#apt i think he does it BECAUSE i recoil

[tonycries]

Pssst..

It's Nani, not Nonnie..

Daddy Tony REFUSES to say "nani", it makes me feel something like this:

[iturbide]

Can I ask 22, 30, 41, and 42 please?

Absolutely!

What character do you headcanon as ace or aro?

The easy answer to this is 'everyone is ace and aro unless otherwise stated' because I kind of default to gen in reading most characters. It's easier to list the characters I don't think are one or the other.

(With that said, though, I read Claude as both aro and ace and will never change that. The 'arrow ace' pun is too apt.)

What characters should have more support options and who should have been their support options?

Claude. Hands down, Claude should have had more options, and I say this despite knowing that he has the most supports out of the three Lords. But I want to see him interact more with other characters, particularly outside of the Golden Deer, because that's his stated purpose let him bond with more people.

What is a favorite character headcanon (can be one you came up with or one you liked / adopted from someone else)?

Okay so this is probably a little niche but I have this headcanon that the reason Hubert keeps his hair like that, where it grows over his right eye, is because back when Arundel spirited Edelgard away to Faerghus and he tried to chase after them, he ended up getting a head wound while fighting his father's men as they tried to get him back. It was a relatively minor injury, all things considered, but with how anxious he was about Edelgard's disappearance, he kept worrying at it constantly and it ended up scarring terribly. When Edelgard finally returned to the Empire and they met again, she recoiled at the sight of the scar -- and while it was a reflex of surprise rather than disgust, Hubert took it entirely wrong and from that point on grew his hair out specifically to conceal the scar so as not to cause her further distress.

(also honorable mention to Claude being a very capable musician, but I've already cited Claude for two answers)

Do you have / are you willing to share a possibly controversial opinion or headcanon you have about a character?

I think probably my most contentious options about Three Houses probably have to do with Edelgard, and at the risk of opening that can of worms again: I am personally of the opinion that she could change course, with proper guidance and support and having to face the consequences of her actions. It's the core concept that the Pre-Timeskip Fix-It is based on (along with giving Byleth more agency than the game ever allowed them): that Edelgard could have a different fate, even if she does spend a lot of time continuing to barrel down the path to ruin because she is stubborn and I can't help but respect that about her.

50 Questions for FE3H

[fyrefrostanimus]

Nightmare'd Evans

Even if these designs are nowhere near done (the only two designs of ANY of the Nightmares I have completely sketched are Nightmare Fredbear and Nightmare himself) I might as well post what I have as of Halloween!

So I always thought that Evan (or Chris, as he was known as for the longest time) ended up trapped in nightmare purgatory for some reason. Only when GoldenDuo came along did I really change my mind, but I still really like the idea even though he's my favorite character in FNaF. I guess that if I love a character, I make their life hell.

I already had a self-indulgent AU where the Nightmares stopped messing with him after a while (he no longer had a heartbeat, and that's what mostly got their attention). But I never really considered what would have happened in that context if he'd managed to get close to one of them. Really the little sketch I did of Nightmarionne Evan made me think about that and I decided to at least do the rest of the Nightmares (maybe the Jack-O's in November? still pumpkin pie season then) with that idea with some trivia about each one because I overthink this stuff a lot.

Should be very obvious that these aren't meant as canon. They're goofy little sketches that may end up as part of an AU. Who knows honestly.

There's going to be exposed bone/muscle in some of these and a fair bit of body horror at the end, but I'll put those under a cut since it's a minority compared to the rest.

Nightmare Chica'd Evan

Since I wanted to base Nightmare Chica in general on a velociraptor/vaguely raptor-like dinosaur, I could go absolutely nuts with this design. The main decision for Evan's design based on her was "does he have full hands connected to his arm wings or does he just have a widdle thumb that can't do much or anything?". I ended up settling for the latter because it's just funny to me.

Trivia

Evan can't fly but he sure thought he could at first. He's kinda peeved that he lost access to his fingers but isn't able to fly but he's at least figured out how to pick up a crayon and draw.

Those sharp claws on his feets can do serious damage so don't piss him off or scare him. Luckily he's more apt to bite.

Bouncing off that last point, being like this (like a lot of the other Nightmare'd designs) affects his fight-or-flight response. Here, Evan's more likely to defend himself with a bite before recoiling and asking himself what he just did.

Nightmare Bonnie'd Evan

I've always been iffy on the basic design for Nightmare Bonnie in general, since unlike the others there's no real inspiration you can draw from. There's Monty Python and the Holy Grail's killer rabbit, but he already has the personality and I wanted to keep the canon color scheme. The problem wasn't Evan's design but just Bonnie's.

Trivia

Evan can jump pretty high/far with the rabbit legs, so he can get around fast. You'd lose track of him easy and that's how he'll manage to spook you.

He will hear you coming. Don't even attempt to sneak up behind him because those radar dishes on his head will pick up on where you are and he'll look.

He has funny little fangies that often stick out of the corners of his mouth since they're too big to hide completely while also being comfortable for him.

Evan's much more likely to kick. With how strong his legs are it could break a bone if it hits the right spot. (He's basically a kangaroo)

Nightmare Freddy'd Evan

Not much to say here except that this would probably be the 2nd/3rd most easy Nightmare'd version for Evan to access. If he cuddles up with the Freddles enough he's pretty much just another of them.

Trivia

The tiny bear poof tail Evan has does wag when he's happy but you can only see it from behind.

Evan's main response to fear remains to curl up into a ball and cry. The difference is that you now have to deal with the papa bear.

Nightmare Fredbear'd Evan

The first complete sketch of the group! Another that would be pretty easy for Evan to access (mainly because these two are pretty closely connected with Nightmare Fredbear coming from Evan's fear of Fredbear). I kept Nightmare Fredbear's design close to canon, since I really liked most of the elements of his design and thought they made sense.

Trivia

Evan is really uncomfortable the mouth on his stomach. It doesn't do much, but he probably finds some way to tape it shut so he doesn't have to think about it.

His neck fluff is nice and warm, at least that's a plus.

Evan doesn't really have much of a fear response like this. He may jump a bit, but it's not something big like the other Nightmare'ds.

Nightmare'd Evan

How would Evan even get to this point, to be honest? Design-wise, I decided that Nightmare as a representation of death from the Bite of '83 was a good basis, but I'm not much of a fan of the semi-transparency with a brain inside. It's a cool detail but it's not my cup of tea. But since I can make my own design, I went for a tooth-centric idea. Unlike Nightmare Fredbear, Nightmare doesn't have an extra mouth: he just has a lot of teeth growing out of him like horns, spikes, or sometimes even armor. The head teeth specifically resemble a crown for the heck of it.

Trivia

Evan's little tooth crown is made up of basically baby teeth! If he were still aging they would probably fall out and grow bigger full-size ones, but that's not happening. Only the canines are actually long enough to show through his fluffy hair.

He has longer claws than the other Nightmare'ds, not counting Foxy's hook-claws.

He has two rows of teeth. It's definitely hard to see but they're there and they're still pretty sharp despite being smaller.

Evan defaults to intimidation in this design. He's a little to small to accomplish that, but he tries and that's what matters.

And now we're onto the one with exposed muscle/bone and body horror. The body horror is lower down, but both have the formerly mentioned anatomical attributes.

Nightmare Foxy'd Evan

You know how Nightmare Freddy and Nightmare Fredbear are tied/undecided on 2nd/3rd place? First place of easiest to access actually goes to Nightmare Foxy. Headcanon in this case is that so much of Nightmare Foxy's behavior comes from being jumpscared by an actual person that he feels compassion to a degree, so there's your explanation. Only other addition is that Nm. Foxy's eye covering is torn bedsheets.

Trivia

Evan has slightly longer claws on the hand where Nightmare Foxy's hook is than on the other hand.

He has catlike pupils that contract into slits when you shine a light into them suddenly. He hates sudden bright flashes since it screws up his vision for a bit afterwards.

The lack of skin around his mouth and only having the muscles needed to open and close his jaws makes him really bad at showing facial expressions (His remaining eye can still squint/close). Just look at the ears and tail to tell: he's like a dog.

He got the long tongue and has managed to stick it in his nose hole once. He hasn't done that since getting weird looks from everyone around him.

Evan's more likely to run like this. It's in Foxy's general nature to run around, so he probably has high energy (he'd love playing tag if anyone would end up visiting).

Nightmare Mangle'd Evan

It's body horror time again, folks! I guess getting bold for day 27 of Apoctober and attempting three heads paid off, since it makes drawing two easier. I knew I wanted Nightmare Mangle's design in general to look plain wrong. Mangle got screwed up in Kid's Cove, so why would the nightmare realistic version look any sort of normal? The heads aren't "one fox and one endo" but I thought the funhouse mirror/old circus freakshow idea fit the rather bright white-and-pink color better than anything else here.

Trivia

Evan definitely hates this Nightmare'd version the most. Sure, he doesn't like having a mouth on his stomach when he's Nightmare Fredbear'd, but a mouth that doesn't really do anything is way better than a whole other head that's essentially a younger brother attached to his body (on other terms, he's starting to understand why Michael didn't like being stuck watching him all day every day). And we haven't talked about the awkward way one of his legs splits at the knee (at least I think it's the knee but it's digitigrade legs and I can't quite tell), resulting in two other legs: one under his control, and the other under control of his other head. Plus the third arm pokes him in the face a lot and he can't actually stop it from trying.

His shirt actually rips when he ends up in this form, although if he were to switch to any other form somehow it would mend (ghost logic).

If you thought Nightmare Foxy'd Evan was bad at facial expressions, now he can't even blink so you have to rely on just body language to tell how he's feeling if he doesn't tell you.

If scared, Evan will just freeze and shiver like a chihuahua. He can't run as well, so maybe you won't see him if he doesn't move?

TL;DR please help him he wants some cuddles

If you have any questions about these, please ask. I'd love to talk about them or put them in silly situations (or just draw them in general).

[survivedsarchived]

“okay,” silas replies, curt and gruff, a snort that's half between vexed and miserable punctuating the word. he gets it. ace is unfeeling; unflinching; he won't turn from a fight. and maybe silas admires that to a degree — it's more palatable than peace and love, kill them with kindness — but isn't there a limit?

it's not a question he can ask; not comfortably. whatever they have between them, it's not friendship, silas thinks — a mutual tolerance might be more apt. certainly not something that could warrant such a conversation. it'd probably just turn him into a target (and silas isn't confident that's a fight he could win.) but — it is cordial enough between them that he can smile at this, a noise that's more of a laugh than a snort exhaled now. “what, you jealous of my broken nose?” he asks, flashing his teeth in a playful grin. “i mean, i can break yours, if you want.”

what both of them did to deserve it — that's another topic silas won't breach. not for him or ace, but for mikayla; he owes her that. (she may never believe it, but he does feel guilty.)

silas' gaze is turned toward the ground, brow raised; he contemplates for a moment, then glances upward, expression neutral. “why, because you care about me and want revenge?” it comes out too sharp, and silas recoils, hand lifting almost defensively. “i mean — what's the point? they're just some stupid, drunk assholes. it's not worth it.”

he doesn't know why he enjoys getting beneath people's skin so much— once upon a time, he would have hated to irritate someone else, would go out of his way to not be a nuisance, but now, it's all his interactions consist of. if he's not making someone bleed, they're rolling their eyes. (if he were honest with himself, he might realize it's because he's forgotten any other way, doesn't know how to behave normally without feeling vulnerable.) “ right. monsters. humans are easy. ” physically, he's telling the truth, but mentally, humans take a far greater toll. not that he would admit it out loud.

ace's eyebrows knit together in a scowl, letting out an indignant snort. “ i don't think she charmspoke your nose into breaking. i didn't exactly have an option when she told me to choke. ” in all honesty, he would have found it wildly attractive, seeing such a dark side of one of aphrodite's kids, had it not been inflicted on him. not that it matters either way.

finally, he reaches down to pick up the bag, because knowing him, he was going to need it at some point. he raises with a bored sigh, sliding his hand into his pocket. “ want to go back to the bar? i could use a drink— and if those guys are still there, i could show you how to take care of three at a time. ”

[thelastspeecher]

Recoil - Chapter 2: Ricochet

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3   Chapter 4   AO3

So, I’ll be updating this fic weekly on Thursdays, it looks like.  Y’all have three more weeks of scheduled uploads, then it’s back to my regular bullshit.  Anyways, the Fiddle boy finally shows up in this chapter, Stan shifts into Ultra Dad Mode, and Ford uses his cuteness as a weapon.  Enjoy.

(Again, this fic was inspired by “1 Step Forward, 20 Years Back” by @infriga)

Ricochet (noun): a shot or hit that rebounds one or more times off a surface

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              Ford sat on the couch in his study, abruptly feeling drained.  Was it the leftover exhaustion from the last week or so?  A side effect of becoming a child?  Children did need naps, after all, though Ford had no idea whether children of his current biological age did.  Or was it simply that Bill filled him with a panicked energy, and sharing the information with Stan had helped to ease that burden, share it?  Ford wasn’t sure which one, but as a tense silence fell, he resisted the urge to look at Stan, sitting next to him.

              “Okay.”  Ford stared at Stan, surprised by the single word response.  Stan’s expression was thunderous in a way that Ford remembered from their childhood.  It was the same look Stan would get any time someone messed with Ford.  The implication was dumbfounding.

              Does…does Stanley want to punch Bill?

              “I had no idea what to expect when I came here, but this sure as hell ain’t it,” Stan said, putting his hands on his knees.  His eyes were still stormy, but he plastered on a lighthearted smile as he looked at Ford.  Discomfort began to uncoil in Ford’s stomach.

              He’s treating me like a child.  From the moment he’d awoken, Ford had gotten the feeling that Stan was, so to speak, using kid gloves.  He’d banished that feeling, telling himself that it was just his misperception of Stan’s protective nature.  But he could no longer dismiss that possibility.  Not with Stan smiling at him so reassuringly after being told his own brother had made a deal with a literal demon.  Ford opened his mouth to tell Stan off.  Although, isn’t this better?  Their brief reunion as adults had been tempestuous and violent, and all Ford wanted at the moment, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, was a calm voice speaking warm words.

              “Why are you taking this so well?” Ford finally asked.  Stan shrugged.

              “I’ve been through a lot,” he said vaguely.  “This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen, yeah, but it’s not the worst. Nah, that’d be…”  Stan shook his head.  “Never mind.”

              “I just told you that if I fall asleep, I could become possessed by a demon!” Ford protested.  Stan raised an eyebrow at him.

              “Then why didn’t you get possessed earlier?” he asked.  Ford flushed with anger.

              “You don’t believe me.”

              “No, I do.  After seeing you get turned into a kid, I can wrap my mind around this weird shit. Also, you’re a terrible liar,” Stan added.  Ford flushed again, but this time from embarrassment.  “Seriously, why didn’t you get possessed when you fell asleep last night?”

              “I- I don’t know,” Ford confessed.  “Maybe it’s because my body was so weak that Bill deemed it pointless to control.”

              “Brute force isn’t the only way to get things done.  If he’d taken you over and asked me to turn on that – what was it, a portal?  If he’d asked me to turn it on again, I woulda done it.”  Stan spoke casually, like he wasn’t discussing events that could bring about the apocalypse.  “You say he’s a smart guy.  He coulda found a way around you being stuck like this.”  Stan poked Ford’s small, hairless chest.  “So why didn’t he?”

              “I…”  Ford was lost for words.  Stan’s logic seemed airtight.  Bill had billions of years of experience.  Ford being stuck as a child wouldn’t have been a major hurdle, just a minor annoyance.  But Ford couldn’t think of a single reason why Bill didn’t do anything while he slept. Ford rubbed his eyes tiredly.

              “You look like you could use a nap.”

              “I can’t sleep.  Not until we protect the house from Bill’s influence.  Otherwise, he could possess me this time.”

              “Can he?”

              “Stanley-” Ford started.  Stan held up his hands.

              “Think about it.  Are you still the same person Bill made a deal with?”

              “Why wouldn’t I be?” Ford demanded.

              “For one thing, you’re a kid.”

              “I- yes.”

              “Minors can’t sign contracts, y’know.”

              “I highly doubt Bill would care about the finer points of legal arbitration,” Ford snapped.  

              “Fair.”  Stan was now looking at Ford with a careful eye, like he was trying to find something out of place.  “I don’t think you are.”

              “You don’t think I’m what?” Ford sighed, tiredness beginning to seep back.

              “The same person that Bill made a deal with.”

              “It doesn’t matter whether I’m not physically the same person, mentally, I am. And Bill’s domain is the mind.”

              “Are you sure about that?”  Stan’s voice was soft, careful.  Like he was prodding at a wound to see how severe it was, prepared to retreat the second it began to throb.  Ford was silent.  He waited for Stan to elaborate.  “You, uh, I think you don’t remember this, but when you first got turned into a kid, you had a breakdown.”  Fuzzy memories began to surface in Ford’s mind.  “And not like, a breakdown that you woulda had if you were an adult.  The kind a kid has.”

              Ford could see it now.  Stan crouched next to him, his face and voice infuriatingly calm.  Instructing him to breathe in and out, to let his mind lay still until he could collect himself.  Ford pulled his legs up and close to his chest, feeling his face burn from shame.

              I fell apart like a child in front of Stanley.

              “Hey.  It’s okay.” Stan rested his hand on Ford’s shoulder. “You’re a kid.  Nothin’ wrong with that.”

              Yes, Stanley’s always enjoyed spending time with children.  Even when they were teenagers, Stan would jump at the opportunity to mentor kids younger than them.  Ford could remember clearly one brisk autumn day, Stan telling a long story to a group of children that, by the time he was done talking, had more than doubled in size.

              “You should be a babysitter,” he’d teased Stan that day, once all the children had dispersed.  Stan had flashed him that crooked grin he always kept locked and loaded.

              “Nah.  This is just for fun.”  A contemplative look had brushed across his face then, an expression Stan rarely wore. “And, I guess, for practice.”

              “Practice?  For what?”

              “…Being a dad,” Stan had answered softly, like he was worried saying it would prevent it from happening.

              “A- really, you want to be a dad?”

              “Yeah.”  Stan had hunched his shoulders up then, retreating into his defensive, closed-off position.  The conversation was over.  “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

              “Uh, Ford?”  Stan’s voice drew Ford out of the memory.  He blinked up at Stan.  “You kinda disappeared for a second there.  You okay?”

              “Yes.  I was just…remembering something,” Ford said quietly.  Stan seemed like he wanted to press further, but he dropped it.

              “Well, like I said, I really don’t think you’re the same person Bill made a deal with.”

              Right.  We were discussing Bill.

              “I sorta wonder…can you feel him?”

              “Pardon?” Ford asked, still recovering from the abrupt tonal shift between his fond memory and the present.

              “In movies or TV or whatever, if someone gets into your mind, you can feel them.”  Stan’s eyes bore into Ford.  “Can you feel him?”

              “No,” Ford answered truthfully.  He frowned.  “Wait.”

              “What?”

              “I- I should be able to sense his presence at the back of my mind. I haven’t warded myself or the house against his influence, after all.”  Confusion colored his voice.  “The only reason I wouldn’t be able to detect him would be if the deal had been broken.” Ford looked up at Stan again. “…You might be right.”  Stan merely nodded.  “Of course, if Bill were to possess another person and come after me-”

              “How did you summon him?”

              “I read an incantation off a cave wall.”

              “And what are the odds someone else would do that same thing?” Stan asked. Ford had to think about that for a moment.

              “Even in Gravity Falls, I’d say low.”

              “So he’s not a problem, then.”

              “He most certainly is.”

              “Yeah.”  Stan’s expression had turned thoughtful.  “But not the biggest one right now.”

              “…That would be an apt assumption,” Ford grumbled.  “I suppose the pressing matter is returning myself to my appropriate age.  I’ll need to examine the portal, go over the output data from while it was running, and I should probably-”

              “Uh, no, Sixer,” Stan said, interrupting him.  “The biggest problem isn’t that you’re small.  It’s that you’re dead on your feet.”

              “I’ll be fine.”

              “Yep.  After you rest.”

              “I don’t have time to-”

              “You just admitted you did,” Stan said quickly.  Ford scowled at him.  “If you have time to spend working on turning yourself into an adult again, you have time to spend resting.”

              “I don’t-”

              “You’ve been a kid for less than a day,” Stan said in a pleading voice. Taken aback by the plaintive tone, Ford was quiet.  “I’m not your dad, I’m not your legal guardian.  But I’m already half-convinced that Child Services is gonna break down that door and take you away.  And then the cops’ll throw me in jail for child neglect.”  Stan’s voice hitched slightly.  “I’ve got a lot on my record, but I’ll be damned if I let that get added to the list.”

              “But-”

              “You’re a kid,” Stan said firmly.  The pleading was gone, replaced by determination.  “And not just any kid.  You’re my brother.  That means you’re under my jurisdiction.  So here’s what we’re gonna do.”  Stan met Ford’s eyes.  “You’re gonna take a nap.  I’m gonna fix the broken heater.  When you wake up, we’ll have food and clean up this sty of a house.”

              “Since when have you cared about cleaning?” Ford mumbled.

              “There’s pieces of rusty metal on the damn floor.  You’re not gonna get tetanus on my watch.”  Stan took a breath.  “And then we’ll go to bed.  And we’ll do those things for however long it takes for you to get back on your feet.  Then we’ll try to turn you back.”

              “I don’t see the point.”

              “Kids can’t handle this stuff!” Stan said, gesturing at Ford.  “They’re not designed to live on coffee.  You need sleep and you need food.  So that’s what you’re gonna get.  Whether you like it or not.”  Part of Ford wanted to continue arguing.  But the rest of him was simply too tired.  He rubbed his eyes again.

              “…Very well.”  Ford yawned widely.  “We’ll revisit this tomorrow, though.”

              “Sure.  We can do that.”  The fervent passion that had filled Stan moments ago seemed to have faded.  He watched Ford with a fond expression. “Let’s get you to bed.”  He picked Ford up.

              “Stanley, you don’t…need…to…”  Before Ford could finish his sentence, his heavy eyelids closed.

----- 

              Sometimes, Stan wondered how things might have been.  There were a lot of scenarios that he would play in his mind while he waited to fall asleep in the latest dingy motel room.  But there was one he kept coming back to, particularly with the current situation.  As he attempted to comb Ford’s unruly hair, Stan wondered what would have happened if those pregnancy scares he’d had with previous girlfriends hadn’t been false alarms.

              He always felt stupid wondering about it.  He wasn’t the type to get tied down, and it was for the best that he didn’t knock up the women who left him and stole from him, sometimes in that order, sometimes in the reverse order.  Stan felt like an idiot for merely thinking about it, so he did his best to quash the small part of him that wanted it.  That wanted to be a dad.  It was difficult to suppress, though, and felt especially difficult right now.  Stan set down the hairbrush and crouched down to Ford’s eye-height to look intently at him.

              After only two nights of full sleep, Ford seemed healthier, though still much more sickly than Stan ever remembered him being at this age.  At least the circles under his eyes were hidden by his glasses.  The plan was to use some of the money Ford had left to buy some groceries, but Stan had been uncertain of whether he’d take Ford along, depending on what shape he was in.  Stan managed a smile and ruffled Ford’s hair.  Ford pouted.

              “Why bother brushing my hair when you were going to mess with it right after?” Ford asked.

              “It’s what people do to cute kids like you, Sixer.  Better get used to it,” Stan replied, straightening to his full height. “I think we’re good to go.  You sure you remember the way to the grocery store?”  Ford bobbed his head.  “Good. So, what are the rules?”  Ford sighed.

              “We’re posing as a regular father and regular son visiting a relative,” he rattled off.  “The relative we’re supposedly visiting is actually me.”

              “And?” Stan prodded.  Ford scowled.

              “And I can act precocious, but I still have to act like a child.”

              “Yep.”  Stan dug his car keys out of his back pocket.  “Let’s go buy some food.”

              The drive to the store was uneventful, aside from the brief shouting match over where Ford would sit in the car.  While Ford was napping the day before, Stan had dug out the book on rules for the road that he kept in the glove box.  He couldn’t decide whether he was proud or embarrassed that the thing had clearly never been read.

              “I told you, the law is that people under thirteen can’t ride in the front seat,” Stan said for the twentieth time, looking at Ford in the back seat.  Ford scowled and slumped further down his seat.

              “Caring about driving laws is incredibly out of character for you,” Ford griped.  Stan turned his attention back to the road, biting back his explanation, that he was determined to stay out of trouble for Ford’s sake.  “Actually, caring about laws in general is out of character.  Or was it not you who stole multiple items of clothing for me yesterday?”

              “Kids’ clothes are expensive,” Stan grunted.  “So are speeding tickets.  All I’m doin’ is saving as much money as possible.”

              “Uh-huh.  Sure,” Ford muttered.  He simmered in barely controlled anger as the car was parked, they grabbed a cart, and up to the moment they walked into the grocery store.  One step past the automatic doors and Stan could feel small, six-fingered hands gripping his jacket.  Stan looked down at his brother.  Ford seemed terrified, but Stan wasn’t sure why.  He crouched down.

              “What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.  Ford looked down at his feet.

              “N-nothing.”

              “C’mon, Ford, you can talk to me.”

              “Bill.”

              “Don’t worry, Sixer.  Even if he’s here – and he isn’t – I won’t let him hurt you.  Got it?” Stan said.  After a moment, Ford nodded jerkily.  He was still visibly nervous, but even the small reassurance seemed to have calmed him down a bit.  “Good.” Stan stood again.  “Any clue where the bread aisle is?”

              “Um…”  Ford looked around, clearly out of his depth.  “No.”

              “Guess we’ll just wander around until we find something, then.”  Before they could even begin their search, a woman swooped in and peered closely at Ford.

              “Well aren’t you just the cutest cutie to ever be cute,” the woman gushed. Ford blanched and hid behind Stan’s leg. Stan forced a laugh.

              “He’s a bit shy, Miss…?”

              “Susan,” the woman supplied, sticking out her hand.  Stan shook the offered hand, unleashing the wide, smarmy smile he used as a traveling salesman.

              “Susan.  It’s great to meet you.”  Stan broke off the handshake and patted Ford’s head.  “Like I said, my son here is pretty shy.  Especially in new places.”

              “Oh, that’s right, you don’t look very familiar.  Where are you from?”

              “Vermont.”  Stan wasn’t quite sure why he’d chosen that state, but he went with it.  “Ford and I are visiting my brother.  He lives here.”

              “Isn’t that nice.”

              “Yep.  We don’t get to see him very often, so it’s a treat.  We’re actually here to pick up some groceries for dinner.  Do you know where the bread is?”

              “Of course!  Third aisle.”

              “Thanks.”  Stan winked at Susan, who giggled, waved at Ford, and then exited the store.  Stan let out a soft sigh.  “Now we know where the bread is.  That wasn’t too bad, was it, Ford?”  Stan looked down.  His eyes widened.  The boy that had been clinging to his leg a moment ago was gone.  “Uh, Ford?”  Stan spun in a circle, panic rising like bile in his throat.

              Don’t panic.  Don’t freak out.  Stan swallowed.  He’s still in the store.  Just look for him.  He can’t have gotten far.  Stan began to make his way down the various aisles, fear mounting as each one was distinctly free of twelve-fingered eight-year-olds.  He just finished the canned goods aisle when his ears picked up on a high-pitched voice.

              “But it’s me!”

              Ford.  Stan took off in a sprint, rounding the corner to see Ford talking to a visibly disheveled and disoriented man.  The man smiled weakly at Ford.

              “I told ya, sugar plum, I don’t know who ya are.  And I think I’d remember a lil one as cute as you,” the man said in a thick southern accent.  Stan walked up behind Ford and put a hand on his shoulder.  Ford froze.

              “Sorry, sir,” Stan said through gritted teeth.  Ford had the grace to act abashed.  “My son can get excited.”

              “Oh, that ain’t no problem,” the man said, waving a hand airily.  His hair stuck out in all directions and his clothes were visibly stained and torn.  Stan wasn’t sure what his deal was, but he was glad to see the stranger grab his basket and walk away.

              “You’re lucky I can’t ground you, because if I could, you’d be grounded for a month after that,” Stan ground out once the stranger was gone.  Ford turned around and crossed his arms.

              “I was merely talking to an acquaintance.”

              “You sure?  He didn’t seem to recognize you.”

              “Wh- of course he didn’t recognize me,” Ford scoffed, throwing his arms up in the air.  “I’m eight! The last time I saw him, I was my chronological age.”

              “Why were you trying to get him to recognize you anyways?” Stan asked. “I thought we were gonna be discrete.”

              “Yes, but…”  Ford looked away.  “He was my research partner.  He’s the one best suited for helping me with my situation.”  Ford drooped slightly, like he bore the weight of something.

              Clearly, something happened with Ford and that guy.  But we can talk about it at home.

              “We’re just getting food today,” Stan reminded Ford.  Ford nodded sullenly.  “Tomorrow if you’re up for doing things, we can try to find this guy again.”  Stan held out his hand.  Ford glared at him.  “You ran off. Either you’re holding my hand or I’m holding yours.”  Ford reluctantly took a hold of Stan’s hand.  “By the way, what’s that guy’s name?”

              “Fiddleford.  Fiddleford McGucket.”

----- 

              Despite Stan’s assurance that they would seek out Fiddleford the next day, they didn’t.  They didn’t look the next day, either.  Stan had taken one look at Ford both those days and deemed him too physically weak to go on a search.  Ford found himself unable to protest too vociferously; Stan was right that children weren’t built to run under the conditions Ford had been subjecting himself to as an adult.

              Two weeks had now passed since the initial incident.  Ford sat on the floor in the living room, perusing his journal for any information he might have missed, while Stan folded laundry.

              “Any luck?” Stan asked, neatly folding one of the T-shirts he’d stolen for Ford.  Ford scowled down at the journal.

              “No.  I told you, the only way to make any progress into a cure is to get outside help.”

              “Why?” Stan asked idly.  “I did all the stuff you asked me to do.  Grabbed the ‘data output’ from the portal, found the other blueprints that you hid in the woods for some reason.  How would this Fiddlesticks guy be able to figure out something that you haven’t?” That was a question Ford had been asking himself lately.  Part of him worried that the regression was blocking certain aspects of his mental faculties.  He understood all of his research, which was promising.  But when trying to reverse engineer conclusions he’d made previously, he found himself struggling with the logic behind them.

              It’s like I have all the information I need, but lack the reasoning and logical skill to connect the dots.  Ford realized that Stan had been waiting for an answer.

              “He’s…a very smart man,” Ford said quietly.  “His area of expertise is different than mine, so he might have some different ideas than I do.”

              “Makes sense.”  Stan set aside the folded T-shirt.  “C’mere.” Ford got up and plodded over to Stan. Stan pressed the back of his hand against Ford’s forehead.  “You’re still a bit warm.”  Ford pouted. Last week, Ford had caught what he insisted was a nasty cold, but Stan was convinced was something more insidious.

              Just because I had a slight fever, Stan acted like I was on my deathbed. Granted, I did feel ill and weak, but that’s what colds do!

              “I’m feeling better,” Ford argued.

              “Yeah, and you look better, too.”  Stan sighed.  His hand dropped to his lap.  “But I don’t think you should go running around town looking for Fiddlesticks.”

              “His name is Fiddleford.”

              “Whatever his name is.”  Stan took a pair of pants from the pile of laundry.  “We’re not gonna go on a wild goose chase yet.”

              Dammit, Stan!  Ford had learned by now that if he wanted to get his way, he couldn’t argue.  Stan would immediately shut down and refuse to listen to him.  The trick to successfully wheedling his brother was to do what Stan had mentioned at the beginning.  Weaponize his adorable appearance.  If that’s what I need to do, then I’ll do it.  I remember Fiddleford’s regular haunts.  I can convince Stanley to take me to one.

              “Stanley?”  Ford adopted a high, plaintive tone.  Stan looked up from the clothes.  Ford widened his eyes.  An odd look crossed Stan’s face.  “Could we go to the library today?”

              “Really?  You wanna leave the house?” Stan asked.  Ford nodded vigorously.  He felt his unruly curls bounce.  “You know that whenever we leave the house, you have to pretend to be my son.”

              “Yes.”

              “Okay, I’ll bite.  Why do you wanna leave?”

              “I’m bored,” Ford said.  It came out as a whine without him intending it to.  A small grin appeared on Stan’s face for a second before he stifled it. “You won’t let me do anything.”

              “Yep.”  Stan took another shirt from the hamper.  “Last time you did something, you made a deal with a demon and got turned eight.”  

              “Please, Stanley, I want to pick up some books to read.  Like I said, I’m bored.  I need to occupy my time with something.”

              “Well, you did say the magic word,” Stan said slowly.  “All right, we’ll head out after the laundry’s done.”  Ford crossed his arms.

              “Why is it that you’re suddenly so responsible?  I’ve never seen you do laundry without being threatened first.”

              “I got a kid to look after,” Stan said with a shrug.  “If I fuck up, I don’t just screw things for me, I screw things for you.  I’m done screwin’ things for you.”  He glanced at Ford.  Ford looked away quickly, preventing Stan from seeing his expression.

              “Well, how long do you think you’ll take?” Ford asked, in a carefully measured tone.

              “Dunno.  But it’d go faster if I had help,” Stan said.  Ford huffed again, but sat down on the floor and took a pair of pants from the hamper.

              “I’m not good at folding,” Ford muttered.

              “You’re a physicist.  You’ll figure it out.”

----- 

              The Gravity Falls Public Library was somehow even less like a library than Stan had imagined, which was saying something.  But the second they’d set foot inside, Ford had darted off to the Classics section, leaving Stan alone to wander around.  Stan ambled over to a pile of newspapers and picked up the one on top.  He was glad Ford seemed better after getting sick the week before, but knew that if Ford tried to push himself too hard, he’d end up bedridden again.

              People always said I was the stubborn one.  They were wrong.  We’re both stubborn as all hell.  Stan sighed and dropped the newspaper back onto the pile.  How Mom managed to raise us without tearing all her hair out, I have no idea.  He glanced over at the Classics section.  Letting him run off might not have been a good idea.

              “Please, just listen to me!” Ford’s voice begged.  Stan blanched.

              It definitely wasn’t a good idea.  Stan strode quickly in the direction of the Classics section.  As he approached, he could hear another voice speaking to Ford.

              “Cutie, I am listenin’.  And I think ya have a wonderful imagination.  But we should prob’ly find yer parents, okay?”

              “My parents aren’t-”

              “Ford,” Stan said shortly, finally catching sight of Ford talking to the same person he’d accosted at the grocery store.

              Fiddlesticks, right?  Something like that.  Ford glared at Stan.

              “Not now,” Ford hissed.

              “I told you to stop bothering people.”  Stan walked over to Ford’s side.  He placed a hand on Ford’s shoulder.  “Sorry about him, Mr.…?”

              “McGucket.  Fiddleford McGucket.”

              “Got it.  Sorry about him, Fiddleford.”

              “No problem,” Fiddleford said with a soft chuckle.  “It’s difficult to get upset with eager children.  They’re so excited to tell the world ‘bout every thought that crosses their minds.  It’s rather charmin’ of ‘em.”  Fiddleford looked at Stan.  A strange expression crossed his face.  His gaze became more focused, his eyes roving over Stan’s features.  “If we’re goin’ to be crossin’ paths this frequently, maybe you should tell me your name, too.”

              “Uh, Stan.  Stan Pines.” The effect was immediate. Fiddleford recoiled from him, backing into the shelf behind him.  A few books tumbled to the ground.

              “Pines,” Fiddleford rasped.

              “…Yeah.  That’s- that’s my last name.  Buddy, you all right?”

              “I- that- I knew yer face was familiar.”  Fiddleford kneaded his forehead.  “You wouldn’t happen to be related to that rat bastard Stanford Pines, would ya?”  Stan couldn’t help it.  A small snort slipped out.  Ford scowled at him.

              “He’s my twin brother.”

              “Why didn’t he-” Fiddleford muttered to himself.  He shook his head.  “Never mind.  I guess yer visitin’ him, then?”

              “Technically, yeah.”

              “And you brought yer son.”  Fiddleford shook his head again.  “That weren’t the best idea.  He’s not safe.”  A heavy discomfort began to settle in Stan’s stomach.  “It’d be fer the best if the both of ya left Gravity Falls.”

              “I mean…that’s the plan.  Eventually.”

              “No, do it sooner rather than later,” Fiddleford said firmly.

              “I have to help him with something,” Stan said.  Fiddleford locked his eyes with Stan’s, a sympathetic expression on his face.

              “Speakin’ from experience, the longer ya help him, the worse it ends up bein’ fer you.  Really, you should leave while ya still can.”

              “I- I can’t leave.”

              “Oh, really?”  Fiddleford crossed his arms.  “Why?”

              “Because…”  Stan looked down at Ford.  Ford took the opportunity to step forward.  He took a hold of one of Fiddleford’s hands.

              “Fiddleford, it’s me,” Ford said quietly.  “I’m not Stanley’s son.  I’m- it’s me. Stanford.”  Fiddleford’s jaw dropped.  “There was an accident, and-”

              “I s’ppose you want my help,” Fiddleford said, his voice thick.  “Well, yer a world-class genius, right?  You can figure it out on yer own.”  He pulled his hand out of Ford’s grasp.  “Best of luck to ya.”

              “No, Fiddleford, please,” Ford begged.  “I don’t- I can’t do it on my own.”  Fiddleford now seemed conflicted by Ford’s pleading.  “I’m sorry for everything that I’ve done, but I desperately need your help, I-”  Tears sparkled in the corners of Ford’s eyes.

              Either he’s laying it on extra thick or he actually feels terrible about whatever happened.  Whether Ford was acting or not, it worked.  Fiddleford gently stroked Ford’s hair.

              “Okay,” he said softly.  “Okay. I’ll- I’ll at least hear ya make yer case.  I can’t promise I’ll help, but I’ll listen.”  Ford nodded tearfully.  He leaned against Stan’s leg.  “I took my own car here, so I’ll meet ya back at yer place.”

              “Got it,” Stan said with a nod.  He cleared his throat.  “Um, and thanks.”  Fiddleford stood.  His face hardened.

              “Don’t thank me quite yet.  I said I’ll listen, not that I’ll help.”

              “Either way.  I- we appreciate it.”

              “…Well, I ain’t exactly heartless,” Fiddleford mumbled.  With that, he walked away.  Stan looked at Ford, who was still using his leg as support.

              “You didn’t need more books, did you?” Stan asked.  Ford shot Stan a small grin.  Stan sighed.  “This is what I get for telling you that I could be manipulated by cute kids.”

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Lost Horizon by Nathaniel Farrell

In this review, Jack Parlett ventures through the avenues, grooves and colliding landscapes, fantasies and libidinal economies of Nathaniel Farrell’s Lost Horizon (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019).

> Nathaniel Farrell’s long poem Lost Horizon (2019), which takes as its subject the space of the retail utopia, makes me think of a lot of things. Which is to say that its sense of breadth and abundance – packed full of things and images, traversing vast distances across different landscapes – had me grasping for other reference points, for affinities that might suggest ways of reading it. The pile-up of the opening lines, scattered across the page, offers a glimpse into the ways this poem can get you lost:

The fountain full of coins       the smell of pretzels, print, perfume

formaldehyde in fabrics

                                   brass rails down stairwells      rebar in the pillars

           the underground parking structure – Roman alphabet

                                                                                   Arabic numerals –

                                                                                       (Farrell 2019: 1)

> The mall, scented with the churn of Auntie Anne’s pretzels (say) and the potent fragrances of a nearby department store, is rendered throughout the poem as an archaeological surface, as though the poet’s task were one of excavation. Lost Horizon reminds me, in this sense, of an Anselm Kiefer painting; a maximalist collage blending the industrial and the pastoral, foregrounding the dimensionality of objects that appear ‘found’ within the landscape of the work, like the unsettling use of spindly wires and sticks the painter is known for. Farrell, too, is interested in exteriorising the subterranean, the things that glimmer and protrude, like the ‘coins’ emanating from beneath the water of the fountain, like the chemical compounds found in our clothes. His is a multi-storeyed work, finding ancient linguistic systems in car parks, conferring the quotidian spaces of late capitalism with the dignity of the palimpsest.

> But Farrell’s poem does not settle upon one groove. It unfolds in strange and wrong-footing ways. Although this opening passage would seem to suggest a logic of succession, a list of things you might expect to find in a shopping mall, with an associative momentum driven forward by alliteration, the poem’s larger scheme is one of randomness, a yoking together of any number of images and textures. (My personal favourite: ‘Avocado.       TV as diorama or diocese                   catfish farm     trout hatchery.’) (27). This fragmented structure speaks back to the form of the Surrealist catalogue, or to experiments in automatic writing, and renders them in a distinctly American vernacular, like the New York melee of Frank O’Hara’s long 1953  poem Second Avenue or, more recently, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s 2011 work Metropole (minus the strict iambic rules.)

> Yet where Second Avenue seems to stage a representational gag – in what sense is this poem, characterised by lines like ‘Butter. Lotions. Cries. A glass of ice’ (O’Hara 1995: 149) ‘about’ Second Avenue itself? – the abstraction of Farrell’s purview is already made explicit in his title. Lost Horizon is a work in search of a potentiality that has already been lost, and it goes looking for it in all kinds of places: shopping malls, forests, multiplexes, highways, locales suspended in the poem’s veering between the vitality of the artificial and the natural realm to which it shall one day return. Where a ‘rebarbative’ work like Second Avenue, in Andrea Brady’s words, recoils ‘from sentimentality but also from the reader’ (Brady 2010: 60), Farrell’s poem does the opposite. It homes in upon the way that sentiment might inhere in the spaces and materials of consumption and the faded spectacles of capital. Perhaps this is why, beyond any of the more high-minded comparisons it invites, Lost Horizon makes me think most of all of the town I grew up in.

> It feels a little parochial to compare the scale of Farrell’s Americana with a single town in Buckinghamshire. (He writes in the Acknowledgments that the project ‘emerged from road travel’ and draws upon the imagery of places including ‘St. Louis  and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Fort Wayne’.) Yet shopping malls trade, the poem suggests, in incongruity; they flatten space and time, incorporate the urban, the pastoral and the global, as if the whole world might be incorporated under their ceilings. I realised in navigating this poem that so much of my sense of America, and Americanness as a kind of distant and glamorous imaginary, was mediated through my childhood in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes was, after all, developed with reference to the layout of American cities.

> The area known as Central Milton Keynes (or ‘CMK’) was conceived in the mid-seventies as part of the recently created ‘new town’ in Buckinghamshire, and was officially opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Although ‘CMK’ is a municipal designation – a name for the central zone of the larger Milton Keynes area – it is predominantly a business and retail district. Laid out on a grid, CMK sits somewhere between the ‘downtown’ area of an American city and the out-of-town shopping mall; an assemblage of shopping centres, office buildings and industrial parks, characterised by its distinctive glass-and-steel buildings and an infamous number of roundabouts. Like many British ‘new towns’, Milton Keynes was created with both pragmatic and idealistic aims in mind. On the one hand, it was an overspill project providing an outlet for London’s rising and congested population. On the other, it was to be a new frontier both socially and architecturally; an automobile haven merging green space with the imposing surfaces of the modern city. Today, it looks both futuristic and dated. Or rather, it looks like what the future was once supposed to look like.

> When I tell people I grew up in and around Milton Keynes, it usually prompts one of two responses. The first, most frequent and predictable, is a kind of apologetic nod, a nod to MK’s associations in the national imaginary as a uniquely naff, soulless place. The other (more generous) reaction is a kind of keen and outsize enthusiasm, prompting a conversation about the town’s architectural significance or its peculiar place in British local history as an experiment of urban planning. (There’s also, sometimes, outright judgment, as when on my first day of university a private schoolboy told me that ‘when I think of Milton Keynes I think of scum.’). My feelings about the place fall somewhere in the middle – I’m defensive of it in the face of snobbery, but I also think that the people who find it an area of intellectual interest probably didn’t grow up there. Until the opening of the recently re-developed Milton Keynes Gallery, which was reported widely in the national press, CMK lacked a culture of its own, and it still remains best known as a cornucopia of brand names and chain restaurants.

> And yet I can’t pretend that some part of me doesn’t kind of love it. Farrell’s work pays attention to the embarrassment one might feel about being from a place like Milton Keynes, or rather the embarrassment in our attachments to such a place. I still desire to rediscover the uniquely artificial pleasures of the shopping mall. Against my better judgments, I find myself beguiled again by CMK’s performance of grandeur, its strange radiance. Or perhaps its that my memories of childhood and adolescence are shot through, like an off-brand Lorde song, with its suburban framework, its constellation of uniquely named places like The Point, a red steel pyramid housing the UK’s first multiplex cinema when it opened in 1985, or the pastoral-sounding Midsummer Place, an extension of the shopping centre built around an oak tree, which people still refer to today as the ‘new bit.’ (It was opened at the start of the millennium and has been bought out by the Intu franchise. The tree is no more.)

> The speaker of Lost Horizon similarly figures the retail landscape as a site of affective and libidinal attachments, less a utopic horizon than a space where experience is packaged and backlit, where material capitalism might dupe us into utopic thinking, where you can hear ‘the beat of an unmoored heart in the duty-free shop’ (Farrell: 70). (The term retail therapy is particularly apt.) This speaker has a mobile erotic attention; reflects on the bulge of a male model, spots ‘a sign for Hooter’s at the Colonial Williamsburg exit / the owl’s eyes made to look like nipples’ (24) and appears to cruise, ‘wait[ing] at the bathrooms; / they smell of feces and orange cleanser / Yankee Candle’ (23). Nature, after all, will make its return, and the most pristine spaces must co-mingle with muck, human and otherwise. An ominous refrain towards the beginning of the poem - ‘A cellphone glows in a back pocket’ (9) - signals the mall’s impending obsolescence, its succumbing to the space of the virtual, and this in turn informs the poem’s ecological fixation, its avalanche of natural elements and catastrophic tableaux. Because this is what happens to shopping malls, eventually, as shown in the work of photojournalist Seph Lawless. Lawless’s portraits of abandoned shopping malls in economically precarious parts of America, malls now overgrown with vegetation, look post-apocalyptic, like a contemporary sci-fi iteration of the way Walter Benjamin conceptualised the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century; as repositories, in part, for the lost dreams of prosperity.

> The shopping area of Central Milton Keynes is now Grade II-listed by Historic England, and it is renowned for its extensive greenery, its line of trees that populate the grid. (The area as a whole boasts 22 million trees and shrubs.) The integration of the green and sub(urban) landscape is something that makes the centre of Milton Keynes more desirable and sustainable, a nod to the land’s past. But you could look at it another way; not as a symbol of origin, but of man-made transience. Whatever shiny promises the retail utopia makes, it is built, Farrell’s dizzying poem suggests, to one day succumb to an unknowable horizon, where the trees will be ‘all that remain of home’ (3).

References:

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press)

Brady, Andrea. 2011. ‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue.’ Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). 59-70

Farrell, Nathaniel. 2019. Lost Horizon (Ugly Duckling Presse)

O’Brien, Geoffrey G. 2011. Metropole (Berkeley: University of California Press)

O’Hara, Frank. 1995. Collected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press)

~

Lost Horizon is now available via Ugly Duckling Presse.

~

Text and Image: Jack Parlett

Published: 19/6/20

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Londerland Bloodlines -- Tower Assault

Hey, I said this AU was on my mind -- and with the release of the newest (pre-alpha, admittedly) gameplay trailer for Bloodlines 2, that's unlikely to change anytime soon. So -- let's have some fic! :D Today's offering was inspired by a previous “updating the verse” post I made, where I talked about a change I thought of regarding Alice's final assault on LaCroix's tower -- rather than going in the front door and fighting her way through all those guards, she manages to get herself some climbing equipment and scales the damn building while Obfuscated. As you might imagine, this is the last thing LaCroix is expecting when he tells his elite guards (and Chunk, here called Officer Norris because that’s his voice actor’s name) to watch out for her. . .

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

"Officer Norris? Has there been any sign of our – miscreant?"

"Uh, no, Mr. LaCroix!" Norris chirped over the intercom. "Haven't seen hide nor hair of her! Promise I'll let you know the moment she comes by."

"Very good, Officer Norris. Thank you."

"Uh, Mr. LaCroix?" Norris got out before he could release the button. "Not to, you know, pry into stuff that ain't my business, but – why is it you want me to keep her out all of a sudden? You weren't really clear on that before. And us in the security business – well, it's important we get our facts straight, ya know?"

"She betrayed me, Officer Norris," LaCroix replied, letting the words roll off his tongue with silver smoothness. Not that he needed to waste such talents on Norris, but – practice. "She betrayed quite a lot of people, actually. She's been selling secrets to other parties, making deals with unsavory sorts. . .and I have reason to believe she's recently caused the death of a potential business partner of mine."

"Oh wow! That is – never would have thought it of her! She's always seemed like a bit of a tough cookie, but the kind with a creamy center, you know? All molten chocolate and–"

"Focus, Officer Norris," LaCroix said, rolling his eyes. Mortals and their obsession with food. His eyes flicked over to the sarcophagus. Then again – I know what it's like to anticipate a meal.

"Yeah, sorry, Mr. LaCroix. Er – so, if Alice is this dangerous, shouldn't we, you know, call proper 9-1-1 and all that? I got some buddies in the call center–"

"I assure you that all the appropriate measures have already been taken," LaCroix cut in before Norris could go on another ramble about his "cop friends." "There is no way Miss Liddell is leaving this city without facing justice for her crimes. If she does come here, you have my full authorization to use lethal force."

"Right you are, Mr. LaCroix." Norris sighed. "Hope it doesn't come to that, though. Man, and here's me, thinking she's a pretty sweet girl once you get to know her. . ."

"The cruelest wolf can mimic the friendliest dog, Officer Norris. Remember that."

"Sure will, Mr. LaCroix. And you can call me Chunk, you know!"

LaCroix winced. "Given our relationship, Officer Norris, I don't think that's appropriate."

"Oh, yeah, yeah. . .well, anyway. I'll give you a call moment I see her."

"Thank you, Officer Norris." LaCroix released the intercom button, leaning back with a sigh. "To think I employ someone like that," he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Now that Bach's little group has been – disbanded, I should give him his walking papers." He smirked, one fang peeping through his lips. "Though I suppose it doesn't really matter, does it? Not with what's in our future."

Melech nodded shortly, then glanced at him, eyes questioning. "Oh, she'll come," LaCroix said, steepling his fingers in front of him. "She will most definitely come. That rabblerouser Jack will have told her by now I'm responsible for all her woes. And has she not made it very clear, during our last few meetings, that she wished our – alliance, shall we say, to be at an end? The girl is a Brujah trapped in a Malkavian skin. She must be itching for a chance to take out her temper on me, and damn the consequences."

Melech tilted his head, lips slightly pursed. "Yes, I called the Blood Hunt, but would you trust the average Brujah or Gangrel on the street to take her out?" LaCroix responded, looking up into that stony face. "After the miracles she's committed? May I remind you that she has destroyed both the local chapter of the Society of Leopold – including one of my personal enemies – and the heart of the Los Angeles Sabbat? Tasks that were beyond your capabilities? And there was that news report the other evening, of the massive wolf found crushed to death in the Griffith Observatory. Somehow, I doubt that was the work of Nines Rodriguez – though it still worries me that we can't confirm his Final Death." He sighed, then waved a hand. "Well, I suppose if he does turn up alive – so to speak – it will make the Anarchs happy. And so far they seem willing to believe that Alice has thrown her lot in with Ming Xiao and her nest of snakes. So long as they remain enraged enough to drive those ridiculous excuses for foreign vampires out of my city, I shall be content. And then. . ." He looked again at the sarcophagus, anticipation clinging to its every chip and crack. "Then we will make plans accordingly."

He pushed back his chair and stood up, walking with lazy grace to his favorite spot in front of the window. Los Angeles stretched out before him, twinkling in the dark. He reached out, longing to scoop it up and capture it in his fist. "A shame, really – she could have had it all," he mumbled, flexing his fingers. "I was just beginning to realize her worth as an agent. To survive everything she did, to accomplish so many difficult tasks as a mere fledgling. . .I will give Fish this – he picked someone worthy of being an eighth-generation vampire. If she'd only been a bit more deferential, a bit less – well, her. . .we could have done amazing things together."

Melech rumbled an agreement. LaCroix sighed. "But, of course, she refused to cooperate. To let her full potential grow under my guidance. To accept the wisdom of her elders and betters. No, she had to go it on her own – to forge down the path of the fool and the malcontent." He chuckled briefly. "At least I have the pleasure of knowing that the Anarchs don't trust her either. From what I've heard, she had an early falling-out with Nines, and the rest of them find her as irritating as I do." His brow furrowed briefly. "Perhaps we really did drive her to the Kue-jin. . .no, she's too smart for that. She'd know they'd never actually accept her." He laughed again, a little louder. "What a silly girl, to reject any and all that could help her! She must feel quite alone on those streets." He leaned toward the window, drinking in his city with his eyes, running his tongue over his fangs. "An apt punishment for the hubris of the newborn."

"God, you love the sound of your own voice, don't you?"

LaCroix recoiled backwards, the scream of a little girl ripping itself from his throat. On the other side of the glass, Alice rolled her eyes, adjusting the harness she wore. "As if getting up this bloody tower wasn't grueling enough," she continued, bracing her legs on either side of the window frame. "What exactly are you compensating for? You're not that short, and I have it on decent authority that your interest in your manly bits should have waned with the Embrace." She shrugged, bending her knees and adjusting her grip on her rope. "I'll leave the question for the primogen to debate. Right now – for putting up with all your posturing and other various pieces of bullshit, I believe you owe me your life. In the most direct sense possible."

With that, she pushed off, sailing into the air – then came rushing back, thickly-booted feet held out in front of her. LaCroix scrambled to safety under his desk as the window shattered, sending shards of glass flying. Melech raised his massive sword to shield himself as Alice rolled to a stop. "Ah – gah – GET HER!" LaCroix managed to shriek, waving one arm wildly in her direction.

His sheriff, fortunately, was quick to comply. He flung aside his sword and coat, spreading his arms wide as he called up on his dark Disciplines. Moments later, his human form morphed and twisted, stretching itself into the terrible gigantic bat LaCroix had only seen twice before. Alice gaped, eyes wide, one hand on her harness's release. "What–"

Melech shrieked at her and flung himself into the air. His talons locked around her arms, dragging her back out the window and snapping the harness like it wasn't even there. "Yes – NO!" LaCroix cried after him, suddenly conscious of the incredible violation of the Masquerade. Too visible, much too visible – but she couldn't be allowed to survive this night – "The roof!" he screamed. "Take her to the roof!"

Melech squealed and wheeled around, dragging his dumbfounded passenger up to the highest point of Venture Tower. LaCroix huddled under his desk, arms around his knees, trying to control his trembling body. It's all right, he told himself firmly. It's all right. Melech will take care of her on the roof, and we'll let the morning sun dispose of the corpse. And – and we'll come up with an appropriate story for the masses later. An – an advertising gimmick gone wrong. A Batman cosplayer gone mad. Some sort of – of mass hallucination from swamp gas carried on the wind. We'll make it right. We'll find the key. And I will never have to worry about any of this ever again.

. . .God, I hope he wins that fight.

[owlespresso]

Clarity #2

Also on my ao3. Commissions are open. Info is HERE. My ko-fi is also open for donations, HERE.

Every now and then, when you close your eyes, you see faint fragments of the past. Last night, on your way home, you saw the doctors smiling at you and congratulating you when you received your diagnosis as an omega. You were eleven. Or twelve. That was seven years ago, but it’s still pretty vivid in your head. 

You don’t even remember what time it was, last night. You talked to the police about the assault that happened, went through some hysterics to convince them that you were only a witness, and asked about the kid that got attacked. You can’t really remember too much of what he looked like. But that doesn’t really matter to you.

What does matter is the vending machine that’s withholding your bag of chips from you. You really hate waking up in the morning and you hate taking the subway to your college, but they’re all necessary evils. Because life is pay-to-play and in order to get a well-paying job, you need to get an education. No matter how much it makes you feel like driving a stake through your skull. You hate the smog of scents that cloud you whenever you get into one of the cars. You hate a lot of things, really. So you try to make everything worth it by treating yourself every now and then.

The vending machine, nestled next to the entrance of one of the local high schools, doesn’t seem to think you deserve the snack you paid for with your hard-earned change. The crinkled plastic package is pressed up against the glass, taunting you. You’ve tapped it twice, now. You have ten minutes to get to class and it’s a five minute walk to campus. You reckon you can figure this out in a calm, orderly fashion.

But really, why would you?

You have feet that you can use for kicking. That in itself is reason enough to kick things. Maybe it’s your anger making you irrational or your unusual lust for the destruction of public property. Your feet kick against the machine, steel-toed boots leaving scratches and marks as passerby (likely students) give you weird looks. The sound of metal against metal rings out in the nearby street as you beat the machine to the best of your ability, causing it to shake.

Fuck you! Crappy fucking ass machine!! Give it to me!

It’s a pretty good way to get your anger out before class. Usually you settle for crying in the shower, but you woke up a little too late for that.

Fucking alarm clock! Fuck! Fuck!

A hand on your shoulder jolts you out of the red haze of anger that’s overtaken you. You jump, eyes wide as you whirl around to face a young man who’s wearing a pretty shocked expression. He looks pretty silly, with his wide eyes and raised eyebrows. 

You’d poke a fun at him, but it’s pretty brave of him to march up to someone so destructive and angry. People are scared of what they don’t understand or don’t know, so you don’t often get approached when you pull stunts like this. You’re taking suppressants, but the scent of your anger is so potent that passerby can likely detect it. Maybe that’s why. Though, you’re pretty sure you’ve seen this guy before…

“Oh!” The realization hits you, “You’re that little guy that was getting mugged yesterday, right?” Looking at him now, “little guy” isn’t really the correct term to use. He’s not the tallest person around, but he towers over you nonetheless. Still, he looked pretty little when he was crouched on the ground, expression painted pale with fear. “You doing alright?” From the uniform, you guess he’s a student at the school the vending machine is next to.

“Yeah…” He doesn’t seem much for conversation. Not that you can blame him. You cross your arms and regard him with a sharp stare. As much as you’d like to stick around and play nice, you really can’t afford to waste time. “Thank you… for that. I hope you’re alright.” He’s cute, though? His hair is long, worn in a messily tied bun with some strands still hanging out. His widdle sweater vest is so cute, too!

“I’m fine. It’s not the first time I’ve had to use some elbow grease,” You declare, leaning up against the damaged machine. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He answers, and promptly goes quiet. You two stand there and stare at each other. You wonder why he isn’t walking away. That’s usually what people do after ending a conversation, but he doesn’t seem to be the most socially apt person. Does he want something else? “What are you... doing?”

“Huh?” You raise your eyebrows, expression irritated. It sounds like he’s challenging you, even though he’s been nothing but polite this entire conversation. All it takes is for him to gesture to the machine for you to realize what he means. “My chips wouldn’t come out. I got mad.” It doesn’t really justify the damage, but you’re too tired to properly reason.

“Oh.” You’re about to tell him to screw off and stop wasting your time, but he takes a broad step towards you. That alone has you bristling, eyes wide and expression curled into a snarl. His sudden closeness combined with the way he looms over you isn’t doing him any favors, either. You’d say he means no harm, but you’ve just met this kid and know not to judge a book by its cover. The sudden change in your scent makes him recoil. You certainly don’t like being an omega, but it has its perks. Alphas and betas always get a little shaken whenever you give a strong, distressed scent. It’s useful when you need to defend yourself. “Sorry. I was going to buy something.”

Oh. Well, now you feel a little silly for jumping to conclusions. Pride damaged, you shuffle out of the way and watch him slide a crisp bill into the machine, his nimble fingers pressing the buttons… He buys the exact same chips you wanted and you want to smite him for doing it right in front of you. It feels like he’s gloating, feels really damn smug of him. You ready a scathing remark (inwardly gloating about how you’re gonna verbally eviscerate this guy) as he bends down to grab the two bags of chips. But he turns to you and holds them out, rendering you silent. You blink, dumbfounded.

Oh. Now you feel even more silly. What the fuck.

“Thank you…?” People don’t do really nice things for you often, and that shows in your reply. He nods and turns to walk off, but you reach out and grab his sleeve, prompting him to look back at you, “What’s your name? Can I see you again?”

Not the smoothest way to start off. You’re not really interested in dating, but you want to get to know the kid (who is probably only a year younger than you are) and maybe become friends. Really. How are you supposed to phrase this kind of thing? Asking for contact information is always awkward and the awkwardness is stifling. It kills your vibes. Ruins your groove.

“Hey. I thought you were just a weird kid a few seconds ago, but I’m going to need your name and your phone number. Right now.” Is what you would say if you were being completely honest. But that just doesn’t work! Not at all!

“Sure. My name is Kozume Kenma…” He sifts through his pockets until he withdraws a sleek smartphone. Relief washes over you. At least he doesn’t think I’m a fucking weirdo. You fetch your own phone and hastily introduce yourself, realizing that you’ve spent four of your ten minutes talking to him. After exchanging numbers, you say a hurried goodbye and dash down the street, only hoping that no one called the cops on you for breaking the vending machine next to Nekoma Academy.

Kenma Kozume is a third year at Nekoma Academy, you soon find out. Much to your surprise, he sends the first text. You get it as you’re on the subway ride home.

Hi.

He’s not much of a talker. You don’t mind. You spent the next half-hour having a semi-active conversation with him, learning that he likes video games and plays on the volleyball team. He learns that you attend one of the colleges close to Nekoma, but doesn’t get much else out of you. You ask him if he wants to hang out tomorrow. He agrees.

It’s a week later and you’ve learned several more things about your new friend. You’ve hung out a few times and he’s gotten more talkative. He’s a low energy guy, but that works out pretty well for you. You don’t really like really energetic people. They’re draining to deal with.

You learn that he has a friend who attends the same college as you and is on the volleyball team. Kuroo Tetsurou. The name sounds familiar but you’ve never met him. You think it over as you sit on a bench outside of a fancy restaurant, waiting for Kenma to show up. It’ll probably be another trip to the arcade, but you don’t mind that.

You busy yourself with your phone, playing Neko Atsume and checking on various social apps. It’s rare of you to make friends so easily, even though you’re not sure if you can call Kenma a friend or not. But you don’t really hang out with people outside of school. Sure, you get along alright with classmates, but you don’t have anyone close to you. It’s kind of a downer. But you’re busy and you have things to do. It’s also difficult for you to really trust betas and alphas, given the assumptions people usually make about you because of your diagnosis.

You refer to being an omega as a diagnosis, because that’s all it is to you. A disease. Something that’s always dragged you down and held you back.

“Hey.” Kenma’s quiet voice breaks you from your negative thoughts.

“Hiya!” You pop up from your seat and give him a meager smile, “Ready to go? You wanted to head to one of the arcades, right?” He nods, and your destination is set. The arcade isn’t too far away. In fact, it’s pretty close to Nekoma. The walk is short, so it’s not too bad.

“So, did you see that new trailer for Super Smash Bros?” You inquire. It’s only been a week but you’ve learned that small talk doesn’t really get you anywhere.

The short walk to the arcade is spent talking about video gaming news and brief details about Kuroo Tetsurou. It’s not too much, but Kenma mentions him in brief instances pretty often. The streets aren’t too crowded, much to your relief. Bustling, metropolitan areas kind of suck when you’re trying to get somewhere fast. 

The arcade is only a block away, but it’s come to be a familiar site to you. Kenma’s eyes light up as the two of you enter, and you think it’s kind of cute. He always gets so excited when he sees something he likes, no matter how many times he’s seen it before. This type of enthusiasm is rare from him, so you don’t remark on it, knowing he might get self-conscious.

Yeah, you’re pretty good at reading people.

“Oh. I should go to the ATM,” Most of the machines have coin slots. You’ve come prepared for that, but it appears Kenma hasn’t.

“I’ll wait over here. Take your time.” You assure him, and he scampers off, leaving you to your own devices.

You sweep your gaze across the dimmed area, roaming over the fluorescent screens and listening the beeps and artificial noises that the machines make. It’s a Friday afternoon, so it’s starting to get crowded. Students from various schools often come here after classes, because it’s so close and also pretty big.

“Hey, are you here alone?” A masculine voice rings out, prompting you to look up. There’s a tall guy in front of you, and you immediately don’t like the looks of him. He wears a smile that’s bordering on smug and is much too close to you, forcing you to take in his scent and acknowledge his presence.

“No.” Is all you say in response, hoping he’ll get the clue and leave you be.

“Really? What a shame,” He drawls. “Bet I could show you a better time than anyone else you’re here with, sweetheart.” Why do guys think that calling you demeaning petnames will help convince you? Great. You called me sweetheart. I’m totally into you, now. His languid remark is enough to piss you off. Your temper is usually pretty short when it comes to things like this.

“Leave me alone.” You don’t waste any time trying to debate it with him. His eyebrows furrow in an aggravated manner. Alphas usually get pretty pissed when you tell them that you’re not obligated to pay attention to them. It’s that gross sense of entitlement that really irritates you.

“C’mon, don’t be like that. We could have a good time,” It’s not like he’s said anything directly insulting to you, but he reaches out as he says that and you find that your patience has run out. Your hand snaps onto his wrist and you slip behind him with a nimble step, twisting his hand and arm back at a ridiculously uncomfortable angle, “What the hell!? C’mon, I was just talking to you! All you omegas are so sensitive—” Your grip tightens and you pull, letting him know that you can hurt him even more, “Ow! Ow! Okay, okay!” He snaps and you let him go. He stumbles backwards, regarding you with a venomous glare.

Now, there are eyes on you. Other passerby are watching the interaction with rapt attention. Multiple people have fixed their disapproving gazes on the alpha in front of you, letting you (and him) know that there will be consequences if he takes further action. You despise the stereotyping of omegas as weak, but you know that it’s a useful tool when in situations such as these. He skulks backwards, rubbing his wrist and muttering derogatory comments about you underneath his breath.

A faint murmur of your name draws your attention and you turn around to see Kenma. His hands are in his pockets and his gaze is stuck to the floor. His posture is stiff and his shoulders are rigid. He looks uncomfortable, likely having witnessed the entire exchange.

“Sorry.” He speaks before you get the chance to. “I should have stepped in.”

He’s a sweet kid, behind all that awkwardness. You shake your head with a small smile.

“It’s alright, Kenma. I don’t mind,” You soothe and his shoulders relax. You’re glad that he believes you when you try to comfort him. He’s reserved, but emotionally open in ways that you sealed off years ago, “I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.” He probably has a natural urge to want to help you, one that’s wired into his DNA. 

But humankind has come far from the backwards species they once were. They have a far way to go. But that doesn’t change the fact that you can handle yourself. You have pepper spray in your pockets and an iron pocket tucked into your jacket. The fact that you need to protect yourself to vigilantly is yet another sigh that mankind has a long way to go before they’re a perfect species.

Still, you’re allowed to take pride in yourself. Or the brief parts of yourself that you can actually stand.

You don’t need anyone to protect you. Or help you. You don’t need anyone.

You’ve only known Kenma for a week and you know that you’d be stricken with horrible grief if he was somehow taken away from you. (And that scares you more than anything)

But you don’t need anyone.

[soulsavvi]

Pondering Death as a Spiritual Practice

Pondering Death as a Spiritual Practice

Death...this word can instill an instant fear and recoil in many people.  In society, talking about death is said to be 'morbid', but what about if not talking about death was actually what was morbid?  The dictionary says morbid means "an abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease."  Instead, I'm proposing here that speaking about death is healthy, and avoiding the issue of death is unhealthy - to our emotional and mental health, not to mention spiritual. Since I can remember I was intrigued by the rebirth cycle of life, especially stories I heard as a little girl of people who had remembered their previous lifetimes. I recall one of a young boy who took his current family to a house where he said he had lived in his previous lifetime, and sure enough the people in that house said they had lost a son, and the whole story seemed to fit.  Later, I started reading books and watching videos about what happens after we die and people's near death experiences (NDEs).  My fascination with death was and is not morbid, but rather the opposite - it's an impetus to understand the nature of life, this very thing we are living in this moment now....and who we are and what truth is.  Intuitively I felt that to avoid facing that seemingly final event, was to understand a part of the whole only. Many people are not able to broach the subject of death, even as they lie on their own death bed.  It seems death has become such a loaded subject and triggers our deepest fears, that discussing the subject means we must face these fears.  This is of course hard to do, especially if physical pain and ill health might be taking most of the energy, leaving emotional and mental resources low. That's why it is vital to consider - and revise as we feel guided to - our views of death before we get to that stage.  And what is in our heart and mind the moment of our death is critical to what happens as we move on from our body and mind into the spirit world as soul.  If we remain in a state of acute fear and distress then the passage of the soul will be harder. Just over a year ago my father passed away - or as I prefer to say - he left his body.  He had had several health problems for many years before.  Death could have visited him at many points during his health issues, and was coming closer and closer all the time.  I remember asking him one day during this period whether he wondered about what would happen after death.   I wanted in some way to get closer to him, to have a real discussion about this impending event that was around the corner for him, maybe to be a support if I could; I was interested in what my father felt about death.  He wasn't ready to discuss such a topic and he shut down the conversation.   I realized it was a no-go area. I definitely feel that Dad is still around as opposed to not being in existence at all which many people wish to believe occurs after death.  Many wish to think that after death they are going to be nothing, that they will just fizzle out and simply won't be - as if they can do what they like in life because 'it won't matter after I'm gone - I won't know.'  But this is not how it works.  It is not possible to go from being a human being with all the complexities to a big nothing after death.  The universe cannot and does not work that way.  Energy created must be balanced.  Existence cannot become non-existence, for everything is alive.  And everything is energy.  There is nothing in the universe that is really nothing, for everything is energy, and energy is something.   Even the void, nothingness, emptiness that are experienced along the spiritual awakening journey, are something.  It's a full emptiness.  This Source Consciousness is our ultimate and common DNA, and it cannot be destroyed.  But it can and does take on shapes and forms that give rise to a perception of apparent existence, and death is but the transition from one apparent form to the cessation of that form, when we exist in a formless, but nonetheless conscious state. Conversely, some people are afraid that after death there is indeed a big black nothing, and want to be assured that they will still be.  To those people I say read what the vedas say, or other spiritual materials, also NDE information.  There is a vast amount of information that can be accessed about life after death. And what of the non-dual path of rising up out of the illusory self into the bliss of Oneness, vis-a-vis death and what happens after it?  Union with God is the ultimate goal,  and one where we give up all individuality and do not take on incarnations anymore...but this is not an easy thing, it is not easy to get off the death-rebirth cycle.  I believe there is much karma to balance for most of us here on this planet.  This may or may not be possible to balance in this lifetime. Every creature in the universe is subject to rebirth, Arjuna, except the one who is united with me. - Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita

It is a useful exercise to get prepared for death by pondering it and working on unraveling and releasing fears and wishful beliefs about the subject - a deeply healing spiritual practice. Then the knowledge from deep within us can be made know to us - that we are eternal souls, and this soul is what continues to live after our body dies.   For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. - Bhagavad Gita 2:20 I heard an apt metaphor recently (sorry unable to recall the source) of death.  There is a play taking place and one of the actors decides halfway to simply walk out of his part and the play, and leaves the building.  The remaining actors in the play get upset. But in reality he has only left the building. Annie Besant said in her book 'Death- And After?' (you can read a free copy online from this page): " And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive, because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory." Interestingly, it was Sri Ramana Maharshi's dwelling on the question of death and his fear, that triggered his Self-realization, as he describes: The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now that death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies . . . But with the death of the body am I dead? Is the body I? . . . The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly. . . From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.” I hope that this post has been of interest and not too morbid : )  I welcome any views you may wish to share on this subject. Namaste,

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[moviesihaveseenbeforeiamdea-blog]

#810 The Thin Blue Line

Source

Released: August 25, 1988

Directed by: Errol Morris

Written by: Errol Morris

Starring: Randall Adams, David Harris

Had I Seen it Before? No

A Fun Anecdote Before We Fall Into Despair: Morris met Werner Herzog while he (Morris) was planning a movie about serial killer Ed Gein. Morris asked Herzog for his help in digging up the grave of Gein’s mother. Herzog showed up at the designated time of the plan, but Morris flaked. This led to a long series of events with Herzog questioning whether Morris could follow through anything, and led to a bet that if Morris finished his debut film, Gates of Heaven, Herzog would eat his own shoe. Morris finished the film, and the subsequent result was that we now have a documentary called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. 

There is a lot of unique power in a documentary, and they are probably my favorite genre of film. I’ve talked about in the past few entries to some degree about my belief in how a work of art creates an emotional truth using a false construction and argues emotionally throughout. Documentaries still very much fall in line with this, but they are grounded in a more intellectual structure by nature and present their case often in more formal, distant terms. Their arguments are often logical in a way that fictional films would be ill-suited to convey. Documentaries like Herzog’s Into the Abyss single-handedly reversed my opinion on the death penalty, turning me from a tepid supporter to a full-throated critic with its depiction of the process as a complete loss of time and humanity from everyone involved, from the victim of the condemned to the condemned himself to the executioner. Documentaries have a power, and it’s one that when used effectively, is unrivaled. 

Although Morris himself disputed the label of documentary for his breakout effort The Thin Blue Line, it’s not unreasonable to understand the massive impact on documentaries and documentarians that this film would have. Maybe Morris shirked the label of a documentary because of its connotations with a static, disinterested viewpoint which tend to make up a good bulk of the genre up to the making of this movie, with few exceptions. 

Among Morris’s innovations to the field he desperately wants to avoid being identified with is the hyperfocus on one criminal case of a man of no importance, the recreated scenes from the crime based on witness testimonies and court documents, and the dramatic flair brought by Phillip Glass’s intimidating score. Few if any introductions are made to the subjects in the speaker that aren’t said by the speakers themselves. There are no name cards or cutesy set-ups. Voices simply start speaking into the void of the camera, doing their best to present themselves as they want to be seen. 

All of these characteristics of The Thin Blue Line can be found in productions like Sara Koenig’s Serial podcast, Netflix’s Making a Murderer, or HBO’s The Jinx. There is a mutual exchange with one of Morris’s influencers, Werner Herzog, whose monomaniacal impulses are present but subdued in Morris’s own work. There is a legacy that this film has, and with good reason. 

Randall Adams, the wrongfully convicted (Source)

Morris does an excellent job of maintaining the structure of the narrative, pushing the story through its ins and outs and never overtly giving way to one definitive interpretation of an event until the moment when you’ve been made most impressionable. It’s then that Morris strikes in with what feels like an objective realization but is, on closer inspection, editorial speculation channeled through his subjects. It’s a myopic view to assume that documentaries are free of any subjective bias simply because they rely on what should “objective” facts like testimony, paperwork, and educated guesses. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. And Morris knows it. 

Randall Adams is a man entirely sympathetic to Morris and, by extension, the viewer. As he narrates his version of the events, he does not hedge, waiver, or contradict himself. His body language is constrained, respectful, and his eyes plead with Morris and the camera to believe him. At one point, Adams recalls watching an episode of the Carol Burnett show in his motel room at a time which would preclude him from the possibility of the murder of Officer Woods, and a later image Morris includes in the movie confirms that the Carol Burnett show was indeed airing at the time Adams claimed he was watching it. It’s a small detail, but in a case who penalty is death, it’s the small details that Adams’s story will live or die by. 

And just as interesting is the way in which Morris portrays Dallas. A place long known colloquially as “The City of Hate,” Morris paints Dallas through his interviews with the people who live about it as a city of barely-restrained contempt and rage, all too willing to devour the innocent like Adams. Adams himself recalls a member of his family remarking that if there ever was a Hell on earth, it’s Dallas, Texas. I’m not sure if that descriptor is still apt today. It’s been nearly thirty years since The Thin Blue Line was released, but it’s only been about a year since the city was the center of a series of police killings that happened in any already fraught racial and political climate. Morris prominently features Vidor, a small town outside Dallas where Davis Harris hailed from, and a regional center for the Ku Klux Klan, the kind of town that isn’t simply tolerating the Klan but is made up of it. 

Adams is positioned as someone swallowed up the inevitability of tragedy that occurs from a place as hateful and entrenched as Dallas. Adams may have been dumb in hanging out with a clearly-dangerous sixteen-year-old, but you can’t fault the man for wanting any kind of trouble. He didn’t. It found him anyway. 

Officer Mark Woods, the victim (Source)

There is a certain amount of pointlessness that seems to be recognized by Morris in which subjects he chooses to include in the movie. The prosecutor who brought the case against Adams declined to participate in the movie, but many of the law enforcement officers and the presiding judge both chime in and reveal a sentiment that they were always pushing for how they should resolve the murder of a police officer so that it would carry through to a cathartic conclusion. At no point does there seem to be any genuine doubt from the people responsible for condemning an innocent man to death. Adams himself notes that it seemed to him throughout some of the judicial processes it felt obvious that the question of his innocence was entirely irrelevant, the only thing that mattered is how and when they could kill him. 

One of the people responsible for Adams receiving the death sentence is a psychiatrist named Dr. Grigson, who is notable in that this whole movie originally started out as an investigation into his career. Known as “Doctor Death,” Dr. Grigson was a psychiatrist frequently used in cases where the possible sentence could include death to perform evaluations on the defendants. Encouraged by the prosecution, Doctor Death would invariably claim that if the defendant were to be released, he would murder again. It was only when Morris met Adams as a result of this initial investigation did he realize that Adams was not a danger and that his trial was likely a miscarriage of justice. 

There are stories like this throughout. Witnesses with something to gain, inconsistent testimony used like a bludgeon against Adams’s consistent defense, Officer Woods’s partner being near-useless in her description of what happened, and David Ray Harris’s knowing demeanor about what really happened that night all show a judicial system that got the result it wanted and not the result it should’ve worked for. 

It’s unnerving to think how quickly your life can be seized from you in the name of justice. We know this. I know this. The trade-off we make is to give a privileged few the ability to take from us what we most privilege in our own lives. This is one of the cornerstones of a civil society. We do this in the hopes that the system will be near-infallible, but we all know that it isn’t. Even if there is no injustice committed against us by the state, we are all at aware of at least one instance in our lives when someone we knew or someone we saw was denigrated and humiliated by a system we all tacitly endorse, and whose misapplication is never taken as seriously by us as it should. 

David Ray Harris, the likely murderer (Source)

This movie is often remarked on for its sense of activism, which is maybe more explanatory for why Morris recoiled at the idea of marketing it as a documentary. There’s an inherent bias towards structure and anticipation of a particular kind of argument once you label a film with a well-recognized genre, and something affixed with a generic label can live and die by how well the movie fits in with audiences’ expectations (see: The Cabin in the Woods and the misplaced disdain that movie gets from people claiming it isn’t “scary” enough for a horror film). It’s the same logic that led Jon Stewart to repeatedly denounce The Daily Show as a news program. 

I believe Morris’s aversion the documentary label is to shed the responsibility that might come with claiming to be a documentary. Purists might take issue with The Thin Blue Line for its artistic ambitions and the creative liberties it takes with the story, and for Morris, the point isn’t even to be a part of cinematic movement tied to a form, he wants to send a message. Morris, sight unseen, ignores the conventions of the documentary and positions his film as a deeply-researched, deeply political work that carries a chip on its shoulder and an ideology in its heart. 

But I think it would be a misunderstanding of Morris’s intent and the movie’s construction to claim that The Thin Blue Line is interested in heroes and villains Morris makes no particular point to paint Harris as evil, only as the likely murderer. It never lionizes Adams, either, instead of showing him for what he was: an aimless guy going nowhere fast, who got caught up in a sequence of events he never had any influence over. 

Morris is steadfast in an unsentimental pursuit of the truth, something which inadvertently positions him as a sort of antiparallel to the sins of the state actors who simply wanted a result in condemning and executing Adams. While Morris’s aim is undoubtedly nobler in his desire to find the truth of the matter, both Morris and the men who botched a case so badly that Morris had to become involved were both interested in a sort of rational explanation for the world that is outside their control. Morris might have been right about Adams’s innocence, but his intuition and judgment came from a place of the same futility he supposedly condemns: that of a man trying to impose how he’d like the world to be in place of how it is. If only that mentality more often led to the Randall Adamses of the world being exonerated rather than convicted in the first place. 

Final thoughts:

Randall Adams had his case reviewed as a result of this movie, and eventually had his verdict overturned and was released when the prosecution declined to press for a re-trial. Adams received no financial compensation from the State of Texas, sued Morris for the rights to his life back, and became an anti-death penalty activist. According to the internet, he lived in such obscurity that his death was only discovered a year after the fact. There’s no shame in any of that, except for his not having received any compensation from the state. 

David Ray Harris was convicted of a separate murder which happened during an attempted kidnapping. He was sentenced to death and finally executed in 2004. His final words were “Sir, in honor of a true American hero: Let's roll. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. I’m done.” The reference to the American hero was reportedly words said by Todd Beamer on the United 93 flight before fighting the hijackers attempting to crash the plane into the Capitol Building during the September 11 attacks. 

I don’t know if it was FilmStruck, the film itself, or my lackluster TV, but the visual quality of this film was abhorrent. This movie might be in dire need of a remastering, the noise was insane and every 40-60 frames the film seemed to flash a single frame that was more exposed than the rest, making the picture look like it was lighting up. 

Recommended: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, and Into the Abyss, Herzog’s own 2011 documentary on a capital murder case. Like Morris’s film, Herzog examines the questionable verdict of the case. Unlike Morris’s film, Herzog uses the case as a more explicit condemnation of the death penalty. 

[perseus-huntress]

Secret Ingredient

To @theravenofwynter whose love for the triumvirate is only matched by her encouragement of my nonsense <3

And also to @puppypopcornpizza because without your sunshine, I don’t think I would be able to write right now. 

“No” Shepard pursed her lips.

“Belligerence does not suit you, Commander. You’re forgetting yourself” Nihlus was calm but his eyes betrayed his irritation.

“And you sir, are forgetting that I am not your bitch but a Spectre in my own right. And as such would like to ask you to act accordingly” she crossed her arms tapping her foot with barely contained anger.

Nihlus observed her silently, his mandibles flaring.

“I’ll take that as a no then” she spun around and stormed off.

“Spirits, why me…” Nihlus mumbled as he set off after her.  

The sun was setting on the Presidium, throwing long shadows on the pavements. The warm breeze played amongst the trees, carrying with it the scent of night jasmine that some industrious member of the Alliance had managed to smuggle and plant on the station. Nihlus always marvelled at the human preoccupation with inconsequential details. Whoever the pioneering gardener was, and judging by the frilly box resting on his lap Nihlus had a pretty good idea who that was, they went to great pains to drag a piece of home to the otherwise soulless station out in the stars. Had they been turian, well for one the box would have just been a box, not a delicate construction with filigreed edges all tied up with a glittering white bow.

He checked his omni-tool, she hadn’t replied, he didn’t expect her to. But he hoped that she would show up none-the-less, she may butt heads with him constantly, but their relationship whilst volatile was not hostile by any measure. He has a sneaking suspicion she enjoyed their arguments, after all, they were never on topics that truly mattered, just squabbles over the chain of command and other insignificant matters. When it counted, she came through and it amused him no end watching the horror dawning on the faces of those who worked with them in the field as they had met the two Spectres in more social settings. Anderson once noted that on the battlefield they twisted and moulded into each other like dancers, but once the curtains fell they acted like two entitled prima donnas, Nihlus smiled to himself, it was apt.

Then a few days ago it all came to a head. The two Spectre’s were called into the Presidium Tower for a friendly discussion, where Tevos mournfully intoned that their disagreements have been brought to the council’s attentions and that they will be reassigned. Shepard didn’t hesitate, didn’t even consider their decision. Her words have been playing on his mind ever since.

‘I would sooner give up the Normandy, then give up Nihlus. If the council chooses to go ahead with this asinine decision, please consider this my resignation.’

The Council were stunned into silence. Meanwhile, a thousand of thoughts raced through Nihlus’ mind, but all that was drowned out by a blinding sense of elation, a feeling that he had been denying for months suddenly burst through the walls and protections he’s built around himself, eclipsing any doubt he’s been harbouring. He looked at her then, her gaze was directed forward, challenging the best and brightest, daring them to a fight. And she was fighting for him. Him of all people! It took his breath away that this fierce warrior, a force of nature in her own right, cared for him enough to want to stay with him.

“You called?” Shepard’s bored voice brought him back to reality. She stood opposite him, framed in the flames of the setting sun, it clad her in shimmering ethereal armour.

“Yes, please sit” he swallowed awkwardly. He suddenly felt clumsy, ungainly in himself.

“Nihlus, I have places to be…” she protested.

“Clara, please just sit” he almost begged, but caught himself making it all come out rather strangled.

Shepard rolled her eyes, but perched next to him, bringing with her a subtle citrus scent that he’s never noticed before.

“I…” he faltered “I’m sorry”

She frowned at him “For the argument? That’s a first”

“I realise that I was being unfair. Especially after last week, you stood up for us, and I repaid you with an unkindness” he fiddled with the bow on his lap. ‘Us’ it sounded strange, but it sent a pleasant shiver down him when she didn’t correct him.

She laughed “Understatement. But if they think I will give up the best damn Spectre in the galaxy and my favourite asshole turian, they have another thing coming.”

“Best huh?” he smirked.

“And an asshole too, don’t forget that part” she gently nudged him laughing.

“Of course” the crinkles of her eyes emphasising her infectious smile, made him grin involuntarily “I have something for you…”

Shepard dramatically rolled her eyes “I know your surprises, I really do have places to be, I could do without three extra hours of training”

He extended the frilly box towards her “No training, promise”

Curiosity won over, and she carefully accepted the box, accidentally brushing his fingers in the process, making him almost drop the thing.

Shepard deposited the box onto her own lap cocking her head to the side. Her fingers played across the lid as she delicately undid the white bow in one smooth movement.

“Not quite your usual style?” she stroked the box’s lace overlay and looked up at him quizzically.

“A peace offering” he nodded.

She frowned perplexed and lifted the lid.

The transformation was remarkable, like a ray of sunshine breaking the surface her eyes lit up with wonder.

“Is this…” she barely whispered.

“Yes” he smiled at her, his heart beating out a staccato “The illustriously named ‘Secret Ingredient’”

“How did you even… there is a list, that list is years long!” she stumbled.

“Anything for my girl” he smiled “And I know a guy who knows a guy who got in some minor hot water, and well you get the gist”

Again, she didn’t correct him.

She picked up a tiny cake out of the box and lifted it up to her eyes grinning, the chocolate intermingled with coffee in a little tower surrounded by biscuity fingers all tied up with a tiny bow.

“Tiramisu, or so I am told. I take it that means something to you?” Nihlus asked.

“Oh hell yes…” she licked her lips replacing the delicate confectionary back into the box.

“Ooooh” she picked up another creation. The patissier went all out on the decoration, the deep purple topping was swirled with pink and turquoise, glittering stars spilt across and down the side of the thing. 

“Galaxy Blueberry Cheesecake!?” Shepard squealed.

“Apparently.” He confirmed, “You like it then?”

She didn’t answer but dipped a finger into the box, scooping up a little of glittering pink frosting. She observed it momentarily before popping the finger into her mouth.

“Pomegranate” she sighed in pleasure. “Want to try?”

“Can’t, it’s all levo.” He answered.

“Right, there is a place by C-Sec. Let’s go” she sprung to her feet so suddenly that Nihlus recoiled.

“Didn’t you say you had places to be?” he asked cautiously.

“It can wait. I owe you one” Shepard grinned.

“Are you sure he won’t mind?” Nihlus cocked an eyebrow.

“You are assuming Spectre” she shook her head “But yes, he can wait, I’d rather spend the evening with you”

Nihlus stared.

“Now come on! You get assholey when hungry, and I’m not risking disturbing this new development.” She extended her hand to him and wrapped her fingers around his. 

[avecorviidae]

Fic: as in a mirror, dimly

Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Relationship(s): Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims Word Count: 1382

Ao3 Link

It is born to a temple of many gifts. You bestow them carefully.

<0>

It wakes untouched, alone, and you teach it that to be Alone is to be Forsaken. It wakes in the darkness and you teach it that to be in the Dark is not to See, that to be in the Dark is to be Lost. It wakes untouched and ungrasping of a place so much larger than its smallness, and you teach it of a Vast that can consume it whole.

This, you tell it, is Fear.

It screams.

This brings broad hands lifting, and the firmness of a chest, the murmur of a voice, and a moment later a light, flickering dimly, but enough. You Open its eyes and they are unfocused, half-formed wet things, and this, too, was a gift. It had been a many-monthed growing thing, kept close in the fragile flesh of That Which Belonged to You, and you had held its eyes Closed while it grew, in a promise that it would not wake for the first time into Darkness.

Your Archivist holds it close and says nothing-words, and you See this through its eyes, Give to it your recognition of him. The Archivist’s eyes belong to it entirely, as they have since it first breached into the light, squalling and blood-slick and whole. You give to it that it is being Always-Watched. You teach it that this is being Seen, that to be Seen is to be Known. That to be Known is to be Unafraid.

This, you tell it, as it is rocked softly back into milk-dreamed sleep, is Love.

<0>

Deep in the coughing dust-choked underbelly of the House of Usher, a Junior Curator traces shaking fingertips over jagged, ink-blotted letters. You Watch as it learns for the first time of a Many-Eyed Crown.

It has not found this by accident. You can See the gossamer threads stuck-clinging slick to the brittle paper, wrapped around its brittle wrists.

The Mother’s spitted discontent is clear: two Archivists have failed. It will try a Curator, this time.

This is well. Her Craft is not to be rushed, and if there is to be another Attempt, it will take time for her to string this one up, to carve the correct holes into her new toy. You will Watch her progress. You are Watching many things.

<0>

The concept of possession is a slippery, slipshod, shifting thing, requires of you a sense of yourself in order to demark what you own, and to be a You in this shifting place of words and touches and blood is an awful thing that recoils from itself because You Are Not What You Are—

But in this Now, this is what is Yours:

The Archivist, and the Anchor, and the thing between them, from its very conception, from the second it took root, was Claimed. And you Know it, and have always Known it, and what you Know, you Are, the way you Are the fever-quick mind of your Archivist, the way you Were the cloying, greedy-taking want of your Heart before his eyes were Closed.

And now you Are this small, swaddled thing, clumsy and heavy-headed and soft, and you have never Been this before, have never had to learn the grasping of fingers and the pain of teeth, have scarce Known a helplessness that was not bred of ropes or chains or Corruption rotting the body, but you Know this now, what it is to be splayed bare on a damp towel and dressed by broad hands, coaxed and stroked and soothed and lifted and fed and bathed,

and you take this newness greedily, countless new statements taken and carefully Filed under your Archivist’s quick-fingered sharp box-minded system, and in return you give it small gifts, teach it to hear in the lull of words the noises that mean its Name, the sound that means it is Seen and Known and Addressed, and give its struggling tongue the sounds that mean That Which Belongs To It, and catalogue the Vast-Swinging-Vertigo of being swung into steady arms, the fast-insistent press of lips to downy-soft hair, when it at last strings together the correct sounds, when it Knows papa.

<0>

The Anchor is awake.

The Anchor is Alone.

This is not well.

You follow him soft-footed through the house as he fulfills his own small rituals, a boiling kettle and a quiet-clinking mug, and you have many times through him Known the heat of it on flesh-soft palms and Know it again, even as he drifts, chilled, across chilling tile and does not drink.

He returns to the doorway of the room where the Archivist and the little one drift sleeping, and he Watches, and fog licks at his ankles and at his mind and you Know this anger from the Archivist, the surge of possession-wanting what is yours by right, what the Captain had sunken grinning fishhooks into, and when you pry the Anchor open you find those wounds still bleeding sluggishly, water spilling brackish-pink-red at his feet.

He was torn from the Forsaken by force, returned to the fold, and he is That Which Belongs to You and your Archivist is stitched to him in uncountable places and unnamable ways with the Mother’s unbreakable thread and yet, the Anchor teeters, threatens to sink. This is not well, indeed.

His Fear is Known to you in snatches that you pull from the fog—

she likes Jon best, of course, the lull of his voice puts her right to sleep and

sometimes he speaks to her like he can understand her, and she’s all he’s got eyes for, beautiful thing and

she babbles endlessly at him, and watches him in pure fascination and thinks he’s the funniest thing in the world and

lord, but the two of them hardly need him at all, do they?

—Silly, is the word your Archivist’s voice gives you. You find it apt.

You nudge the little one into hazy-waking, open its eyes and Know as it recognizes the shadow of the Anchor in the doorway, and Feel the muddled surge of joy-warm love as its mind feels at the shape of him, even as its heavy-soft arms cannot quite be persuaded to reach for him.

The Anchor Sees it wake, and he lifts it so gently, fits it to the curve of his shoulder and it settles against his neck, and he murmurs questions to it that it answers in contented sighs.

It is shifted against his side and the Anchor meets its eyes and you are Watching through it and you are Watching through him and for a moment you Let-Feel their Knowing slide against each other, and these flesh-warm creatures speak more truly in voices than tongues and it is such a simple matter for you to turn their noises to Meaning and—

he dabs the nib of the bottle against the inside of his wrist, ever-scared of scalding her tongue and he is saying, I love you, and she fists young-slow fingers in the soft knit of his jumper and does not let go and she is saying, I love you, and he is guiding her fingers to the flap of a picture book and pressing it open with the tiny meat of her thumb and he is saying, I love you, and she is noisemaking to him, trying to sing even though her Throat does not Know what that is yet, and she is saying, I love you,

—you File the feel of hot-streaking tears in its hair as the Anchor presses it close against him, insistent kissing and shaky-laughs kept to whispers that will not stir the Archivist, and shaky-murmurs that Belong just to the soft shell of its ear and he is saying, I love you, I love you, I love you.

This is well. You will watch this, a while.

<0>

The Curator’s left hip is a marred, raised, pink-knotted thing, stinging-sore where a Hunt caught it by the claws and left its Mark, and coughs past lungs full of Choke-Dust, and is strung up in delicate gossamer thread that moves its puppet-limbs, deliberate and slow. She is crafting this one carefully.

This is well. You will Watch the Archivist a while longer.

[thevividgreenmoss]

When Swann had said to me in Paris one day when I felt particularly unwell: “You ought to go off to one of those glorious islands in the Pacific; you’d never come back again if you did,” I should have liked to answer: “But then I shall never see your daughter again, I shall be living among people and things she has never seen.” And yet my reason, my better judgment whispered: “What difference can that make, since you won’t be distressed by it? When M. Swann tells you that you won’t come back he means by that that you won’t want to come back, and if you don’t want to that is because you’ll be happier out there.” For my reason was aware that Habit—Habit which was even now setting to work to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the position of the mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the clock—undertakes as well to make dear to us the companions whom at first we disliked, to give another appearance to their faces, to make the sound of their voices attractive, to modify the inclinations of their hearts. It is true that these new friendships for places and people are based upon forgetfulness of the old; my reason precisely thought that I could envisage without dread the prospect of a life in which I should be for ever separated from people all memory of whom I should lose, and it was by way of consolation that it offered my heart a promise of oblivion which in fact succeeded only in sharpening the edge of its despair. Not that the heart, too, is not bound in time, when separation is complete, to feel the analgesic effect of habit; but until then it will continue to suffer. And our dread of a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love and from which today we derive our dearest joy, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all—to remain indifferent; for then our old self would have changed, it would then be not merely the charm of our family, our mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our affection for them would have been so completely eradicated from our hearts, of which today it is so conspicuous an element, that we should be able to enjoy a life apart from them, the very thought of which today makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection, but in a different self, to the love of which the elements of the old self that are condemned to die cannot bring themselves to aspire. It is they—even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom—that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognise to be a secret, partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us at each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow. And for a neurotic nature such as mine—one, that is to say, in which the intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly, fail to arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to reach it, distinct, exhausting, innumerable and distressing, the plaints of the most humble elements of the self which are about to disappear—the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless this affection too would disappear, another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh, and on this first night especially, confronted with an irreversible future in which there would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it tortured me with the sound of its lamentations whenever my straining eyes, powerless to turn from what was wounding them, endeavoured to fasten themselves upon that inaccessible ceiling.

But next morning!—after a servant had come to call me and to bring me hot water, and while I was washing and dressing myself and trying in vain to find the things that I needed in my trunk, from which I extracted, pell-mell, only a lot of things that were of no use whatever, what a joy it was to me, thinking already of the pleasure of lunch and a walk along the shore, to see in the window, and in all the glass fronts of the bookcases, as in the portholes of a ship’s cabin, the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin, fluctuating line, and to follow with my eyes the waves that leapt up one behind another like jumpers on a trampoline. Every other moment, holding in my hand the stiff starched towel with the name of the hotel printed upon it, with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself, I returned to the window to have another look at that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last. It was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning, as at the window of a stagecoach in which one has slept, to see whether, during the night, a longed-for mountain range has come nearer or receded—only here it was those hills of the sea which, before they come dancing back towards us, are apt to withdraw so far that often it was only at the end of a long, sandy plain that I would distinguish, far off, their first undulations in a transparent, vaporous, bluish distance, like the glaciers that one sees in the backgrounds of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings it was quite close at hand that the sun laughed upon those waters of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on which the sun displays himself here and there like a giant who may at any moment come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light. Moreover, in that breach which the shore and the waves open up in the midst of the rest of the world for the passage or the accumulation of light, it is above all the light, according to the direction from which it comes and along which our eyes follow it, it is the light that displaces and situates the undulations of the sea. Diversity of lighting modifies no less the orientation of a place, erects no less before our eyes new goals which it inspires in us the yearning to attain, than would a distance in space actually traversed in the course of a long journey. When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bear no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder. Alas for that sea-wind: an hour later, in the big dining-room—while we were having lunch, and from the leathern gourd of a lemon were sprinkling a few golden drops on to a pair of soles which presently left on our plates the plumes of their picked skeletons, curled like stiff feathers and resonant as citherns—it seemed to my grand-mother a cruel deprivation not to be able to feel its life-giving breath on her cheek, on account of the glass partition, transparent but closed, which, like the front of a glass case in a museum, separated us from the beach while allowing us to look out upon its whole expanse, and into which the sky fitted so completely that its azure had the effect of being the colour of the windows and its white clouds so many flaws in the glass. Imagining that I was “sitting on the mole” or at rest in the “boudoir” of which Baudelaire speaks, I wondered whether his “sun’s rays upon the sea” were not—a very different thing from the evening ray, simple and superficial as a tremulous golden shaft—just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk, while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which, for his own amusement, some god seemed to be shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky. Unfortunately, it was not only in its outlook that this dining-room at Balbec—bare-walled, filled with a sunlight green as the water in a pond, while a few feet away from it the high tide and broad daylight erected as though before the gates of the heavenly city an indestructible and mobile rampart of emerald and gold—differed from our dining-room at Combray which gave on to the houses across the street. At Combray, since we were known to everyone, I took heed of no one. In seaside life one does not know one’s neighbours. I was not yet old enough, and was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their hearts. Nor had I acquired the more noble indifference which a man of the world would have felt towards the people who were eating in the dining-room or the boys and girls who strolled past the window, with whom I was pained by the thought that I should never be allowed to go on expeditions, though not so pained as if my grandmother, contemptuous of social formalities and concerned only with my health, had gone to them with the request, humiliating for me, that they should consent to allow me to accompany them. Whether they were returning to some villa beyond my ken, or had emerged from one, racquet in hand, on their way to a tennis court, or were riding horses whose hooves trampled my heart, I gazed at them with a passionate curiosity, in that blinding light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered, I followed all their movements through the transparency of that great bay of glass which allowed so much light to flood the room. But it intercepted the wind, and this was a defect in the eyes of my grandmother, who, unable to endure the thought that I was losing the benefit of an hour in the open air, surreptitiously opened a pane and at once sent flying, together with the menus, the newspapers, veils and hats of all the people at the other tables, while she herself, fortified by the celestial draught, remained calm and smiling like Saint Blandina amid the torrent of invective which, increasing my sense of isolation and misery, those contemptuous, dishevelled, furious visitors combined to pour on us.

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

[envirotravel]

Eight Secrets of Brazilian Beach Culture

I read once that local of Rio often say “tenha uma boa praia,” or “have a good beach” over the much more standard translation for “have a good day.” It’s a culture-revealing phrase not unlike Thailand’s famous “gin khao reuyang?”, a way of asking “what’s up?” which literally translates as “have you eaten rice yet?”

In much of Brazil, the beach isn’t a place you go for a few hours on vacation. It’s a lifestyle. I was warned ahead of time that Rio in particular has a strict beach etiquette and rules that had to be heeded — luckily when it comes to all things sand and sea, I’m a quick learner.

Despite wildly overscheduling my trip and visiting in autumn, when Brazil’s beaches are lightly buzzing but not overblown with people, I managed to hit the beach in Ilha Grande, Rio de Janeiro, Buzios, and Jericoacoara. Here are a few strict rules I learned along the way — the rare kind that are more fun to follow than to break.

Take as little as possible

The frumpy schlep of coolers and chairs and endless beach supplies is a major faux pas in Brazil. A towel in particular is considered a horror-inducing no-no. A canga (the Brazilian term for a sarong), some cash, and maybe a volleyball are basically the only acceptable items to take — anything else you need can be supplied on the sand.

Cangas are fabulous alternatives to towels — they can be worn as cover-ups walking to and from the beach, they can be laid out on the sand to lie on, they can be used as scarves and towels and a million other purposes in a pinch. In my mind, they are a travel essential! They also make for amazing gifts and souvenirs — Ilha Grande in particular was a fun place to shop for a few.

Wear as little as possible

In Brazil, tops stay firmly on – regardless of how small – but another body type entirely is on display. You can’t talk about Brazilian beaches without talking about butts. Women of every age and every size subscribe to the “suns out, buns out” line of thinking, and men don’t stray far behind with their own sunga swimsuits, a kind of modified speedo that would leave most American men recoiling in horror. Why put any extra fabric between your body and the beautiful sun, sand and sea, the thinking seems to go?

I quickly purchased several teeny, cheeky bikini bottoms for myself after receiving several stare-downs for wearing a fralda (or “diaper”, as Brazilians refer to the more full-coverage American bikini). Believe it or not, wearing more modest American styles is apt to draw even more attention than a teeny tiny thong — you’ll stand out as a gringa and some say make yourself more of a target for petty crime from those who target tourists!

While I felt seriously self-conscious at first letting my cheeks and inhibitions fly, I just looked around the beach for inspiration — Brazilian women appear unburdened by the body-hang ups that plague many other cultures, and I marveled at the confidence that strutted down the sand in so many different shapes and sizes.

One government worker from Brasilia who I met while she was vacationing in Jericoacoara told me she dreamed of visiting Miami, but the horror of wearing an American bathing suit had stopped her so far. I am afraid people will look at me in my bikini, but, I just cannot wear that diaper! I cannot!

Brazilians are known as some of the sexiest people on the planet and having shared the sand with them, I feel like I now know their secret — it’s confidence! It speaks to the major difference in our cultures that I uploaded and deleted the following photo so many times, wondering if it was inappropriate to post on my own dang travel blog, even though it’s a beautiful photo that I love taken by one of my closest friends — because the wrong square inches of skin are showing. In Brazil, a grandmother wouldn’t bat an eye wearing these bikini bottoms to the beach with her family. I love this aspect of Brazilian culture!

Say yes to snacks

It’s almost considered rude to bring your own food to the beach in Brazil. Acai cups, caipirinhas, seasoned cheese on a stick, iced tea, puffed crisp Globo and empanada vendors will walk along the beach calling our their offerings and you simply wave them over if interested. Eating out is incredibly expensive in Brazil and so sitting on the beach and grazing on snacks all day is not only fun, it’s also a great way to balance out the pricy dinner you might go out for later.

The very cool thing that I loved was that unlike in other countries where you apparently sign a blood oath to make a purchase if you so much as accidentally make eye contact with a beach vendor, the Brazilian ones were fairly low key and didn’t mind if we called them over to take a look and then decided not to buy. Everything was low-key and done with a smile. (We did encounter one over-aggressive bikini salesman who had a hard time hearing no in Copacabana, but he was the exception to what seemed to be the chilled out rule.) Normally I loathe beach vendors but in Rio they were one of my favorite things about the city.

The other beach cities I visited didn’t necessarily have the roaming vendors walking around, but they did have little stands where you could grab any snack you’d need.

Where you beach matters

In Rio especially, all sand is not made equal. The city’s main southern beaches stretch across over five miles of shoreline and are divided by 12 postos, or numbered lifeguard stations. These are for more than just giving directions; they are for finding your tribe. There is a saying in Brazil that you can tell everything you need to know about a person by three things: their favorite soccer team, their favorite samba school, and which posto they lay their canga at.

While Copacabana is the most widely-known to foreigners, it’s far from the hip place to be among Cariocas, or Rio residents. We spent an afternoon on touristy Posto 4 in Copacabana but far preferred the trendy, see-and-be-seen Posto 9 in Ipanema, where we spent two beach days in Rio. Certain Postos denote gay beaches, family beaches, and beyond.

Each posto is lined by barracas, semi-permanent beach bars where you can buy fresh coconut water, cold beer, and more caipirinhas, and also hire beach chairs and umbrellas. I was particularly enamored with Barraca Uruguay at Posto 9, both for the lively atmosphere of the easy-on-the-eyes crowd and the fact that the employees were primarily from Uruguay and Argentina, which meant we could chat in Spanish.

When you beach doesn’t really matter

Because there’s never a bad time to be at the beach. We were pretty amazed that even on a Monday in May, the beaches of Rio were pretty darn busy. While summer (December-February) is certainly the most popular time for Brazil’s beaches, don’t expect to ever have the popular ones to yourself. But no worries — that’s part of the fun!

Watch your stuff

This is probably fits int he “duh” category for most travelers, but don’t go swimming in the sea and leave your stuff unattended. Brazil’s crime problem is pretty notorious so I’m guessing most travelers don’t need to hear this, but it does warrant a warning. If you’re really blending in with Brazilians, you brought next-to-nothing to the beach (kudos!) but if you’re like me and can’t resist bringing your phone and camera, too, ask a trustworthy-looking neighbor to watch you things while you go for a dip.

It’s common practice in Brazil and as a bonus, is a great way to get your feet wet with Brazil’s notoriously social beach vibes (see what I did there?)

Don’t you dare bring a book

I’d read before my trip that Brazilians almost never read or listen to music with headphones in at the beach. Well, they can do what they want but I’m going to read my darn magazine, I thought, stubbornly throwing an old issue of Afar into my tote en route to Ipanema.

Yeah, no. I didn’t crack a single page. The beaches of Rio are alive in a way that you just can’t look away from. Impromptu fútball games, flirty chats with the barraca boys, beach vendor picnics…. who could read when there’s so much to do and see?

I suddenly understood the disdain for towels and personal beach chairs. Some beach-goers, I noticed, more or less spend the whole day standing. If they aren’t already engaged with someone, they are scanning the crowd and checking out the scene. It’s one of the most hyper-social situations you can be in, and the people-watching is unmatched.

Heather and I weren’t even being particularly outgoing; with our busy schedules our beach days did double duty as our hangover days and we were still just soaking it all in and getting into the Rio groove. Yet one day, we had a long, in-depth conversation with an empanada entrepreneur around our age who plopped down on the sand to answer our questions about the legalities of beach selling, and on another it only took two trips to our barraca for coconut waters before I was politely asked for my phone number by a cute Argentinian who intended to take me on a date. Some things are worth skipping the next chapter in your beach read for!

Stay for sunset

Don’t leave, the party is just getting started! Sunset on the beach in Brazil is, quite simply, a must. In Ilha Grande, we booked a hostel on the water so we’d never miss one. In Rio, we took it in at Aproador where a huge crowd had gathered to watch surfers and sip caipirinhas delivered by an enterprising local with a cooler. In Jericoacoara, it was a nightly ritual for the entire town.

. . .

It’s no secret that in many ways I found Brazil to be a frustrating and challenging country. And yet all that seemed to melt away when I was by the sea — I left Brazil completely enamored with its unique and special beach culture.

As much as I loved the tours I went on and the attractions I took in, I vowed that my next trip will involve summer, and include about four times as many unscheduled days to do nothing but plop my bare bum on the beach and watch the Brazilian world go by.

So Brazilians — and Brazil lovers! — tell me what I missed! 

Pin It!

Of course, a few days baking in the Brazilian sun hardly make me a cultural anthropologist — please forgive me any misinterpretations of the local culture, and feel free to set me straight in the comments if I’ve erred!

Eight Secrets of Brazilian Beach Culture posted first on http://ift.tt/2k2mjrD

[sugisxiv]

I need about seven stars for Khaj and Dar! Three for whoever else and whoever else, but I need to know more about Khaj and her favorite uncle.

(JFC @balladofdariuskinkaid WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS!? YOU KNOW WHAT FUQ YOU GONNA DO ONE BETTER BUD!)

For each “⭐️” I get, I’ll write a headcanon about our muses.

GENERAL KHAJ AND DAIRY:

⭐️ Khaj suffers from the same aether problem her mother has. Itwas Darius' idea to have the young girl study under both William and Fell inorder to tame her unstable aether. However, Khaj found the studying boring and oftensnuck off to her Uncle's to bother him. She snuck off so much that the coachmenknew her by first name...

⭐️ Her style of fighting is a hybrid of both Darius andSven's. While she is more apt at hand to hand and unable to headbutt correctlywithout worry of her horns. Khaj has adapted to using the same fake out as herUncle's headbutt technique instead using the momentum to connect faces with herknee.

⭐️ On that note... Khaj's thirst for fighting rivals that ofSven and Darius' to the point that Sugis is quite certain the girl is some kindof weird crystal turd bullshite offering love child for the two idiots. She hasoften tried to start fights with Darius simply to gauge his strengths as theChampion of Oschon, but is quite sure her Uncle goes easy on her for her smallstature.

⭐️ As a child, Khaj was far too interested in reading herUncle's old case files to actually be a problem for Darius when he watched overher and her brothers. While her brothers would be off causing a ruckus, shecould be found sitting in what he called her 'nest' with scattered, color fadedparchments.

⭐️ Khaj fell for the whole Inspector thing hard andeventually took over for her uncle becoming his replacement. While she hasn'tgained the fame as Darius once had, she is slowly getting there. It's easy tospot her when she's on the job due to the red coat and gun that she carrieswith her. She hasn't noticed it yet, but she channels her Uncle a lot more thanshe thinks.

⭐️Toddler Khaj had a horrible obsession with Darius' unrulyhair. Any time she would riding on the Highlander's shoulders or sit listeningto a story, she would try to mess with it. The amount of recoiling poof aftershe would pat it down amused her to the point of giggle fits.

⭐️ Khaj got her love of tinkering from Darius. While at firstshe simply did it so that she didn't have to pay someone to clean and repairher guns, she eventually found another calling for her mechanic-like trait.

FROM THE TIME PARADOX SAD TIMES:

⭐️ When Darius passed away, she didn't quite understand dueto her age. Her parents tried to explain it the best they could to all thechildren. While they were packing his stuff, Khaj would look around the housethinking her Uncle was simply playing their usual game of hide and seek. Khajrefused to believe her parents until she was eight, thinking Darius was justreally good and hiding all of a sudden.

⭐️ Khaj has a stuffed mandragora queen that was given to herby her Uncle before his depression and injuries got the better of him. To thisday it still has the odd lingering scent of the fogweed he use to smoke fromher leaving the toy at his house.

⭐️ Her bond with Riccard is very much similar to Sugis andDarius' bond. She considers Ricc to be her brother and very little does she referto him as her cousin. She followed Riccard to the Order because she wanted tomake sure he was protected, even if she knew he could protect himself.

⭐️ Khaj lives in Darius' old house and seems to havedecorated the same as she remembered growing up. Though there are far moreallagan-related items in there than before.

BECAUSE RELEVANT:

⭐️ When Khaj first met Altare she was quite certain there wasno way in the seven hells that a walking, talking bucket was Riccard's higherup. Or that Riccard could actually be close to someone other than their family.Being slightly offended by an outsider trying to 'take her place', she was veryabrasive to the man making it well known she did not like him in the least.

⭐️ Though they started off on a bad foot and much scoldingfrom Riccard, the half-auri tried to make amends with the Duskwight. She beganto try to offer her help to Altare only to be told to wait in the commons justoutside the lab and he would come get her. He in fact had no intention ofcoming to get her often finding her passed out in said commons because sherefused to let him win.

⭐️ Due to Khaj's 'drive' and the Xaela need to conquer newthings foreign to her, she began to hit on Altare with the intention to one anddone him. Unfortunately between having to practically save him when one of hisvalves busted and kissing him to shut him up so she could focus, the drivefizzled and found herself trying to befriend the Elezen.

⭐️ After the valve scare she started to hang around more inhis lab and the commons to make sure someone was there in case something likethat happened again. She actually has a blanket and pillow she brought fromhome due to the fact she's always camping out in his lab despite his protest ofher doing so.

⭐️ She's super jealous of the way Altare lights up when hetalks about or talks with Riccard. She adores her cousin to pieces, but hasalways wished to see the Elezen light up like that when he talks about her orwith her.

⭐️ Even though she was courting him, she always preparedherself for it to be one sided.