

“Do you..” started Raphael, but Ishtar broke in.

“No, noo.. no no no no... no no no no.. no no there's no limit..” she sang and laughed again.

“Ain't she a sight?” Raph said. “Maybe we should film her..”

“Yuou.. sshould..d.. wwaait... until.. the... next-t phase..” Ishtar slurred.

“Why?” Raph asked while he escorted her to the couch.

“Because that phase is the interesting one. It's when the brain works together with different areas, which can lead to fantastic insights, creativity, inventions and even genius.” Donnie spoke enthusiastic.

Bending down towards Ishtar, Raphael asked her, “even more genius than Donnie is already?”

“... possibly..” she said with lazy eyes.

“I like to see that!” Raph said. “Do you experience different colors too? Do you see things flying around?”

“No.. moooore.. thaaan.. uussuual,” she grinned.

'Wait, what? Normally you see things flying around too?' Raph thought.

“It iiissss... mooore.. a iinteeernaaaal ex..peeee...riencccee. But the musssic in my head-d tastess great.”

Leonardo and Raphael looked dumbstruck. “How can you taste music?” Leo asked. “And why is she so calm with these effects?”

“Tasting music isn't that hard, Leo” Ishtar said, who was able to speak relatively normal again. “Just stick your finger in the air and sniff the best songs out. This song tastes like blue..”

“She is probably so calm because she knows it is not a threat. And she has done this before..?” Donnie looked down at her and she nodded. She started swaying again and her head bobbed along with it. “Wheee, this is fun!”

“Better enjoy this Ishtar, while it lasts. Her senses flow over into other senses. That's why she can smell sound and hear colors. Also a sign that different brain areas are connected now.”

“Can we leave her unsupervised?” informed Leo.

“Yeah, that shouldn't be a problem. But we should inform dad, just in case..”

“And what caused it that she's high?” asked Splinter when they explained. Feeling uncomfortable to share this information, Leo kept it short. “Something in the bedroom” he said flushed face.

“Yes, I already understood that from your explanation. But of what exactly?”

“Er.. she drank some of my blood..” he stammered, looking down.

“Was it her intention to drink your blood?”

“No, she just bit me really hard and pierced my skin. It was in the heat of the moment..” Leo said, looking away again.

“And it has nothing to do with her being more dominant?” asked Splinter amused.

Unwilling to share, Leonardo looked away. 'Of course it had to do with their game, who could be more dominant. But this was private information. Shell, why is it so hard to talk about this?'

“You boys can go train, I'll look after her.” Splinter said.

Still distracted Leonardo bowed and thanked his father.

Meanwhile on the couch, Ishtar felt nature's call to use the bathroom. 'Oh, this is gonna be fun.' she thought. 'How do I walk again?' she wondered. She got up and swayed on her legs. Somehow it helped her to point in the direction she was going. At the corner of the couch she stopped. From there to the stairs was no support, no furniture to hold on to. “How to get there? … I could crawl on hands and knees.. Oh wait, I've got it. I do not have to think about it, I just walk..” she spoke without noticing she said it out loud.

Donnie walked by on his way to the dojo and saw her struggling. “Hey love, are you alright? Where are you going?”

“Hi Don... purge … need bathroom..”

“Do you need help? Seems like you got trouble walking.”

“Oh, I just walk forest trails in desert mirages and need to play drums in bathroom..”

“Yes, I thought so. Come on, I'll help you get there,” Donnie offered.

“Is this the part where she's smarter than you, Donnie?” asked Raphael. “She looks kinda lost in the world.”

“I'm experiencing all possibilities in a world who tends to keep order within chaos.” she answered.

“Okay... That doesn't make sense. Do you understand what she means, Donnie?”

“Most of it.”

“WHOOOW, mission accomplished!” Ishtar cheered.

Everybody laughed at her outburst. And for some reason the guys weren't able to leave her on her own while she was still tripping. Splinter looked approvingly at that and said “this is where you need to be, my sons.”

When Ishtar returned from the bathroom Raphael couldn't resist. “Tell us something smart, babe.”

“Don't feed me any chocolate. I really would like the pure cacao right now. But if you're going down a river at two miles per hour and your canoe loses a wheel, how much pancake mix would you need to ri-shingle your roof?”

“I don't know..” Raph said blinking. “How much?”

“Well, purple of course, because aliens don't wear hats!”

Even Michaelangelo was lost for words, it sounded so ridiculous. Smirking Ishtar gently slapped his cheek a few times and looked knowingly at him. And slumped back on the couch. It felt like a good idea to lie down. And she sat upright again. “I need to write this down! Give me something to write with!”

Leonardo had seen something on Ishtar's leg when she bounced up from the couch, but he didn't got the time to say it, for her attention was focused on writing things down. Donatello sprinted to his lab to get her a white board and markers. “Can you write already?”

Ishtar snorted, “watch me!”

1N73LL1G3NC3 15 7H3 4B1L17Y 70 4D4P7 70 CH4NG3

“Yes, that is something Stephen Hawking said,” said Donnie.

“Wait, you can actually read this?” asked Raphael.

“Sure dude, this ain't hard to read.” said Mickey.

5C13NC3 D15C0V3R135 1N 7H3 C0M1NG M0N7H5:

* R3534RCH35 H4V3 CR3473D 4ND 0B53RV3D 4 N3W PH453 0F M4773R, P0PUL4RLY KN0WN 45 4 71M3 CRY574L

* 4 SP4C3CR4F7 H45 70UCH3D 7H3 5UN F0R 7H3 F1R57 71M3

* W0M4N WH0 PR4C71C3 53LF-C0MP45510N 4R3 47 L0W3R R15K 0F C4RD10V45CUL4R D153453

“Wow, really? You do realize that these are future predictions, right?” Mickey gasped.

“How do you do that, Ishtar?” asked Donnie. “These are amazing discoveries!”

“I'm tapping into the field of knowledge. The discoveries are already made, just not made public yet.”

“What are we talking about? I cannot read this”, Leo said annoyed.

“These are scientific discoveries who will be published within a month.” Ishtar said.

“And how do you know this?” Leo asked beyond believe.

Ishtar answered with a peaceful smile, “I just told you..”

“Yes, but... how does it work? It doesn't make sense.”

“Should it be? Not all things in the world is logical or explainable. There is a reason why this plant medicine is illegal in many countries. Not because you are a danger to yourself, but you are a danger to society.”

Leonardo frowned.

“As long as you are under the influence of these drugs, you experience the world differently. You find yourself in a different reality, which allows you to look at things in a different perspective. Asking questions about the most normal things in the world. Sometimes people find out that the system doesn't work the way they've been taught, for example the governmental system. And that poses a threat..”

“That does make sense..” Leo agreed. “Are you back on earth yet?”

“Yes and now I can enjoy the afterglow.”

Not understanding Leo looked at Donnie for an explanation.

“It's the opposite of a hangover. Common effects of afterglow are increased confidence, state of inner peace, feeling 'cleansed' and insomnia. A psychiatrist named Walter Pahnke described aftergow as an 'elevated and energetic mood with a relative freedom from concerns of the past and from guilt and anxiety'.”

“Too many words, Donnie. It feels like the hot coals after the fire has gone out. I feel peaceful and content.” She purred leaning against Leo's arm. Looking upwards to the blue clad turtle she still saw worry in his face. She nudged him, “hey, this isn't your fault. And nothing bad happened..”

Unconvinced and still feeling guilty Leo looked down at her. “Are you certain? You having this trip might have been a side effect. Pull up your trouser of your left leg.”

Doing so she reveals her leg, seeing scales... “What the fuck?!”

If it wasn't such a tricky situation it was just funny to see both Donnie's and Ishtar's facial expressions were the same, while putting all the facts together and coming to the same conclusion. They even said the same thing at the same time. “Leo's blood and probably yours / my brothers' blood acts as a catalyst to mutate even further. To become more of a mutant turtle-like appearance, scales in this case..”

“Yo Don, that was creepy, speaking simultaneously!” Raph exclaimed.

“Did we speak simultaneously? I didn't notice!” said Donnie. “That's awesome!”

Ishtar grinned, she wasn't surprised. She had experienced strange things before, partly because she was a witch. Because she's used to work with energy. Sometimes the word witch wasn't a right fit. But it was still a good introduction to the things she could manifest. The law of attraction, being able to communicate with spirits, performing Reiki and energetic healings were all part of her being. Some skills she had acquired in past lives, only to be reminded about it in this life to activate it again. Those were skills she learned very quickly. And other skills took a little longer to learn, but were just as dear to her. Hearing her surroundings again, Ishtar looked at her new family. Looking at each one in turn, she sighed content.

Mickey waved his hands in front of her, “earth to Ishtar, anyone awake in there?”

“Yeah, I'm here, just pondering..”

“It looked you were kinda out of it, you sure you're not spacing anymore?”

“Well, maybe I am, maybe I'm not,” she said sarcastically. She felt the afterglow fading away. Ready to get it over with, she asked Donnie to come with her to the lab, to perform the necessary tests. Though she wasn't looking forward to it all. Of all the things she should get from transforming more mutant turtle-like, she hadn't expected scales. Nor from drinking blood..

#bayverse leonardo #bayverse donatello #bayverse raphael #bayverse michaelangelo #bayverse splinter #oc

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thorne93 · 4 years ago

Text

The Stars Made Us (Part 20)

Prompt: In this world, you’re one of the “lucky” ones who got a soulmate, but what if the universe gives you more than you bargained for?

(Prompt challenge – You live in a world where your soulmate can write on their skin and you will get the writing on your own and vice versa. Where they can wash away the ink on their own skin, however, the writing is forever scarred onto your skin until you meet face to face)

Word Count: 2578

Warnings: angst and language throughout

Notes: This was supposed to be for @sorryimacrapwriter and their challenge like a year ago, I think? I still loved the prompt though and have been working on this story for quite some time. This aesthetic was made by @dontshootmespence, thank you so much! Beta’d by @like-a-bag-of-potatoes, couldn’t have done it without you, as well as @carryonmyswansong and @arrow-guy and @mrs-dragneel-stark-solo

Also, I’ve never really liked the whole soulmate AU thing idea, but this felt so right and it was amazing to write. I hope y’all love it too!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stephen and you set out for Nepal. You’d spent two or three days traveling all over, chasing leads. Finally, you were close. You knew it was in Kathmandu, and you were certain it had to be one of the buildings nearby.

The two of you stopped and asked everyone if they knew where Kamar-Taj was, but no one responded. The two of you turned a corner into what appeared to be an alley or a deserted market area. Just behind you was one guy, and then two guys in front of you.

Immediately, both you and Stephen knew they were going to try and rob you or worse.

“Look, guys, we don’t have any money,” Stephen began.

“Your watch,” one of the miscreants said smugly.

“No, please, it’s all I have left,” he begged. You got closer to him, hoping that would somehow ward them off.

“Your watch,” he repeated as they moved in closer. You were afraid at first, but now the adrenaline in your system made you beyond angry.

“Alright,” he agreed after taking a breath. He looked at all three of them, then suddenly he swung and punched the guy who had asked for his watch.

You didn’t have time to think or react, so you just followed his lead. He cried out in pain from the punch, but you decided to swing at the guy in front of you. The guy Stephen hit began hitting him in the stomach. You kicked the guy in front of you in the stomach, knocking him back, but the guy behind you grabbed your hair and yanked you backwards.

You cried out in pain. You weren’t trained to fight anyone. You were a doctor.

The guy held onto you, holding your arms. He was holding you back despite your best effort to get away. The two other men began to gang up on Stephen, kicking, beating on him, and you screamed.

“Get away from him!” You looked around and yelled. “Help! Somebody help!”

The two men worked quickly to get his watch, and just as they were about to run off with it, a hooded man came up and knocked all three of them out in record time. You stood back, a bit worried about what this man was about to do to you two too.

However, he grabbed the watch from the mugger, and walked it over to Stephen. It was broken, but at least he still had it.

The hooded man asked, “You’re looking for Kamar-Taj?”

The two of you nodded and he told you to follow him.

You walked with him about five minutes before walking up to an innocuous building. It looked and seemed just like all the others. Of course, Stephen had to make a crack about this fact.

“Really? Are you sure you got the right place? That one looks a little more...Kamar-Taj-y,” he joked as he gestured towards what looked to be some kind of religious den.

The man smiled, but he wasn’t amused. “I once stood in your place. And I, too, was… disrespectful. So might I offer you some advice? Forget everything you think you know.”

Stephen glanced at you, an unsure look on his face before saying, “Uh… alright,” as if he were highly confused. You simply shrugged and followed him inside.

“The sanctuary of our teacher, the Ancient One,” the man introduced as the two of you walked into the building. You could smell incense.

Stephen scoffed and you elbowed him in the ribs. “The Ancient One? What’s his real name? Right. Forget everything I think I know. Sorry.”

The three of you entered an open room with tables and just a few people. An older Asian man sat at a table, reading, and Stephen presumed this man was the Ancient One.

“Thank you for--” Two people came up and removed Stephen’s coats and yours. He seemed disturbed by it. “Huh! Okay, that’s, uh… a thing…Thank you,” he began again, but this time a woman approached with a cup of tea for both of you. “Hello. Uh, thank you. And thank you. Uh, thank you, Ancient One…for… seeing me…” But as he spoke, the older man got up and started to leave.

The two of you frowned, confused by the action until the woman in front of you two pouring tea spoke. “You’re very welcome. Thank you, Master Mordo. Thank you, Master Hamir. Mr. Strange!”

Ah, so Mordo was his name, you mused internally.

“Doctor, actually,” Stephen tried to correct her.

“Well, no. Not anymore, surely. Isn’t that why you’re here? You’ve undergone many procedures. Seven, right?”

“Yeah…Good tea,” he noted after taking a sip.

You simply stood there and listened. You weren’t here to weigh in or judge. You were just for moral support.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Did you heal a man named Pangborn? A paralyzed man?” he asked.

“In a way,”

“You helped him to walk again.”

“Yes.”

“How do you correct a complete C7-C8 spinal cord injury?”

“Oh, I didn’t correct it. He couldn’t walk; I convinced him that he could.”

“You’re not suggesting it was psychosomatic?”

“When you reattach a severed nerve, is it you who heals it back together or the body?”

Stephen answered, “It’s the cells.”

“And the cells are only programmed to put themselves together in very specific ways.”

“That’s right.”

“What if I told you that your own body could be convinced to put itself back together in all sorts of ways?”

“You’re talking about cellular regeneration. That’s… bleeding-edge medical tech. Is that why you’re working here, without a governing medical board? I mean… just how experimental is your treatment?” He seemed excited, and to be honest you were quite intrigued too. Just what was it they did here?

“Quite,” she responded, trying to flash a convincing smile.

“So, you figured out a way to reprogram nerve cells to self-heal?

“No, Mr. Strange. I know how to reorient the spirit to better heal the body.”

Uh oh.

You knew he was going to lose his mind soon. Talk of spirits would not fly with Stephen.

“Spirit… to heal the body. Huh. A… Al… Al… alright. How do we do that? Where do we start?” he wondered, not quite sold but what choice did he have?

She opened a book and showed him chakras.

And here we go, you thought sarcastically.

“Don’t like that map?” the Ancient one asked, seeming amused, knowing already he didn’t like what he saw.

“Oh, no. It’s… it’s very good. It’s just…you know, I’ve seen it before. In gift shops.”

“And what about this one?” She turned the page.

“Acupuncture, great.”

“Yeah? What about… that one?”

“You’re showing me an MRI scan? I can not believe this.” he spun around, clearly put out by the whole thing. You could tell he was about to blow up.

“Each of those maps was drawn up by someone who could see in part, but not the whole.”

He walked around with his hands on his head, obviously having a meltdown already. “I spent my last dollar getting here on a one-way ticket, and you’re talking to me about healing through belief?”

“You’re a man who’s looking at the world through a keyhole, and you spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more, know more. And now, on hearing that it can be widened in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility? Is that what you did with your soulmate here?” she asked, glancing to you briefly.

“No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras, or energy, or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter, and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe.” He was angry, and getting in her face.

His words stung, because you thought you’d finally made a connection. You thought after everything you’d done for him he would’ve changed his mind about soulmates, but he was still in denial about it all.

“Stephen,” you lightly said from his side, hoping to calm him.

“You think too little of yourself,” she responded.

“Oh, you think you see through me, do you? Well, you don’t. But I see through you!” he said loudly, poking a finger in her chest.

In a matter of a split second, she grabbed his wrist and turned it, and used the heel of her pam to punch into his chest. He started to fall backwards before Mordo came over and put his hand under his body.

“Wha--what did you just do?” you asked, a bit horrified.

She waved her hand and then he stood up as if he woke up from a bad dream.

“What did you just do to me?” he asked and you eyed him, worried.

“I pushed your astral form out of your physical form.”

“What’s in that tea? Psilocybin? LSD?”

“ Just tea. With a little honey.”

Dr. Stephen Strange: What just happened?

”For a moment, you entered the astral dimension.”

“What?”

“A place where the soul exists apart from the body.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“To show you just how much you don’t know. Open your eye,” she said before putting her thumb on his forehead and pushing on it.

He seemed to faint again and you went to his aid but Mordo held up a hand while he held Stephen’s body. You frowned, but obeyed.

“His heart rate is getting dangerously high,” Mordo warned.

Suddenly, he was awakened again and a chair was quickly put under his falling body. He looked disheveled, confused, and scared.

“He looks alright to me,” The Ancient one said before seeming to send him back out of his body again. “You think you know how the world works? You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality. This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end. Some benevolent and life-giving, others filled with malice and hunger. Dark places, where powers older than time lie… ravenous… and waiting. Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?”

You stood by, wringing your hands. You weren’t sure what was happening to him, why they were talking to him. He seemed to just be slumped over in a chair, but you knew better.

Stephen’s body suddenly hit the floor from the chair, as if he’d been catapulted into it.

“Have you seen that before in a gift shop?” the Ancient One asked confidently.

You walked over to him as he slowly got on his knees, his hands shaking more wildly than they normally did.

“Teach me,” he requested.

After a moment, she said, “No.”

“No?”

“No. But, if your mate here were so inclined, I would teach her. She has the gift.”

Stephen looked up at you, surprised. You glanced from him to her.

“What… what are you talking about?”

“I won't train him, he's arrogant. But you have a disposition for the mystic arts," she explained, pointing at you.

Your eyes went wide as you were taken aback. “Me? No, no I’m not special. I’m just here for Stephen,” you explained., getting uncomfortable.

“Not special? Odd thing to say for the only person to ever have two soulmates.”

“Well, that…” You lost your words, you had no response to that. “Thank you, Ancient One, but you should really be teaching Stephen. He needs it, not me.”

“Sorry,” she said as she turned around. “I either help you or neither of you. If you’re choosing neither, then I’ll have someone escort you out.”

Mordo came over and picked up Stephen’s things, but he fought him the whole way.

“No, no, please, I need to stay and learn. Please!”

The more he gouth, the more they fought back. They walked you two back to the exit and just threw him out - literally. He went rolling in the dirt. They threw out his bag, his coat, and slammed the door behind you.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Stephen ran up to it, slamming his hand on the door before drawing back in pain. “No! Open the door! Please!” he begged, and the beg was so sincere, it broke your heart.

You’d seen him go through quite a bit in your short time with him, but this… This was going to wreck him.

You couldn’t believe the two of you had traveled all this way for this miracle cure, only to find out it was magic. While it didn’t both you, you had experience with mutations and soulmates, you knew Stephen was probably having a tough time of things.

He continued to pound on the door for hours before he had to take a break. He turned and sat with his back against the front door. You sat facing him, sitting on the dirt in front of him.

“Disposition for mystic arts, huh? When were you going to tell me?”

“I had no idea until just now,” you admitted. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

“Somehow I doubt that. That’s really great. I come here looking for answers, and all I get told is it’s you who has the ability to do this and not me.”

You pressed your lips together, not knowing what to do or say. "Is it the idea of a soulmate you don't like, or is it having me as a soulmate that you don't like?" you finally asked. You had wondered about it since day one. Stephen seemed to resent you out of nowhere. You understood that Charles was trying to keep you at arms length. But this… Stephen didn’t know you from Adam, and yet here he was, constantly fighting you, fighting your role in his life, fighting the idea of soulmates. “Am I really just the worst thing you imagined when you thought of a soulmate?” Tears sprang to your eyes, surprising you.

You’d always wondered if your soulmate would reject you. Of course, Charles didn’t but, Stephen seemed to absolutely hate the idea of having you around. That rather hurt. No one likes to be rejected, but it hurts much worse when the person you’re destined to be with

“Neither,” he answered, sounding tired and exasperated.

“You certainly could’ve fooled me.,” you muttered, your eyes casting down to the dirt.

He sighed. “It isn’t you. It’s not… You were right when you said it was my fault about my hands. It’s not anyone’s fault but my own. I’m more angry at myself for letting it happen. I’m angry that I can’t find a fix for my hands when this is all I’ve done in life. I imagine it would be like you getting schizophrenia and not being able to help yourself. All I’ve done for the majority of my life is fix other people's bodily issues and functions. I’ve repaired cases that no one could see past. I healed injuries that should’ve killed people. And now, a lousy car wreck destroys my hands, my whole career, my whole livelihood and I can’t get it back? No one can get it back for me? I can’t accept that.”

You nodded, a lump forming in your throat. Now it all made sense.

Charles and Stephen had similar issues, yes. Both handicap, both lost their jobs. But it was for vastly different reasons and sources. Charles was accidentally wounded by a friend. Stephen made a terrible mistake and it cost him his career. Charles could be helped, he didn’t have to blame himself. Stephen does though.

“I ignored the scars because all I cared about was my work. Getting to the next big thing, performing the next miracle. Then you show up out of nowhere, and I don’t know you. I don’t know what your motives are. I just threw Christine out for treating me like a charity case. I felt like you were about to do the same. Felt like it was your due diligence as a soulmate to care for me. I didn’t want the pity.”

“I don’t pity you,” you softly said.

“Everything feels like pity when you’re in the state I am.” He sighed. “When you showed up, it was just another thing to deal with. The anger about my hands got entirely mixed in with finding out you were my soulmate. I just directed it all at you, and anyone else. I’ve purposely not bonded with you because all I want right now is to fix my hands, that’s all I’m focusing on. I can’t lose sight of that.”

You nodded, the picture becoming clearer for you.

“In a way, I saw you showing up as an obstacle, a distraction from getting my hands fixed.”

“That makes sense,” you said. When you showed up at Charles’s home, he wasn’t actively seeking to get better. He thought he was doomed to either live with his mutation or his paralysis. He had the choice to walk, or have his mutation. He chose to walk. There was nothing to fix on him medically, just mentally, emotionally. That could only be done through you, with the help of you at his side. He couldn’t see a way out of the dark hole he’d dug for himself. That’s what you were there for.

But Stephen, he didn’t have a cure all at his disposal when you arrived. He was right, that this would be very much like if you developed a debilitating mental illness and couldn’t help yourself. It’s frightening, frustrating, and it makes you feel powerless.

His focus, his goal, had been to get his life back. Not to fall in love. He didn’t have the time or the ability to do that right now. He needed his career back. He needed his hands to work again.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t see it before,” you whispered. “You’re absolutely right. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it. I’m so sorry for pushing you.”

He waved you off. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not. It’s my job to discern these things, to read between the lines. I was just so swept up in the fact that I was meeting you, that I had two soulmates, and that you were so hostile... “

“I suppose we were both wrapped up in ourselves,” he responded with a smile.

“Well, yes, but you had every reason to be. I was just being selfish.”

He bobbed his head side to side in thought. “Not quite. If we’d met under different circumstances, I’m sure we would’ve hit it off much better. You’re a good psychiatrist. You didn’t come to me as a patient though, you came as my soulmate and so far, you’ve surpassed any expectation I would’ve given you.”

You gave a half smile. “That’s good to hear I suppose.”

“Well, I don’t have a particularly high standard for anyone. So don’t get too proud, it’s easy to surpass ground level expectations,” he remarked with a grin, his eyes crinkling at the corners. His comment made you laugh.

“You’re an ass,” you said as you chuckled.

“Thank you, for doing this with me. I’m sure I could’ve done it alone, but… having you here helps, and not just because of helping me medically.”

“I’m always happy to be by your side.”

“You’re a good liar.”

“I’m not lying,” you shot back evenly, your eyes tender on him. Your words made him curious and soften.

“Then, thank you,” he said sincerely before the door suddenly opened and he fell inside. “Thank you,” he called out weakly. You stood up and grabbed his coat and bags before following him in there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Forever Tag:

@essie1876

@magpiegirl80

@letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked

@iamwarrenspeace

@marvel-imagines-yes-please

@superwholocked527

@missinstantgratification

@thejemersoninferno

@rda1989

@munlis

@thefridgeismybestie

@bubblyanarocks3

@igiveupicantthinkofausername

@kaliforniacoastalteens

@feelmyroarrrr

@kaeling

@friendlyneighbourhoodweirdo

@damalseer

@heyitscam99

@yknott81

@sorryimacrapwriter

@glitterquadricorn

@xxqueenofisolationxx

@little-dis-kaalista-pythonissama

@bittersweetunicorm

@alyssaj23

@sea040561

@princess76179

@thisismysecrethappyplace

@sarahp879

@malfoysqueen14

@ellallheart

@breezy1415

@marvelmayo

@lyniboy

@paintballkid711

Charles Xavier

@bohemianrhapsody86

@lenawiinchester

TSMU

@tilltheendwilliwrite

@allinhishands

@solaramoonset

@halfofwhatisayismeaningless

#the stars made us #stephen strange #stephen strange x reader #stephen strange fic #charles xavier x reader #charles xavier fic #charles xavier

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togglesbloggle · 4 years ago

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Hmmm, 16 and 31 please!

16. who was your first crush?

Just listen to this on repeat for three hours and you’ll have the sum of the experience, I think. That’s not entirely true- I made the classic mistake of falling for a straight friend in high school, and there was some associated drama about it- but, you know. It’s always a bit messy. Haven’t talked to the crush in over a decade, but that song still makes me think of him.

The biggest clusterfuck was that my little sister had a crush on the same guy. I told him about it in front of her, which is one of the meanest things I’ve ever done to anybody. We were jumping on a trampoline at the time, I remember. It was jealousy, in retrospect, though she couldn’t have known that at the time, and I only barely did. I don’t have too many acute regrets in life, but that’s one of them, and only partially blunted by the knowledge that children should be forgiven for almost anything, and that kindness is a skill that takes decades to learn.

She forgave me, eventually, if only because she’s the better of us. These days we talk often over the phone still, and we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in tandem and talking to one another about our choices. The lockdown has been rough for us, but like the queen says, we will meet again.

31. who is/was your favorite teacher?

When I was 21, I took a “History of Western Music” course as part of the university’s desperate attempt to culture its engineers some. This project worked, marginally, though I wouldn’t actually pick up the trappings of true liberal education until much later- mostly it gave me plausible deniability about taking subjects for the sake of their beauty. The music professor began with monks and their choirs, as one generally does in this sort of class, and skipped lightly through baroque and the romantics; if I was wiser in the ways of the world, I would have seen the warning signs of a teacher that loves modernist composition.

We spent roughly the second half of the semester on the twentieth century- this professor, now a jailer, waxed lyrical about chromatic scales and atonality. A terrifically poor choice for non-music-majors. At the time I just assumed he was a bit of a bubblehead, but having spent more time on the other side of the classroom, in retrospect it was probably more that he was out of shits to give.

In any case, there was one day that broke the mold. The topic was musical indeterminacy, also called aleatoric composition. At first it was just like any other weird day- almost exclusively focused on John Cage. I recall him showing a video of ‘Inlets’ that wasn’t this one, and a few other things, which the class took about as well as you’d expect. But right towards the end, he showed a performance which I haven’t been able to find since (if you know it, by all means please tell me where I can find it!). It was just an interview with Cage himself, discussing his philosophy and his theory of music. John Cage being John Cage, this was intercut with video and sounds of collapsing construction sites and equipment, which would sometimes drown him out. I have no recollection whatsoever of the words. All I know is that somewhere in the process of watching that interview, I got it.

‘It’ here is, I’m afraid, not something I have the chops to explain. When I try, it looks something like this:

Those chasing philosophical enlightenment in the Eastern sense tend to agree that it happens all at once; to be enlightened is structurally like getting a joke, not like studying math. But they disagree about the best ways to prepare for this. One of the points of disagreement is sometimes labeled ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ enlightenment, that is, whether practices like mindfulness, virtue, and lovingkindness should be used to make the transition more comfortable, or whether a student should just be thrown in the deep end and taught to deal with the crisis afterward. Proponents of the so-called ‘dry’ side, the sudden unprepared catastrophe, are epitomized by the school of Zen Buddhism, famous for their koans and other such tools designed to provoke abrupt enlightenment.

John Cage was a Zen Buddhist.

After listening to the video and the end of class, I spent the next little while absolutely fascinated with sound. Instead of going to my next lecture, I just wandered around the engineering building, letting the chaos of footsteps and half-heard conversations wash over me. I’m sure I must have looked drugged, and speaking from experience, it was about as dramatic a psychological state as a half-dose of psilocybin, and much less transient in its consequences. In the end, I passed the time standing under a sycamore on the south side of the building, looking up at the blue sky through its branches and letting the world pass through me.

It wasn’t enlightenment proper, at least I don’t think so- at a guess, a practitioner would have called it a jhana. After an hour or so it passed away, albeit leaving behind a significantly expanded relationship with the notions of cognition and sensation. That sycamore tree is still a pretty good candidate for my favorite teacher, though.

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spitandfroth · 4 years ago

Text

My Psychedelic Journey

Why take mushrooms?

What do they do to you?

I want to explain why I take them, my reasoning is not for everyone if anyone else at all! We all have our reasons.

So, Since being 16 i have taken drugs, started on pills, then coke and onwards. I had a coke & speed addiction for a 2-3 year period and often relapsing. I had consciously not taken psychedelics as i have known I've been mentally ill since being 20 and being diagnosed and given Prozac at that age. I was wary that i would have bad trips or i would be stuck on a trip. I just felt the risks were too high, especially taking medication and all the other drugs. Pretty sure i took LSD one night at a party was these green things and i was off my nut, i was in a different reality and i was quite honestly scared. i went skinny dipping in November at Great Yarmouth beach! So yeah it was a weird thing to happen and to this day can't remember what these pills/little plastic-looking things were or what i did with them, literally can't remember if it was paper or a pill. they were just in a bowl with all the other drugs.

I digress, several years later, I’d been clean maybe 1-2 years of all substances including weed, well maybe the odd joint but we moved somewhere we couldn't find a supplier! So we would have to make a 2-hour drive down to manchester just to pick up but eventually decided it wasn't worth the money in fuel. We were also skint which didn't help matters. We eventually found a supplier of weed and met new people who like us, liked drugs. We started sessioning on anything and everything. Mainly research chemicals as they were cheap and plentiful. m-kat hadn’t be criminalised at that point so we were importing large amounts of it. My friend, Xander decided to start making his own drugs. We were all sceptical about it but we trusted him. He made LSE(?) which is pretty much LSD but i think weaker, that trip was a nightmare as i spoke to my boyfriend just before the trip and i hadn't hung up and he heard me slagging him off...Anyway, moving on lol He made DMT one day, took ages. We had enough for the 3 of us who wanted to do it and my god, it's a short trip but it changed my way of thinking forever. I may revisit the DMT experience later. We did DMT a fair few times before i abruptly moved out as i ended the relationship with my boyfriend.

Now i did some research online, it wasn't as fruitful in results as it is today, we are talking 10 or so years ago. So came across mushrooms and some scant info on where to find them and how to take them. I went for a walk with the dogs, we lived in the middle of nowhere, 1500 ft above sea level (lived on top of hartside) and by a river and lots of sheep. Anyway, i started looking in sheep fields and soon realised that the fields were full of them! I would collect enough for a few doses at a time and dry as much as possible. I was taking shrooms 3-4 times a week including at times DMT.

So we’ve got to where i am taking them, i best explain why and what the effects were.

To be honest i took it as an escape. My relationship was a nightmare, he made me feel like death was my only escape. I had spoken to friends who had used psychedelics and they thought it might help me feel better. I had started being in pain a lot too at that point but not medicated for it. I was still taking meds but when planning i stopped taking them the day before. As Psilocybin is affected by SNRI’s. That applies to most drugs though tbh. it gives you a very high tolerance, you have to take more to feel it. Which could result in serotonin syndrome.

I wanted to search deeper inside myself, i had been interested in Buddhism and Krishna consciousness for maybe a year at that point and i saw it as a way of speaking to god. to confirm to myself that he existed. What i got was a revelation.

So using it so regularly means i can't remember each trip but i can give you what i learned and saw from those experiences.

I would take maybe 10g (its rough but 6 cup teapot with a handful of shrooms in) of fresh shrooms in tea. Tasted rank but get it down you! Then wait, and it is a waiting game!

I would sit cross-legged, often by the log burner, just close my eyes, listen to music and i would feel calm. A completely blissed feeling. An inner peace. I could see patterns and colours, swirling great vortex’s of colours and light. If i opened my eyes the patterns and colours overlayed the room and i would just forget i was in the room. I would see parts of my past, like showing me it wasn't my fault, that i should let go of trauma. I saw my present and it was like looking at my brain, black, covered in clouds and dying. If i touched it then there was a flash of colour. I saw the energy of the universe in front of me, glowing and pulsating in front of me, my heart beating with it, a feeling of supreme power came over me like i had been recharged. I was seeing my future, i saw the love i am capable of giving and receiving. It showed that my empathy wasn't a weakness and showed i was a good soul, It made me think deeply on experiences and learning from them, it cleansed me, it rewrote who i was. All hate drained from me. At peace with myself and others. The visuals were amazing, you can't describe it, you cant show the colours on a palette, you cant imagine the scale of this place. It truly was an amazing thing to do with my life for a year.

So it showed me a different me and overtime i morphed into that person. Today i am still hugely empathetic towards people. I have a kind and calm nature. I don't hold onto hate & i respect myself more.

However, i have decided i need to revisit the energy, i need its healing and recharging. I want to journey further and this time i get to do it with someone i love, my sister. She’s used drugs infrequently for a few years but like me, she has mental problems and wants to try shrooms more holistically than just ‘getting high’ and she thinks i can do that with her. I will be there to look after her, to experience everything with her. I want her to get to where i did and she sees life differently. That she grows as a person. It will be a very special journey that i get to be a part of.

So we reach the end of my epic. I hope you read it and enjoyed it. Maybe learn something, understand it better, i don’t know but most of all it's out there. Sharing experiences are a solid way of learning and getting to know someone.

Enjoy your mushrooms, be safe & enjoy your trip <3

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maxante · 4 years ago

Text

Elohim Magical Encounter

Nancy had suggested we could gather a small group for our next encounter with the psilocybin. I got my collection of magical chocolates ready, and now that Nancy’s friend, Katie, from the US was in town, we could all meet this evening, setup in the back garden, to sit around the fire pit and connect with the magical realms. We also invited Nat, who wanted to share his crystal sound bowls so that we could be bathed in it’s vibrations as we traversed the cosmic portals.

Once they arrived, the first thing we did was go out for a walk to collect fire wood. The place where I got firewood last time had a friendly guy sitting in the darkness, under a large tree. He confirmed there was no longer any firewood there, but he knew a better spot, just a few streets away.

He said he was happy to take us there. Myself, Nancy and Katie followed him through the well lit streets, under the almost full moon. He wore his large white Mexican cowboy style hat, and sure enough within minutes we had found the wood. He happily helped us fill our basket. We thanked him, and even though we had no pesos, he seemed genuinely good about taking a few minutes out of evening to help us.

Back at the house Nat had already arrived with the sound bowls. We also had the chocolate pyramids ready. Everyone selected which chocolate they wanted. We then sat in circle, each one of us meditating and tuning into psilocybin, unwrapping the small pyramid, half expecting to find the “eat me” message, we quietly munched on them, feeling their strange taste and tingling that was unique to this type of chocolate.

I then went into the back garden to make the fire and Nancy joined me. The others remained inside for sometime, while we built the fire and talked about how fortunate we felt ourselves to be. As the fire blazed and we moved back a little, basking in it’s warmth, while at the same time as the magic began to expand within. I could feel the subtle shifts taking place, the more I tuned in, the more I could feel myself turning towards pull to cross the veil into hidden realm.

They were coming into view. They were inviting me.

I told Nancy I could no longer look at her, and instead I turned to focus on the plants, which had begun to move and transform in the most remarkable ways. In no time I found myself on all fours, facing the rosemary bush, and once again the first growl came from my lips.

I could no longer speak as the jaguar was once again with me, he was back, and fully in charge. Such a force, such a power, I was entranced by the plants, sniffing, burying myself in the rosemary bush, biting it, chewing, growling.

Now I was no longer in the human realm, and yet still they were all around. It’s hard to relate to them when like this. When any of them came towards me, I would growl and make movements to show them the boundary for them not to cross. This went on for sometime, as what was left of my human consciousness swirled out of control.

I could close my eyes and see the luminescent light of the plants. I buried my face in the rosemary, and found they opened a portal of light that had me become transfixed by what transformed into spiraling golden mandalas, swirling hexagons taking me deeper into the magic behind the plant world, and for the first time I heard the chanting of the hypnotic ELOHIM, ELOHIM, ELOHIM... again and again, and I dived deeper and deeper into the golden mandalas that were taking me through the plants into this magical sound.

It became too much, and I fell back, opening my eyes, still unable to speak, and so growling again, I looked up at the almost full moon, and the red wandering star beside her.

I felt their power. They were here. All of them. They were with me. Calling me.

“Look up”, they said. “Be with us. We have much to show you tonight.”

I fell back, staring up again at the moon and the star. They glowed with that powerful intensity that was only visible on nights like this.

The moon had an almost blue flame emanating from it, while it’s accompanying red star grew intensity. They were sending messages beyond language, beyond what I could fully grasp.

It was too much for me. Being with these heavenly bodies was overwhelming. I sat bolt upright again, looking around the scene. The humans were all here, sitting quietly it seemed. The fire was burning and keeping us warm.

I fell back again to be with the moon and the wandering red star.

“What do you have to tell me” I asked. “What is the most important message that you can give me?”

“That everything is perfect, all of it, all the time” they spoke. But it was said in a language beyond English, and commanded a power from out of this world.

“And yet, you have much to do here” they said. “Be with us, for we are always with you”

And with that I sat bolt up right again.

Their intensity was still too much. My feeble human consciousness could only take in so much of their power. Is this who they are... the ELOHIM... all this time... all these past years of communicating with them...

“Yes, we want you to build a grand cathedral here. In the future, you will assemble everything you need to build the most beautiful temple to us.”

And I could see this most luminescent cathedral, so tall, reaching the heavens. And they were inviting me to join them, and build this.

“And all will come, and be with us, they will feel our power and will forever be with us. You are to build this cathedral, you are to be with us, for we own you, all of you, forever.”

Hang on... and it was there I realized... it was the FIMS, the machine insects, the darkness that was speaking, speaking of it’s false light, trying to sway me into it’s vision of a world under it’s dominion.

I spoke to them, “I am not with you, you do not own me.”

“Then who are you with?” They asked, “who do you trust, for is there anyone else with you now, or do you only feel and see us?”

“Even though I can only feel and see you, I have no interest in this cathedral you speak of. Yours is the false light. There is no temple that is needed to be built in this land, in this world. This whole world is the temple, and nature herself is the cathedral, what you speak of is a shrine to your dominion, what you want is tobuild a false temple that will sway the many and bring them to you for your own ends. And this is not something that I will ever be a part of.”

It was clear our world needed no artificial temple or cathedral, for she, in all her majesty, was the fullest expression of all that was most sacred. And how could it be, in her destruction to build such a cathedral tower, that she could be honored.

And they were gone, and once again I was with the natural world and it’s magic.

“You are back with us now, and the darkness has gone again” they said.

“Why so many tests?” I asked “and how I am even to be sure of who you are? What are you, and how can I be sure that you are not another trick?”

“This is perfect, the way you question even us. For we designed you like this, the perfect protector of the truth, had to question everything that came across his path, even us. For you to protect the most sacred deepest truths, you would have to question them, at their very core, question everything, every step of the way. This is your perfection, and now you stand here protector of the truth, in a world of lies and illusion.”

I was back with the moon and stars. For they were giving me greater guidance and solace after the encounters with the FIMS.

For sometime I bounced back and forth with the angelic heavens, falling down, becoming transfixed by the moon and star, then back to the garden. Then, it became clear what to do. “Be with the humans for some time” they said, “We much to share with them also, let them come and speak.”

And so I returned to the circle, and found myself once again able to speak. But it was no longer me speaking. The “Barnaby” character had moved far into the background, which gave them the space to step through. There was the force from the heavens inhabiting “his” body, speaking through “his” mouth.

The eyes that looked at the humans were no longer “mine”. I was seeing the humans in so many different ways. Often they looked so much older. Often I saw death in them.

“You have less time here than you think” they said to me again, a message they would often give. “These humans are not understanding what is coming for them, there is grave danger now, and much less time for everyone, while this snare is set around humanity, they are collected into their trap. You are here to point to a different path, you still have time to show the light and truth.”

I could feel the presence of the darkness intruding, and I growled again, snapping it, sending it away. I had no fear of it’s power or it’s tricks. I sat here with the others, protecting the perimeter from any intruding entities that wanted to disturb our space.

The young women and man had many questions over this next time. As we sat around the fire, I would ask if they had any sincere questions to ask.

Katie, recently visiting us here from the US, was the whole reason we put on the night. She was not here for long, and we wanted her to have the opportunity to connect with the medicine. It was clear she no longer wanted to be behind the wall, and in the land where the machine and darkness ruled. She could feel all the power and magic that was still here in Mexico, with it’s contrast to that world she lived in, that was increasingly being turned into an entrapment of consciousness by the machine. She was looking for answers on what to do, and how to connect with her power as a woman, in a world where the men were lost to the machine and danced to it’s message of control and fear.

The powers that spoke through me were certainly not subtle in their answers, and in the background I was shocked at the ferocity of the answers and the intensity that was spoken. That the tragedy was that as a woman, she did not feel respected in her power, whereas the truth was, that the woman was the power of the world, for she was the first expression of consciousness from Gaia, and had been lied to by the machine who had taken control of the men, to dominate and transform the world into it’s own vision of perfection.

When the man asked questions, he wanted to understand more of what was going on in the world, but his questions seemed to be coming from a different place. And then at some point, he asked directly “and who is speaking?”.

I turned away. “We are still not known here. What do we say. Who is this that is asking? Who does he speak for? Do we share, is this the time?”

I turned back, and said “Michael... this is Michael”

And with that utterance, I felt the danger in being seen. The secret was spoken.

I looked him directly in the eyes “From where do you come, and who sent you?”

Then I reached out my hand, to shake his, and while we did I said “Never speak of this, do not share this with anyone. For we still need more time here, and the longer we are here, the better it is for everyone.”

And he smiled and agreed, saying it was all to simply respect.

Soon after he got up and we hugged, and a great power and force arose within us, beating each other’s back and growling, the power grew stronger and stronger, until I exploded and pushed him away. Falling he regained his balance and went inside to play the sound bowls.

I stood collecting myself, feeling the power of such a force was like an explosion, and I was aware I was still with the women, and so focused on drawing everything back inside.

Growling I came back down to the ground and paced around on all fours. The jaguar was back fully in it’s power now.

Coming closer to the women, I came right up to their faces, and saw them move back a little, and I told them they had nothing to fear, for I would never touch them, the way I touched him, I was here to protect them, and they could relax by the fire, knowing this power was here, for them, to feel safe.

#magic #psilocybin

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caithelps · 5 years ago

Text

Trip by Jhene Aiko RP Sentence Starters Part 3: (feel free to change name(s), pronouns, etc as needed) Find part 1 here, part 2 here

Triggers: Drugs/pills, alcohol

Never Call Me ft Kurupt:

“Oh, boy, I'ma have to call them boys on you”

“Awe damn, I'ma have to call that man on you”

“Something, something, something must be really wrong with you”

“Why can't you just tell the fuckin' truth now?”

“Yes your mama did, she raised a fool, wow”

“What the fuck did you learn in that schoolhouse?”

“To chase them thrills"

“Takin' pills in the hills, Slauson Hills, Overhills might get you killed”

“Not welcome 'round them parts no more”

“Do not run your mouth no more”

“I can't protect you no more”

“It's out of my hands for sure”

“You should've called me”

“Why you never call me?”

“Okay, now you wanna say all that I’ve done to ya”

“You knew all along that I wasn't the one for you”

“So let's stop pretending like we were in love”

“We never shared anything but the drugs”

“We were both numb, never had anything real between us”

“We really must be smoking that crazy shit, in my city talkin' crazy shit”

“But you ain't know I'm a crazy bitch”

“And tell your lawyer that I ain't paying shit”

“Maybe you should chill, really in your feels”

“My bros really in the field”

“Neighborhood is really real and they don't play that here”

“You shouldn't say that here”

“You should've made it clear, my dear”

“Now hey sis, I'ma let you know like this”

“Hit me right back, this Kurupt, okay?”

“The 60's, we ain't worried bout none of these muthafuckin' bustas”

“Ya understand me?”

“From the Overhill to the fronts to the back mayne”

“We pushin' this line to d'nine”

“So don't worry 'bout none of this shit"

“Don't worry 'bout him callin' you and all the rest of that shit”

“You know what? It's his lost, ya know what I'm sayin'?”

“I heard the homie, the homie called me and was like”

“I'm like "No, not Jhené"

“Né-né, you hit me I got you, you understand me?”

“You're the one, I love you, make sure you hit me back”

“This is your big brother, you hear me?”

“Aye, call me as soon as you get this, you hear me?”

“Don't make me call your mama now, I'll track you down”

Nobody:

“Attention is expensive to pay”

“I can't get by on minimum wage”

“Been dealing with this venomous rage”

“Since I was under the age I've been under the influence of pain”

“And I never needed nobody”

“Never needed no one”

“No, I don't need nobody"

“I don't need no one, shit, I don't need no one”

“Fucking up my chakras again”

“My father is a doctor, I've been talking to him”

“All the shit I'm taking could've got it from him”

“I don't have no patience, prolly got it from him”

“Just a product of him”

“Pop one, pop two, pop three, four pills”

“These things tell me how life should feel”

“Fuck you, it's my free will”

“Please don't tell me to chill”

“'Cause I don't need nobody”

“No one ever listened, no one called me pretty”

“Grampy called me ‘Penny’, I think I am worthless”

“I don't have a purpose”

“Who am I enough for?”

“Why we always lose what we work for?”

“Why we hurt more?”

“Why we never see my mother cry?”

“She's so tough for us, poor her”

“Grab my purse with my prescriptions in it”

“Tiny bursts of optimism in them”

“I'm reversing my decision to win”

“Take this take this, take this, take”

“Back to '88 when everything was great”

“Then life had just begun”

“It is '89 now, everything is fine now”

“I am only one”

“Wait for the 2008 summer”

“I'ma be a mother, wow”

"2012 summer, it just got tougher”

“I don't have my brother now”

“Take this, take six, take pics, faces, famous”

“Face it, fake shit, pain is faithless”

“Yes, I am aware I am tripping”

“I'm here in this hell that I don't wanna live in”

“I smoke on my own, I drink on my own”

“I know it's wrong”

“To people I know, they just wanna know what's going on”

“I can't tell a soul, no, I can't tell no one”

“Don't need nothing from no one”

“But you're not alone, you got me”

“Look, I know what'll make you feel better”

“Here, try this

Overstimulated:

“Is this thing on?”

“Reverse effect”

“Don't get it wrong, don't get it twisted”

“Don't mix it up, gotta get lifted”

“You know I'm young, you know I'm gifted”

“I'm on a roll, I'm on a mission”

“I need your light, I need your guidance”

“Already high, I'll be alright, I wanna try it”

“Crushing the line, cutting the line, crossing the line”

“Bumps in the night got me over here overstimulated”

“Crushing the line, cutting the line, crossing the line”

“Bumps in the night got me, got me over here overstimulated”

“Why you never stay for long? You always go so fast”

“Who's gonna hold my hand when I'm crashing”

“Took it without looking now I'm looking up the side effects”

“Pill identifier says that I should be dying next”

“My regrets, oh my regrets”

“Over here overstimulated”

“Let's get one thing clear bitch, I am the greatest”

“You are not my peer, you are overrated”

“Know you mad I made it, know you hate it”

“But I'm in this bitch like”

“And if my heart goes out right now this goes out to you”

“This goes out to you”

“What the fuck did you give me?”

“Oh, no no Chill chill”

“Huh?”

“Are you okay?”

“Did you see that?”

“I don't know what you're talking about”

“Relax, relax”

“Get me out of here

“Why would you do this to me?!”

“Someone give her some water”

Bad Trip:

“I'm having an awful time

“You said you would get me high

“But you took me out my mind way down to the other side”

“On a bad trip”

“Like a child in a womb, with no room to grow”

“In a world I didn't know, I'm confused and cold”

“Now you show me all the things I could never see”

“In a new reality, I cannot believe”

“Bad trip”

“I thought you loved me”

“Someone get me some help”

“You told me you loved me”

“You're a liar, I hate you”

“Where am I?”

“Just calm down”

“Don't touch me”

Oblivion (Creation):

“The world's a fucking mess”

“It's gone to shit”

“I am every bit a part of it”

“I may have started it”

“I try to find a brighter sight”

“An elevated, higher sight”

“It's out of sight”

“Oblivion”

“Wish I would go back”

“I could go back to no one”

“Oblivion, wish I would go back”

“I could go back to nothing”

“My life's a fucking trip”

“It makes me sick”

“I am so jaded and I hate it”

“I'm faking it”

“I try to find a greater shade”

“To be the way”

“To lead the way”

“I need to wait”

“I could go back to nothing”

“There's no lovin' without losin'”

“There's no livin' without bruisin'”

“There's no limit, no delusion”

“Sweet oblivion”

“It's out of sight, out of mind”

“Dear brother”

“Am I still asleep?”

“Last night I saw you”

“And you told me there was coin laundry on the moon”

“I met a boy, he wasn't right for me”

“But now that I'm alone I can hear the spirits talking”

“From the metaphysical to the physical”

“From the inside out”

“Let there be no doubt”

“Sage, means sagacity and intelligence that’s why the indigenous people burned it”

“To bring out the wisdom”

“If you talk to your plants, they will talk to you and they will nourish you”

“Nourish you to a greater creation“

Psilocybin (Love in Full Effect):

“Get it poppin' on this Psilocybin”

“Getting rid of inhibition”

“In a sane asylum”

“I can feel it hit the ceiling”

“When it’s in my body”

“An out of body experience”

“A spirit party”

“Won’t let the day get in the way”

“We’re on a plane to inner space”

“Don’t be afraid, give it away”

“We gotta make a great escape”

“I can do all things”

“By the sunlight”

“What a wonderful life”

“We should do mushrooms by the moonlight”

“What a wonderful ride”

“Right mind, right now”

“Right direction”

“By your side”

“You and I, do or die”

“Who am I?”

“Your reflection”

“Got this Psilocybin in my pocket”

“I am a healing prophet”

“Seeds of promise in my garden”

“I need to harvest often”

“Such a lush experience”

“So mysterious”

“In a sweet delirium”

“No need to rush it”

“I am helping you grow”

“Psychedelics, yes”

“A supreme bright other”

“Can't you see my color?”

“I'm the divine mother”

“Please don't blow my cover”

“Take a ride into paradise”

“Let's go on a journey hidden in the sky”

“Come and take a ride into paradise”

“Open up your heart and let me in”

“I will not let you down”

“Don’t trip, I gotcha”

“Open up your mind and you’ll feel it, the healing”

“Go slowly, go slower”

“No need to rush it”

“Love-lovely feel”

“Now, breathe”

“Breathe through it”

“Be still, be here”

“No fear”

“You are here”

“Breathe, love”

“I'm from Sirius”

“8 light-years away”

“15 trillion miles”

“Without the smiles”

“Let me see you smile”

“Give me 5,200 feet of happiness”

“Now let me see you smile”

“Give me 5,080 feet of happiness”

“Are you living?”

“Or are you just surviving?”

“Are you giving?”

“Let me see love”

“Living on valued energy”

“I got life”

“Love is for happiness”

“Love in full effect”

“I'm from the Universe soul”

“We're all from the Universe soul”

“We're all one”

#rp starters #sentence starters #rp memes #rph #rpc

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