#and literally devouring women on the basis that he knows better than them and it's for their own good

[chuthulhu-reads]

[ID: Four panels from Trigun Maximum. The first shows Knives, as a child, blank-eyed and chewing on his thumb. He's been doing it long enough for it to start bleeding badly, blood trailing all the way down his arm and past his wrist. The second panel shows him typing with his other hand. The third panel has pulled out to a wide image of the bank of computers that he's working at, alone and in the dark. The fourth panel shows him smearing the blood from his thumb down the left side of his face, while tears pour out of his right eye. End ID.]

KNIVES. KEEPING EVERYTHING INSIDE IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU OR SAFE FOR ANYONE AROUND YOU. There's a horrible twisted echo of a child sucking their thumb or biting their nails, but to a degree where it looks like he's ripping his thumbnail off, which is giving me the MASSIVE ick.

I used to think he was crying and doing this because he was reading Tessla's case files, kind of morbidly obsessed with what happened to her and fortifying his own hatred for humanity, but now I think it might be that he's writing the virus that'll ultimately crash the fleet. If that's what he's doing here, showing him not just crying but self-harming suggests that he's feeling very conflicted about his plan to wipe out the fleet, that he knows what he's doing is a horror... but he's doing it. He's decided that he has to do it, that he's the only one strong enough to do it, circling the drain of his own mind with the self-justifying logic that he has to do it because he can. Even if he's crying and tearing himself open while doing it. Under those circumstances, and given the sheer scale of the murders he's about to commit, what can he do but double down and insist that he was right all along afterwards?

...Literally anything else, kiddo, I am begging you to go hug your mum and talk about your terror of humans instead of self-harming while planning mass murder PLEASE

[hunllefauwriting-blog]

The Key to Dealing with Hauntings

Hauntings.

It’s something I see on here a lot, and whenever I read about other people’s experiences, I internally cringe. Hearing a noise and immediately investigating it? Following the creepy looking thing that’s floating two inches above the ground? Conducting experiments to try to communicate with these things? Nope. No. Nada. In my humble opinion, those are some of the worst things you can do. The entity is already mad enough to start bothering you, and poking and prodding it is just going to make it worse. My best suggestion? Ignore it. Don’t follow that voice. Don’t record yourself sleeping. Don’t give it any indication that its tricks are affecting you in any way. Just simply ignore it.

Now, I’m no expert demonologist or whatever it is. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a poltergeist and a haunting or if they’re the same thing. My credentials are my experience. I don’t know all the facts and statistics on the supernatural, but I know what happened to my family and I.  

My wife, two sons, and I moved into a home out in the woods about three months ago. It’s a beautiful little cottage painted a light grey with white trimming, sitting amongst an old-growth forest that filtered the light in way that reminded me of fairy tales. Contrary to what most people pay for a haunted house, this property was not cheap by any means. There was a lot of land covered in forest and the cottage itself was well-built. But it was perfect. The realtor agent was a nice, young woman who seemed trustworthy, and the town that it was near was quaint and welcoming. There was literally nothing that indicated anything was wrong with the cottage. We were overjoyed with how well the boys acclimated to the new environment and new school, and it was heartwarming to see a small community so warmly welcome two women married to each other. My editing business was taking off, and my wife was having the time of her life decorating our new home. Within a month, we fell into a steady routine, and life was absolutely perfect.

And yes, of course it gets fucked up.

After a month, my younger son, Christopher, began coming into our room every single night, complaining about hearing a voice coming from under his bed. His older brother, Michael, swore up and down he had nothing to do with it, but I know what it’s like to have a younger sibling. It’s fun to play pranks on them, especially when they couldn’t prove that it was you. Despite me sternly talking to Michael several times, it continued happening. Knowing nothing I could do would stop it, I told Christopher to just to ignore it, and it would go away.

Next came the banging in the attic.

Loud, obnoxious knocks that came in threes scared the hell out of my wife, who wanted nothing more than to investigate it. I told her no, there was no reason to go up there. All we put up there were holiday decorations, suit cases, and camping gear, and I made sure there was nothing already there when we moved in. I suggested she just ignore it, and it would stop eventually. She didn’t like my advice, but she listened and after a while, she only slightly jumped when it happened.

Now, this next one did freak me out a bit, but there was no reason to show any distress. I wear an activity tracker that counts my steps and monitors my sleep. One morning, about two months into living at the cottage, I woke up unusually exhausted. My tracker only had me awake for a minute, and the rest was mostly deep sleep. But my step count was already at 15,000 steps; I don’t even walk that much during the span of a day. I didn’t fully believe it, but I forced myself to believe that it must’ve malfunctioned. I ignored it. I continued to do this when I woke up with muddy feet and a rust-colored substance under my nails. Of course, my wife asked questions, but I shrugged her off and she knew not to push it.

After that is when the old woman showed up.

My first encounter with her took a lot of self-control to not react. I was taking a shower, rinsing shampoo out of my hair. And because shampoo is awful to get into your eyes, I closed mine while letting the water hit me, feeling the suds slide down my face. It’s a wonderful feeling, honestly. Rubbing the water off my face, I opened my eyes to the milky white eyes of a dried, wrinkly face. I’m not proud to admit it, but I froze. Unexpectedly staring into the white eternal depths of an entity taking the shape of a hunch-backed, slack-jawed old woman will do that to you. It took me a couple of seconds, but I regained my composure and continued my shower. The woman stayed there the entire time, but it was easy to maneuver around her. My arm brushed against her once, but I was careful not to jerk away from the feeling of dry leaves dragging across my skin. After that, I saw her on a regular basis. In the kitchen, behind my sons getting their afternoon snacks. Clutching the ceiling, staring down at us as my wife and I had “our time.” Right next to the dryer as I was switching over the laundry. I seemed to be the only one who could see her, no one else reacted to her. I know I told them to ignore weird things, but I knew there was no way they’d ignore a sight like her.

What really pushed my limits was waking up and finding my family dismembered in the living room.

It was a Sunday, and my wife wasn’t still in bed next to me when I woke up, which I thought was weird but shrugged it off. She had been talking about attending a church service or two the past couple of days. It was also completely silent within the house, which does not happen with two boys, so I figured she took them with her. She knew better than to ask me to go, explaining why she didn’t wake me up. Anyways, I got up, showered, and stumbled my way to the coffee maker. To get to the kitchen (where my lord and savior, the coffee maker, lives), I had to pass through the living room.

Now, imagine your family. You love them more than life, and it’d kill you to see anything happen to them. Now imagine them torn to pieces and tossed into a pile. Yeah, that’s what I walked in on.

I really didn’t know what I as looking at, at first. There was this oblong object poking out with stubby, wide sticks capped with red attached. While staring at it, it slowly registered that I was looking at my wife’s dismembered foot jutting out from the bottom of a pile of flesh and viscera. After that, my mind seemed to register every hanging ribbon of skin peeled from the muscle, every blood droplet dripping from tattered arteries, every splinter of white peeking through the deep red. I drank in the sight of it, so close to screaming and raking my nails against my eyes to claw it out. Their heads sat intact and wound with entrails, as if to keep them standing to greet me. Eyes wide with terror, filmed over with a milky white; jaws broken and slack, hanging down past the heads’ pedestals of intestines. Blood drenched everything, the puddle still creeping outwards from the pile, slowly devouring the white of the carpet.

That terrible, fucking curse of a sight is what I walked into, while thinking my family was at church and I would enjoy some alone time. And you know what I did? After gawking at it for a few seconds, I swallowed my initial reaction and walked past it. I ignored it. Entities are capable of conjuring all sorts of hallucinations, aren’t they? I originally thought that they went to church, and the entities saw their chance to try and fuck with me. They wanted a react and I was not about to give it to them.

After the sun started setting, I figured my wife just got tired of everything going on and decided to stay at her mom’s house with the boys’. That’s all. I thought she’d at least leave a note or call once she got there, but she tends to shut me out when she’s pissed. Lord knows I’ve pissed her off with ignoring everything that’s been happening around the house. So she’s just taking a break. That’s all.

The stench of the living room is beginning to make me gag every time I go into the kitchen, but I’m still holding strong. It’s been a few weeks since my wife left with the boys, but I’m confident she’ll call at some point. I’ve been considering moving again so they don’t have to deal with this; they’re much worse at ignoring everything than I am. Until then, I’ll hold strong. Ignoring the pile of bodies is getting easier even if the smell is getting worse.

Ignoring is the key.

[sunderlorn]

Got tagged in this big long Describe Yr OC Meme by @chameleonspell because they love to make me suffer as they have suffered, toil as they have toiled. I am more merciful, which is why I am tagging no-one. (Also cos chameleonspell tagged most of everyone I’d’ve tagged anyway.)

GENERAL

Name: Simra Hishkari. Alias(es): Sim. Harmless. Flintfingers. “Hey, greyling…” Lonya, to his mum, but not for a while thank fuck. Gender: Cis male. Age: That depends where you’re reading, doesn’t it? Uhhh. He’s 11 in chapter one of part one, poking his nose around Senvalis’ shop and bothering the poor mer for paper. And now in part three, he’s recently endured his twenty-fourth birthday. Place of birth: Chiming Row, The Rigs, The Grey Quarter of Windhelm, Eastmarch, Skyrim. Spoken languages: Native Level Grey Quarter Dunmeri Patois. Fluent Marchspeak. A flexible range of Tamrielics, from the sort of versatile trade-tonguey Imperial Tamrielic you’ll hear at the docks of any major city, to something like the closest thing Skyrim has to a unifying language: an archaic version of Tamrielic with enough in common with all Skyrim’s dialects that it’s at least mutually intelligible for most people. Fluent House Dunmeris, with a few dialectic oddities picked up and understood. Relatively fluent Velothis. Some Riftspeak. Can curse a bit in Jel. Sexual orientation: Insert a withering stare and a question as to why it’s your fucking business. Practically speaking, bisexual. As in, he’s been attracted to men, women, and in the words of the warrior-poet Fred Durst, people who just don’t give a fuck. He doesn’t really have the terminology to parse that out in his own words though. Probably thinks of sexuality more in terms of activity than identity. Occupation: Murderhobo. Uhhh. I mean…freelancer. Currently, anyway. That is to say, sellsword, bounty-hunter, scavenger. Formerly? Semi-pro urchin. Carrier of heavy things on the Windhelm docks. Soldier-of-fortune. Prayer-scriv. Storyteller and sort-of-kind-of-sheriff at one point. Basically like a literal  accountant at another point too. Moral support to more qualified goatherds. Fireman — like, literally, a man who makes fires happen. Quartermaster’s assistant. Caravan guard. Itinerant herder and spokesperson of certain itinerant wisewomen. Bootleg performer of certain Temple rites and duties.

(This is long, so more under the cut.)

APPEARANCE

Eye colour: A reddish shade of amber or an ambery shade of red. Hair colour: Cinder-white. Height: About 5’10” (178 cm or s0). Scars: Oh god I literally have a fucking like reference sheet to keep track of all these. His Velothi harrowmarks: a hornlike curl out from the corner of his left eye, and a tapering line underscored for half its length with a series of dots, curving from the right edge of his mouth up towards his ear. A deep stiff scar through the left side of his lips, diagonal, from near his nostril to the beginning of his chin. A shallow horizontal scar across the side of his throat. A ragged starburst of scar tissue, in the muscle between neck and shoulder, just above his right collarbone and again at the back of his neck, from taking an arrow and having it pushed out. A flat diagonal stab-wound, on the left side of his ribs. A torn right earlobe. A straight raised scar up the back of his ribcage, on the left. A series of silver lines on the outermost three fingers of his right hand, where the joints meet the knuckles, and lightning-scar-looking traces following from those fingers over the front and back of his hand. And a plethora of tiny nicks and burns, mostly concentrated on his forearms and hands. Does a twice-broken nose count? Overweight: Nope. Underweight: At several points in his life, yeah.

FAVOURITE

Colour: Sea colours and shades of bronze. In clothes? Leather tones, slate greys, off-whites, neutral gloomy blues, details and decals in reds, silvers, copper, brass. Doesn’t tend to wear pure blacks or whites, or any particularly saturated colour — they spoil too easy. Hair colour: Statistics suggest red, though he’d be quick to insist it’s just coincidence, not, like, a fucking Thing or anything. Eye colour: Not red. Light-coloured eyes are weird and novel. Music genre: Weirdly he doesn’t enjoy music with lyrics all that much. (In canon, anyway — he’d feel differently in a modern AU or whatever.) Finds it distracting. They can be interesting, of course, but it’s not something that makes him happy hearing it. He likes stringed instruments with an emphasis on drones or echoes and silence. Things like the Tamrielic equivalent of qanun, koto, morin khuur, etc. Side note, but in modern AUs he’s definitely the sort of person who’s physically incapable of doing anything as mundane as laundry or tidying without putting a podcast on first. Movie genre: This is AU stuff, but yeah, he might talk a big game about being into Deep Penetrating Drama and so on, but he’d most often find himself watching the feature length equivalent of all you can eat hi-octane junk food buffets. Fighty action movies, particularly with an emphasis on melee combat. Finds revenge narratives particularly rewarding. Only genres he really considers himself a buff on though are samurai cinema and westerns. He’ll yammer at length about Anti-Westerns too if you get him started. (Don’t.) TV show: Hates the idea of having to watch anything live at a particular time. Fuck letting something as petty as TV schedule and section his life. Will gladly on-demand binge on historical drama, gritty travel documentaries, and twisty-turny political and intriguey thrillers. Doesn’t like cooking shows. Doesn’t want personality with his foodporn. He’d rather wait for the book to come out. Food: The Platonic ideal of Simra food is basically like soft starchy silky carbs with something sharp and heavily spiced on top. Rice porridge and preshta-jan, maybe with a raw egg stirred in while it’s hot. Fresh soft panbreads used to mop up redspiced mutton. Meat still feels like too much of a luxury to have often though, and he has a lot of feelings about vegetables. Pickled carrots, cucumbers, turnips, greens, green tomatoes, soft or crisp, spiced or just salty. Yams roasted in embers, smashed open, drizzled with spiced honey. Dried fruit is a particular pleasure as well, with a special place in his heart for persimmons and figs. Drink: Black tea of any sort – Nordic pine-smoked, Dunmeri fermented, light or dark, toasted or not – taken with sugar or honey. Alcohol of any sort felt like a luxury to be taken whenever luck offers it, back when he was a little younger. He’s got preferences these days, though whether he sticks to them is debatable and down to circumstance. He likes red and dark beers, biscuity flavours in the former, bittersweet in the latter. Hasn’t had either in a good few years though, and mazte compares oddly, to him — too starchy and sour. He once drank some Colovian grape brandy before he realised it was expensive enough that he really should have just sold it, and liked that well enough. He’s had actual grape wine once or twice and liked the idea of being the sort of person who liked it. He doesn’t especially like sujamma except in some freak cases – almondy and subtle vanilla-y wood flavours in that one bottle that one time – but he’ll drink it anyway because at least of all the quietly awful things Morrowind might offer you to drink, you have to drink less of it to know you’ve drunk it. He can’t remember if he liked mezga better or whether he was just less fussy back then. Book: Ideally he would have a larger foundation for reference than he does, but he doesn’t. Still, his basis for comparison has grown a little since he first learnt to read and first got covetous of books, so he does at least have some preferences. He’ll still hoard up and devour literally any book he can, good or bad, because books are expensive and serious business – even the cheap ones – but there are some where he’ll fall into impressed absorbed silence and others where he’ll complain the entire time. He has a thing for treatises on use of one sort of blade or another, not because he really enjoys reading them, or really because they’re very useful. Mostly they’re awfully written and opaque to the point of being very unhelpful. But that puts a sense of the arcane around them, doesn’t it? If something’s hard to read, it must be hiding something worth knowing. Simra reads, trawls, lives in hope that one day that assumption will prove right, but really the issue is that if you never check you’ll never know. Back in Suran he read a lot of pre-Red Year devotional poetry from back during the time of the Tribunal. That and poetry the old Temple couldn’t or didn’t censor and so decided was devotional even if it wasn’t. A lot of that was just wankery – tongue twisters for the brain, either thematically or in terms of its showy prosody – but you’d occasionally get the odd scrap of lyric that was just effortlessly well-turned. There was a third era Dunmeri poetess called Anthiss for instance, the printing of whose work the Temple officially banned which only stoked its popularity. It was only after she died – mysteriously, it’s worth noting – that the Temple lifted the ban and claimed all her work had been religious allegory all along, revealing a conflicted but truly faithful sole. Simra’s pretty sure that, no, she was just writing about her girlfriend the entire god damn time. Between that and tracts on philosophy, interpretation of scripture, hagiography…he enjoyed reading it all but in retrospect couldn’t say he liked all of it. At the heart of what he really enjoys unreservedly in books is escapism. Travel narratives – little holidays for the brain – they’re what put a glint in his eyes and a lightness in his heart without really having to try much.

HAVE THEY

Passed university: Nope, nor has he had any formal education of any kind, yet. Given my headcanons about the state of the Mage’s Guild, for instance, in the 4th Era, and other Imperial institutes of higher learning there aren’t quite as many opportunities for that sort of thing as there used to be. Not in the parts of the world Simra’s kept to so far, anyway. Had sex: Currently, not in a while.   Had sex in public: Define public… The tonghouse of the Dyer’s End Few wasn’t a premises as rich in privacy as it could’ve been, but I’m inclined to say no. Gotten pregnant: Please no. Kissed a boy: Yes. Kissed a girl: Yes. Gotten tattoos: Do scarifications count? If so, yes, facial ones. Gotten piercings: Six in his left ear. Mer have more cartilage than humans. One through the lobe of his right ear too, but that doesn’t really count as a piercing anymore — just a tear. Had a broken heart: Don’t ask. Been in love: Something like that. Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Here’s where he laughs in your face and says “twenty-four?” and kisses his teeth for two minutes.

ARE THEY

A virgin: Covered this. A cuddler: There’ve been times. Sometimes being close to someone’s all you want to fill your head with, your time with, your world with, and all you can do is do that. Not many times though. They’re more anomalies than anything else. Prolonged touching, or lengthy physical intimacy — he’s pretty averse. A kisser: Mouth-on-mouthy kissing makes him nervous. Half his lips don’t really work right and he gets very conscious of it. Makes him feel ugly, clumsy, exposed. Scared easily: Terrified, yes. He doesn’t exactly keep a level head on him all that easily. Jealous easily: Statistics would suggest yes. Worth noting thought that this is less in terms of seeing everyone as someone his lover might leave him for and so being possessive and shitty and more like he feels left out easily, left behind easily, and if he sees someone he cares about sharing some sort of positive experience with someone else, he’ll feel a sense of abandonment and sadness about it. It’s not an angry or suspicious feeling so much as a melancholy self-effacing one. Trustworthy: In what sense, exactly? Depends who you are, what you’ve done to deserve Simra’s trust or respect, what the circumstances in both your lives and their mutual conjunctions are, what there is to be gained from breaking your trust, or what there is to be lost by keeping it or sticking with you. Depends how strong Simra is at this point in his life. Uhhhh…this number of variables probably suggest that, Simra is not inherently a trustworthy person by nature. But that doesn’t mean he’s never loyal, or faithful, or worth putting your trust in. Dominant: Uhhhhh. Submissive: Fuckin uhhhhhh. In love: Right now? Fuck off. Single: And ready to mingle. (God can you even imagine.)

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Have they harmed themselves: Not with anything sharp. Thought of suicide: Yes. Attempted suicide: Comments on my fic suggest that a lot of what he does, accidentally or by choose, basically constitute attempts to die. Thing is though, Simra’s pretty much more terrified of dying than of anything else. Any attempts at straightforward suicide would be impulsive cries for help or lashings-out against feeling particularly helpless. The goal wouldn’t be dying. Wanted to kill someone: Wanting to sounds way more personal than he really wants to have to deal with. Appreciating the reasons for having had to do so? Fine. (Yes, yes, yes, but funny how the people he’s really wanted to kill are for the most part still alive.) Ride a horse: He regrets to inform you that, yes, he has ride a horse. Have/had a job: We’ve covered this. Have any fears: Ghosts and bones, yes. Death, or more accurately, ceasing to be alive and existent. Being maimed; no longer being whole. Blindness, deafness, muteness. He has a pretty primal flight-or-fight response to the idea of being caught out in any sort of lie. Oh, and he’s not fond of dogs.

FAMILY

Sibling(s): Yes, Soraya. Does she still count? Parents: Sambidal Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Mabudani nas Zainab, his babu, Windhelm dockworker and former adventurer. Ishar Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Nem nas Zainab, his ammu, Grey Quarter spellwright, seller of medicines, and former adventurer. Children: No. Pets: No. A cat might be good, but he’d get terrified of it deciding to abandon him, and would take it very personally if it was ever gone for very long.