#and then ill move onto frontiers

[kideternity]

FINISHED DIGIMON TAMERS. I liked it! I don’t think it’s perfect / without flaws though. Nothing is. But I enjoyed it. I'm glad I finally decided to watch it. It was fun!

Under the cut will be I suppose my more full length review

Things I really liked about tamers:

- Really cool digimon. Ive very much come around to the designs and lore etc of the digimon in tamers, they’re really nicely designed and have really interesting personalities or lore behind them

- I liked how it tackled family and family dynamics better than savers did. Savers had a very strange like, “biological blood relations are The Most Important Thing Above All” attitude about it which I hated, but Tamers was much more nuanced about the family relationships and I liked seeing the more unconventional family structures, like Ruki's mom being divorced

- Generally I love how global it felt. I loved how there was so many different characters from all over the world, and how the existence of people and countries outside of Japan genuinely mattered and influenced the plot

- The world-building for the digimon is REALLY really cool especially the lore about how digimon and the digital world was created. I love seeing it actually get discussed and explored how things work, whats the correlation between humans and the digital world, etc. like how the devas and holy beasts were inspired by irl folklore and mythology and cultural beliefs

Things I didn’t like about tamers or had gripes with-

- To me, the biggest flaw of tamers was whatever the hell sort of theme or messaging it had going on. I know it’s supposed to be trying to say something about morality and power and violence, but all of that comes across extremely muddled or aimless- do you want to leave it open to interpretation, or do you have a specific stance you want me to take? It just felt like saying words for the sake of saying words. And along the way, I felt like the series just dropped all of it anyways to follow other themes commonly found in digimon media, like the power of friendship between digimon and humans or humans coming to respect digimon as real beings with autonomy. They have this whole scene about how depending on perspective, the deva are good or evil, but then the show literally pegs the majority of them as inherently evil anyways and kills them???? It’s frustrating. Only really Beelzemon sort of lives up to the idea of moral ambiguity / is given any sort of character arc regarding morality and power, but one well written character can’t save all of it.

-Connected to the above, generally, I didn’t like the villains of Tamers nearly as much as I did the villains in Savers. I just made a post about this so TDLR: The D-Reaper is a terrifying eldritch abomination, sure, but they’re an extremely one note and uninteresting villain who again, is portrayed as objectively evil and must be eradicated / destroyed. They’re not very compelling and they mostly really get any sort of narrative weight due to their connection with Juri, and how they connect to their character and her trauma, and thus, how it affects everyone else and their attempts to save her. Idk. Idk.

- I didn’t like how Tamers was generally more about romance or hornier than Savers was. It was really weird to me. I understand that kids think about love and stuff too, obviously, but most of its inclusion was just weird to me and made me uncomfortable in certain episodes. I Don’t Want To Think About The Love Lives Of 10 Year Olds. I Am Twenty One Years Old.

General other comments-

- Plot and main + side Characters were generally pretty good! I liked all of the characters in Tamers generally, though I will say that I don’t feel as though you get to connect with the characters in tamers as much as say Savers. It might be due to the much larger cast, or the fact I'm not like, you know 10, but I didn’t really get to know the characters I feel as well as I got to know the savers characters. And generally, I felt some of the character writing was very weak- Ryo and Cyberdramon were the only characters I genuinely didn’t like, because they felt overall useless and meaningless to the narrative as a whole- they don’t really add anything outside of deus ex machina style Actions That Progress The Plot. #Justice For Hirokazu for fucking real. I liked Leomon, but he also very much felt like a filler character designed just to die. Sorry.

- The tonal dissonance, especially when it would play the songs, was a mixed bag. Sometimes it was very funny and endearing and cute to watch the characters go from a harrowing scene to a much more lighthearted setting, and other times, particularly near the end of the series, it just drove me absolutely insane how it felt as though Nobody Was Acting Like A Real Person and taking this Seriously Enough. The music was good, but most of the times whenever it would start playing it would just completely take me out of the scene, especially the more serious ones.

I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff I've wanted to say 😭 this isn’t really meant to be a serious review or anything. Again at the end of the day I don’t regret watching tamers, i'm really happy I did. But I think even for kids shows, it’s important to keep a critical eye, you know? To not be blinded by nostalgia. Idk. Idk.

[iron-hearts-ablaze]

Karlach; a full timeline

1462 - 22nd Eleint (September) Karlach Cliffgate was born 1475 - Caerlack Cliffgate falls gravely ill with fever. Due to the clerics turning down Tiefling coin, she passes away. - Karlach starts getting into more fights in school. 1478 - Karlach finishes secondary school, instantly starts working small jobs to help her father financially. - Pluck Cliffgate is involved in an accident involving his wagon and dies from his injuries. Karlach is involved in more city-wide fights, starts making a name for herself in underground fighting rings. 1480 - Karlach's friend informs her of job position going being a body guard for Enver Gortash. - Karlach is accepted for the job, her employment begins. 1482 - Aged 20, Karlach is traded to Zariel for blueprints and information. - Enver Gortash tells Karlach's remaining friends she moved to Neverwinter. End of 1482 - midway through 1483 - Karlach is subjected to imprisonment, experimentation and countless surgeries for her engine to be placed and adjusted as well as to break her mentally to be moulded in Zariel's image. - Gets Zariel's name tattooed on her by force. - During maintenance on her engine for repairs and upgrades, the engine explodes, burning most of Karlach's body on the right side. - Karlachs first tour of the Blood Wars begins. 1485 - Karlach becomes part of Zariel's special forces. More tattoos are forced on her, as well as the engravings in her horns to mark the occasion; "my champion, the Demonsbane. My blood is her strength!" 1488 - During a vicious battle with demons, Karlach loses part of her right horn 1492 - 20th Eleasis (August) Karlach, persued by the Blade of Frontiers, spots a nautiloid ship and jumps on board. Becomes infected and ship later crashes onto the shores of The Chionthar. - 22nd Eleint (September) Karlach's 30th birthday

Explanations under cut, this this is long already:

We are told BG3 takes place in 1492, and it has also been confirmed that Karlach is 30 during this time - so basic math led us to discover the year. However, I made up the 22nd Sept section - using Samantha's birthday instead.

There is a contradiction in Karlach's story in game. At one point she says Gortash paid her well enough to move her parents into a nice neighbourhood. However, at their graves in Act 3, she says: "I was a teenager when mum passed--bad fever. A good healer would've saved her, but she slipped away before we found one who'd take our gold. Dad went a few years later. He was on an errand for work, travelling the Risen Road. His cart overturned and caught him just so. I was on my own after that. Fell in with Gortash not long after. If my folks had been alive, they would've sniffed him out straight away." - I have gone with the graveyard story. That she was an orphan when she started working for Gortash. The ages, however, I have made up based on the 'teenager' comment.

Throughout her childhood, adolescence and young adulthood - Karlach scrapped. Quote: "I was a wild kid--brawling my way through the city." I feel she has a strong reputation because she has always been this way. More of a Fighter, than a Barbarian in her past. Becomes more a Barbarian after the anger gets to her after the trade.

"One of my mates got wind of a bit of work guarding some indoorsy type with lots of enemies. Seemed like easy money, so I went in for it." - another quote to back up that a friend was the one who told her about Gortash and Karlach showed no sign of knowing who he was before this.

I admit I have made up the origin of the burns, just something I like for the character.

Originally, before it was changed, Anders told the player Karlach lost her horn while battling hoards of demons - despite the slight change, I thought I'd keep it. I feel the burn made the horn weaker and easier to break.

[timothylawrence]

Hey wanted to tell you I love seeing Rana on my dash! Can you tell little bit more about Rana? How does she view her relationship with her teammates? Does she have any family? What drew her towards Wyll?

oh stop this is so sweet omg 😭😭😭 Im glad you all like to see her bcus i love to show her off!! she's my little angel and the only tav i've had break past act 1!

I'll put most of this under the cut but I wanna put out a disclaimer that I came up with her background before learning abt anyone elses backstories so if she seems very similar to an origin character i swear its on accident 😭😭!!!!!!

Rana is a tiefling rogue assassin :)! Her backstory is that of a street urchin and after her mother died when she was very young, she spent a lot of time outside of her home. Her father wasn't very good at fathering and oftentimes they didn't even speak with one another despite living together in the same home. At the age of 12, she ends up stealing a little more than something that can be unnoticed and gets arrested. Upon her father hearing out her year-long sentence and hefty bail, he decides it's better to let her rot in prison for her sentence than to spend his little money on bailing her out.

Of course, Rana breaks herself out after 3 weeks and never returns to Baldur's Gate until the fateful day of the Nautiloid! She spends a lot of her time traveling the coast, running through different guilds and vowing to never rely on anyone.

With her backstory out of the way, she has a very interesting relationship with everyone! 😭 So for those who don't know, I played this story with my darling dearest bestie @katagawajr who has her own character Vaeril. To put her in Jordan's words, Vaeril's very much a disney princess-esque, think Anna from Frozen or Rapunzel, or if you're familiar with Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle!! (where as you have Rana who despite being fire coded is very much Elsa-like)

(and sometimes she teams up in a detective noir episode alongside Private Wyll Ravengard to uncover the mysterious explosive toys of Baldur's Gate.... but thats a side quest) (yes it's chaos).

Moving onto Origins, She's got a very funny raport with Gale. He's an obvious know-it-all but unlike most egotistical men Rana's run into, he has the facts to prove it. For my Blands mutuals, she's got a very Fiona and Rhys type of dynamic where they do get along but you wouldn't believe it from the amount they bicker. Vaeril also romanced Gale in this playthru so she's very much >:( hurt my best friend and ill kill you wizard boy.

Karlach is Rana's best friend. They have very similar backstories and although they didn't know one another as kids, they're very protective of one another. Lae'zel is also one of Rana's closest friends even though she's obviously more reserved, they get along very well on the battlefield and rely on one another. Halsin makes Rana nervous because he's just So Sweet and Asty is pretty much entertaining (they argue abt the best techniques to take people down quietly ofc). Shadowheart and her also get along albeit it's a bit more reserved because of Rana's intrinsic and initial mistrust of familal figures.

haha. onto Wyll. Which is probably the funniest of funniest stories. Originally, Rana was... very put off. On one hand, she's heard of the blade of frontiers and genuinely thinks what he does is great, but on the other hand... Wyll has a heart of gold and it scares her. When they have their talk on the beach in Act One, Rana sees that he's not this 'perfect hero' and that he has doubts just like anyone else- he put on a front just like she did. Keeping people at arms length was just... natural.

So yea, they develop from their as they do in canon and albeit his sweet nature, Rana's incredibly shy abt their relationship and answers virtually no questions unless pestered by Vaeril :). They wear Lover's Caress rings to protect one another, and once they get to Baldur's Gate, Rana is quite... stand offish with Ulder and anyone else who dares to be rude to Wyll.

Ok i'll cut my essay short but THANK YOU FOR ASKING!!!I love talking abt her im just . so incredibly shy. but i truly appreciate anyone who made it this far down the ask ily!! 😭😭😭😭

[timetravelauthor]

Remembering a family friend

It's never easy. As many people have observed over the years, losing a beloved pet is like losing a family member. You lose not only a companion but also part of yourself. We lost our cat, Charlotte, this week to an aggressive form of bone cancer. She went quickly on Sunday night after battling the illness for at least a few months.

Charlotte, for those who don't know, was an incredibly mellow and docile cat, one that would let even strangers pick her up every which way or give her long belly rubs. She was comfortable with people, dogs, and even change. Only vacuum cleaners got her attention.

She was a part of our family for fourteen years. During that time, she lived in five homes in three states and gave us enough memories to last a lifetime. In Alabama, where we let her run free, she once confronted an armadillo in our backyard and stood her ground. In 2015, in the same location, Charlotte climbed into the engine bay of my Nissan Frontier pickup and went for a seven-mile highway ride to the market. (She emerged shaken but unharmed from the harrowing experience.) In Nevada, she was a house cat and a never-ending source of amusement.

We noticed Charlotte's decline late this spring and took steps to accommodate it, but we merely prolonged the inevitable. As many pet owners know, old age is one thing, terminal illness is another.

In her last week, she ate little, drank little, and barely moved. And yet, she did her best to remind us that she was still around, still visible, and still a part of the family. On Saturday night, hours before she died, she did what she had done for years. Moving with a limp, she climbed two flights of stairs, entered my room as I worked, and plopped onto her side. She signaled her interest in getting one last belly rub.

I gave her the rub and, with my wife, Cheryl, gave her comfort the next evening when she finally passed away. Like so many others, I said goodbye to a pet that is now just a memory.

[alice-and-ethel]

Lincoln��s Women • NANCY HANKS LINCOLN

“Mrs. Lincoln was...affectionate—the most affectionate I ever saw... [She] always taught Abe goodness, kindness...taught him sweetness and benevolence as well.”  Dennis Hanks  •  “Mrs. Lincoln...was a woman [known] for the Extraordinary Strength of her mind among the family and all who knew her... She was a brilliant woman—a woman of great good sense and Modesty.” Nathaniel Grigsby  •  “She was beyond all doubts an intellectual woman, rather extraordinary if anything. [H]er nature was kindness, mildness, tenderness... Abraham was like his mother very much.”  John Hanks

Nancy Hanks was born in 1784 in Virginia. The identity of her father is uncertain, and it’s possible that her parents were not married. She moved with her mother to Kentucky as a child, where she was raised by her maternal aunt and uncle. Nancy grew into a kind, hard-working young woman with a keen intellect and deep religious convictions. She worked as a sought-after seamstress until she married Thomas Lincoln in 1806. Their first child, Sarah, was born the next year. Not long afterwards, they moved onto a rural farm called Sinking Spring. It was there, on February 12, 1809, that Nancy gave birth to a baby boy named Abraham in a single-room log cabin. He was followed by a second son who tragically lived for only a few days.

Life could be difficult and demanding for poor families trying to survive on what was then the American frontier. In need of their help at home, the Lincolns were only rarely able to send their children to school. Nancy, however, knew many biblical passages by heart, and these she taught to Sarah and Abraham. Some accounts suggest that she also helped teach them to read and write, but whether she was in fact literate is not clear. She was remembered by friends and family as both a highly intelligent and very affectionate person. In September 1818, Nancy fell ill, most likely with “milk sickness” (snakeroot poisoning), while nursing sick family members who lived nearby. After suffering for nearly two weeks, she succumbed to the illness and died at the age of 34. The loss of such a gentle, loving presence—the first of many in his life—must have had a profound impact on little Abraham Lincoln, who so strongly resembled Nancy in personality and temperament. Though he may never have actually said “all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to [my mother],” the statement still has the ring of truth.

[lettrespromises]

#LettresPromises informs you : You have one notification. ──➤ 𝐘𝐎𝐔'𝐕𝐄 𝐆𝐎𝐓 𝐌𝐀𝐈𝐋!

─➤ Kuroo Tetsurou sent you a letter, would you like to read it? #CC of the letter directed to : @bbthots-underground​

──➤ #𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 : smut. ─➤ #𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 : Caught in a snowbound, Kuroo has to work from home. But your sinful envies don’t really match with his working tendencies. Will you be able to keep it quiet for him? Or will you disobey and get punished? It’s entirely up to you. ➤ #𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 : Minors please do not interact, +18. Vaginal sex, penetration, degradation, binding. 

« Of course, of course… I understand, mhm. The weather is not on our side, this year’s winter is even more cruel than last year’s. Mhm, for sure, for sure… » Without stating the obvious, this pseudo speech, intercut with several hums leaving the frontiers of his lips, belonged to a man who had to work from home. The blame of such a sudden change was the blowing white storm outside and its ceaseless waves of snow coming to crash down on the ground, the roofs, everywhere. The wind which accompanied the blizzard in this symphony to the ode of the muses of the cold weather seemed to be whistling along to the series of affirmations which continued to pour from his lips like a cascade that couldn’t reach its end.

It was a meaningless consecution of affirmative sentences, perhaps sentences that he didn’t even mean in the first place, but oh well, it was what he would call ‘corporate language’, talk to please the person on the other end of the phone and make them hear what they want to hear.

The discussion, which gravitated around the next selling strategy for the upcoming volleyball competition, wasn’t bound to come to an end anytime soon. Meaning that Kuroo had to more or less listen and give half-interested hums of acknowledgement for a few more minutes. He took a seat on the leather chair throning along with his acacia desk in the middle of the room, his gaze fell on the constant flickering of the ambers in the fireplace to seek a distraction from this deafening discussion.

But there he was, saved by the salute of the echoes of your knocks on the door. You knew perfectly well he was on the phone, being able to hear his hums from the other side of the door, but it’s not as if it was going to stop you. And you stepped into the arena that was his office, dressed in the newest set of scarlet lingerie Kuroo had gotten you (after having ripped to pieces the last set no longer than two days ago.) It was flawless, and the melted perfectly with the shapes of your body. But the way the transparency over the fabric which ‘covered’ your breasts, leaving his imagination run to the darkest corners of his mind, was already stimulating his salivary glands. And he knew, from the first glance on your figure and the way you were leaning against the shut door, that he was going to make a mess out of you… And make that new set of lingerie witness the same fatalist fate as the martyr before. Kuroo didn’t say a word, but the way his fingers pointed at his lap were enough indication for you to understand where you were going to be sitting, after all, you had deemed it as your throne. « Of course, I think it’s the best strategy to valorize the merch. » words fell effortlessly from his mouth, as if he became unfazed by the not so foreign presence on his lap. Or so you thought. « Maybe we could think about asking the MSBY team for some interviews, mhm? » His free hand was busy messily undoing the knot of his tie, far too tight for his liking, before setting his phone in a hold between his ear and his shoulders.

This newfound position gave him the opportunity to undo his belt, the sound of the metal of clicking in unison, and it gave you a hint as where he was going already. You were bound to drag his underwear down, but not before teasing the edge of said underwear with your fingertips (a deed which was saluted with an ill-intentioned glare on his end). « Hold on a second, I’ll be quick. », what a stark comparison between the numbness of his words and the growing bulge obtaining more and more the privilege of omnipotency in the constricting fabric of his boxers.

Kuroo gave a second glance at the phone on his desk, double-checking it was far enough to be able to pronounce the following words without being caught by his correspondent on the other end of the phone call, « All dolled up for me, kitten? How nice of you… » a metaphorical green elixir of mischief dripped down from his words whilst his fingertips found salute on your clothed core, his fingertips moving in appreciation at the sensation of wetness. « Here’s what we’re going to do, kitten, you’re going to ride my cock like the good girl you are but you have stay quiet, mhm? Good girls don’t want to be punished, do they? » Such a rhetorical question, but you nodded nonetheless, eager to feel full once more by the intoxicating sensation of his girth inside you. You were willing to do anything, give up on your boundaries, bend the holy rules of decency if it meant you could reach nirvana. And your ascension began as you allowed yourself to sink on his length, making a martyr out of your lower lip due to the pressure of your pearly whites. You needed to stay quiet, you needed to be a good girl for him.

Kuroo almost felt a hint of guilt at the palette of crimson shades now coloring your lower lip, but it was a sight to breathtaking to feel anything but pure ecstasy. « Tet— Mmphf! » You plea was cut to a halt by the sudden presence of his palm over mouth mouth, were you going to break his rules so quickly? « What did I say about being a good girl? Don’t make me punish you, I know you’re better than that, kitten. » Oh, the disappointed tone in his voice, a forecast of the sinful nature of events which were bound to happen if you kept playing with fire.

And whilst Kuroo was back on the call, having apologized for a pseudo issue caused by who-knows-what, you were hesitatingly rotating your hips, letting the tip of his length kiss your velvety walls. They were shy, almost experimental rotations. But although they were agonizingly slow, you could already feel the sick sensations of knots forming themselves in your lower stomach. Your palms were laid flat on his broad shoulder, your glance solely focused on the way his cock was filling you up, gracing your insides with how the prominent veins were dancing against your walls.

Fuck, was it hard to keep your composure and not give in to the subtle calls of the muses of passion. But he was on a call, the same hums and other signs of agreement leaving his lips whilst his oculars were fixed on you, an ill-intentioned grin throning amongst his facial features as a sign of a silent victory. You were such a good girl for him. He tapped his fingertips against your luscious thighs caging him in a hole he’d dream of spending his entire life in, silently telling you to begin a more rushed rhythm. But before you could start, his index found its way against his lips, another wordless way to demand absolute silence on your end. He knew it was pure torture, that’s why he was liking it so much.

And so you obliged, and the vertical motions on his girth became natural until reaching a steady rhythm which wouldn’t expose you to the light of danger. Or so you thought. Your own betrayal manifested itself when he shifted his position in his leather chair, causing the tip of his length to hit against the roof of your core, a terribly sensitive area which held all the nerves which burned under the sudden touch. A dragged moan left your lips before you could even realize it, your body began acting on its own before your mind did, and that’s precisely when you knew you had both lost yourself and he had lost patience.

You could hear a hushed « Kuroo-san, what was that? Is everything okay? » from the other side of the phone, and the silence invading the air was the worst response Kuroo could ever possibly come up with. « I’ll call you back. » It was short, dry even, and the way his voice had dropped a few octaves was the last sign announcing your own end. He pressed the red button on the screen, thus cutting an end to the call. A sigh of pure exasperation had been set free from his lips, and the silence had become agonizing, the stare he was giving you paralyzed your every move, you could only muster enough strength to swallow thickly.

« I’m so— » You were cut off as soon as the sound of your voice drowned in his eardrums. « Did I give you permission to speak? » You nodded negatively. « Do you know just how spoiled you are? I let you ride on my cock because you can’t seem to get enough of it, mhm? I only ask for one thing in return and you can’t do it properly? Get off. Get off of my cock. Now. »

You did as told, respecting the oh so dear rules of performative language, and found yourself standing before him with your knees almost giving in at the severe look plastered upon his facial expression. You opened your mouth to let out another apology, but your poor attempt had been cut short as he crashed his lips onto yours so roughly he was convinced you had awakened the side of him he always tried to keep tamed.

He had enough pity for you to break the kiss once your lungs began to give up due to the lack of oxygen. « Turn around. » You did as told, awaiting for your fate. « Your arms on your back. » He spat out another order, the coldness of his tone was enough to make a trail of chills run down your spine but you obliged nonetheless. « Tetsu— » Once again, cut off. « Did I give you permission to talk? » He asked, although he already knew the answer to his own question, to which you shook your head. « I thought so too. »

The knot of his tie came out easily, having already undone it a bit earlier on, it dangled from his fingers and his free hand pressed your back against the desk, a move which earned a mewl out of you. Then, his hands travelled around your wrists, leaving a soft caress on your palm before binding his tie around your wrists in a tight hold which severely contrasted with the sweet nature of his previous gesture. You winced in response, furrowing your brows together while he was spreading out your legs. « From now on, I don’t want to hear anything. You can moan as much as you want, I don’t give a damn. Got that, kitten? » And although Kuroo always used this nickname in such a sweet way, this time it had been tarnished by a sinful tone. « Y-Yes, sir. » You choked out, a watery veil covering your oculars in anticipation.

You heard nothing but the sound of his suit pants falling to his ankles, the click of the metal of his belt echoing against the floor, followed by the sound of yet another gulp being swallowed down your throat with difficulty. His fingertips found your core, and they were met with the wetness coating the area. Were you worth cherishing? Certainly not. And yet, he took it upon his kind heart to flick your sweet bundle of nerves, alternating between circular and pinching motions to stimulate you just enough to bring you on the verge of your apex. And just when your moans followed the crescendo of your sensations, he ceased all kinds of motions with a wicked grin on his face.

You couldn’t help but whine in frustration at the sudden lack of touch, your apex hitting a harsh stop so suddenly. « What was that? You’re complaining? » Kuroo half asked, taking a fistful of your hair to orientate your head towards him. « S-Sir, no… I just need, I need… Fuck, sir, I-I need… » Your words were mere hopes against him, your mouth was mouthing unintelligible sounds which found no purpose. « You don’t even know what you’re begging for, how fucking pathetic. » He released the hold on your hair, letting your head fall against the wooden surface of his desk while a string of whimpers left your lips.

« Ah! Please, sir, p-please, just fuck me… » You pleaded, hoping that you’d bent his heart somehow. But you were greeted with a harsh slap right on your derrière in retaliation, « Did I give you permission to speak? You’re fucking lacking politeness, what a slut you are. »

And it was the last vocal warning before he slammed his hips against yours, the latter caused him to dig his pearly whites into his lower lip to prevent any unwanted groan from leaving his mouth at the sensation of your walls wrapping around his cock so tightly. ‘So fucking tight’, he thought, knowing your cunt was made for him and him only. He had to still himself for a few seconds, adjusting to the iron grip which could’ve made him come undone at this very instant, you were too eager for your own good. And yet, you wanted to beg for him to move, do something, but you had to stay silent.

« You. Just. Can’t. Stay. Fucking. Silent. » Each word was accentuated by a slam of hips, followed by the sound of his testicles slapping against your skin. How you wished to bring your fist to your mouth, to bite your poor martyr of a hand at the violence of his thrusts which seemed to increase each time he moved. Pearls of salt gathered at the corner of your eyes, threatening to fall at any given second as Kuroo’s thrusts grew more rapid and more precise, kissing effortlessly the myriad of nerves adorning the roof of your core.

The moans fell from your lips like a cascade which couldn’t reach its own end, and so the tears fell. Kuroo, on the other one hand, rolled his head back in ecstasy while maintaining an iron grip on your tied wrists, thus guarantying you to have scarlet marks.

You knew you couldn’t come undone just yet, at least not when Kuroo was feeling like this, but he was close to his own end judging by the ferocity of his thrusts making a martyr out of your poor derrière which was bound to be colored by a palette of crimson shades as well. The inferno had been set free from its chains in Kuroo’s lower stomach, the blood rushing down to his girth in anticipation for the grand finale. « Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Look at what you— Ah! Fuck, look at what you do to me, squeezing my cock so hard like the f-fucking slut you are. » Truthfully, Kuroo needed to gather all of his strength to prevent any loose grunt from leaving his lips at the same time as his curses.

But he was only a mere man facing his temptations. « C-Cum with me, now! » He spat the words in pure lustful frenzy, losing himself in his own thrust while you could only resume to moan your pleasure away. Your were digging your fingernails in your own palms behind your back, drawing crescents into your flesh in order to distract yourself from the fact you were bound to come undone at any given moment.

Your mind was spiraling into a state of blankness, your body falling numb as you witnessed the metaphorical gates of heaven opening themselves before your sins. A hot trail of liquid painted your blank canvas with stains of sins and passion, and in return, the elixir of your own pleasure leaked down the sides of his cock while he was still thrusting his cum into you, all in a cacophony of sounds of pleasure.

Then the movements ceased, leaving room for more silence and choked breath. A trail of drool leaked from your mouth onto his desk, Kuroo stared at the ceiling while trying to re-gain the control of his breathing. The harsh grip of his hands around your wrists loosened up a bit, until they turned into mere caresses. Such a contrast with his previous deeds.

Kuroo was welcomed with a dragged whimper when he pulled out, the sudden feeling of vacuity replacing in the least pleasing way possible the sensation of his cock. And while you were about to fall down on the floor, your knees shaking from the aftermath of your orgasm, Kuroo’s grave voice shook you away from your thoughts. « Don’t move. I’m going to get the silk ropes, I’m done not with you yet. »

[lovestrucked-again]

Days Of Eminence | L. Jeno

Summary: There’s only a small amount of cities that still exist, the city of Eminence being the next most likely to perish. It’s not the city that dies, but the people - guided by an Angel. He says Y/N is his saviour, the one who can guide him to Heaven, but how can she when she’s the one meant to kill him.  Genre: angst, smut, 

Pairing: angel! Jeno x agent! female reader (ft Jaemin) Word count: 5k

Warning: corruption of Angelic themes, smut, death

a/n: Something very different as part of the summer collaboration by @neo-cult-ure​. My chosen summer-titled song is “Summer” by Keshi. Thank you for hosting this!! <3  

“3 months is all we’ve got.” _____

They asked you to write everything you could remember. A hard thing since there’s only so much sorrow in the telling. Your mind shies away from it, looping between the past and present in time.

Jaemin squeezed your arm, his face stern. “Stay only long enough to find out what goes on, Y/N. 3 months is all we’ve got.”

You nodded, believing it would be that easy; truly imagining that you were prepared for what was coming.

***

First Month Eminence was cool and muted as the mountain city of summer. As in summer, most constructions of the city covered in a shadowed glow, soft stone in the dark; seemingly clean, bare, bonelike whiteness. You knew the ceremonies conducted by the Angel occurred during sunset, hence your entry at that time. Walking through the main street you started to see how the people of this place looked ill and frail. Many bore savage burn scars, though they looked content.

“We know there is a place called the Chantry where the people meet to hear the Angel speak every day. I will guide you there.”

Passing from the pink stained dusty street and into the shadowy interior of the Chantry, you could hear the murmurs of the hundreds of voices that echoed. People were pressed in close and stood staring up at a raised stage. A plain wooden seat set atop the stage and sitting on it, was the Angel.

Dressed in a white shirt, barefoot; his feet not quite touching the floor, fingers clasped loosely on his lap, like a child sitting at his lessons. Though he wore no crown, his hair was white and rose up floating about his head, catching the sunlight in a nimbus.

Behind him, the shocking contrast. The outermost wall of the city lay open and presented a black continuous land. Eminence was the edge of the frontier beyond which no one could walk and live for long.

Jaemin had told you the Angel was young, but the light glowing behind him made it impossible to tell. You felt uneasy at the face of shadows crowned by light, surround darkness. You told yourself, that it was a deliberate effect, that the angel had aimed to make himself binding awe and mystery.

Then the angel shifted and light fell onto his features.

You gasped, but the sound drifted and lost its way into the cries of people pressed around you. Your breath was kicked out of you; the Angel was beautiful.

Even as you recall these memories, your seeking for another word, but are defeated, for there is no word made that can describe the solemn beauty of the Angel’s features. You were stunned.

Surely the others tasked with your mission would have mentioned this. And if so, why didn't they tell you? Then a second later you realise that the appearance of the Angel would not be thought important to adult agents searching for power and corruption. They would not see such incandescent beauty as power, for anyone seeing truly must know no corruption had ever touched that face. Here was goodness personified. Here was an Angel.

It made sense now, why they had chosen to send you instead. An adult would see a child in the Angel’s face and search for a manipulator. Indeed, you had been warned to search for the boy’s controlled. But you only saw beauty, so pure it could inflame those who looked upon it with a kind of madness of adoration; and in its midst, eyes with the sad wisdom of emotion.

You missed quite a lot of what he was saying that day due to your shock at his appearance, but you visited the Chantry every day from then on, with the rest of the citizens, listening to him say the same words over and over again. Before long, you knew them well enough to chant with him, as the rest did.

“There was a sickening of the spirit of heaven.” He began without preamble, voice sweet and low pitched, shaped to the story, so that his words became a sort of wind that breathed itself into you.

“Therefore, heaven separated this sickening spirit, lest it infect the rest, imprisoning it in a cage of flesh. Sent it upon the earth, the flesh which calls itself human-kind, multiplied, as is its nature. Far from what heaven had hoped, the spirit became further corrupted, wholly absorbed by its physical prison.”

His voice shaded into an implacable subtone. “In grace and infinite mercy, heaven sought to undo this binding of flesh to spirit. I am that spirit and that flesh sent to rid Plethora – to end the overmuch of flesh and spirit that clings to it and worships it.”

“These are the days of Plethora; the days of Eminence which you may prepare for the end of flesh. That the spirit in you will perish with the flesh in which you chose not to rise above. This is the judgement of heaven. I am the Angel, offering to those who seek it, a high path offering the choice to loosen your spirit from flesh so that when Plethora comes, it may fly.”

He asked who aspired to take the High path and a lot of people lifted their arms, streamed through doors to left and right at the front of the Chantry. After a few visits, you had learned those who were more sick and ailing and scared, stood right. The others gathered on the left.

You watched them go curiously, thinking to yourself that this High Path and the whole story of being an Angel, was a mixed belief of old religions. Your superiors had predicted it.

“The angel is using tried and true beliefs, but the it doesn't explain how he has amassed his power. Nor does it explain the weapons he has his followers collect. If it was only weapons, we could disarm them and let them be, but there is more to it than that and this Angel is the centre. That is where you come in, it seems the Angel is searching for someone to restore his condition.”

They meant this literally. The Angel lived amongst people who adored him, who devoted their entire life towards him, yet, he could not find someone to share his warmth and in turn grew colder each day. You were told he would play with the Children of Eminence. You learned how easy it was to get to him the first day you woke in the city, attendants of his asking who would like to visit the Angel. Ten were selected. It was a simple process, proving no difficulty, but that wasn't your goal. Initially you had planned to learn a little more about the High Path, advocated by the Angel.

You learnt that the meaning behind separating the spirit from flesh was literally that; people letting themselves be physically tortured. You learnt it the hard way, choosing to follow those people who ushered you to the left door in the Chantry. You knew there was a physical torture of some sort behind the door, having seen those who went in healthy come out battered and thin and pale, but still alive.

They are a nightmare to remember. Only glimpses can still be recalled through the erased memories. They were not able to wipe out everything, and the strongest details of pain remained; where you were swimming and swimming desperately in a vast of water, pushed by people prodding sticks to keep you from reaching the surface, until you could swim no more. You would sink, screaming for the end to come, breathing in the thickness of liquid. There would be agony, then unconsciousness. Then you would be revived and be tortured to undergo the same thing all over again.

Some died in this first process of the High Path, and the Angel praised them, claiming heaven had accepted their spirit before Plethora had fallen. Many went mad, the pain of drowning and reviving repetitively unable to keep the sane. You were on the verge of falling victim to the second stage; thinking it could not be any worse, when you were selected to visit the Angel.

Second Month Unable to refuse, you went with caution and a little excited flock of children, expecting rituals and brainwashing, or maybe some sort of sexual interference disguised as play, but all the Angel did was play with them. The children squealed and giggled, running in circles as he tickled them, crawled after them, growling and pretending to gobble them up. He laughed and told them stories of heaven, singing melodies and songs he had learnt. You hovered at the back, wondering how one who so obviously adored children could allow them to be tortured and guide them to their deaths.

As if he felt the intensity of your scrutiny, the Angel looked over the children’s heads, towards you. And in that moment, you learnt the truth behind love at first sight: a mingling of souls that surpass all sense, all words, all life. The first single look you exchanged left you weakened in a voracious longing. But the most shattering thing, was the awareness the Angel experienced the same amount of recognition and emotion.

You watched his lips part in the shape to form a word, perhaps a curse or prayer, then he beckoned you. The children parted, letting you pass as you moved to him as quickly as you could, unable to contain the string that seemed to be tugging from his direction.

“Welcome, my dearest love,” he whispered, taking your hand, “I was waiting for you.”

You were completely bewildered. You tried to open your mouth but nothing came out; the phrases you had prepared in order to fit in, could not form. Dearest love.

“I am Y/N.”

He smiled and it seemed to you there was something new in his face. “Yes.” He released one of your hands and reached out to stroke a finger along your cheek. “I am Jeno, and as an Angel, I am beyond saving. Yet how else shall my spirit transcend flesh at the end, except by its grace? Thus heaven swore that I would find Plethora in the face and flesh of a girl called Y/N. My name was given to me – Jeno – as I was told I would know its truest meaning only when I saw you, and with that pain that it would bring, my soul can be released.”

You swallowed hard, unable to process the stream of words amongst your panicking madness of gibberish about love and death. “I…I don't understand. Did you know I would come?”

“I knew you would come to stand before me today. I left you to freely wander through the city of Eminence where other agents before you were discarded of at once.”

“I…other agents?” you questioned, feeling your spine turn cold.

He sighed. “You are not the first to be sent from your city in fear of attack and conversion to Angel worshipping. The man who led you here still stands outside these walls, where even now, waits for you outside Eminence, his fear of losing you gnawing at him.”

You blinked, remembering the look on Jaemin’s face as he placed the gun in your hand.

“You have undergone the start to the High Path,” Jeno goes on. “You have seen all the city in your wanderings. You asked questions and received true answers. You know my name, my face, my voice. I know that you have yet to be touched by the Highest Path – but we shall find that path in one another, for only by love can the soul find its highest pain.”

You gave up your act of confusion. You were trained to accept and prepare for the inevitable death when the time would come. The fear of death mingled with his words of terrifying madness claimed of love. You let your emotions fuse into a shield, waiting for it to form a barrier that could not be broken.

“An opportunity will come, in that split second when you can act and alter the course of events. Miss it and you die.” Jaemin had warned you, showing you how to remain calm and watchful.

“What are you going to do with me?” you asked the Angel.

“First, I will show you what you have not been allowed to find,” he said, and with that, he led you out of the enclosed garden. The children trailed behind in a train as he brought you through the city to the silos where the weapons were kept. Ancient missiles which, when activated, would rain acid chemicals to poison the earth and sear the flesh.

“H-How did you find them?” you asked, frozen at the sight. There was enough to destroy all cities – Plethora.

“Heaven guided me,” Jeno said, his fingers lightly caressing your arm.

“Why?” you hesitated, but you knew. Had you not heard the words a dozen times? Watched him form the sentences from his lips? As if reading your mind, he said them once again.

“These are the Plethora days - the end days - in which the spirit will be guided to abandon the flesh in judgement of heaven.” He touched the missile gently as if it was an animal that may run. “In a sense, I am also an agent, sent from Heaven. Just as your Jaemin had given you that gun to summon aid, I have you. My one chance for redemption.”

He smiled and led you back to the garden. Strange though it seemed, the two of you sat and he held you, stroked your hair and whispered words of love into your ears. He went for a while to deliver his morning speech, but he returned immediately after. You didn’t bother to run or hide, because he was an Angel and you knew you were captured by love.

“Come with me,” he murmured, grasping your hand in his as he guided you down an empty street. The sun was setting now, glowing from behind your figures and casting a shadow over you.

Jeno led you to a small but neatly structured building. His place was far from your imagination. For some unknown reason, you had pictured a place full of light of both natural and artificial. A room full of white, perhaps a few paintings of what he claimed was heaven. So to come into a small building shrouded with colours of grey and black surprised you. He left the curtains drawn during the day, allowing no light to shine through and liven his home.

“Is this where you live?” you asked quietly, swaying the curtains slightly as you peeked through to see outside.

“Yes,” he replied, “Do you like it?”

It bought a strange comfort knowing that his place was different from what you expected, a strange sense of relief. The Angel was a being himself, not controlled, not programmed, but with his own thoughts, likes and dislikes.

“I do, it’s nice.” It wasn't something that could be explained; the thought process that ran through your mind when it occurred. You bought your hand to his arm, sliding it down to hold his hand. He turned to look at you, startled at your touch.

You squeezed his hand softly, feeling his fingers intertwine with yours. He doesn't seem to realise what his doing, focused only on your eyes, caught in them yet again, out of his depth.  

Jeno blinked; suddenly he knew. He leaned in towards you, just a little. And you watched as his soft dark eyes close, bringing his lips in to touch yours. He leaned in further, sweeping your lips with his tongue and he felt his heart leap when you opened for him.

His hand cupped your chin and you let your face be guided. That too was right, as was the sudden tautness in your nipples. And his long fingers leaving your face, softly sweeping over your shoulder to enfold your breast - that was right, too, as it should be. And so was Jeno’s emphatic manhood, now thrusting upwards; that too was appropriate, perfect.

His breath caught at the feeling of soft fingers on his knee, tracing their way up his thigh. His hand swept over to your other breast, squeezed tenderly. His uncertainty vanished when you reopened your eyes. The look in them was ageless, assured. He could see yearning in them, too, a need not just for him, but for his approval, his acceptance of you as you. His breath caught again as you hand moved further, as if in confirmation, grasped at his cock. Your tongue met his, teased and played as your fingers rolled his balls between them.

He began to turn towards you, but the you were faster and he found himself pushed onto his back on the couch with you lying half on top of him. Your lips crushed his, your tongue probing deeper into his mouth. His hesitancy gone, he kissed back, his own hunger now open and clear.

Your fingers trailed lightly up and down the length of his manhood before returning to the tip, pulling it gently away from his body. You held it there for a moment, released it, began to roll his balls again. He had never been so hard, so aroused. His eyes closed as he focused on your light, deft touch.

You smiled to yourself, happy at his obvious pleasure.

You in her turn gasped softly as Jeno’s hand squeezed first one breast, then the other, lifting, weighing them, mounding them. His hands drifted, began to roll and pull your long nipples; you sighed at the sweet sensation flooding through your body. It was clear that the Angel, too, knew what pleased a partner. His patient, loving working of your nipples continued even as you shifted, moving to lie on your side, facing him. You shuddered, gave a slight cry as he lightly pinched a swollen nub, leaned down and began to tease it with the tip of his tongue. You felt your labia swell, sensed your dew on them, felt your clitoris ease out from under its hood, hard now, expectant.

Your hand moved from his balls to his cock. You slid a hand over it, up and down, thumbing its swollen head at the top of each stroke, giggled as it twitched in your hand. Squeezing harder, you began to drag the velvety skin back and forth over its iron core, slowly at first, then faster and still faster.

You gave a low moan as his hand moved down your body, caught along your pubic hair, pulled it gently. You could feel the air on your wet sex, moaned again as a long finger traced the length of your entrance.

You moaned again as the finger probed your opening up to the first knuckle, began to turn and twist within you. You could feel an orgasm building within you as his foreplay fanned a fire unfed for far too long.

You sensed that he too was very close.

You gave a strong push, rolling the Angel onto his back, his engorged organ swaying for a moment. With a soft chuckle, you straddled him, reached down and slowly guided yourself down onto his length. You paused for a moment, sitting upright, your eyes closed, allowing yourself to enjoy the feeling of being filled, happily stretched by Jeno’s manhood.

He layed still, his eyes sweeping back and forth between your eyes and your breasts. His hands rose up over your waist, fell to seize the tops of your hips. He smiled at the sight of your figure beginning to sway and rock on his cock.

Your eyes were closed and there was a happy smile on your face, one of pleasant concentration perhaps. The sun shone through your hair, rays reflecting against the bedsheets. With each roll of your hips, your soft breasts swayed, the ends of your hair drifting across his face and chest.

He slid his hands lightly over your thighs, came to rest on your bum. Your weight was on him and he couldn't move his hips. He found himself longing to pull you down, to crush your lips on his. His hands rose, hesitated.

Instead, he settled them on your waist, squeezed, pulling your body against his. Your skin was warm, soft, with toned, firm flesh underneath. His hands swept up to recapture your breasts, took your swollen nipples between thumb and forefinger, pulled gently, twisted.

You drifted in a wave of sensation as you rolled up and down on his cock. The taut rim of its crown pushing back and forth across your velvet lining fanned your arousal, each millimeter of motion like gasoline on a fire.

For the first time since you arrived, you were allowing yourself to be happy, to enjoy yourself without guilt. You began to give short cries as Jeno’s fingers gripped your nipples more firmly, pulled them and turned them.

You shifted, grabbed his wrists and leaned forward, pinning them to the armrest over his head. You could feel your nipples brush across his chest every time your hips drove torso down.

Jeno, for the first time in his experience, was not controlling anything. It was a strange thing for him -- exciting, but very different. Looking up at you, he could see that you’d caught your lower lip between your teeth. Your eyes were closed as you focused on the happy lust blooming within you.

His hands held against the sheet, he could do little but enjoy the sensation of you working yourself over and along his cock. After a moment, he bent his legs, pushing you further up his body. You opened your eyes, smiled at him briefly before changing your rolling to more of a plunging motion.

Your boobs swayed and swung as you bounced up and down; your soft buttocks slid up and down along his thighs.

He found that he could lean his head forward and almost reach... He pulled his feet in closer, raising his knees, pulling her closer still... and found his mouth could now reach your nipples when you came close enough. You gasped in surprise the first time and, still biting your lip, moaned in appreciation.

Jeno’s cock felt enormous to you. He could feel a fiery pressure building behind his balls.

You dropped all of your weight letting the intrusion into your pussy, letting yourself grind your pelvis against his. You went rigid for a moment, crying out at the explosion of joy, your orgasm possessing you, controlling you.

***

“Will you kill me so easily?” you whispered, unable to fall asleep with the silky sheets tucked around you.

And then you turned in your position, shifting to stare at him carefully in the dark – the only light provided by the natural moonlight shining between the gap of the open slit in the curtain. His expression lost as it seemed reality set back in. And then he wept, and you wept too. He reached out a pulled you into his arms. Surprised at the strength of his arm under your soft flesh. His hands trembled as they rested on your bare arms, and he leaned towards you and put his lips on yours.

“Flesh keeps our spirits apart,” he said, without taking his mouth away from you. “When Plethora comes, we will never be parted, not in all eternity.”

“But we won’t be ourselves in your heaven,” you shivered, the desire for him to kiss you again so powerful it felt like a knife poking at the edges of your heart.

“You’ll see.” he murmured bleakly, and you noticed the shadow of longing, the pain of parting, mirrored in his eyes, “it’ll be okay,” he said. And he kissed you again.

The two of you laid awake all night, he told you his coming to Plethora and the years of his rising to power. He explained to you the deaths of the agents - all self chosen as they challenged the road to the High Path. They had been converted he explained. You knew he was trying to convert you, and that in convincing you to accept death, he was fighting his love. In turn, you sought to win from his duty to heaven. Every minute that passed together seemed to make love seem brighter and more dangerously alluring.

Third Month The next day, or perhaps it was many days later, he showed you the maps that indicated the piles of missiles which had been set under all the cities; under yours. To destroy Plethora wasn’t enough for him. He showed you the room on the perimeter of Plethora, where the explosions and weapons would simultaneously be set off.

“This time, everything will go.”

“You’d kill all of those thousands of people after they survived the madness of world wars?” you asked, standing in the small machine dominated room

“I would free the souls left behind,” he said gently, “free them from fear and death and pain and sorrow,”

“And from love and beauty of the sort that only flesh would know?”

Again there was a flash of pain in his eye, and he stroked your cheek, then pointed to the back of your pants – the gun hidden underneath your clothing. “Why not summon him then? He will come here to save you will he not? He could kill me and save you.”

You thought there was a flare of hope in his eyes.

“Would you let him kill you?” you asked, knowing that there was an answer already known. The thought of Jeno dying bought heavy pains to your heart.

***

“You believed he was an Angel?” Jaemin asks, taking a moment to read through the words you had just written down. His eyes are filled with pain, disbelief and lack the warmth they held moments ago. He does not try to hide it anymore, unable to care if he knows how you feel.

“He was,” you say, “He came to bring Plethora. He fell in love, he trusted me.”

“Y-You loved him?” He turns around, letting himself stare out at the window as he braces himself

“I-I did.” you hesitate, wondering how many forms of pain your heart could go through without breaking for good.

“You killed him,” Jaemin states blankly, “You had to. He would have killed himself, killed you, and all of us. All the children and killed humanity out of love. You killed him so that we would survive.”

The flashes of pain and memory well up and spill out of you. Again you see his face, fused with radiance, for he would have walked the Highest Path of all in the moment of his death, knowing he failed because of his love for you. Again you feel the wind blow past your body, the explosion and flaring heat of flames as they coiled around you. The sound of Eminence dying was the sound of your undeniable regrets.

***

“Could you explain what happened?” The man asks, “I know its written here but…”

He stops talking, not wanting to force you into explaining something so visibly emotionally exhausting but desperate for the information.

“He showed me the control room, and when I had the chance, I went back to destroy it. I rewired it so that it would be blown up. I didnt realise the city would go with it. I thought it’d be only the room.”

“He might have lied when he said the control room was the only centre. The weapons could have been triggered some other way.”

You look at the wall, and when he realises it’s the end of the conversation, he leaves. He doesn’t believe Jeno was an Angel, convinced you had perhaps been manipulated – gone mad. He could not understand than an Angel is truth. Unfortunately you could not tell him any different. People see what they want to see. Jeno had said that.

“It was foreseen that it would come to this moment of balance,” Jeno had said, standing in the doorway of the control room. His eyes were on the weapon you held. Jaemin had handmade it, the handgun that had been carved with your initials, attached with a blooming light. Your hand trembled.

“You love me,” Jeno said.

You nodded weeping, “I do, but I have to stop you. I can’t let you destroy everything.”

“Only flesh, my love. Only the material world would die. I would never hurt you.” He was smiling because he was an Angel. And Angels are love and only know of love. He loved you, but he did not understand the nature of flesh, the need for it to survive - to love. “Come with me.” he said, his face exalted, “It’s not too late, even with all you have done. We can end it together.”

He reached for the lever which would bring destruction to the world before the control room could explode and sever Eminence from the other cities. But before he could, you triggered first. The gun that you had not once ever used finally triggered and a red flower landed on the Angel’s heart. He fell like a snowflake, as the city around you shook. His head landed in your lap and he smiled, lifting his fingers to your face.

“Too late,” he whispered, his hand falling back. “I failed heaven. I failed you, my love. We must part.”

“No,” you cried, but he was gone, flesh and spirit.

***

Survival is a disturbing topic. You were meant to follow him, for the journey of the High Path was started together. Yet you live and suffer. Perhaps the path is longer for you, a punishment for your betrayal.

The meaning behind his name only occurred to you long after your recovery. Jeno was an Angel, a King to his city. He was the strength of life, binding the souls and spirits of the citizens and guiding them to Heaven. And he was also strength in its scariest form – forcing you to put an end to the life of someone you cherished in the short 3 months you had.  

[shes-fast-like-me]

i know how much it matters to you

i know how much it matters to you

AO3 Link

Pairing(s): Established Lifetane, Gibby x his boyfriend

Word Count: 1,791

Warnings: Mentions of childhood neglect and bad parents, discussion of mental illness and trauma, alcohol. (Tell me if you feel anything else should be tagged!)

may was borderline personality disorder awareness month (alongside being adhd awareness and mental health awareness month in general) so i decided to project onto my fave. the symptoms of it aren’t 100% being portrayed here but this is something i feel like a lot of us relate to so?? idk man emotional impermanence be like that

=+=+=+=

"Here comes the big man himself!" Elliott called, twisting around in his seat to wave Makoa over to sit with them in the living space.

"Show us the ring!" Ajay beamed as the tall man made his way over to the other Legends gathered around their small makeshift coffee table. He held out his hand, a rather dainty bejeweled silver ring on his ring finger. Everyone cooed over it.

"You're so lucky, man," Elliott said, handing Makoa a beer as he sat down on the couch next to him, "congrats."

"Aye, thanks bruddahs," Makoa grinned from ear to ear. The man was always bright and full of smiles but Octavio swore he has never seen him this happy. He was almost radiant.

"When's the weddin'?" Ajay asked, sitting back against Octavio's side and sipping on her mocktail. She always hated alcohol so the drink was as fruity and non-alcoholic as Elliott could possibly mix up.

"Spring of next year," Makoa said, "We want some time on our honeymoon before the next season, so,"

Everyone nodded in agreement. The season breaks between spring and summer were a little longer than the autumn to winter breaks and since Makoa was proposed to this spring it gave them extra time to plan everything. Makoa and his fiancé had relatives all over the Frontier and would probably want to plan the wedding at a time when the most family members could attend. And the other Legends, of course.

"So," Octavio set his empty cocktail glass down and picked up a can of beer off the table. He could get a little drunk, it was only their first night back onto the dropship, the new season kicking off in two days. "Any idea for wedding gifts?"

He was loaded. He could afford pretty much anything they wanted.

"Ah, no, it's no problem, bruddah-"

"No, no, I insist," He decided to pour the beer into his empty glass anyway, not wanting to waste the ice cubes still sitting at the bottom, "anything you like, I got it."

Makoa laughed. "Just you showing up is enough for me."

"Alright," Octavio sat down into the headrest but still decided he was going to buy Makoa and his fiancé something anyway. After all, that's what you do at weddings, right? Octavio has been to many weddings before, many of them being his own father's, and the couple was always gifted a fancy car or yacht or something of the sort.

He mostly just tuned out the rest of the conversation. Talk of weddings always reminded him of his dad and how weddings were a near weekly occurance for him. He wanted to go for Makoa's sake, of course, and he would force himself to even if Ajay told him it was okay to stay home if it got too overwhelming. He'd just get blackout drunk at the party and probably just dissociate the whole evening, but he was willing to do that for his friend.

Later that evening, Octavio lay on Ajay's bed as they watched anime together on the small holo-TV provided in their temporary rooms. Octavio buried his face into Ajay's pink hair as they spooned, his arm around her waist. He would've fallen asleep if his anxiety wasn't keeping him up. If he had his legs on right now they'd be tapping away furiously, probably disturbing Ajay from watching the show altogether. Octavio kinda missed tapping his feet, he couldn't sleep without moving them and now that he didn't have them he'd imagine the sensation, like a ghost, and get sad whenever he realized it wasn't real. But that's such a small thing to get upset about.

His fingers grazed against the skin showing between Ajay's t-shirt and her sweatpants, tapping on the waistband as he worked up the courage to ask a question that has been itching at his brain all evening.

"Baby?" he said, uncertain of how to begin. She looked at him over her shoulder. "Have you ever thought.... about marriage?"

Instantly he cringed at the phrasing and tried to fix it. "I mean, not to me, necessarily. I'm just wondering- If you ever want to get married?"

She looked back towards the TV with a smile. "Depends who's askin'," she replied simply, "not at the moment though, I'm too busy. But it would be nice in the future."

Octavio bit his lip and really had the urge to tap his missing feet. The fear ached in his chest and he could feel his hands sweating. "I don't think I wanna get married," he said it quickly, almost afraid to hear her reaction. Verbally retracting as if he expected her to hit him or something. Why was that his instinctual reaction? No one ever hit him for speaking out.

She looked down at his hand and lightly brushed her fingers over his knuckles. "That's fine," she said but he couldn't pick up the tone. It made it feel worse. Was she upset? Was she hoping for a different answer?

"It's not," it took all his strength not to let his voice crack, assuming that she wasn’t satisfied with his answer. She turned to look at him properly. He tried to blink away the tears starting to form in his eyes.

"Babe, it's all fine. We don't have to get married. You don't have to get married, ever, if that's what makes you comfortable."

"But I want to," he said, voice trembling. "I want to make you happy if that’s what you want."

"I don't need marriage to be happy in life." She held his hand comfortingly and traced circles into it. "Besides, who says I'm gon' marry you?" She joked and he loved the way her nose scrunched up when she smiled at him. It lifted some of the weight off his chest and he smiled at the joke despite the tears.

"Okay," he swallowed and wiped the tears from his eyes, his fingers shaking.

"It's alright," she pushed the hair out of his eyes. He admired all the freckles dotting her skin. If Ajay let him stare at her for a while he could count them and maybe calm down a little bit, but that'd be weird of him to ask.

He let out a breath, "it's just," the tears were back but the tension of holding them in and bottling everything up was gone, "I don't want to be like my father."

"You're not." She whispered and studied his face as he continued.

"I don't wanna have kids and have them go through the same shit I did." Tears spilled from his eyes and down the sides of his cheeks. It hurt to think about treating his kids the way he was treated. He didn't even think his childhood had affected him that much until now. But it did, it hurt, it hurt to be ignored your whole life and live with no constants. He was constantly scared of everyone abandoning him, of things being taken away from him. Everything was so temporary to him, even Ajay. What if they got married and one day she decided she didn't love him anymore? How would he even handle something like that? He'd be crushed.

"You're not ya father," Ajay said calmly, bringing his hand up to her lips and kissing his knuckles, "and I've seen ya with my li'l cousins. You'd be a great dad. You said yaself you'd never want to hurt them the way your dad did, so you won't. Not intentionally."

"Do you think my father intended to hurt me?" He asked, his tone a little more passionate than he had intended it to be. "Obviously it was out of his control how I would react to-"

"Tavi, he did awful things to ya. You're allowed to be upset about it."

"But if I don't make excuses for him, how can I excuse my own shitty actions?" He covered his face and dug his palms into his eye sockets, blocking her out from his blurry view. "I'm even worse." His voice broke.

"You're not. You're ill. Ya just need some time and help to get things right. You're taking those steps. Your father never even considered that. That's what makes ya better than him."

It's true, he did have a therapist now, trying to help him manage the many disorders and issues he got stuck with. And he was trying so hard to be better, but it all felt so useless sometimes when he kept acting like this, being like this. Whenever he relapsed, whenever he split on someone, whenever he acted out or isolated or dissociated or cried. He always felt like he was taking steps backwards, not forwards.

"Listen, I know recovery's not easy for ya," she tapped her fingers on his chest and he moved his hands from his face to look at her as she spoke. "But you're pushin’ through it regardless. And I'm gon' be here for ya all the way through it, ya hear me? I'm not goin’ anywhere."

"Everyone says that." He sniffled.

"Yeah, well, I mean it," she said, "and I'll promise this to ya, that I won't leave ya alone no matter how hard it gets." She looked directly into his eyes, her soft voice calming his thoughts.

"Here," she said and took a beaded bracelet off her wrist. It was one of those kandi bracelets she sometimes wore, this one pink and purple with the word "LOVE" spelled out on it. "It's a promise." She held it out to him.

He looked at her hand, puzzled.

"It's like a promise ring. It should make ya feel better to have a physical representation of my promise to ya. I read that it helps with BPD to-"

He sat up and hugged her. "Thank you," he murmured into her shoulder. She pat his back and when they released each other he took the bracelet and put it on his wrist. "Thank you, " he breathed out again.

"Ya welcome." She smiled softly and honestly, her smile momentarily lit up the room. He was so lucky to have her.

"Now, can we finish the show? This next episode's the best one." She gestured with the remote to the paused screen. He hadn't even noticed when she paused it to speak to him. He smiled and nodded, laying back down on his side, her snuggling into him as she pressed 'play'.

"I'm sorry if I ruined the evening." He apologized.

"Ya didn't. I still love ya." She said and took his hand in hers, their fingers intertwined.

And after watching that magical girl show and breathing in her flowery perfume, Octavio finally found himself able to peacefully drift off to sleep for the night.

=+=+=+=

Taglist: @herondaleatheart @brontophile @moontearchild @soulheartthewolf @hey-its-mika @xbeaxbeax (You may always ask to be added or taken off the list! Being on the taglist notifies you of whenever I post a fic so if you are interested, please message me!)

[tamorasky]

Cursing Sharp Stones Chapter 1

Summary: It wasn't uncommon for the women to be eventually cast aside, Elsa knew this all too well. Yet was unable to protect her sister.

Rating: T

Relationship: Elsa/Honeymaren, Kristoff/Anna (background)

Canadian Frontier AU

Words: 1,002

Part 2 of Mistress Anna 

AO3

Tags: Canadian Frontier AU, Metis Culture, Friends to Lovers, Illness, Colonization/Colonialism. 

Notes: This is Elsa's side of MA, it won't be as long but I wanted to write it SO bad!

Rupert’s Land, 1851

Elsa stands off to the side, her arms crossed over her chest as she watches her younger sister embrace their mother. She does not like any of this, wishing she could board up Anna in the house and keep her from going to the fort with their father. But knows that Anna had the willpower of a buffalo and would not be swayed.

The auburn-haired girl turns to Elsa, bounding towards her with glee. Anna takes Elsa’s hands into her own, mirroring eyes reflecting against one another.

“I still do not think you should go.” The older sister warns, her mouth pressed into a thin line as her forehead creases.

“I will be fine!” Anna reassures, squeezing Elsa’s hand in her own. “And really it is only for a few months, the summer will be over in no time.”

Elsa wraps her arms around Anna’s shoulders in an instant, holding her sister close. “You be careful while you are there.”

“I know, I know. Do not get involved with a white man.” Anna giggles, pushing out of Elsa’s embrace. “Ki shaakiihitin.”

“Ki shaakiihitin.” Elsa repeats, forcing a smile as she watches her younger sister meander towards the carriage, where their father waited for her.

The brunette steps forward, shoving her hands into the pockets of her buckskin jacket as she watches the carriage pull away with her sister in it. Standing next to her mother, Elsa sighs loudly, catching Iduna’s attention from the road.

“What is it sa jaang?” The matriarch asks, placing a hand on her daughter’s back.

“I do not like this.” Elsa states sternly, her narrowed eyes still fixated on the road. Reluctantly she looks away to her mother, whose own features are unreadable. “How do you feel about this all?”

Iduna sighs, glancing down at her moccasins. “This is a choice Anna has to make. It is not up for us to decide.”

“You could have told her to stay,” Elsa states, pulling away from her mother without another word, ignoring as Iduna calls out for her to return.

The brunette ventures into the bush, further away from their river lot. She could not believe that her mother had allowed Anna to leave Ahtohallan, the safety of their community for Fort Arendelle. Iduna of all people should know what these journey’s entailed; Anna would return to Ahtohallan pregnant with child, or worse, engaged to a white man.

Elsa remembers living in Arendelle with their father as a young girl, Anna was not yet born. She can still recall the night their father cast them out of his home, throwing his pregnant wife and young daughter to the wilderness.

She comes to the river, her toes kissing the water’s edge as she wraps her arms around herself, staring across to the other side. Thinking back to only yesterday, when her and Anna played in the water, splashing and tricking one another. Now Elsa is alone and would be for the entire summer.

Her ears perk up as she hears rustling in the bush behind her. Elsa spins around, her eyes scanning the forest to locate the source of the noise. Certain that it must be a rabbit or deer, but one could never be careful with Fort Arendelle and Carlton nearby.

A figure moves through the trees, in that moment Elsa wishes that she had brought her gun to protect her. She slowly crouches to the ground, picking up a sharp rock into her hands, curling it into her fist as she yells out. “Who is there?”

The figure proceeds closer toward the riverbank as Elsa’s grip on the stone tightens, digging painfully into her palm. The brunette expects a white man to emerge from the forest, watching her as if she is prey to him. But no man emerges.

Elsa’s hold of the stone loosens as the figure emerges. Her blue eyes widen as they step onto the riverbank. A Cree woman stares back at the Metis women, sky-blue eyes meeting ones the colour of chestnuts.  The woman’s dark brown hair is secured in a braid, her shoulders covered in a dark brown shawl with a rust-coloured skirt peeking out from underneath.

Elsa glances down to the Cree woman’s side, noticing the two rabbits she held. The woman in front of her is most likely from the nearby encampment, Yelana’s tribe. Elsa drops the stone finally, offering a polite smile to the other woman.

“Your hand is bleeding.” The woman states, staring at Elsa’s hand. The brunette glances down at her hand, noticing that there is in fact a small gash on her palm.

“O-oh, I did not notice it.” Elsa stutters. Her cheeks flushing, in what the young woman is certain is embarrassment. The other woman giggles, causing Elsa to glance back up at her, managing a smile.

“Let me help you with that.” The Cree woman reaches into a small bag, Elsa had not even noticed at her side. The woman takes out what looks to be a roll of gauze, steeping towards Elsa, the stranger demands. “Hold your hand out.”

With some hesitancy, Elsa holds her hand out to the stranger, allowing her to take her hand. Elsa’s palm faces towards the sky as the woman gently wraps the hand.

“You just carry this stuff around with you?” Elsa inquires.

“My brother has been known to be clumsy from time to time.” The stranger shrugs, wrapping the hand once more before cutting the piece of gauze from the larger bundle.

“He and my sister would get along,” Elsa smirks, tucking the end of the gauze. She glances up again as the woman giggles, the soft laughter turning Elsa’s smirk into a genuine smile. “I’m Elsa.” She says, louder than expected, flinching at the loudness of her voice.

“I’m Honeymaren.” The woman responds, her gaze never leaving Elsa’s as she tucks away the gauze and knife. Elsa peers back at Honeymaren, thinking that maybe her summer won’t be as lonely as she thought it would be.

Author’s Note: ALSO! I understand that Sami (who the Northuldra are based on) are an entirely distinct Indigenous group from North American Indigenous groups. I just thought this might be a fun thing to write especially since I study Fur Trade marriages and Metis Women.

[ask-de-writer]

DARING DO and the ADVENTURE of the X'IBIAN VASE! : MLP Fan Fiction : Part 11 of 21

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Daring Do

and the Adventure of the X'ibian Vase!

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

And

Carmen Pondiego

Cover Art by

Doctor Dimension

52630 words

© 2015 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Writing begun 08/26/15

All rights reserved.  This document may not be copied or distributed on or to any medium or placed in any mass storage system except by the express written consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions, provided that such things are done without charge.  I will allow those who do commission art works to charge for their images provided that I receive a copy of each image for my archive.  

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fictions is actively encouraged.

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Jeremy bowed to them all the bow of an inferior seeking a favor of one of importance.  “I do not wish to delay the expedition for Doctor Do’s sake.  Is there no way to remedy my errors?”

Sang He thought that over and conferred with her herd.  “We will carry you, but only if you study what Daring Do assigns.  At each stop, you will be questioned by her about your progress.  For each question that you answer wrongly you must walk for an hour.  We know that Doctor Do would not have you along if you were stupid.  We hope that this will assist your learning.”

One of the dromedaries knelt for Jeremy.  Before she would get up, she demanded with distaste, “Doctor Do, I do not carry this insect willingly.  Please assign him his lesson to study.”

Daring Do nodded and showed Jeremy pages of The Darkling’s Tomb and several pages of expedition materials as well.  “Master these, Jeremy, or walk.  They are perfectly serious.”

The expedition set out at the kilometer devouring pace that only a dromedary can maintain in the desert.  The Dunn See and its fertile valley fell behind.  Ridges of bare stone and small, scrubby brush rose ahead.  They were entering the highlands of X'ibia.  Soree was having a wonderful time sketching and writing.

Jeremy stole occasional glances at the rugged land that these sure footed dromedaries were passing so swiftly.  He shuddered at the thought of trying to keep up with them and returned to his studies with renewed vigor.

Shortly after noon, the whole herd swung away from the line that they had been following.  Coming to an overhanging cliff edge, the herd settled down, kneeling and easing down to the ground.

Daring Do and Soree dismounted, first stretching cramped legs and then setting up a small charcoal fired stove.  They quickly had water heating for tea and rice.

The dromedary mare that was carrying Jeremy said, with the slightest bob of her head, “Please dismount, Insect.  I do not carry you because it is my wish.  The less that we are together the better.”

With ill grace, Jeremy dismounted.  He saw that Sang He was cheerfully familiarizing herself with her new rifle.  Daring Do was conferring with her over the ammunition.  “We included the molds for the bullets.  Henea San should have no difficulty in preparing the charges.  The explosive is simply melted and poured into the bullets.  It hardens to a safe waterproof form quickly.

“As soon as it does, it is ready to shoot.”

“These are excellent for us, Daring Do, my friend.  Our artisans will have no trouble at all making more of these, if you will give us permission.”

Daring Do frowned, “There should be an assignment of rights document with them.  Let me see.” She dug through the manuals and found a paper.  “Yes.  Here it is. We only need to sign it together and get an official chop on it for it to be done.”

Soree cheerfully announced, “Noon Rice and tea!”

Saying, “Eat when you can! Who knows when you will see food again!”  Sang He gently pushed Daring Do to the stove.  Jeremy was about to reach for a rice ball when he was stopped.

“Your studies, Jeremy.  Tell me of the X'ibian weapons display.”

Jeremy began to mumble.  

“Speak clearly or be counted wrong.”

Jeremy explained the various things that a visitor could say to a host by what was done with the weapon after a non threatening, “I come in peace,” display.

Daring Do nodded.  “You will be checked on this again.  This is life and death information.  You may have a rice ball and tea.”

He sullenly took his rice ball and commented sourly, “Why can’t we have decent civilized bread?”

Soree looked up from nibbling on hers to say, “For the same reason that we don’t have bread on journeys in Saddle Arabia.  It either spoils or goes stale hard in only a day or so.  The rice, being a grain, will keep indefinitely. It is easily fixed when wanted to provide both nourishment and hydration.  I would think that you already figured that out.”

“I do know it!  It was a rhetorical question!”

Daring Do nodded, “It was also an insult. Including the words decent and civilized was utterly uncalled for.  It was saying that these friends of mine are somehow uncivilized simply because they are nomads.”

Jeremy glared down at the ground at his hooves as if the clay and stones were somehow at fault.  He finished his rice ball in sullen silence.

~~ ~~ ~~

Robber was feeling aggravated. The other two were doing nothing to help.  They were sitting in comfort in the cabs of the trucks.  HE was stuck with trying to negotiate their passage around yet ANOTHER canal.  

While their trucks were being pulled from the river at the last one, it had dawned slowly on him that trucks were not suitable for long distance travel in the Empire. Careful talk with some of the salvage crew leaders, imitating their customs of bowing and the like, had proved it.

“No, indeed, Sir.  There are no through roads to X'ibia.  This road that you are following will take you as far up the Dunn  See as Can Chow.  It is at the X'ibian Frontier.

“I believe that you will have eight more canals and nine railroad lines to cross before you get there.”

He was as politely as possible waiting his turn to speak to this lock supervisor.  While he was waiting, he was taking the advice of the beggar to watch and think deeply about bribes.

He bowed deeply to the Lock Keeper and said, “Sir, this honorable but unworthy one seeks your assistance.  We are an authorized party in search of Antiquities.  We were led astray as to the best transportation means and that has caused us and the good Shun Yu much trouble.

“Seeking to avoid any more such problems, I put the whole of our trust in your knowledge and skills to get us past this canal.”

He discreetly offered twelve golden cash.

The Lock Keeper took his money and returned the bow of one highly placed as he replied, “I have heard already of these matters.  That you do admit fault is to your credit.

“Wishing to prevent any further disaster, we shall move your trucks by the barge as soon as we may.  The grain transport Gula Nu is being unloaded and that work must go first.  As soon as it is done, my crew will see to the safe passage of your trucks.”

Robber, remembering to bow again, said, “I shall await your workers at the barge road junction.  I hope that it will not be too much longer.”

He was told, “An hour, perhaps an hour and a half.  Please wait as you have said.”  The Lock Keeper turned to the next pony and resumed his business.

Tyranny and Overthrow did not greet his news well.  Tyranny demanded, “Why did you not seek immediate passage?”

Robber said dryly, “Because I could see out the window into the canal lock.”

“So?”

They have two more grain barges sitting in the lock waiting their turn to be unloaded.  We could have been put last, especially after Overthrow’s bungle at the last lock.

“As it stands, the Lock Keeper wants us gone as swiftly as possible.  For them, this is it.”

Overthrow, disliking the reminder that the river disaster was his fault, snapped, “We can take the trucks down to the loading area, at least!”

Imperturbably, Robber said, “Only if you want to have them order us back here.  We are wanted HERE to be visible from the office windows.  The Lock Keeper does not trust us.”

They all settled back and began to play cards to pass the time.  A knock at the cab door got their attention.  An elderly pony led them down to the loading area and saw to the loading of their first truck onto the barge.

Overthrow kept his mouth shut. It took time, but all five trucks passed the end of the canal safely. The barge was removed back to the downstream dock.

The truck engines were just beginning to roar to life again when there was the scream of a steam whistle.  Up at the top of the embankment a huge 4-8-4 locomotive was pulling a string of rail cars slowly across the exit road.  It stopped with three cars blocking the road.  There was the loud clatter of the huge couplings being freed from the engine.

The dark blue engineer with his orange mane waived cheerfully at them as he proceeded up the siding, switched to the mainline and backed his engine up to pull more cars up from the warehouse.

Tyranny cursed and drove his truck right up to the rail crossing.  Robber put a hoof across Overthrow and said, “DON’T follow him.  That puts us all onto a steep slope.  After being in the river like they were, I  don’t trust the brakes to hold.”

The big locomotive pulled the new cars up past the siding switch.  The switch threw and the cars were backed to the siding to latch onto the cars already parked there.

Robber and Overthrow watched in horror as the coupling failed to catch and the cars buckled outward, off the track!  One derailed car broke loose of the wreck entirely and burst down on top of Tyranny’s vehicle!  The smashed and tangled wreckage tumbled down almost to the river.

Robber and Overthrow raced to the wreckage and found that the truck’s cab was only slightly damaged.  They had to smash out an amazingly still intact windshield to get to Tryanny.  At first he was dazed but quickly regained his senses.  He was able to release his safety harness and, with help, crawl out of the mangled remains of the truck.

They were attempting to see if any of the truck’s load could be saved when, with a groan of tortured metal, the whole mass, truck and rail car together, slid, caught on something for a moment and splashed into the river.  Only part of the rail car showed above water.

Robber simply pointed to the submerged truck and observed, “If we had followed you, that would be all of us drowning right now.”

It was only moments before the ponies of the lock work crew were on the scene.  Almost immediately after, the Lock Keeper himself showed up to inspect the disaster in person.

To Robber’s surprise, he was obviously enraged but was being seriously courteous to them.  He bowed to Robber as an equal and asked, “We most urgently wish to know all that you can tell us of this happening.  I must say that in this, you are not at fault and my report shall say so clearly.”

Robber, too shaken to remember his bowing, told the Lock Keeper all that he could remember.

“You are forgiven your lapse of bowing, Mister Robber.  Did you see this engine driver?  We want most urgently to lay hooves on him.  He appears to have vanished.”

Bowing, now that he was reminded, Robber said, “The distance was too great for any clear view but he had a dark blue coat and orange mane that I did see.”

The Lock Keeper glanced up sharply and inquired, “The same as the barge tender that you reported to Shun Yu?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. Is it a common pattern here?”

“No, it is not.  It is not only rare, we count it as connected to all manner of bad luck.” The Lock Keeper gestured up at the train wreck and out to the barely visible wreckage in river.  “Can you guess why?”

~~ ~~ ~~

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[brainsdivided]

Shattered Hearts and Broken Dreams - Chapter 4

13 September 2293

The Colorado river flowing between the carved cliffs with Hoover Dam holding back Lake Mead was a sight to behold. The final frontier of Legion territory.

Despite Joshua’s unfortunate history with the Mojave region, he was thankful to be back. Ezekiel’s condition had quickly collapsed within the days it took to reach the Mojave.  No longer able to walk much anymore, the boy had to be carried most of the day. To help free his arms, Joshua made a makeshift harness that strapped the boy to his person. On his back, the boy suffered quietly from his illness.

Having approached a ferryman on the river, he handed him a few coins before they got to move across in the dead of night. As the raft slowly moved across the river, Joshua softly whispered to Ezekiel, "It isn't far from here anymore, son." Genuine concern about the boy's deteriorating health was visible in his voice. He reached behind him and clasped Ezekiel’s blistering hand in his own.

"It hurts so badly." He whispered, his energy so far gone that he could barely muster out a cry. Blood stained his clothes and his skin was discolored in patches of red and his skin seemed to radiate heat from the fever that was brewing.

Joshua nodded and turned his head to the side to look at Ezekiel, "I know, son. I will do whatever I can to help save you. The clinic is less than a day from here and surely they will be able to help you, God willing." Despite the bandages covering it, Ezekiel could tell that the face was one of desperation.

Weak and exhausted, Ezekiel’s speech began to slur, “Those stories… the ones from your book and your teachings… God led me to you, right? That makes you my blessing. Remember when I said that uh...." He thought out, trying to string together his words so that they didn't come out botched, "You bein' my blessing and helping me, you'll have your answer? Maybe you'll get something out of this, as God intended, right?"

"I already got all I need out of this, Ezekiel. The only thing that matters from here on out is that you get to live to see another day." Joshua acknowledged that Ezekiel had become more willing to listen to Joshua’s teachings. Though he tended to mix up information and wasn’t entirely able to retain some lessons, he knew that the fear the boy felt was valid. The lessons were a way the pair could feel a little more comfortable should the boy not survive the trip. 

Ezekiel smiled weakly and sighed, resting his head on Joshua’s shoulder. “I’m not ready to die.”

"You won't die, don't forget about that. As long as you have hope and the Lord on your side you will survive.”

The boy’s optimism was dwindling, and he couldn't think of much else to say. He could only think of the things he used to do when he lived in Goodsprings. He merely mumbled out in his feverish state, "You're the greatest godfather an orphan could have."

Joshua gave the boy a pat on the head and leaned the side of his head against Ezekiel’s. Some strands of Ezekiel’s hair had begun to dull and cling to Joshua’s hand.

The balding and blistering scalp was gently groomed by Joshua, who did his best to comfort and soothe the child until they arrived at the other end of the river.

When the raft reached the other side of the river, the older man exited the raft and continued to walk up the banks and into the Mojave.

Ezekiel hesitantly picked up his head and stretched his arms. He gazed at the distant neon lights of New Vegas brandishing themselves against the night sky. He knew he was so close to sanctuary but it felt so far, as death lingered around him.

Coughing and sputtering could be heard from the boy, nothing unusual. Ezekiel's stomach pooled blood and he refused food and water now too sick to eat or drink. As he spit up blood, his body blistered from the terrible combination of radiation and whatever other diseases he might’ve picked up. Every now and then he'd pick up his head only enough to spit off to the side of Joshua. Even still, he’d occasionally make a mess of himself and Joshua’s vest.

Joshua knew there was very little he could do. Whenever Ezekiel fell ill, he’d do what he could to comfort him. Very soon, this would all be over... one way or another.

After wiping his mouth on his arm, Ezekiel’s voice grew raspy "I know it's obvious but man... I feel like I look like shit. And feel like it."

"Don't give up yet. The clinic is not too far. Just try to rest for now."

"Josh, the day I give up is when you give up on me. You're all I have left." His little voice croaked from behind.

"And I won't give up on you." Joshua looked straight ahead and sighed. "We're coming by Camp Golf soon."

It was often difficult for Ezekiel to breath. They come out raspy and strained, "I feel so tired, but I can't fall asleep. What if I don't wake up?"

"You will wake up. Just sleep. The doctor will know what to do, son."

There was a bit of silence before he whispered, "Have you ever seen someone die right in front of you? How do you think they felt?"

"Of course I have. I could see what they felt in their eyes. Regret. Every time it was just that, regret. And some... some pleading to know the answer to the one question they always ask... why?" Joshua looked down and sighed

"Should I feel regret? Should I feel the need to know why? I don't feel those, but I feel grateful and scared. Also a lot of pain, but otherwise alright."

"Everyone I saw die was in battle, son... you won't die that way. I will make sure of it."

"I just don't know what to expect to feel if the implant doesn't work. When do I know when I should stay close to you even when the doctors tell me not to move?"

"It will work. I promise. And I will always stay close to you."

Ezekiel smiled until his head felt fuzzy. When part of his body drooped in Joshua’s arms and went limp, he raised his voice in alarm, "Joshua? My arm and leg… I feel numb.”

"You’re having some sort of seizure, like the doctor said. It will be okay. I promise."

The static within his limbs subsided within minutes, but it left a twisting pain in Ezekiel’s limbs. He groaned in pain.

"We will be there, soon. For now, I will be on the lookout for chems to help ease your suffering... I am sorry, son." Joshua hurried up.

The pain in Ezekiel’s body spread to his chest and head and he sobbed softly. His cries were weak and his lips quivered.

Joshua pushed on as much as it hurt him to allow this boy to suffer. Still, he tried talking. "You know, in my tribe, in my home, we used to say that of all people, those who face their challenges and work through them end up being the happiest and become better people. I believe in it and I know you will turn out well when you grow up."

"I'm gonna kick the Legion's ass for this.” 

"See? That's the kind of motivation I want to hear! You're not letting radiation kick your ass, you have shit to do!" 

Ezekiel’s hazy eyes widened with shock and he smiled. 

Not too far ahead a campfire flickered with figures walking around nearby. Joshua knelt down onto the ground and removed the harness, setting Ezekiel onto the cool pavement. As Joshua promised that he’ll be right back, he wrapped a blanket around the boy to keep him warm.

Ezekiel watched his guardian walk up to the figures with ease. He could hear Joshua speak, too quietly to understand what was being said though.

The talking turned into arguing. Arguing turned into shouting. Shouting turned into a man drawing his firearm. The man, the only one of the four properly visible, was wearing makeshift armor made from gecko pelts. Raiders. It had to be.

The boy's heart rate quickened and he fumbled with his own pistol as he cried out for his uncle. 

Joshua raised his hand to tell the boy to quiet down as the man slowly walked closer to him. "He the one who has the caps? In that case.. I don't need you anymore." The gun was raised and pressed to Joshua's head. In one swift motion Joshua moved aside, aimed the gun at one of the men's comrades and forced it to fire, knocking the man over and the gun from the other's hand, allowing Joshua to pull out his own and start blasting. In mere moments he turned the one that had just threatened him into paste. A moment later, the two behind that one were shot as well. Four bodies were on the floor with two shots each. When the deed was finished, Joshua made his way back to Ezekiel picked him up, carrying him to the campfire. 

"You were right, the NCR doesn't take care of their land. Are you hurt, though? I saw them put a gun to your head." Ezekiel checked over Joshua's bandages to be sure.

"I'm okay. I've killed men much more competent than these rookies. Let's see if they have any med-x to help you. They are often on chems."

While Joshua searched the bodies and duffel bags for medicine, Ezekiel clung onto his guardian. "I have to worry about you."

"No, you really don't. I just-" Joshua froze in place, pulled out his pistol and shot behind him. One of the bodies' heads splattered open. "One was still alive."

Ezekiel stared in awe. "You really don't leave any survivors. I thought I had seen something. I could've shot it" he pouted. He drew out his own gun, determined to fire again at an enemy before Joshua does.

"Put the gun away. You can't shoot in this condition."

"But I have to protect you too. You've done so much for me"

"I can take care of myself, son."

"No one should worry about their own survival when you have someone else and yourself to care for. I have to care for you too." He looked at him with determination in his eyes as he holstered his gun and rested his chin on the vest.

Joshua gave his head a gentle rub for a few minutes, then he continued looking for items to use. Shuffling through a bag resulting in some much needed success as a couple med-x syringes fell out onto the ground. “Alright… The pain will be gone for a while."

Ezekiel perked his head up. With the adrenaline from the encounter wearing off, the burning pain in his body began to flare. He braced himself for the needle.

Joshua set the boy down on the ground between his legs and prepped Ezekiel’s arm. With one quick plunge, the needle was pushed into his frail arm, releasing the strong pain killer.

He sighed in relief as the pain melted away and he glanced over at Joshua and gestured to the city. "Bet you never thought you had to feel like the city of sin would be our holy grail, huh?"

"Oh shut it, you." Ezekiel could hear Joshua laugh a little.

Ezekiel smiled and gave a lighthearted laugh as he tried to stand on his own. Using his guardian as support, his knees were wobbly and his stance was poor. "Oh, you liked that joke?”

Joshua smiled and picked Ezekiel up, holding him close to his chest. The change would give the older man’s back a break and it gave the sick boy a greater sense of comfort, provided they didn’t run into any more danger. 

Resting his head against Joshua’s neck, Ezekiel inquired softly, "Will they ask if you're a ghoul, too?"

"Of course they will. And I'll tell them what they want to hear. The NCR would kill me if they knew who I am, and who I was. Caesar's Legion would do the same."

"Maybe they wouldn't kill you if they knew you were playing caregiver to the Courier's kid."

"They don't care about the Courier. He was merely a tool for them to get where they need to get. This world... it is not as nice as you may think, boy."

Ezekiel looked at him with confusion. Such a naive child thought the world of his father and thought that the Mojave loved his father for all of his deeds. "But... What did he tell you about himself? About the things he did?”

"Oh, he did those things. But you need to understand one thing: here in the wasteland and out there in Shady Sands, none of it matters. They are just out to get what they want and they will walk over corpses for it. They are the other side of the coin of civilization, the corruption of man personified. It matters not what you do, they will take what they need and leave you to the crows."

"Maybe some people would care though..." Ezekiel looked sorrowful at the thought of his father's work being taken advantage of and taken for granted.

"There are good people, yes, but you still cannot trust them. Behind a facade of gold the devil may hide. It takes a long time to see the true nature of a man, the soul reveals itself only when you are dying or when you are free to kill others."

Ezekiel contemplated the cryptic words and tried his best to make sense of them in his own mind. He nodded as though he fully understood but Joshua knew that he was too young to truly understand. 

Joshua held the boy close to him, his determination to repay the courier who helped him long ago drove him to walk through the night. Ezekiel drifted off to sleep in his arms and Joshua silently prayed that they wouldn’t run into any more trouble. For he didn’t know how much longer the young boy could hold onto life. Every day it seemed like Ezekiel was getting worse. Every day as Joshua watched Ezekiel grow weaker and lose more of what made him human hurt him. Never before had Joshua experienced being so close to a child in a way that made him feel like he had been missing out on something his whole life. He tried to shoo the feeling away, knowing this is no time to become attached. If Ezekiel dies, he thought to himself, he believed that he would see the world a bit differently. Tonight, Joshua pushed through the soreness in his body to continue without rest if it meant that Ezekiel had a higher chance of living. Tonight, he promised he’d continue to repay his debt.

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 2.2

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time, as chapter 2 began, Kaito took Kaede’s wish to heart and started constantly looking out for Shuichi, Maki found her lab and became consumed by the fear of people learning her secret, Shuichi tempted fate by noticing way too many details about the pool, the casino’s slot machines joined in with the narrative’s attempt to imply Kaito is expendable, and Kaito encouraged everyone to keep being brave and proactive, except for Kokichi who is still being a coward.

And now, time for more Kaito. I mean free time.

Shuichi:  “There’s still some time left today… I need to think of a plan!”

It’s a little odd how Shuichi often thinks something along these lines before starting a free time segment, and then just goes on to hang out with someone and talk about nothing that has anything to do with plans or escaping.

And by “someone”, I mean Kaito, of course! They’re not officially friends quite yet, but Kaito’s still been good enough to Shuichi at the end of last chapter and the beginning of this one that it seems reasonable that Shuichi would feel most inclined to hang out with him already.

But first, a little bit of asking around the others. Most people’s minds are on the Ultimate Hunt, trying in vain to figure out what the hell it is.

At some point in between when he left the dorms in the morning and now, someone changed the icon over Shuichi’s door to one of him without his hat on. Monokuma did, I guess?

You can also go around and examine things that have to do with the previous case for some bonus inner monologue, by which I mean you can take Shuichi on a huge guilt trip about not having noticed and stopped Kaede.

Examining the moving bookcase in the library…

Shuichi:  (Rantaro noticed the trick to this bookcase. Just like me… The only difference between me and him… is that I had someone I could trust. I wonder what I would’ve done… if Kaede hadn’t been there…)

This is a nice little observation that’s also brought up during chapter 6’s trial! I imagine that if he hadn’t had Kaede, Shuichi would have just done nothing, not having the confidence to follow his deductions through.

Miu:  “What the fuck is up with that Flashback Light? You can’t just mess with someone’s memory using light…”

Except apparently, in this universe, you totally can. Clearly they didn’t give the Ultimate Inventor memories of that particular technology in case she figured out what was really up with the Flashback Lights.

Gonta:  “Not even trying to survive… That even possible? Cuz everybody got someone who would feel sad to lose you…”

Gonta is one of the handful of people who are thinking about what Ryoma said instead. He’s so pure, not even being able to consider the idea of not having anyone who cares about you. Also it’s very him to be thinking of the idea of a reason to live not as having someone who makes you happy, but as the fact that your existence makes someone else happy and so you don’t want to make them sad by dying on them.

Kaito:  “You seen Kokichi anywhere? I saw him a while ago and tried to tell him something, but he got away again.”

Meanwhile, Kaito is still focused on Kokichi’s words about not co-operating and trying to make an attempt to get through to him.

(Doesn’t your Monopad’s map magically tell you where everyone is at any given moment, Kaito? No? Does Shuichi just have a special Protagonist Perk Monopad?)

Shuichi:  (Kaito and I spent some time looking for Kokichi.)

…and apparently totally failed at finding him. But that’s par for the course with Kokichi’s hide-and-seek skills.

I gave him the Hand Grips, which improve strength for punching.

Kaito:  “Are you giving this to me? Haha, you know me so well!”

…I mean, you did punch Shuichi last night and threaten to punch Kokichi this morning, so. Not that hard to figure out.

Kaito:  “You got something to tell me? Don’t hold back! I’ll listen!”

It is so very Kaito to assume that Shuichi would come to him for the purpose of unloading his problems onto him and immediately try and make the conversation about that. It’s a little bit forward of him to think Shuichi would be ready to do that already. All Shuichi actually wants to talk about for now is what it’s like to be an astronaut trainee.

Kaito:  “No problem! My training’s a piece of cake!”

Shuichi:  (Kaito was grinning at me, but then his expression turned serious.)

Kaito:  “Well, to be honest, it’s about as intense as intense can get.”

I like how Kaito starts out pretending that his training’s no big deal before admitting the truth. He knows and is willing to admit that it’s really very challenging, but that’s not the first impression he wants to put in people’s heads. It seems he’d rather people have this image of him as the heroic Luminary of the Stars who can do everything effortlessly.

Kaito:  “Alright! Pop quiz! What’s the most important thing an astronaut needs?”

I am very amused by the fact that one of the possible answers to this question is “a healthy body”. Yeah, to be an astronaut, you need to, I don’t know… not be dying from a mysterious illness? That sounds like a good start.

Kaito:  “And that thing is… Communication! The most important thing for an astronaut is teamwork. The universe is a frontier that the people of the world challenge together. And since we need to work together, communication is vital!”

This explains so much about Kaito’s character. He was written to be someone who is such a perfect candidate to become an astronaut that the space program accepted him even though he’s too young and cheated his way into the exam. So he needed to be given the exact qualities that an astronaut needs – not necessarily in terms of specific skills, which he can learn during his training, but in terms of the kind of person he is and the potential he has even before being accepted. Of course he would have to be someone who is really good at communication and co-operating with others and values those things so much!

Kaito:  “They check that in the recruitment exam.”

Exactly – all the other more specific skills you need, they can teach you during training. But communication is so important that you have to be talented at it already to even get in at all.

Kaito:  “Of course, I can speak Japanese, English and Russian all fluently!”

The localisation worded this line in such a way to not have him mention which of those three languages he’s speaking right now, because it would sound awkward for him to mention that he’s speaking Japanese… in English.

Shuichi:  (He can speak multiple languages, is well-learned, and has what it takes to be an astronaut. …I’ve been underestimating him. Kaito is incredible!)

Damn right he is! And it’s interesting that, despite there being a number of actual concrete reasons why Kaito is a pretty awesome person that he’s just been chatting to Shuichi about, Kaito never mentions those things when he’s talking himself up as the Luminary of the Stars and trying to get people to be inspired by him. There’s no sense during this conversation that Kaito is actively trying to get Shuichi to look up to him by telling him about all the skills he’s learning in his training; he’s just stating the facts like it’s no big deal.

Kaito:  “I wanna get back to training! The universe is getting away from me! The world needs this Luminary of the Stars to shine even brighter!”

…Well, until this line, at least. Even so, this seems separate – he’s not saying that he’s the Luminary of the Stars because of all of those things. This is something he wants people to think that he just is.

This is probably because Kaito believes he’s more inspirational to others this way than if he frequently talked about all the proper reasons why he’s talented. If he talked about those all the time, then other people might get discouraged, thinking they’ll never be able to do all the things Kaito can do and so they’ll never be able to be as talented as him. But if Kaito just presents himself as this general idealised hero who is The Coolest Ever for no specifically-defined reason, then that’s a much easier thing for any given person to want to aspire to be a little bit more like in a way that suits them. Most people aren’t going to be able to become an astronaut like Kaito is, but everyone can become a bit more of a hero in their own way.

(Kaito is so good.)

Shuichi:  (…I don’t have the heart to tell him I’m not so sure about that.)

Really, Shuichi? Because I think that Kaito still needs to be a bit more luminary in order to fully inspire you and give you the strength to carry on Kaede’s wish and end the killing game. He’s made a start, but he hasn’t done enough yet.

(Did you know? The word “luminary” means “someone who inspires or influences others”, but also “an object that emits light, especially the sun or moon”. Kaito’s self-proclaimed title is perfect for him.)

Kokichi:  “Everyone’s got it all wrong! I only act like a bad guy so you guys don’t get too soft, y’know?”

See, this is at least what Kokichi likes to think he’s doing – deliberately playing devil’s advocate to foster more open suspicion because he’s convinced that’s better than people pretending to trust each other. In reality, all he’s doing is decreasing the chances of everyone working together and managing to escape and survive and not have more killings happen – in other words, what he’s really doing is actually being a bad guy, if still less of one than Monokuma.

Tsumugi:  “I just remembered… The phone game I was playing is having a collab with an anime I like… and I’m missing it…”

Well I guess those are just the kinds of sacrifices you make when you decide to take a few weeks out to force a bunch of people to kill each other, aren’t they.

Meanwhile, Kaito is now hanging out just outside the door to Ryoma’s lab.

Kaito:  “Damn it, Ryoma… The famous Ultimate Tennis Pro…”

Seems like he’s still hung up on Ryoma’s behaviour, too.

Kaito:  “O-Oh, it’s nothing… Instead of talking about that, it’s a better use of our time to think of ways to escape.”

But he doesn’t like being hung up on it, and he certainly doesn’t want to show it in front of Shuichi. There’s no point in moping around when you could be doing something to make a difference!

Kaito:  “Alright! Today I’m gonna tell you about me!”

That’s what you ended up doing last time too, Kaito, but sure. At least this time he seems to have realised that Shuichi came to hang out for the sake of learning more about Kaito and not for the sake of talking about his own issues.

Kaito:  “You wanna know, right? Why I feel so strongly about the universe!?”

Shuichi:  “Ah…”

Kaito:  “Good! I thought so!”

Shuichi:  (I haven’t even answered yet!)

This might not have been quite what Shuichi wanted to hear about, though. I love how Shuichi’s so awkward and passive that he just ends up getting utterly swept along by Kaito’s ridiculousness.

It’s also interesting to note that when it’s Kaito making the choice of what things about himself he wants to tell Shuichi about, and not Shuichi asking to hear about a certain thing, Kaito doesn’t choose to talk more about his astronaut training and actual genuine talents. Instead we get… this ridiculousness that’s about to happen here.

Shuichi:  (So not only are you going to force me to listen, it’s a long story…)

I also think this is a pretty good indication that this event should be happening this early in the story. Shuichi seems mildly annoyed here, whereas I feel like if this happened after the training session in which they properly become friends, Shuichi wouldn’t mind so much at being subjected to this.

Kaito:  “When I was a kid, I’d go to my gramps’ place to play sometimes…”

Keep this in mind for a bit later when I’ll talk about Kaito’s grandparents. The fact that he calls it his “gramps’ place” and says he’d only go there “sometimes” implies that when he was younger (I’m picturing him as being about six or seven in this story), he wasn’t permanently living with them.

Kaito:  “After I found that map, I made a decision and set out… I went to the nearest pawn shop and sold the map for some cash!”

Shuichi:  “You sold it!?”

Kaito:  “There’s no way I, Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars, would ever follow a map to adventure! A life free from maps, finding my own adventures… that’s the life for me!”

Even though this is all just a silly game he played when he was a kid, that’s still such a Kaito thing to do. Of course he’d want to carve his own path and be unique, rather than do the same things everyone else would do!

Kaito:  “But the sea still called me, so I bought a boat and went on a voyage.”

Can we talk about tiny Kaito pretending to be a pirate and how adorable that must have been. (Apart from the fact that it never actually happened, shush.)

Kaito:  “Soon after becoming a captain, I met my destined rival!”

Shuichi:  “Your rival?”

Kaito:  “Yeah! The boss of the Great Pirates!”

I wonder if this “rival” he talks about was an actual friend of his who joined in his games or if he was also imaginary.

Shuichi:  (…So what happened to outer space!?)

Shuichi is so bewildered I love it.

Kaito:  “We clashed on the field of battle many times, to the point we became friends…”

I also like that Kaito clearly adheres to the idea that competition fosters friendship, whether this rival was real or not.

Kaito:  “But during our final battle to see who would conquer the seas… I could’ve won, but I’m not the kind of guy to be satisfied with just the sea. No! I’m not the kind of guy to be satisfied with just the world!”

Of course you’re not, Kaito. That’s why space.

Kaito:  “That’s why I couldn’t finish him off with a final punch… He got mad at me for holding back. We haven’t met since that day…”

…If this rival was a real person and not just someone he made up, this is apparently Kaito talking about the time he fell out with his at-the-time best friend. Which means it probably happened absolutely nothing like how he describes it here and he doesn’t like to think about how it really went. Getting mad at your friend for holding back sounds like the kind of thing Kaito would do – holding back your full strength isn’t being true to yourself! – but not something many other people would, especially not when they’re like six years old or so. So that part’s definitely something Kaito made up just because it made sense to him.

Shuichi:  (I’ll just keep listening…)

Kaito:  “Hey… it’s written all over your face…”

Shuichi:  “Huh? What is?”

Kaito:  “You’re not taking this seriously, are you!? If it’s boring, just say so! Pretending to listen is super unmanly!”

As much as I feel a little bad choosing the option that makes Shuichi show obvious disinterest, I had to, because here’s another example of Kaito talking about manliness. And again, it’s about being true to yourself – be open and honest about how you really feel about things, rather than trying to pretend you feel differently!

Shuichi:  “Ah, no! I’m not bored or anything! It’s really interesting, Kaito!”

…To be fair, I don’t think Shuichi actually is bored, precisely – just exasperated at how obviously made up it is. At the very least, Kaito’s story isn’t boring to listen to.

Regardless, Kaito decides to leave it there for now and continue the story next time.

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate part of the summary of this event on the report card, which was apparently written by Shuichi based on the use of first person:

“It went on and on. I have no idea where he is going with this.”

I’m not sure he does either, Shuichi. Kaito is such a ridiculous dork and I love him.

Shuichi:  “I wonder… how it was for Kaede…” (I’m sure she had plenty of reasons to live… That’s the kind of girl she was. But I—)

Shuichi is still being plagued by awful intrusive thoughts about Kaede’s death. To be fair, Kaede’s main reason to live seemed to be to make other people smile, which also ended up being the reason she died.

Monokuma:  “Oh, but Spike Chunsoft games are fine. They’re specially made to improve your focus.”

Do Spike Chunsoft even make games any more, Monokuma? I thought Danganronpa had been a live-action “real fiction” thing for a while now. Then again, there was that Ultra Despair Girls 2 poster, so maybe the games they still make now are just spinoffs.

Monokuma:  “Back by popular demand, it’s time for the motive video!”

Hah, popular demand indeed. They probably did an audience vote on which of the classic motives they wanted to see again.

This photo of Kaito with his grandparents is cute. They’re so proud of their grandson! …It’s a shame it’s completely faked and the “grandparents” are presumably just actors who don’t actually give a damn about him.

But from Kaito’s point of view, they’re real, so let’s talk about the fact that his grandparents are the most important people in his life. That one line I brought up from his most recent FTE implied that at least when he was a kid, he didn’t live with his grandparents. So it’s not just a case of his parents having died when he was too young to remember and he was always raised by his grandparents. Something happened with his parents at some point while he was growing up.

There seem to be two trains of thought among the people who like Kaito enough to have thought about this: that Kaito’s parents died, or that Kaito’s parents are assholes. I’m personally on the “Kaito’s parents died” train. That part back at the end of trial 1 where he gives advice to Shuichi on how to deal with Kaede’s death, where I mentioned that it sounded kind of like he was speaking from personal experience? Yeah, this would be that experience. It ties these two dangling unexplained subtleties together nicely. Kaito probably lost his parents while he was growing up – not while he was so young that it would have left a permanent, noticeable scar on his psyche, and also not so recently that the wound is still raw, but long enough ago for him to have developed a healthy, positive way of dealing with grief that he’s then able to try to pass on to Shuichi after that trial. It might even have influenced his more general optimism and go-getter attitude, since he’d know first-hand that life is short and so you should live it to the fullest and not waste a second of it.

I’ve seen quite a few people on the “Kaito’s parents are assholes” train instead, and their reason for it is usually something to do with the idea that all of Kaito talking himself up to be such an awesome person is actually because he’s desperate for the validation that he never got from his own parents. But that just doesn’t quite fit for me. Don’t get me wrong; I love characters like that whose outward confidence is just a façade born of a desperate need for acknowledgement. But that’s the thing: there are so many characters like that from other works of fiction that I like and enjoy and have spent a lot of time thinking about that I feel I’m pretty good at spotting that nuance, that subtle need for validation beneath the surface – and I don’t get that sense from Kaito right now at all. Perhaps part of the reason I feel this way is because of what I mentioned earlier in his first FTE, about how he never brings up any of the concrete reasons why he’s talented, which would be the first thing you’d think he’d do if he was secretly desperate for everyone’s validation. It really feels to me like Kaito’s confidence is completely genuine.

Not that I don’t also enjoy reading people’s headcanons about how Kaito’s parents being assholes would affect him, mind you, but I just don’t personally think it quite matches up with canon.

I also really like how, even though the deal with his parents is never explicitly revealed because of course Kaito wouldn’t want to talk about it regardless of which version is true, this is still a thing anyway. It wouldn’t be hard to remove it entirely – the writers could easily have gone with the most obvious option of having Kaito’s most important people be his parents instead, meaning nothing bad happened with them. But they did it this way, even though we never learn for sure what’s up with his parents – because the out-universe writers had an idea in their heads for what the deal was, and they didn’t need to explicitly explain it for it to still be a thing that’s true about Kaito that would have subtly influenced the way he acts, even if it’s only a little. Subtle character writing is great. Writers knowing more about their characters than they ever outwardly mention in the story is great. Kaito is such a great character.

Monokuma:  “Thanks to his exceptional talent, this young man is already an astronaut trainee! Wow!”

I love the audible air quotes as Monokuma says “exceptional talent”. (Screw you, Monokuma, we just established how genuinely talented Kaito is in one of his FTEs yesterday.)

Kaito’s Grandfather:  “No matter what happens, you must live. You must *never* give up.”

Kaito’s Grandmother:  “Please… live on. For our sakes, too.”

Monokuma:  “Their only wish… is for Kaito to live.”

This particular wish is very interesting. Consider the fact that Kaito’s grandparents aren’t real and don’t have any actual feelings about him and are just saying whatever the in-universe writers think would be most likely to make Kaito murder someone to escape. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be a very good motive for that! If they wished for him to fulfil his dream of going to space, or even just to see them again, that’d be something that would actually require him to escape in order to do. But just living? The safest way to guarantee that in this killing game is to keep your head down and not murder anyone, while trying to avoid becoming a victim too. Sure, you’d be stuck inside this academy for the foreseeable future, but at least you’d be alive. Murdering someone to escape is significantly less likely to achieve your survival because of the incredibly high chance you’ll be found out and executed.

Except for the fact that Kaito is the one person among these students who has a deadly virus. If he just keeps his head down and stays here and doesn’t try to escape, he will not live. The only way for Kaito to live is if he can get medical treatment before his illness kills him, and to do that, he needs to escape and get to a hospital, in theory sacrificing everyone else here for the sake of his own survival. This message from his grandparents is trying to make Kaito feel more inclined to do that, once he realises what’s wrong with him. (Not that it’d ever work. Kaito selfishly putting his own survival before everyone else’s, even if it’s the only way to fulfil his grandparents’ wish? Ha ha, nope, not ever.)

…On the other hand, this could instead be a reference to the backstory with the Gofer Project and how Kaito’s grandparents would presumably know that everyone left on Earth is super doomed but at least Kaito will get to live. Apparently they were unaware that their grandson also has the virus and is equally doomed. That said, if this were the case, then you’d think everyone else’s motive video would also have the subject’s loved ones saying something similar, wishing for them to live on since they’re the only ones who can. The only other motive video we see that is an actual motive (aka not Ryoma’s) and isn’t explicitly connected to the end-of-the-world plot (aka not Kirumi’s) is Kokichi’s, and there’s nothing in there about his goons wishing for him to live on and spread mischief across the new world or anything like that. So it still seems more likely to me that the motive videos’ creators were thinking primarily about whatever would make someone most likely to commit murder, and only tying it into the overarching backstory if it happened to fit.

---

[Next post]

[wistful-wizard]

I’m Proud of This One

Sinclair’s life was spun like a spider’s web. Fragile gossamer that could be so easily torn apart, whether through accident or ill intent. Some of the paths he took didn’t make much sense at the time, and there was seldom any part of his life after 12 that he was sure of himself. It was only now, when the final touches of his web were being put into place that everything seemed to make sense. He wondered if it was some senseless sentiment he was trying to comfort himself with as his life was coming to a close, or if he really was finally sure about himself, and who he was and all he had been. It was doubts like these that plagued him. When the first nibble of the winter’s cold descended on him, he felt death stalking its shadow. He figured he wasn’t going to survive this one, though he had expected so of the last.

Memories would sink into him from time to time like the jaws of a wild animal, biting down and tearing deep, spilling red thoughts of bitterness from the wound. It was hard. As he was going into his forties, he figured that he was still too sensitive for his age. Most of the adults he knew had ‘grown up’ by then it seemed. They were secure about themselves, and they didn’t regret things quite as much. Though, maybe they were faking it. He was sure that some kids must’ve thought of him as devoid of these teenage idiosyncrasies. All of his philosophical musings about life had left him living alone and widowed, his children scattered like seeds in the wind, never to come back to the tree that made them. That was alright, he supposed. He had wanted that kind of freedom as a child after all. Though, children were a joy he never quite expected before he had them. It was a new experience, the first fresh splash of paint on his then dulled life. And the coat had lasted a while too, but then they grew up, and he felt like everything he had put into the past 25 years had suddenly left. It was sad, and maybe he was a bitter old man, but he wished that they would remember him more often. They would get old too, and though he hated wishing badly on his own children he knew that they’d come to feel how he felt, but then it’d be too late to accept their apology.

He’d forgive them anyway he thought. That was a lot of what he was. A forgiving person. Many of the tiny threads that made his life were tinted black with that act of forgiveness. His second girlfriend cheating on him for example, was something he forgave regretfully. She was drunk he had thought then, and he kept up being in a relationship with her, convincing himself every night that she was the one, until they broke up 3 months later, when she had cheated on him again. It took him months to get over it, and even more time to realize what a fool he had been. That trend would follow a lot of his life. Nearly half of his spider’s web was tinged with black. He used to be amazed that he hadn’t become a bitter person by it but then he realized that he had. A lot of revelations hit him throughout his life, most of them he would’ve gotten a lot quicker if someone pointed it out, or so he thought anyway.

He sighed deeply. His room was musky, so he opened a window and let the cold in, or the heat out rather, which was another thing he learned in his life. Most of his childhood was scarce now. Sometime around his twenties he started to really romanticize that part of his life. He came to miss the sweet innocence of it, the last time everything felt okay. Now he thought that in those days he was just being dramatic and that things have, and always will be, both okay and not-okay. That’s just how it was, and he accepted that. It was only when he felt like dying that this kind of bitterness would take him. He wasn’t suicidal, he just really wanted to get it over with. Onto the next frontier, if there was one. Nonexistence was something he never thought about now. In his youth, he would’ve called himself an atheist, and put on a brave face, saying that it was oblivion after you die. Now the proximity of the void he once taunted frightened him so fiercely he’d find himself crying whenever the fear took him. He had too much pride to go back on his word, so he settled on agnostic.

He wondered a lot about the life he lived, and whether he’d be sent to hell or not. Again, when he was younger considering something like that was silly, but with his age he had to consider it as a serious possibility. Hell was still preferred to oblivion. He was so tired now too. He felt sometimes as if he would just stop moving on the mornings, if he’d just remain in bed and lie there, that he would die. And he wanted so badly to some mornings. But his spirit would always pull him to get up.

‘Not yet,’ he’d think, and he’d wonder why he thought that. He knew why, but for Sinclair it was just too hard to admit. He died a long time ago, his will at least. The dreams he had, those little things that the spider called Fate didn’t deem worthy to fit into his web. He missed them, and still wanted them. When he had kids he thought that he’d give it to them, but he couldn’t burden them like that. His dreams would have to die along with him. It was funny to think that there was a time in his life when he wanted to change the world. He supposed that he did, he added to the population, changed a couple statistics, but that was a shallow comfort. Life was not what he wanted it to be. It would seem that in the end, all he would end up having was his spirit.

A lot of times throughout his life, he would ask himself, ‘what am I willing to sacrifice?’ The answer would mostly turn out blank, though some days when he felt particularly motivated he would think things like happiness, or free time, or family. These were fruitless ambitions though, and led him nowhere. His life came and went. In the brief flash he was given as it buzzed pass him, he saw the prospects of a happier home, a more fulfilling career, and even grander things, like becoming so influential that he came to inspire people to be the best that they could be, and in so doing, change the world for the better. He got this glimpse, and before he could reach out it was gone. Life had left him with nothing but his hopes and dreams, all things that were meaningful once, but were shallow now.

So ends our story of Sinclair. Alone in his house he would brew his despair, and eventually pass away. His dreams however, do not die with him. It was a mistake he made, maybe from his own ego, to think that he was alone in his ambition. His dream was one shared by many others, and among those people there are the ones who know they aren’t alone, and that they have to do it, if not for themselves then for the ones that tried and failed. This is a group effort, and if so much as one person succeeds then it’ll all be worth it.

I could live with that.

———————————————————————

The wording of this is janky as hell, but I’m proud of it. It was 2am when I wrote it, and at that point I was mostly just letting thoughts flow.

[ruminativerabbi]

To Boldly Go

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched the video released by NASA last month of Perseverance         descending towards the surface of Mars and then gently landing on it. (Click here to watch. You won’t be sorry!) I don’t know much—or rather, anything—about the aerodynamics of space parachutes, but watching this spacecraft slow down from its initial descent speed of 1000 miles per hour and then gently plop down in the center of the thirty-mile-wide Jazero Crater is just riveting. The event itself was not unprecedented—an earlier visitor named Curiosity landed on the Martian surface in 2012, but it didn’t have any cameras aboard to record the landing. (It’s still there, by the way, completing today as I write its 3137th day on Mars.) Nor was Curiosity the first vehicle to set itself down on Mars—that would be the old Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe that landed on Mars in 1971 but only managed to convey data to earth for 14.5 seconds before conking out. And there have been other attempts as well, most notably probably the Mars Exploration Rovers of 2003 and 2004.

What intrigues me the most, I suppose, is that the point of sending Perseverance to Mars is not to collect soil samples or to chart the geography of the planet, but specifically to attempt to answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. It’s widely understood that Mars once flowed with water. So the question—way simpler to ask, apparently, than to answer—is whether we can find the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that could have flourished when Mars was wet. Perseverance, a rover the size of your average car, also has along for the ride a little helicopter named Ingenuity to fly overhead and attempt to see what would not be visible from the ground. I’m completely into it! But I have to stop thinking of Perseverance and Ingenuity as the Martian versions of Star Wars’ C-3PO and R2-D2. (That would be silly. Or would it be?)

Like many people my age, I suppose, I grew up dreaming about the planets and about the possibility of human beings actually visiting them. Nor was I alone among my classmates at P.S. 196 to dream in that direction: space adventurism was just part of who we were back then. (I was eight years old when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, nine when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet.) I remember both those events clearly, but more than that I remember the specific way that neither felt like an end unto itself, but far more meaningfully as one more step forward on the great journey that would eventually bring us to Mars and beyond.

It may have been a generational thing. My parents, for example, did not dream of Mars. For them, in fact, the whole space thing was more of a contest than a science project and the specific point was not to do any specific thing at all, only to do it before the Russians got there and did it first.

But for me and my pals in fifth grade the whole space thing had nothing to do with beating the Soviets and everything to do with conquering new frontiers. Nor was this something we intuited on our own: when that disembodied voice opened every new episode of Star Trek (our favorite TV show, and by far) by referencing space as “the final frontier,” we all understood it to be saying almost clearly that our brave astronauts were merely the latter-day descendants of the brave settlers who risked everything to move west in their Conestoga wagons and establish an American presence in the western part of North America back in the nineteenth century. (That the parallel was not at all that exact—in that the crew of the Enterprise was not seeking out that “new life” and those “new civilizations” so that they could push them off their own soil and settle there themselves—did not dawn on me back then. Or at least as far as I can remember, it didn’t.)

I was on my way into twelfth grade when Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and the sixteen-year-old me was still possessed of the same enthusiasm for our nation’s space program that the younger me felt so keenly. But I had evolved in other ways by then: I still dreamt of travel other planets, maybe eventually even to other solar systems, but an element of social justice had crept into my field of vision and part of the point of pursuing the exploration of space, my hip teenaged self thought, should be precisely to use each successive discovery as a way to combat the kind of parochialism and provincialism that allowed so many of our fellow earthlings—centuries after Copernicus—still to think of our home planet as the center of the universe.

By the 1970s, of course, no one would admit to actually thinking that. Everybody understood perfectly well that the planets were in orbit around the sun, that the solar system itself was part of a much larger galaxy that contained not some other stars, but about 400 billion of them. But although no normal person would have insisted that the sun and the stars travel around the earth, the world continued to behave as though that were the case, as though the earth were the center of all existence. The adolescent me saw in space exploration the ultimate way to combat that kind of self-serving provincialism…and, perhaps, in so doing to ween humanity away from the supposition that the universe exists to serve their needs.

By college, I had moved on in my space-fantasy-life to wonder more seriously about the search for extraterrestrial life and to wonder, given our endless interest in meeting the neighbors, if it could just possibly be the case that the neighbors were just as interested in meeting us as we were them. And if that were the case, then was it not just a matter of time before we actually would hear from them? And by “hear from them, “ I meant really hear from them, not via a momentary glimpse of a mysterious silver orb in the nighttime sky or an otherwise inexplicable blast of radio noise from somewhere out there in space—but in the specific way the residents of Hispaniola heard from Columbus on December 6, 1492, when he landed on their island—where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are today—and simultaneously changed the history of that island, this hemisphere, and the world utterly and forever in as long as it took him to step off his ship onto dry land. And yet those neighbors have never come a-calling. Or have they?

A few years ago, I wrote to you all about Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped reddish rock about 2600 feet long that scientists noticed one day hurtling through the cosmos. (To read what I had to say then, click here.) I left the matter unresolved, but had it drawn back to my attention just recently with the publication of Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January of this year. Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard and the chairman of its Department of Astronomy, has studied all the data and concluded that the most likely explanation for the existence of Oumuamua in the first place is that it is a kind of light sail, a spaceship that gets its energy from sunlight or starlight and that was either launched by some alien civilization in our direction or else set out in the cosmos as kind of in-place space buoy (in which case it would be more correct to say that it was we who ran into it). The book was reviewed both worshipfully and harshly—some of the reviews were respectful, while others were filled with the same kind of sarcasm born of ill ease and disbelief that once greeted the theories of Copernicus or Galileo. I read the book and enjoyed it, finding the argumentation plausible and the conclusions, if not fully convincing, then at least intriguing and challenging.

The chances are excellent that we will never find out if Professor Loeb was right or wrong about Oumuamua. It—Oumuamua itself—is long gone into interstellar space; we’ll debate it for a while, then let it fade into the background among other unproven theories relating to the distant neighbors we feel certain must exist but have, at least as yet, been unable to find any clear trace of. But I continue to feel certain that the neighbors are out there…and that they day will come when they come to call and we on earth finally have no choice but to seize just how tiny a piece of God’s great universe our little planet actually does constitute. Will that happen anytime soon? There’s no way to know…but if Professor Loeb is right about Oumuamua, the doorbell could ring now any time. It’s clear that Perseverance is not going to find Mars filled with little green Martians eager and able to establish diplomatic (and every other kind of) relations with their counterparts on Earth. But each step we take towards exploring the cosmos makes it that much more likely that we will attract the attention of extraterrestrial space watchers gazing at the heavens and waiting for signs of life on a planet other than their own.

[justinjohn]

A New York State of Mind. 2.18.18

I’ve been out of NYC for about 3-4 months now. 

It’s been an insane two years. I feel like I’ve just woken from a coma, but in which I was awake and functioning but operating like one of those cockroaches that’s been taken over by a zombie wasp, maneuvering through the world but without free will. You know that feeling? “Automaton mode”? That was me for like the last several years– just sort of going through the motions, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over, wondering where the remote is, if the Handmaid’s Tail is on yet. 

It’s taken me months of questioning myself, my identity, my dreams, my life, and doing the ‘Okay, so I’m 33 now - I have, like, how many good years before I am too decrepit to fly?” questioning, which I guess is premature, unless like me, you’re convinced there’s a terminal illness brewing inside you at all times just waiting to emerge. (Thank you @WebMD.)

So as I sit here with a blanket on my lap on this reflective Sunday, staring at the broken tortilla chips littering the carpet that missed my mouth last night and empty glass of wine on the coffee table, I thinking about “what’s different now?” And I realized that the longer you live in New York, it changes. It morphs. Sometimes for the better, and in my case, sometimes not. 

When you’re in New York in your twenties, the passage of time doesn’t exist as a concept: you’re too focused on work, Tinder, trying to not throw up in the cab on the way home, doing ‘brunch’ as a novelty thing with sunglasses on the whole time and bitching about how slow people walk on sidewalks. It’s this hubris ‘freedom of youth’, a 6-year alcohol-slide of fun after college that spits you out at 30 when you wake up with your first 3-day hangover you didn’t know was possible and the realization that three of your friends moved away for jobs, pregnancy, and ‘other pursuits’.

Except at 30 in New York, you’re like, “What other pursuits?” Other pursuits don’t exist in the lexicon of a die-hard New Yorker, so you just think everyone else is a cop-out for leaving, like those people who go home at 11:30 PM at a really good party, and you keep going because on the island of Manhattan, everyone is dancing and there’s no bar time. 

Except then, like me, you wake up a few years later and you realize that you’re still at the party but in a stupor in the corner, and the girl you used to hook up with 10 years ago is now a lesbian and 40% of the party has departed. Once you climb in mid- to late- thirties in New York and look around, 90% of your friends are still single, some are starting to go insane, and you find $160,000 in New York gets you a 650-sq foot one bedroom, you’re sort of like, “Wait, where’s my brownstone and executive husband who is going to surprise me with a ticket to the opera?” And in my case, I sort of realized, I was the one deluding myself. As you get older in New York, the experience centers more around a good bagel on a Saturday morning, runs along the river, more adult-like meetings that don’t end in someone doing coke in a bathroom stall. Seeing your friends’ baby and then calling your friends to talk shit about her.  For me, it included a constant state of exhaustion due to always feeling like I had to be productive at every waking second of my life, low-buzzing anger against tourists and crowds in any context whatsoever, and an undying fear of cockroaches. I lived a self-righteously independent lifestyle that required the existence of no one else, and I saw that going nowhere good. It was a moment when I realized, “Does this just continue until I die?” 

Retail changed. Fashion changed. I started to like dogs again. My sister had a baby. I was tired of flying all over the country and sleeping on hotel pillows that smelled like someone else’s hair. I stopped going out after work 5x a week. And restaurants seemed all overpriced with mediocre food. And the rest of the country was getting all the same places. I was realizing more and more that what made NYC special in my twenties just didn’t have the same sparkle.

My friends were mostly gone. My life had become a smaller vortex in a way I didn’t expect: marked by dinners the same people, the same restaurants, and I started to go to places I used to frequent that became younger versions of themselves for the ‘new class’ of young Manhattanites. And yet I still had only a partial set of dishes, no oven in my apartment, and when it would rain, the water would drip through my bathroom ceiling onto my toilet. I started to run out of bars if I saw I was out past 2 PM, and living in 300 square feet was just starting to feel more like a cage but with pre-war accents. And those nights of just going to Broadway shows on my own that I imagined? I did it once and I felt like that 85-year old gay man who loves musicals so much he goes to ‘show tunes’ night at the bar on Mondays to sing Bernadette Peters and people are like, “Clem has been coming here since 2006.”  So, no. That ended.

The construct of New York itself, as an intimidating, incomprehensible frontier, had withered; it wasn’t a playground for fun like it used to be, but rather now a place of subsisting where I now had to transition from “NYC” to “adulthood”, to real life, in a way I never thought possible, which grew in volume by the day until I couldn’t drown it out anymore. The days of taking subway rides to challenging jobs with fun dinner plans and a possible reckless night ahead had been laid to rest. Now, I was in the game of back waxing, face masks, and 11 AM body attack classes on Sundays, wondering if I should finally try to make my relationship work.. A word not in my lexicon in my 20s.

I had come to a moment in my life where I had to question: do I cling to this ideal of what I imagine New York is forever, or is there something behind the curtain of life I am missing in the process of being addicted to this pursuit?

Sometimes what we want is not what we need, and very often those things diametrically oppose one another. I wanted: fashion, money, status, clout, a big apartment, exotic travel.  I need: someone home with me, possibly a dog, good food, music, writing, adventure, family. 

Weird how simple it is, no?

Manhattan, to me in my twenties, was an eschewing of life and its convention, an escape from the imposition of social standards, freedom. And it was. But then you realize in your thirties: we are all actually just human. And the vulnerability of humanity rises above any place we choose to live. The need for love and socialization, to desire to co-habitate and be with friends and family (and for some to pro-create) will rise about the context of any city and its wonderful, sophisticated distractions. 

New York is a state of mind.

It hasn’t been easy. In four months I’ve almost moved back twice, like some Stockholm syndrome, this magnet of promise of a life that once was, of relevance and excitement, which is now a proverbial urn filled with the ashes of fabulous memories we will retell over drinks, which periodically pop up on my facebook feed as embarrassing face-palm reminders of my behavior.

I’ve been forced to look at life in a bigger way, beyond ‘Manhattan’,  and in hopes that I haven’t broken our relationship for good. 

And so it is after 10 years of fashion, two moves, that I am trying to now rediscover life in all of its new meaning. It’s weird and hard and yet kind of fun and I’m doing my best to learn the ropes. I hope I hit my stride soon.

---

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[beatricethecat2]

out of place, out of mind - 1

Sequel to “one step forward, two steps back (v.2.0)” part 1+ part 2.

“These chapters are short,” she said to herself, “you can knock them out in no time!” But brevity does not equate with simplicity, nor is simplicity easy to accomplish, especially where writing is concerned (for me). So more time has passed before posting than I promised, but thankfully the upcoming holiday break will give me time to focus on future chapters. 

This story is meant to replace “Instinct,” so the timeline starts after 4.14 and moves forward with it’s own trajectory. It does cull hints of plots from episodes afterwards (for instance, Claudia becomes caretaker, you’ll glean the rest) but then spins off in it’s own direction. It is a fix it on many levels and requires some knowledge of the show (as well as "part 1," linked above). 

TV RULES APPLY to this whacky thing, so it moves pretty fast and loose, and hopefully works as a whole. I’m sure there are typos, I’ll fix them later. I hope you enjoy it!

///////////////

"What the hell, H.G.?“

Helena blinks awake and tries to focus on the faces above her, their identities hazy at best.

"Pete, she just woke up!”

“But Myka didn’t."

"Seriously bro, give her a sec.”

The name Myka prompts other names, such as Steve and Claudia, to pop into Helena's head.

“What happened to Myka,” Pete says, stressing each word.

“Mrs. Frederic sent me to help,” Helena says as if it were the answer to everything, unsure of what everything entails.

“A lotta good that did."

“Her vitals are dropping,” a woman’s voice says from across the room.

Pete turns to face the adjacent bed.

“Second’s over, H.G. Come on, think!"

Helena looks at Claudia, yes, Claudia is her name, then at the unconscious woman lying in front of Pete. “No!” she yelps and hops off of the bed, memories flooding back all at once. She dashes toward Myka, but Pete steps in front and holds her at arm's length.

“She’s been shot,” Helena says, glaring at Pete.

“With this?” Steve asks, holding up a static bag containing a pistol.

“Yes, that."

“Where? I don’t see a wound,” Dr. Calder says.

Helena pushes Pete aside and points to Myka’s chest just as a blood stain begins to appear.

“How?” Pete grunts, grabbing Helena's arm.

“A ‘gunfight.’ Duel gone awry.”

“Like in a western?” Claudia whips out her laptop and clicks on keys.  

“We were digging through props on a soundstage,” Steve adds.

“Vitals still dropping,” Dr. Calder announces, now pressing gauze to the wound.

“I must go back,” Helena says, jerking free from Pete’s grip and striding towards Steve.

“Uh-uh. I’ll go,” Pete says, elbowing Helena aside and swiping the bag from Steve’s hand.

“You can’t. It won’t work.”

“You’ll screw it up again.”

“It has to be me,” Helena says, lunging at the bag, but Pete holds out of her reach.

“Why?”

“Give me the bloody artifact!” Helena jumps up, but Pete dips down low. “Only I know how to fix this.”

“Then tell me.”

“Dude, let her go,” Claudia says, pointing with her eyes at Myka.

Pete looks at Myka, and his mouth falls open, the artifact slipping from his hand.

“Helena, go. Quickly,” Dr. Calder says, swabbing a jellied wand over Myka’s swollen, exposed belly.

Helena crouches down and swipes the bag off the floor. “It’s mine, by the way,” she says to Pete, then marches towards the bathroom and slams the door.

----------

“No!” Myka yelps, lurching upright, eyes darting around the room. “Helena!” She jumps off the bed and rushes toward Helena, but a hand holds her back.

“Mykes, whoa," Pete says but Myka yanks her arm free and steps forward. “Is she ok?” she says to Dr. Calder, her eyes wild and round.

"She's stable,' Dr. Calder answers.

“Suave move getting yourself shot H.G.,” Claudia quips.

“Shot? Where?” Myka asks Dr. Calder.

“Nothing yet, but if our last encounter is any indication—”

“Last encounter?” Myka says.

“This was you last time. You don't remember?"

"No."

"She went back to save you.“

“All I remember is a shot,” Myka says and laces her fingers through Helena's as the heart monitor bleeps erratically.

“There’s the blood,” Dr. Calder says, then checks the wound. "No bullet. It went straight through.”

“We need the bullet the neutralize the artifact,” Claudia says.

Myka searches the faces in the room.

“It’s here somewhere,” Pete says.

"Maybe in the dirt by the gunfight. Wherever that was," Steve adds.

"She might bleed out by then," Claudia says, eyes glued to her laptop. "According to this, the actor died. Just like Myka's did last time."

Myka spies the static bagged pistol in on a table. She lunges to grab it, but Pete holds her back.

"I have to go back,” Myka says.

“We'll figure something out,” Pete says.

“I’m not losing her again!”

“Mykes--”

“Pete, don’t.” Myka glares, and Pete's eyes soften, in a "please give it a chance" kind of way. But Myka's resolve remains steady, his plea falling on deaf ears.

Claudia steps in and commanders the bag. “There’s stuff you should know before you go,” she says to Myka. She gives a quick rundown of her research and Myka fills in the blanks with what little she recalls from the artifact's world.

“I’ll be back,” Myka says, striding toward the bathroom.

“Wait!” Claudia yelps. "How did the gun go off in the first place? Pete pulled the trigger to hop in and save you, but nothing happened.”

“I dropped it, and it went off,” Myka answers without stopping.  

“But both of you were whammied. How?"

“Best guess?” Myka pauses and looks over her shoulder. "We were kissing when it happened."

Claudia snaps her fingers and points at Pete. “Love's the secret ingredient!”

“Love. Great,” Myka says and pulls the door closed.

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

Myka faints upon arrival and is swept up by two women, who strip her down to her petticoats and lower onto a daybed. She's relieved to be lying down but disconcerted by her bulging stomach; Claudia explained the hows and whys, but the reality of being pregnant is beyond anything she could have imagined.  

She tries to stand up, but queasiness doubles her over, and the women scoop her up and settle her back onto the bed. This time she stays horizontal and examines her surroundings; probably a parlor of sorts, with resplendent furniture for entertaining. The women must be servants of the house by the way the women dart about straighten every chair and doily. Her handmaids, she guesses, as they’re not wearing aprons, which, unfortunately, means they’ll constantly be by her side.

Her maids scurry towards the windows, and she feels compelled to follow, trailing sluggishly, unaccustomed to the extra weight. She peers into the backyard and sees men with guns and dogs walking in packs, not unlike manhunts in the Secret Service. Out of nowhere, a wave of queasiness returns, and she leans against the window. She focuses on searching for the artifact and Helena as well as she's hasn't a clue where to find her.

Claudia had pinpointed where they’d been sent, but the movie was never finished, so the finer points of the plot remain a mystery. “Ye olde railroad times,” she said, “on ye olde western ‘frontier,'” in air quotes, the exact time and place left open to interpretation.

There’s shouting in the distance and the men shift to the right, just as her maids notice Myka’s no longer in bed.

“Miss Mary, come away from the window!” one pleads, and yanks on her arm.

“You’re not safe, Miss Mary,” the other adds, scrambling to her side.

This “Miss Mary” business grates at Myka's nerves, but there’s no getting around it, she must stay in character for this to work.

“Stop fussing,” Myka snips, shooing them both away, the words rolling off her tongue without thought.

“But they’ll see you,” a maid pleads.

“I don’t care. I know he’s out there and I want to see him,” Myka replies, surprised by her petulant tone, that of the debutante she's meant to portray. She chuckles at the “him," but when her maids look at her oddly, she sees she needs to hone in any improv.

A shot is fired, and as the men surge to the left, Myka moves to the right and scours the yard for Helena. She startles when in a figure dressed in black shoots out from behind the barn, zipping behind a thicket of trees. They zig-zag forward, then scurry behind an outbuilding, close enough for Myka to make out their features.

It’s Helena for sure, clothed head to toe in cowboy finery, looking ruggedly and roguishly dust covered. As their gazes meet, Myka's heartbeat surges and Helena's eyes fill with love and longing. Both are scripted emotions, overacted for the camera, but Myka's caught off guard at their realness. Helena then lifts her stetson and runs a hand through her hair, looking every bit the handsome, misunderstood loner she's meant to be.

A shot sounds in the distance, and Helena turns back to the yard.  

“Miss Mary,” a maid says, tugging on Myka’s arm, but Myka pays her no mind. The men circle back, and Helena draws her pistol, eyes scanning the horizon for an escape route. She glances at Myka, and touches the brim of her hat, nodding goodbye before disappearing behind the main building.

“Miss Mary, your father—“

“Tell him I’m ill, and I don’t want to see him. Tell him—“

“Mary!” a male voice booms from behind.

Myka's shoulders pinch together, and she turns slowly, reluctantly, not looking forward how this scene will play out.

--------

A whole day passes without further signs of Helena, though she’s heard whispers a larger search is underway. “The cowboy," she’s learned, has a bounty on his head, having sabotaged something, or robbed a bank, or killed man, depending on who you ask. Who exactly is out hunting for him is a genuine question, as the main characters all seem present in the house. Tonight is Mary's engagement party, and since her father is the mayor, the celebration includes nearly the whole town.

She hasn’t met him yet, but her betrothed is Jamison McAllister the Third, the son of a railroad magnate from New York. He was sent out to the sticks to oversee his father’s advancing empire, and from what she’s gathered, won little fondness within the town. He took a shine to Mary immediately, but Mary shunned his advances until Mary's father strongarmed them together.

It was a not very well-kept secret that Mary was stepping out with “the cowboy,”  a man with a checkered past but a heart of gold. Then when Mary fell pregnant, her father forbade her from seeing “that bastard,” threatening to kill both of them if she ran. He forced her to marry Jamison, seeing dollar signs in their union, desperate to acquire the wealth and power Jamison's family possessed.

“Hey!” Myka cries, as her maid shuffles her down the hall, her nausea returning full force as they go.

“We must prepare for the ball!” the maid declares and deposits her in the middle of the room, but there’s a pause before anyone tends to her. Time is playing out chronologically, but when the action's happening elsewhere, Mary's thoughts shift back into her own.

After an unbearable amount of fussing, she’s strapped into a florid, lacy gown, then escorted by her maids to the mayoral ballroom. To complicate matters, it’s a costume themed ball, leaving her at a loss to know who's who as she greets them. Hefty men guard the exits, many of them in uniform, including her father, dressed in his Civil War officer’s regalia. He talks with a man in a severe brown suit, his mask slightly askew. Her eyes widen at the gun slung high on his hips, the very one she's been searching for. Her stomach knots as he approaches and she looks down at her feet, bracing herself for what happens next.

He kisses her awkwardly, then hooks their arms together and tugs her towards her father on the sidelines. As her father gives a speech, she thinks to steal the gun now, but there’s no way she can escape the room unnoticed. Plus she needs to find Helena, or is she looking for the man in black? Her character’s thoughts keep interrupting her own. Get a grip, she tells herself and tries to yank free from Jamison, but he tightens his hold.

When the speech ends, the band begins to play, and Jamison leads her to the dance floor. As they sway to a waltz, he grumbles in her ear that he’ll torture and kill “the cowboy” if she tries to escape. Her expression reflects Mary’s fear, but her hands have other plans, balling into fists where they sit on his shoulders.

As the next song begins, the floor fills with guests, and a figure in black mask taps Jamison on the shoulder.

“May I?” they say, in an American twang, but the voice is familiar to Myka.

“Huh?” Jamison grunts, but by then Myka's gone, swept up by the uniformed person in question.

Helena is light on her feet, which is a welcome change from Jamison, but does Helena know she’s Helena and not "the cowboy"? And if Helena does know she’s…he’s...Helena, does she know that she, Mary, is Myka? She nearly says something, but worries she'll mess up the scene. The last thing they need is to be stuck here until the movie ends.

“Your curls are magnificent, Miss Mary,” Helena says, her accent now back to English.

Myka nearly breaks out into a laugh, as way the line sounded is as circumspect as the ringlets her hair’s been forced into.

“Why thank you, sir,” Myka replies, emphasizing "sir" for effect.

“We’ve precious little time, my love,” Helena says, glancing at the band. “Two songs from now, near the far door, you must faint and insist only your maids may accompany you.”

Myka’s stomach flutters at being called ‘my love,’ drawn to Helena as both protector and lover, knowing in her heart “the cowboy" will save her from her horrible fate.

“They’ll be a ruckus out front, but we’ll escape out back.”

“By whom?” Myka asks but doesn't push for an answer as the way Helena looks at her tells her she’s gone off script.

They twirl to the left and Helena passes Myka off, taking the lead with another woman.

Can she faint convincingly? Pete says she’s a bad actress, though tonight she's dancing like a pro so allowing the movie to take over must be key. But she needs to be careful and monitor it's influence, at least until she and Helena manage to be alone.

-TBC-