#because it ‘butchers the image quality’ or whatever

[telestoapologist]

uh. ok? apparently they never uploaded.

woe, bad color edits that only appeal to ME be upon ye

ok I just posted like two pics in one post of sav, my internet isn’t working, so if you’re suddenly barraged by endless pics, i’m so fucking sorry

[eldritch-spouse]

An idea, Morell catches another one of the monsters about to eat his prized caught human, you said he's a pretty amicable guy to the other monsters but I feel like this might be something that pissed him off.

[Good ask. Sorry for the wait, I got carried away with it. Full reference for Vinnel probably in a week or two.]

(Minors dni)

TW: Violence, descriptions of inhuman body horror, yandere monsters, mentions of human consumption.

Morell will be honest here.

He's always been proud of the way he handles himself professionally. The mushroom monster is wholly passionate about his job, taking the satisfaction of his customers extremely seriously and never slacking off during work hours. He's good at what he does and no one can deny it!

Furthermore, Morell wouldn't call himself a natural with people, but many at The Clergy have been charmed into lively conversations with him. Maybe because he's a good listener, he's been told by certain chatty clientele that he exudes a sort of comforting aura. Whatever that's supposed to mean. Truly, he understands he's mellow most of the time, and maybe some folk think he's good looking, but the shroom didn't think those qualities would get him this far in his professional career.

He's working for The Clergy! Perhaps the most infamous monster establishment out there! Who cares about the reputation when the pay is so very appetizing? Who cares about any of that when he finally has the chance to work with his favorite ingredient-

Humans.

The best meat there is. The softest cuts, and so versatile too- Most people aren't even aware of how many different ways a human can be prepared! Which is a shame, this should be common knowledge available to everyone. After all, there's such a large market for human dishes out there, it certainly draws a very wealthy crowd to the establishment- And keeps Morell busy all the time. Sometimes he has to talk to Patches and order bobbles to come help him out in the kitchen. The little creatures are clumsy but they can be trained into decent workers.

The large mushroom monster hums as his thoughts drift to his best catch yet. His piglet. The best human out there, he's sure of it. Somehow, someway, the universe decided to reward Morell by handing him quite possibly the most succulent little porkchop out there. The monster knew, since day one, that he could not cook that human. Not yet anyway. Not ever really. He's not usually this… Stingy about a good catch, but Morell knows his chances of finding one like you again are next to null. Butchering you so hastily would be a complete waste!

No no, you have to be savored.

Morell can't get enough of your plush thighs around his fat cock. You can't take him yet, but you will soon, he's been training you for that. You take veggies like a champ, and truly, your come just makes them taste better. Morell's dick jumps in his pants as he recalls the image of you squealing on his fingers while he gagged you with a cucumber. Pretty pretty piggy, you've been distracting him too much with your cute trembling lips. Morell wonders how he can make you scream today after he's done-

" AAAAH NO NO NO- MOREELLL!! "

Well, that's definitely not the type of scream he's looking for right now.

The shroom's cleaver slams down on the cutting board with thunderous strength, nearly splitting his thumb in two. It'd take months to fully grow that back. The monster quickly attempts to yank it off, but the blade appears to be firmly lodged into the wood, splintering it even. He knows he should have gotten the metal one for this cut…

Racing out of the main kitchen area, Morell pushes bobbles out of the way indiscriminately as he races for the warehouse, seeing red. Who would ever dare enter his warehouse without explicit permission? Laying eyes upon his piglet without supervision is an infraction punishable by swift death and whatever sad excuse of a monster thought they could touch her without consequences won't know real pain until they meet the chef.

The large red doors burst open and he sprints to the far corner, where his piglet should be peacefully resting, chained against the wall. Instead, the shroom gets a sight that makes his blood boil hard enough to steam.

Of course it'd be him.

Vinnel.

The thin and tall jester has you corralled against the very corner of the room like a frightened hare, eyes bulging with tears while the sadistic monster wiggles its suit-clad fingers at you like a greedy parasite, his other comparatively massive hand right at your neck. He cackles at your despair, a wet and murky sound as if his throat were filled with expectorant. It tapers off to a lustful, hungry gurgle as he very carefully tips the bottom of his gleeful mask up.

Morell has never seen you look so horrified before. You're so focused in terror that you don't even register his presence. To be fair, he never actually saw what lies beneath the peculiar monster's full-body suit and perpetual mask, he just knows it's not right. Part of Morell is jealous that you never made that horrified face for him, the rational one is screaming at him to do something. The moment Vinnel starts bringing his now bare face closer to yours and something black drips onto your bare thighs is when the chef springs to action.

Vinnel's head darts his way, but he's not fast enough to escape, a strong palm compresses the jester's strangely malleable chest to the adjacent wall. The flesh, if he can even call it that, encompasses his hand through the suit. Morell grimaces at the sensation, but it's the sight of Vinnel's face that really catches him off guard. Pitch fucking black. Like his. But sickly. Filled with strange tar-like growths that protrude and drip down his chin, sullying the suit. More and more of it cascades at faster rates, as if the monster is liquifying right in front of him. In that vastly featureless void are two swollen black pupils and a row of horrid misaligned grayish teeth. No doubt what he was going to use to harm Morell's piglet with. Good heavens, Morell knew there was something physically wrong with Vinnel but this… This is awful.

" AhahahAHAHA- " The thing shakes with laughter, voice cracking. " Come now Mori, this one has to squeal too! It's not fair to the other ones, is- "

The shroom knew just what to do to get the obnoxious bastard to quit yapping.

Cruelly, he jabs his free hand onto Vinnel's face, minutely testing the material before viciously stabbing his digits into the monster's rotten slime, quite literally inside his head. The reaction is instant. The jester fails wildly and shrieks like a burning banshee, more ink-colored splotches being splattered across the room. It gasps and wails, a level of agony Morell most likely can't understand, nor does he care to.

" Didn' I tell folk like ya to stay off my kitchen a long time ago? " The chef snarls, grabbing a piece of semi-consistent slime and twisting it off Vinnel's face. It stretches outwards, dragging the jester's broken teeth along. Vinnel quakes and leaks more darkness onto the floor, weakly convulsing in Morell's grasp. One gloved hand attempts to claw at the wrist crushing him to the cold wall, but it merely poises there uselessly. " The nerve ya bastards got, for real. "

Finally, after the jester appears to be nodding off, Morell stops compressing its chest and throws him to the floor. The monster immediately crawls unnaturally across the floor, hands clutching defensively at its leaking face while he quickly fetches the discarded mask and slots it into place. Morell watches with ice-cold hatred in his eyes. The only reason the entertainer isn't dead on the floor by now is because he really doesn't want to stoke the flames of his manager's wrath. The shroom only speaks up again when the other has messily picked itself off the ground.

"Watch yerself. I hear ya jingling around these parts again and I won' be so hospitable. "

Vinnel's porcelain complexion shifts to a venomous leer. He'll taunt anyone even within an inch of his life, it seems. " Aye, harhk- Captain… " He spares one last look at the human behind Morell, coughs grossly again, and trudges off, lacking the energy to float as he usually does, leaving trails of black someone will have to clean.

Morell sighs, knowing he's just lost precious working time on something so utterly frivolous. It's not the first time the jester has tried to mess with his floor, but he was never bold enough to apparently try to eat Morell's prized piggy. Morell never had to get violent… But he couldn't help it, he didn't even think right. Of course the jester would try to terrify his human or take a chunk off them, his whole role in The Clergy is to be an entertaining sadist! And yet, all the chef could see was his frightened little piglet in danger, crying for him. For help.

You called him for help. Because you would rather be with Morell than anyone else in this hellhole, right? Such a sweet little thing you are, smart enough to know the shroom monster won't let anyone lay a finger on you.  Still, with the bad blood he just created between himself and the entertainer that will no doubt tattle to Admin, he needs to have you under constant watch for these next couple of days.

Morell sighs, brushing at his smock, then turns back around to you with an easy-going smile.

" Say piggy, ya wanna help out in the kitchen? It might stretch 'em legs. " The ones he tied together by the ankles.

You sniffle in place, still horrified by what you've just witnessed. It's a pity really, he'll have to treat you to something nicer when his shift is over. Morell watches a myriad of expression flash through your pretty face before you nod quietly.

" Th-... Are the bobbles there? " The sound of your hesitant murmur calms him down further.

Right, the little buggers you like so much. " Yup. Turnip's been askin' for ya. "

" O-Okay. "

[bakerolivias-archived]

Out of Hosie or Hizzie what ship do you think is the most like Klaroline?

hello, tumblr has literally deleted my answer for this ask THREE TIMES, DAMNIT (and they were kinda longish meta answers too), so fourth time’s the charm i guess? i’ll probably butcher my explanation of my answer to this question so sorry if i sound incoherent LOL, there’s just so much klarohizzie evidence. also i'm about to go off on a tangent, you awoke the beast.

content warnings for klaroline (because i know for some of my followers that’s not really your cup of tea), slightly hosie critical but not anti hosie, slightly josie critical, etc.

to me the answer is str8 up hizzie, hands down, because they parallel klaroline faaar more than hosie (minus the weird lamp stabby and tyler!klaus scene because that was a gross miscalculation on the writers’ parts, but whatevers). and it goes so much farther than the fact that lizzie is a blond and bears more Obvious resemblance to caroline in her physical traits and mannerisms - which, first of all, isn’t true, because while josie is maybe more quiet and reserved she’s equally as much caroline’s daughter (regardless of hair color) and it has been shown in canon that they both inherited some of caroline’s personality quirks and strengths, as well as her supposed “flaws.”

and i guess that, if it’s simply limited to the fact that lizzie is a blond and is caroline’s daughter and hope is the spitting image of her father, by that logic hosie would be equally as much like KC. lizzie is so goal driven and stubborn and opinionated, but also incredibly optimistic. josie seemed a bit more cynical and reserved in the first season but she really grew into herself (if we discount the rampant ableism) and became more confident and outspoken like her sister and mother - and the way these two girls share their mothers’ qualities, and how they approach/view romantic relationships similarly to caroline, is so fascinating to watch. lizzie has many insecurities about “saying the wrong thing,” (see: lizzie having no filter and telling raf “we’re all glad to know you’re single” after she finds out his gf died, lmao) and judges herself harshly for making mistakes and being, sometimes, irrational and a control freak. she thinks her romantic mishaps are because of her own flaws and in her lacking perfection. josie’s insecurities about relationships is more centered on being chosen second, not any self-loathing/ rejection based off any of her flaws, and how she’s “never the one,” whether it’s because of another potential romantic partner (see: the whole love triangle nonsense between hope/landon/josie) or because the relationship, and getting attached to her, is a risk (see: finch’s valid and reasonable but still hurtful concerns about her and josie not having a future together due to the MergeTM; josie wants finch to choose her and take the risk of all the problems and inherent baggage she comes with, for the chance at being together; she wants to be worth that kind of pain, and is open and honest about how she deserves that, and there are so many ways it parallels caroline's love interest scenes it's a crime fandom doesn't talk about it more).

so yeah, it’s been established that the twins are Very Much similar to their mother and hope also shares a lot of her father’s characteristics, but despite that hosie and hizzie are very different relationships, especially when compared to KC. hizzie is more central to the story than hosie is, and they have entire episodes, and even the whole of s4 dedicated to the development of their relationship. they are integral to each other's arcs lizzie was the one who remembered who hope was first, hope was the one who said “everything is right in the world, lizzie and i are friends again,” and i think that their relationship is far deeper and more fleshed out than hosie’s (”you have no idea how deep our history goes” - lizzie). and, imo, hizzie might be what KC could have been if they were done right and their dynamic was actually properly written, because i’m watching tvd right now and there are entire eps where KC’s dynamic isn’t explored and goes unnoticed despite their mass of potential, and it’s clear that the writers didn’t really want to develop KC as much as they wanted to focus on the boring love triangle between their main character and the salvabros but they needed to pander to a somewhat rabid KC fanbase, no offense y'all.

the difference between hosie and hizzie is that while hosie started off as slightly antagonistic, same as hizzie and KC did, they eventually became friends, however it didn’t feel like they truly got under each other’s skin the way HL did, or had a lot of animosity between them that they themselves put there to disguise their hurt the way hizzie did. hosie’s animosity and passive-aggressive behavior just kind of... disappears (and if you’re wondering how that in particular relates to KC, in TOs5, while KC were in a much better place, caroline didn’t hesitate to lecture klaus and be brutally honest about the fact that he was letting down his daughter, to adopt a "harsh" tone because that was what he needed, what he responded to, and hope and lizzie kind of interact in the same way - there are so many instances, so many eps on legacies, where lizzie and hope help each other through the emotional breakthroughs and conclusions they need to get to so they can both properly grow as individuals: see at the 80′s dance when hope tells lizzie “we don’t exist for just one fate” and lizzie in return reminds her “we don’t just exist for one boy,” which hope really needed to hear since she had become very codependent on her and landon’s relationship to an almost concerning degree; in short, HL and KC are never afraid to tell each other the difficult truths and express themselves, which HJ don’t do for each other as often, if ever). HL became friends too, like hosie, but it’s so much more complicated than HJ, which, yeah, while i do like the understated relationship where two characters gradually become friends without any whirlwind dramatics, KC had a very tumultuous relationship, similar to hizzie's, and hizzie need that kind of volatile and brutally honest dynamic because when they’re soft and compassionate, but at the same time challenge each other, they truly thrive. and even after they got past the whole “you told ppl about my episode” thing, when hope and lizzie got to know each other, she was always quick to see lizzie’s supposed flaws as strengths, to defend lizzie to others who would criticize her (”she can’t control her brain chemistry”) and she sees so much good in lizzie in the way klaus saw in caroline despite everyone writing lizzie off as being too much, too insecure and too controlling - klaus, like caroline's good love interests, doesn't see her as someone to be "put up with," or interactions as some kind of charitable action, but "enjoys" her for her strengths and flaws.

josie and hope’s relationship wasn’t even really that antagonistic at the beginning, there was no raw tension the way hizzie and KC had - they were simply acquaintances who felt alienated from each other, because hope seemed more closed off and emotionally unavailable (which is perfectly understandable since so many people in her life died). but hope and lizzie’s initial friction was far more personal, their conflict way more intense and loaded like klaroline’s, and lizzie was legitimately angry at hope for, allegedly, spreading sensitive information about lizzie’s mental illness (which was actually a deliberate lie and act of manipulation on josie’s part, but that’s a moot point lol). and even when the misunderstanding was cleared and HL became friends, hope and lizzie still get under each other’s skin, and are “frenemies” because they’re far more similar than they’d like to admit (reminding me of the scene where klaus told caroline he and her were the same). they confide in each other because they bond through shared experiences, being locked in an 80′s video game together, hiding hope’s secret from the super squad and landon, etc, and through this, as they get to know each other, they begin to see parts of themselves in the other - in the same way caroline was able to see through klaus in s3tvd, which allowed klaus and caroline to have really transparent and honest conversations that i don’t think klaus has had for quite a while, or even knew he needed.

holding on to that thought, on tvd, klaus was a paranoid and untrusting maniac who alienated his family out of his selfish grabs for power, and caroline, who is far more emotionally perceptive and intelligent than anyone (except maybe tyler) gave her credit for. she saw through klaus’s self-destructive tendencies and his loneliness that he brought on himself through problematic behavior (i get it, your father didn’t love you so you assume no one else will either... “you don’t connect with people because you don’t try to understand them.”) and i think lizzie serves that purpose for hope in the same way, because she does not hesitate to be absolutely straightforward and will call hope out on her bullshit - but in a slightly different way, refreshingly honest without being slightly aggressive like her mother was (which i don’t blame caroline for because klaus was trying to make a hybrid soldier out of tyler and rule mystic falls lol).

it’s because lizzie understands hope in a way that she hasn’t really been understood and truly seen since her parents died, that she’s also able to confide in lizzie during difficult times, because like caroline lizzie’s a good listener as well, and lizzie and caroline both put hope and klaus in a position where they’re more relatable, more comfortable and fun and youthful, and they can be comfortable and human and emotional without being such lone wolves all the time.

i’m going to need to wrap up this little rant to a close soon - honestly if you’ve gotten to this point at all it’s a miracle XD, but s4 really is the most representative of hizzie’s complicated and borderline dysfunctional dynamic and it's relation to KC. based off what i’ve seen from spoilers and gifsets and leaked scenes, i think they kind of leaned into klaroline a little bit. i mean the show is called legacies, so i think it would make sense that hope and lizzie follow a similar path as klaus and caroline and repeat the same cycle - “history repeating itself,” and all that. from what i understand of s4 since i haven’t actually gotten to see it yet, hope turns off her humanity because she killed landon, then goes on a murderous rampage similar to her dad, and lizzie wants and even make plans to kill hope (which, really, is peak klaroline lol). but the thing is hizzie repeated the events of klaroline in a different order - hope and lizzie got to know each other and become close, forming a strong bond before hope went on a grief driven murder spree and lizzie lashed out at hope in hurt and anger and grew the Red Oak tree to build a Murder Hope weapon, while KC’s relationship started evolving only after caroline was being the Bait that was intended to lead klaus to his death. but there’s still the same concept here. it’s because lizzie saw so much goodness and PerfectionTM in hope, in how kind and compassionate she was, because she and hope had feelings for each other (sirebond for the win!), and because she considers hope to be her family and has so many complicated feelings for the woman that hurt her, that she couldn’t kill her. lizzie’s putting faith in hope choosing a new path and one day being deserving of forgiveness the same way caroline put that same kind of compassion and faith in klaus because she saw goodness in a man who was a complicated monster ("i find myself wanting to forget the bad things you did, (TVD)" "i saw the goodness in klaus, (TVD)" "this [being good and selfless] is all i ever wanted for you (TO)"), and it was up to klaus and hope to show their BlondesTM that they’re worth it (which klaus did: “i happen to think you’re someone worth knowing”).

aaaand that's a wrap on what was probably a bunch of incoherent ramblings lol.

[senotsuri]

Way back when, I posted an image of an OC, who fairly recently got a full name (she only had a surname back then.) So, with Eliza’s name finally figured out, I realised I hadn’t actually given my overview of the game that spawned her; Champions of Vestroia.

Time to lose my mind, I guess.

Some fore-knowledge before we get into this.

I am, by all means, a legacy bakugan fan, not a reboot fan. I’ve only seen one double episode (the become-smaller-child episode, which was cute, and Outer Demons, which has a super good premise, but the execution is. something.) By all accounts, CoV is essentially my introduction to the world of the reboot, and I’ll come to this later.

I played both the first game (Bakugan Battle Brawlers, specifically the Wii edition), and the... third game (Defenders of the Core, shortened to DOTC, also for the Wii. The second game, for anyone curious, is Battle Trainer, a DS exclusive.) This will come up later, of course, but I want to point out these two as they’re basically my control group for the quality here (not for the battles though; different battle system and all.)

I am incredibly stay-at-home. A lot of people I know irl I don’t have contact with, and most of them don’t live in my city. This is only important when it comes to the protagonist and literally no one else in the game, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

So the game begins with the character creator. This is pretty standard stuff, honestly. My one issue with it is just-- this is probably my fashion sense speaking, but the fashion in the game is very... for lack of a better term, naff. There aren’t many options that look good, personally speaking. This is ignoring the issues where the protagonist loses their name, mid conversation, or is referred to as if I chose the male option instead of the female option. These issues are likely just oversights, by all accounts, but talk about jarring.

The first time you see your character is where 3. comes in. The protagonist, no matter what you chose (I have two save files, in case there was a difference. There isn’t), will always be a football/soccer player. Are you one of many, many people who isn’t sporty, who is trying to play as themselves? Sorry, your character is sporty, and you can’t do anything about it.

In the legacy games, this was never really a problem; your character was never seen doing anything other than brawling and interacting with other characters. Whether they played sports, or stayed indoors and wrote fanfic, the game let you decide on that for your character, by not having them do either of those things: your character only battled, or snuck around in DOTC’s case.

Once you stop playing football, you get to run to your best friends, and I guarantee you, you won’t immediately guess who they are unless you somehow already knew.

I mentioned BBB and DOTC being my control group on quality. Bringing the character creator back into this, the NPCs are laughable in quality. Any character who has the same model as you (older child. There are only two other model types: adult, and younger child) will look like a remixed version of your character. Had it not been for some characters having special eye shapes, you could practically cosplay any character in the game, because they were made the same way you made your character.

This includes your two best friends.

You could easily make the same character (minus clothes) as one of your best friend characters, without knowing it until you saw them.

While, yes, BBB and DOTC had the characters from the legacy anime in them, the fact that your best friends are nigh indistinguishable from any other character in the area, because you could easily make any of them in the character creator, isn’t... great.

Speaking of that. Characterisation is questionable, to say the least. Whatever bakugan you have in your first slot will answer to you the same as any other bakugan you have in your first slot. If you started off with Howlkor in the front of your party, and you replaced him with, say, Barbetra, Barbetra will act the exact same as Howlkor did, and it’s really something.

There’s only (?) Armoured Alliance bakugan in the game, other than Dragonoid, Pegatrix, Trox, Hydorous, Nillious, and the afforementioned Howlkor. That’s a small roster, by all accounts, so having varied dialogue depending on the bakugan would make sense.

The characterisation of the other characters is also a little funky in places. Your best friends don’t brawl, and I honestly forgot about them for a portion of the game. The tournament brawlers are practically as faceless as the villain minions, and the villains- oh the villains...

Preston. I don’t like Preston, at all. He’s a villain from the moment you see him, and the whole “try to find Preston” section in Helena Heights makes me want to punch someone. When you fight him in the Parasol HQ, his dad being the CEO, it’s fairly clear that Preston is little more than a tool for him. Sometime later, you fight Preston again, this time as the final tournament’s final battle, and he’s laughably weak compared to the other challengers. Remember, this kid fights you with Leonidas.

You’d think Leo would be good, but I’ll get into the butchering that happened to my death dragon later.

Anyhow, he fights you, assuming his dad will enjoy him defeating you. With the power of you’re the player character, you beat him, he hands all of his bakugan to you, and gives up on brawling for good. Kinda.

The next time you see him... hoo boy. In Old Town, on the way to defeat dear detestable dad, you come across Preston. He offers you help, and when player character is understandably suspicious, Preston complains that... one of his toys was taken away because you beat him, and now he wants Revenge On Dad.

I wish I was joking. His revenge, by helping you defeat his dad, isn’t because he’s obviously neglected by his dad (company taking priority over him, the CEO’s son), and then is used as a minion to try and get rid of you. It’s not out of bitter feelings because his dad doesn’t care about him, no, it’s because his dad took his ball away.

What’s worse is how player character reacts: “Oh! :) You’ve learned that bakugan aren’t just tools! :) Yes you can help me, despite the fact that you learning this sounds less than genuine and definitely not last minute! :)”

This is a level of stupidity I’ve only seen in DOTC Mira when Spectra tricks her into giving him Drago. He’s literally sulking and moping about over his ball, and then he sees the player character, immediately being manipulative so that player character can take down his dad for him. 

Leonidas also forgives him, and has the same reaction as the player character.

Speaking of Leonidas! I think everyone’s been excited for Leonidas in general - we all love a shark headed death dragon, and we wanted one in the reboot for ages.

I refuse to call reboot Leonidas Leonidas. This is like the Shun Kazami debacle, but one I’m substantially more angry about.

Leonidas, in BBB, was untrusting of everything, wanted to throw down with everything in sight, had no fear of anything because “I don’t fear weak [humans]”, and literally came from hell. He eventually grew to trust you and others, to calm down and enjoy himself at his own pace, and was willing to have help from others, showing anyone around him that his origins aren’t the be all and end all about him.

Leonidas, in CoV, is immediately trusting of the first human who showed a hint of kindness, has a weakness to all attacks in the game, comes from Vestroia (not the Doom Dimension), and forgives the human who threw him away when he didn’t win the battle against you for him.

Ignoring the fact that Leonidas just doesn’t look good in CoV, I’d say he got bastardised. That’s not Leonidas, it’s just a dragon with the same name.

The main villain is the CEO of Parasol, an energy company that, assumedly, used to use solar power. Upon finding out that bakugan battles give off incredible levels of power, they turned to using bakugan, forced to battle, to generate power. These guys literally dug into someone’s house to try and get Leonidas. They’re evil.

On the topic of the battling for power generation; this has a decay effect on Vestroia, as it happens, as battling energy would usually go back into Vestroia, which would be recycled and reused.

The CEO doesn’t bend the knee to you until you break him, which is undoubtedly nice for a villain; I was honestly expecting him to give up, but he doesn’t. You beat him into a corner.

But as my introduction to the world of BP, through CoV, is lackluster at best. Obviously the game is meant for those who have seen the reboot, and don’t mind being completely disconnected from the story, because CoV is self contained, and Dan only shows up to be the tutorial giver (as a jpg, no less).

From what the game tells me about the setting; bakugan are often exploited by adults, bakugan do not like adults because of this, but can’t tell when a human child is manipulating them, unless another child removes them from that situation (the lack of agency here is somehow worse than in the legacy series, who knew).

Despite bakugan being around for 18 years in the setting, no one seems to be aware that they’re living beings, other than the main charcter, as if BP humans are equivalent to Legacy’s Vestals. I was already aware of Vestroia and Earth sharing a location in space, but the fact that drilling deep enough causes bakugan to appear on Earth seems... really weird? Schrödinger’s Bakugan Summoning Pit, but they exist on every digging site possible. Bonus points to all bakugan being able to speak, and they do speak a lot, but only to the player and whoever is around the player in a cutscene.

I’m missing a lot of things, such as battle items being the worst sometimes, I’m aware, but at this point I’m tired of rambling, so let me end off in a comparison.

CoV has, in my opinion, the same replayability levels as Pokemon Shield; I couldn’t replay either game to the end, and I wouldn’t recommend either to anyone unless they were desperate for a new game to play, and had nothing else to chose.

[curestardust]

if you want: to suffer immensely (if you care about TPN) or to be bored (if you don’t)

S01 (x)

You want to see how to butcher one of the most intriguing anime set-ups and end up with something that looks like it came from a no-name studio with $10 for a budget? Yeah boy, it’s “The Promised Neverland Season 02″ time.

<SPOILERS> because this anime is shit and I don’t care.

First off, I’m not a manga reader. Why does that matter? Because if I were, I’d probably have had an aneurysm watching this anime. “TPN”’s manga ran for 4 years and boasts 181 chapters. The very first season, which was only 1 episode longer than this, adapted the manga up to around chapter 40. Again, why does that matter? 

Because this is the final season of “The Promised Neverland”.

From what I’ve heard after S01 aired, people were concerned about the quality drop in later chapters of the manga but everyone was hyped for S02 because that arc in the manga is a fan favourite and from what I’ve read about it, I can tell why. But what did not only the Studio but the MANGAKA do?! Scrap the entirety of the fucking manga and make up a completely different story for the anime! WHY? HMM?? Is the studio going to go bankrupt or something? What the fuck lead to this decision?? Did the mangaka butcher their most popular creation because??? 

Ok, now putting aside the fact that the arc in the manga that would’ve been adapted for S02 sounds amazing, as a non-manga reader, if this season was you know, GOOD, maybe I would’ve cared a lot less. But is it? Fuck no.

The first maybe 3 episodes did make me wonder why all the fuss was about. We pick up immediately after Emma and her cult followers manage to escape from Grace Field and into the forest. There’s some chase scenes with some demons, 2 new characters with a pretty interesting introduction, and preparation for how the gang was going to proceed. I liked these episodes not really because of the story but because it did still carry the original atmosphere of the 1st Season. And that is the psychological horror genre that set this apart from other anime when it aired.

Anyway, it all completely goes to shit after so whatever. The anime is somehow too fast and too slow at the same time. We’re literally speedrunning the main story itself but there are really long segments where characters just stand around in a dark room and exposition dump for like 5 straight minutes. Oh that reminds me, this anime is dark. Like *literally*. I could barely see shit half the same.

Let’s talk about how the story and the characters were completely butchered (ironically). The characters find an underground shelter, lead there by the plot magic pen. We spend like an episode marveling at how great it will be living there, making you think that the place will play an integral part in the story. No, a fucking SWAT team blows the whole place up the next episode, then they all get killed by a wild demon. We never see these human SWAT people ever again by the way. Then there’s literally a “6 months later” cut (EXCUSE ME?) where we see that Emma’s cult has set up shop near a demon town. Unfortunately, this much more boring (and dark) place is where most of the story takes place. 

We find out that demons need to eat humans to keep their human-ish form or they’ll become deformed and crazed. But there’s also some kind of demon nobility that’s keeping tight supply on their farm animals (the kids) so oh no, there’s class unequality even in the fucking demon world, damn. Anyway, believed to be dead Norman returns like “haha, eyyyyy, I’m gonna kill the demons” then Emma is like “but but demons have like names and families so we shouldn’t kill them!” then Norman is like "okay” but tries to do it anyway. Then we have one of the most cliché and cringe “redemption” scenes where Emma does her plot speech, then Norman cries. Cool. He then just casually throws the fact that due to the drugs he had to take at the Lambda research institute where he was taken, his brain is all messed up and he will die soon. The same is true for his own cult he brought along from Lambda, some of whom were brutally tortured by the demons. But after Emma’s plot speech, Norman does his own plot speech on his followers who are just... okay with it? Suddenly? Like, y’all were tortured for years by demons, probably have mad PTSD, are going to die soon because of the drugs but because Norman said “actually, let’s not do this” they’re all like “ok”????? But fear not, because the magical plot pen gains a new feature where Norman completely casually says that it has the recipe for the drug that can cure them of the Lambda drugs’s effects and the topic is never brought up again.

????

The very final episode is the most horrible of them all. I endured all this and was going to give this anime maybe a 3 or a 2 but this episode....with every single scene, I felt a migraine coming. It was torture. The main-main villain shows up, who’s actually just some human dude, and everyone is holding an AK-47 so they could easily kill him but nooo. Emma tries to do her plot speech magic on him but he instead decides to slice his neck. This was supposed to be impactful, how? We see this dude’s backstory, which makes no sense, and then immediately after he kills himself. AND THEN HIS CORPSE JUST VANISHES. There, gone. The demons also do some sort of uprising and the farm kids and the moms go down to the gate where they could go back to the human world. But Emma is like oh no, I gotta stay with these other losers to do some stuff that probably would’ve been interesting to see animated but whatever. 

The ending is literally just a slide-show of showing the kids vibing in the human world and then an. ENTIRE. storyline. in the demon world with Emma’s little gang. Like from what I could decipher from the 5 images we were shown, Emma changes the promise made between humans and demons so the 2 worlds will be seperate (this is the actual ending of the manga by the way and it’s supposed to be emotional as hell but it was reduced to a single frame), the demons probably had an uprising against the nobles, won, and Mujika is crowned like the saviour of the demon race (I completely forgot to talk about her but this is rant is already long enough). Then some years later, Emma and gang just show up in the human world and everything is hunky-dory, yaaaayyyy.

Besides the story being a fucking mess, you might’ve noticed that I never mentioned Ray anywhere. That’s because, both Norman and Ray become Emma’s side-kicks. Neither of them have a single coherent thought, and whenever they have opposing opinions to Emma’s (which is often), she just uses her plot speech to convince them. None of the rescued kids are interesting either, and every single new character introduced is just a shell. Pretty sure one of them doesn’t even say anything throughout the whole anime. 

The animation, especially compared to S01, is ugly. The characters look bland, the detail is gone, the CGI demons are fugly, there are a LOT of scenes with no movement, and actual frame-to-frame inconsistencies (dude slices his neck with a knife -> shows knife fall to the ground without a speck of blood on it. This is the same dude whose dead body just disappeared from the scene later on.)

And of course, the most interesting thing about this anime, the psychological horror is gone. Instead, we get the typical “hero makes hero decisions even though they make no sense but because of their plot armour everything works out in the end” story, that is just....sigh.

That’s all I have to say to finish off: Sigh. 

[1/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | There was actual money spent on this (or was there)

[player-1]

Anyone who’s been in the TMA fandom (or those who understand the bare minimum of the story) know damn well that whatever was going on with Michael D. Stortion and Gabriel/Worker-of-Clay was not just a simple Avatar/Entity partnership. No, in the twisted timeline of the Spiral itself, the Armageddon arms-race pales in comparison to the romantic tragedy subplot those two had long before Jon and Martin were in the picture.

(This is also going to be a long one, and with some MAG 101 spoilers, so buckle on in...)

Here’s what I mean:

Gabriel (or in this case, Gabe) works with Neil Lagorio (Web aligned special-effects dude) in the mid 1900′s on their first movie The Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Unfortunately for him, Gabe quits in 1972 just as the movie was released. 

Not much is known of this time after 1972 up until the dreaded sculpting class in 2004. Speculation-wise, Gabriel might have been corrupted by the Flesh during his movie-making times or earlier before he came into contact with the Spiral.

Reasons: -The Spiral connects with the unraveling of reality, question one’s sanity and eventually “spiraling” into insanity. -The Flesh, in its literal sense, connects to the fear of people or animals being killed for meat; even the appearance of flesh/bone being twisted, bent, or butchered. But it can also connect on a emotional level, such as being viewed weaker than others, mostly relating to a person’s body image. That’s also the reason why the nature of his death is completely unlike the Spiral simply letting him fade out of reality. -Gabriel displays more Flesh-like qualities in his appearance and work up until the end of MAG 126. He doesn’t want people to judge him by appearance alone (even if his entire body is made up of clay) but he makes up for it with his unassuming personality and amazing talent. In a literal sense, he wants to mold himself into the kind of person that gets praised for his clay-making abilities, not just from his creations alone.  

[Enter Ｔｈｅ　Ｄｉｓｔｏｒｔｉｏｎ: Stage Left] Of course, while there’s no evidence on how, when or why the Distortion would target him specifically, but there is one thing. Compared to all the other Spiral avatars and fear-aligned creatures, they all used to be humans in the past. The Spiral by nature is to cast aside their humanity and submit to the nature of insanity. But since most of the Spiral avatars either faded out of existence or just refused to do anything ritual-wise, how was it supposed to create a new world if all they ever do is destroy? It adopts an artist, of course. There’s nothing more chaotic than the struggles of a budding sculptor such as himself. But while that may be a convincing argument for the Spiral to get Gabriel to join the Dark Side, there could be more to convince him that it’s worth following the unknowable being of delusions. Long story short, there was no reason for Gabriel to judge himself so poorly if he knew how to reshape the world to how he sees fit. it would convince him that, like the archangel he’s named after, he could show the world the coming future; twisting the laws of reality so that there’s no room to judge how something should be right or wrong, imaginary or real.  As if they were said from the Lord himself, Gabriel heard the Distortion’s tell him about a new world and finally found inspiration in them.

Then comes the sculpting class.  It’s worth noting that, even with the angel symbolism for Michael and Gabriel, it could be implied that Gabriel is also a goody-two-shoes Christian boy who regularly attends church, as evidence of Michael having knowledge about Mass in MAG 20, assisting the Flesh in driving Father Edwin to cannibalism (so the Flesh and Spiral have an interesting partnership, huh?).  Besides that, this is where Gabriel takes the spotlight. From Deborah’s point of view, he was a strange little man from the beginning; eyes always jutted out of his face, appearing right in someone’s personal space and disappearing just as fast, and of course, his works of clay. (Also a random headcanon just because: Gabriel may be afraid of water, either because his entire body being made of clay, and since you need water to help shape the material, he does not want to get it melded into his own flesh. Could also be the reason why he has short and greasy hair, cause he would practically melt into a puddle if he was unfortunate enough to get wet.) And apart from Deborah and her friends’ growing discomfort over Gabriel in general, he’s just vibing in the back of the class, trying to make a shape for the unknowable form of the Distortion. And the second Deborah inadvertently gives him a break from his artist’s block, he quite literally takes control of the class; switching over the biweekly schedule it was before into every week, and even manipulating the space of the classroom to further support his artistic needs. 

“Ray told us the lesson was ‘faces.’ I put my hand up to say that sculpting faces was probably a bit advanced for where we were in the course, but he shook his head, and said that we were… a lot more talented than we thought. He said the key was that faces were twisted. All faces were twisted on the inside, and all you had to do was reach into the deepest part of yourself and put that twisted on the outside of the clay, and as soon as you can scream you’ll have your own face staring back at you.”  (MAG 126)

This is also the key to the Spiral itself. With Gabriel’s assistance, he will be able to let the spiral to insanity move in reverse, create the physical manifestation of that fear instead of letting it collapse and destroy itself. And in that lesson as well, Gabriel finally creates a fitting image of the Distortion...A door, the physical entrance to insanity itself.

Then comes the final stretch in Sannikov Land, the nonexistent island that was said to exist between the years 2009 and 2011. And as Michael D. Stortion explains in MAG 101, was the perfect place for their ritual, The Great Twisting. After everything Gabriel had done to appease his good “friend”, The Distortion seemed extremely invested in the Worker of Clay at that point. Nevermind the fact that its telling Jon how its identity was stolen away from Michael Shelley by merging with the Distortion, but there’s more to this origin story.

“Michael was protective of the frail old woman he believed her to be. So… so delicate, so forgetful, yet gently wise. He cared for her. He trusted her. And she fed him to me. She made him to destroy our transcendence. And she did not hesitate.” “And it was me they sought to stop. Me and the others of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is. Our Great Twisting. The-Worker-of-Clay had laboured for decades on that contorted, impossible edifice of doors… and stairs… and falsehoods… and smiles. A thousand staring morsels stood, and not one of them believed themselves sane to look upon it. And in the centre, the door that would open to all the places that were never there, was me.“ “Perhaps I should have realised what was happening; seen those two lonely figures approaching me, but I cannot tell you the existential joys of truly… becoming. Of an entireness finally crossing the threshold into your self. So ecstatic was my completeness, I did not even hear my own door creak open.“ “Even sharper than the joy of becoming is the agony of being opened and remade. To have your who torn bloody from your what, and another crudely lashed into its place. To become Michael. And to do so at such a crucial point in our Twisting, in our becoming, well of course it destroyed it. The impossible altar collapsed. The-Worker-of-Clay tore out his veins to dissolve himself in crimson mud. The others of us were cast to all the places that aren’t; some have still not found their way out again...My very existence tied to my pointlessness. Wearing my failure as the very fabric of my being. Reduced once again to feeding on the unsuspecting and confused. That is who I am.“ (MAG 101)

Even if all of this was to explain how the Distortion became the being it is in the series, it’s easy to see how overjoyed it was during the ritual. All that the Spiral ever did was bring the sense of unreality and paranoia unto people for ages, only breaking down the mind until they eventually spiral into oblivion. It wanted to be something, it wanted to make something twisted and nonsensical from the world, to shape the world itself to the nature of insanity. And after all that time, no matter how many avatars it had in its control, Gabriel was the only one who began creating the ritual. Even if it was for an ulterior motive, The Distortion was pretty giddy as Gabriel worked for years on end to create the meaning of insanity; to create something that the Distortion saw as the perfect vessel for itself. And even as it was explaining it, with all these feelings of joy and ecstasy and very human thoughts and emotions, this was before it was forced to become Michael. So much for not being bound by human nature, huh? But it’s pretty ironic that, as the embodiment of delusions, insanity and lies, it never considered the idea of having an avatar that could make something out of that chaos. Even if the Distortion was explaining how Michael-not-Michael Shelley came into being, it also can be interpreted as Michael just yearning for his best Avatar so far.  So instead of “I’m going to tell you my entire backstory.”, it’s more like “I’m going to tell you how a nosy old woman and her idiotic assistant ruined my chances to be with my Avatar of the Decade who may or may not be my boyfriend.”

In conclusion, Gabriel AKA The Worker of Clay AKA Igor with an art degree became the Hands of the Spiral because the nonbinary embodiment of delusion (who is also a door) gave a miserable struggling artist a shot of self-confidence (and a shot out of the Flesh’s control), eventually becoming its #1 Boyfriend Avatar of all time, and is the only person that would make the “hates gender and existence itself” Distortion yearn for years after his tragic death.

Takes notes people, this is what peak performance looks like.

[flydotnet]

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, character headshots are prompts I’ve already filled).

An Empress has to do what has to be done, no matter what.

Sup y'all, it's a boi Fly, back with another fic of questionable quality and even more questionable concept. Tonight, we're once again rewriting Ares because it's my new greatest pleasure in life to exploit wasted concepts and potential. This case is specifically Anna, because man, I love her design, such a shame she was just a generic ojou-sama for three episodes then lost all pretenses of personality. As such, I decided she was now going to be whatever she is in this story, because it's my canon rewrite, my rules. Also, I had to give YuuAnn another shot, because it also got butchered by canon and I felt like I could somehow do a better job. I'll let you judge. My first idea for this prompt was actually to slap Nosaka with it, but I ended up going the other way around because that seemed more interesting. Blame the Ares rewrite we've been planning with a couple pals from the Inazuma writing server, I suppose? (no, just blame me, they've got nothing to do with it). It was a bresh of fresh air and, man, I missed being a purple prose-loving moron.

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

Regalia

Summary: Behind the mask of the Empress is a girl with scars all over her soul, yearning for someone to share her sentiment.

Fandom: Inazuma Eleven (alternate continuity series)

Wordcount: 2.5K words.

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo​

AO3 version available here.

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There are blemishes and wounds on her skin that she’d never let most people see. It used to be by pride, then for fear that her image as an invincible queen would be tarnished. None of them are physical, etched into her mind rather than her actual body, but it only makes them more painful: if they ever fade away, it’s a process which will take much longer than a blemish left by an injury, and she’s resolved herself to it.

To cover up these scars, she’s become the Empress who showed neither remorse nor hesitation, showing mercy only to those who felt like they deserved redemption. It was only meant to be a mask for some occasions, but she got too comfortable wearing it and is now stuck being the regal figure to a group of people who surely must be even more lost than she is without a sort of guidance.

Sadly, no matter how much or how well she hides them, the wounds have never truly closed and if a grain of sand enters one of them, the pain flares up again and all she can do is suck it up and keep on as the Empress, always keeping it together, composed and in control. Even her own feelings can’t get outside her control, even if everything around her makes them peak in all the wrong directions. As is the duty of an Empress guiding her court.

 Because of her closed-off emotions and stubborn wishes to prevent herself from getting near more harm, it is very rare of Anna to open herself to other people. She used to be a much more open person, back when she didn’t know just how far some people can go to use others to their advantage, gladly discarding anyone who has exceeded their initial use and cannot be drained for more. Nowadays, however, she’s the opposite: as long as someone hasn’t shown they’re worthy of her trust, she’ll never be herself around them, never take off the Empress’s jewel-incrusted mask.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t a few people she trusts. While none of them are part of her “court”, mostly because she believes they’ll abandon her as soon as they find someone better or closer to their interests, she still keeps them close. One of them is a long-time classmate of hers, Ootani, whom she only recently got to know through her position as a soccer team manager: someone earnest, unable to lie, heart on her sleeve and her emotions clear as day on her face. In short, Ootani is a real open book, one so free to be read by the first malevolent spirit that Anna can’t help but be far more transparent than she’d usually be comfortable being around her.

 People like Ootani are very rare, however, so most of the time, she ends up befriending people less honest but whom she can tell have similar scars to her. One of them just so happened to be the captain for a team hers was against. It’s ironic because Nosaka fits her mental image of who exactly she wouldn’t trust: haughty-looking, closed off to the world, a scheming look on an expressionless face and someone who seems to be at his very command.

His reputation preceded him, she must admit. As a team manager, she had to know who played for the enemy, so she knew they would cross paths eventually – just from far away, from opposite ends of the field, because he was a warrior commander and she was a ruler working on the sides. He was the Emperor of Tactics, she was the Empress, and their similar reputations were where everything was going to stop.

It didn’t.

 It didn’t and she fell into a rabbit hole like the naïve girl she once was.

 It started by speaking at the end of a match. They merely ended up getting a cup of coffee in the same shop on the way back from the stadium after watching a match that had nothing to do with their respective schools. Nosaka was the one to open the discussion, seemingly trying to pique her interest with whatever had just happened on the field. She kept most of her actual opinions to herself, that day, preferring to reply as vaguely as possible as not to leave a hint to a man whose scheming was rumoured to rival a computer’s.

They kept coming across each other and, after some time, their discussions started to revolve less and less about football. At first, it felt comfortable to just mention a couple things like the recent news, but it progressively became personal and… they exchanged phone numbers. She gave him the one way to contact her directly, gave it to the enemy, and in turn, gave his to her, his enemy. It felt wrong, tasting like betrayal, but with a sweet aftertaste, because there were things she wanted to tell him and they never had enough time.

That was when she realized liked his company, and by then, it was already too late: she had opened to someone else and, even if partially, even for a moment, put down her mask and showed parts of her real self.

 Even if neither brought it up, she could feel they had similar scars on their bodies. He spoke about people with natural distrust, preferring to assume the worst out of people so deception and disappointment couldn’t settle in, only leaving himself a little open to a couple persons (he never said she was part of them, but the way he looked into her eyes with a slight smile was enough to convince her she was now part of this group, and it comforted her – she wasn’t the only one vulnerable). His recounting of his experiences were always vague, yet the messages were clear.

She was the one who said that, despite their opposed sides and different roles, they were more alike than she thought. At first, he stared in silence, about to tell her she was wrong and they were different persons (and she cannot deny having feared such a reaction); but he ended up looking aside, eyes looking at the horizon, and replied she had a point. For a second, his fingers brushed against hers, and they remained silent for the rest of their short time together.

 They became friends, started talking to each other, trusted each other more and more as time went by. She told her about her reasons to distrust her own council, he told her about being unable to confide in most of his teammates no matter how much they trusted him back, because both of their lives had lead them to naturally distrust anyone. The only reason why they let their guard down around each other, she’d have guessed, was because they were both doing so: if both were vulnerable, then neither of them was because, in a sense, they both held a sword over the other’s head.

Mutual respect, mutual trust. They both knew the taste of betrayal and didn’t wish to inflict on the other. They may not have known what the other’s wounds were exactly, but they took care of them, patching closing cuts and persistent but mostly faded bruises. For a while, Anna thought that was it, she had found someone who was like her: play-pretend royalty who didn’t match their masks, fragilized egos hiding behind a façade of pride. He was the Emperor, she was the Empress: it was almost like a match made in heaven, that of songs and romance novels, and despite how weary she naturally was, she let herself get that spoonful of honey.

And she almost regretted it.

 For some time, they were in a situation where even the way they referred to each other was intimate, yet they weren’t doing the thing she started to hear rumours about. No, they weren’t dating, she was truthful in her words – but there was some lie in there, because as much as she refuted it, she refused to admit she’d have wanted it to be true. Still, the Empress would betray her people if she said she had grown feelings for the enemy’s leader and staying silent was the best thing she could do. Maybe, once that tournament ended, they could stop pretending they were the enemies they never managed to be…

Yuuma was protective of his intimacy, so while she could never know what exactly had happened, she still thought she could believe he was at least saying the truth and only hid the most intimate parts of his stories. They weren’t tales, to her, just like what she told him never were lies, but she hid the parts where she had cried or the dark thoughts she had had – erased the ugly and the weak parts of herself from her past self, gave her the strength she wishes she honestly had.

The thing is – he didn’t tell her everything. It was a given, of course, but what he hid were things she wishes she could’ve known, not because they were demonizing and would’ve given her reasons to be mad and to leave, to take back her intimacy and shield her true self away again, but because they explained a lot and… she thought he trusted her.

 Betrayal is the one feeling the Empress doesn’t stand: the entire school knows it. Traitors are the people she’s always treated with the least amounts of respect, those whom she’s shunned away despite knowing their reasons and being aware of what that reputation entails, because they pour salt into the wounds she refuses to show. Trust is an important component of the school, of the team she manages, of so much in the world of sports: her wrath with them has always seemed natural, to the council. If only they knew…

…but Yuuma knew. He knows she hates being kept in the dark and having to discover the hidden truth by herself. He’s aware of what it means to feel like your trust is only one-sided, especially if it has reached the point of intimacy. Of course, part of it is shame on her: she should’ve known a man known for his schemes on the field and his rhetoric would be able to manipulate her into a sense of easiness, just like people did in the past, as if she hadn’t learnt her lesson. Still, despite knowing this, she’s furious and dismayed, unable to think about the issue straight.

 It may be a minor thing, but it still stung like it was yesterday, reopening old wounds like a shell getting pried open as to steal its pearl. The rational part of her – the manager in her – knows it’s only a minor illness, is perfectly aware she’s getting worked up over a seasonal case of the flu; but the emotionally raw part of her who’s never moved on from the things that inflicted pain on her acted up immediately and tried to put the mask back on and run away from the situation.

Yet, despite that, Anna is still by his side, because she’s the one who was there when he fainted in public, and her house was the nearest and – she knew what she was doing. It’s not about practicality, because her family has the funds to make her every wish come true, it’s about following her feelings and being the better person (as much as she hates the idea, as much as she knows it’s not how she’s supposed to think, as much as the rational her is screaming at the other her) – or is it because, no matter how much her injuries bleed again, she knows what loneliness feels like and concern has bloomed in her chest?

Yuuma knows what it feels like to be alone in times of need, to feel helpless at the worst times, and if her wounds have been reopened, then she may as well not inflict the same on someone else. It eases her pain to at least know he’s got someone with him now, because the idea of a sick person fighting against themselves in times of physical and emotional vulnerability scares her, and the way he spoke about his missing parents horrified her – she couldn’t abandon him at a time like this.

He may have betrayed her, but she’ll show him how wrong he was not to trust her.

 They’re stuck in silence, neither wanting to speak, an unfamiliar tension rising between them. All she does is refresh the washcloth she’s stuck on his forehead, hands reddened by the cold water in the bucket, because she’s given him medicine already and she knows better than distrust a doctor’s orders: these things don’t rely on emotions, rather on rational observations and conclusions, it simply isn’t the same as the relationship dynamics she’s so weary of.

There are a lot of questions on her mind, but none of them make it outside of it. She wants to know why he didn’t tell her, why he thought it was okay to let himself wither away like that, how he thought she was going to feel when she’d have inevitably known – questions to which she can kind of answer, questions she doesn’t dare answer by herself because she could give herself false hopes and injure herself even further.

That is, until she muses too loudly, and he tilts his head when she laments about being kept in the dark.

 I didn’t think anyone would bother, is all he tells her; but the feelings are there, the undertones are clear, and she realizes it wasn’t about her.

 Her answer could be “you should’ve known”, “you should’ve told me anyway” or “what did you think that’d bring you?”; but she dislikes every one of these possibilities. His words ring a bell to her, a sad chime of a relatable feeling: would have she been in his place, she’d have figured people wouldn’t have cared for her, and if they did, then it wouldn’t be for her sake, but for their interests. Better be alone than ill-accompanied, as the saying says, a saying ringing true to him, to her –

She gets it. She gets it all now, and she feels stupid for doubting him, because she should’ve known earlier and better than that. Their wounds are the same – they both opened their own in this; but it means they can stitch them close back again together.

 You don’t bother me, she tells him, taking his hand in hers. He doesn’t bulge, doesn’t take it out from hers. Instead, they look at each other, still silent, and he gives her a slight smile.

 For the first time, Anna decides to stitch her wounds shut with a golden thread and leave it at that, pushing the Empress’s mask aside.

[mamapamanderson]

One on One Time | Mother and Son

Who: Pamela & Blaine Anderson ( @blaineandersonsub )

When: Tuesday 2.23.21

Where: On Campus Cafe

What: Pam and Blaine have lunch to catch up.

Pamela Anderson

It was no secret that Pam adored her son and it was a matter of time before she was jumping onto the opportunity to spend some one on one quality time with him. With her handbag clutched in the crook of her elbow and her heels hitting the floor and filling the small space with the sound of her presence, she approached Blaine with a smile and opened her arms for a much needed hug. "I know I just saw you yesterday, but I was missing you already. Come here, anak."

Blaine Anderson

Having his mom back meant everything to Blaine. He loved his dad, but he'd always had a special connection with his mother. When he noticed his mother approaching with outstretched arms, Blaine stood from the table he was sat at and moved to hug her tightly, letting out a soft laugh. "I was missing you too, mama. I'd be wrong not to see you as much as possible while you're here."

Pamela Anderson

As soon as he was in her arms, she wrapped them tightly around him, bringing him in close as her hand cupped the back of his neck and her nose nuzzled into his perfect hair. "Well I would hope so, it's been too long since I've been able to see you everyday. You kids grew up way too fast, I was just telling your father on the phone." Reluctantly, Pam pulled away from Blaine, pressing a kiss to his forehead and smiling as she took the seat in front of where he was sitting. Pulling her purse holder from her purse, she hung it to the edge of the table beside her and hooked her handbag right on it, smiling at the satisfaction the little contraption gave her. "Okay, so what kind of place is this? What will you be ordering for your Mama?"

Blaine Anderson

Blaine smiled softly at the nuzzling, followed by the kiss to his forehead. "I actually have to agree with you on that one. Feels like just yesterday I was leaving for college," He said, gaze following his mother as he slid back down into his chair. "Oh, you spoke to dad? How is he? Where did work send him this time?" He asked curiously, unable to stop the chuckle as he watched her hang the purse holder on the table next to them. It was always nice to see his mother getting so happy over employing small, innovative things like that, he could tell they brought her some level of joy. Getting to see things like that also gave him potential future gift ideas. "It's a sandwich and coffee shop. I got us two coffees, some water and a chicken and cranberry on ciabatta with tomato soup. It's on the healthier side of the menu, but it's one of my favorite combos here."

Pamela Anderson

"They have him somewhere in Singapore right now," Pam responded absentmindedly as she looked over the menu, just to see what they had. It was a normal thing for them, Mark going off on his business trips. At first Pam protested him traveling so much, but she grew accustomed to it and wasn't going to complain about how it was the reason she was able to live so lavishly. She never wanted for anything and for her that meant success. Especially if her kids got to go to a school as lavish as this one. "That sounds lovely, anak," she said with a brith smile, leaning over to cup his face with the palm of her hand. "Thank you. So we didn't really get to catch up yesterday at the pool. I want to know everything. Who have you been sceneing with? Spending time with? Is there a special someone?" She continued, giving her son a wink

Blaine Anderson

Blaine nodded, smiling over at his mother as he leaned into the touch on his face. After a moment, he sat up straighter, maintaining the smile as he listened to her talking about his dad, and then his food choices. "Of course. Only the best for the best mom ever to walk through the gates of this campus," He teased, though the affectionate look on his face proved that he meant it, because he absolutely did. However, he hadn't been prepared for that next line of questioning, but he maintained the smile on his face as their food was brought over and set in front of them. "I've been scening with Queen Max and she actually has me under orders Monday too, I helped Miss Mercedes unpack so I guess that counts, and then I did a scene with Sir Sebastian. However, I can't say I haven't enjoyed those experiences. As for someone special, no. Not yet anyway," He smiled, quickly grabbing his cup of water to take a sip after the waitress had left.

Pamela Anderson

Pam always had a close relationship with Blaine and she was just happy it could carry on over to when he was grown and away from home. She loved all of her kids, she really did, but there was a special bond she had with Blaine, ever since he was a baby. It was why she dug in a little deeper when asking him about his time at the academy. She was concerned with Princess and Carter's progress, but was far more invested in Blaine's. Pam pulled back, scrunching her face right away. "There is someone walking around here calling themselves Queen?" She asked, before shaking her head and taking a sip of her own water. "I see. I guess we really are among the rich and entitled, hah?" It was so like Pam, to be judgmental right away before meeting someone. "I'm just happy you are meeting people and doing scenes. I was worried about you when you first come here. You'll find someone special." She reached out and covered Blaine's hand with her own. "Because you are the most special person I know."

Blaine Anderson

"Yeah, I thought it was a joke at first, but nope. However, someone else uses Fire Lord as a title, so I guess people are just really into the unique titles here," Blaine smiled down at the table, drumming his fingers on the side of the cup. Adjusting to the new title usage was a little hard to remember at first, but he quickly caught on, as he did with most things. "I was concerned when I first got here, because I hadn't seen Princess or Carter in so long. But once I got over that hurdle, it was easy from there. Speaking of, would you mind giving me Princess' phone number? I have her in my phone but I want to make sure it's up to date phone number wise," He said, taking another drink of water as he smiled down at the way his mother's hand rested over his. He felt a little wrong going behind Princess' back to get it, but he hadn't spoken to her much since he'd first come in. "Thanks, mama, that really means a lot to me. I've already met a few cool ones, and I know I should be focusing on finding a claim, but... I'm more worried about upholding the legacy. I need to keep my grades up to do that, and I don't want to distract myself." That was at least halfway true, anyway.

Pamela Anderson

Pam rolled her eyes. Not at Blaine but at the way this new generation seemed to be butchering the use of titles. As Blaine went on, it didn’t help her annoyance. “Is Princess still being hard headed?” She asked, her accent thinker than ever. It always came out when she talked about her oldest daughter and she didn’t know why. Kalangitan, that’s why. “Yes, I will send it now.” She reached into her purse to pull out her phone and sent the contact to Blaine. “Focus on what makes you happy.” His father didn’t agree with that sentiment, but his father wasn’t here.

Blaine Anderson

Blaine smiled and pulled his phone from his pocket, quickly saving the contact in his phone just to be on the safe side. He'd text her at some point, when he managed to find something actually productive to say. As he slid his phone back into his pocket, he chuckled softly. "I... well, it's Princess. She's never quite been a fan of me, but... I'm working on it. We're kind of stuck together now," He informed, nodding once. When he was told to focus on what made him happy, he paused for a moment, but he new better than to argue. He simply nodded, offering her a small smile. "I will. I might have... exaggerated a little earlier. There is one boy, I guess. But he's taken."

Pamela Anderson

"I can talk to her if you like," she offered, knowing exactly how hard headed her daughter could be. She was the spitting image of her mother after all. As Blaine went on, he captured Pam's full attention. She knew there had to be someone special. Blaine was always someone who poured love and affection, most people didn't deserve it but she would never stand in the way of something Blaine wanted. "He is not pulling on your a string... no, what is the word... Oh. He is not leading you on, was he?" She asked with concern in her voice.

Blaine Anderson

Blaine shook his head quickly, chewing on the inside of his lower lip for a moment. He knew that would just do more harm than good. Not to mention, they weren't children anymore. He had to be able to work things out with Princess without running to their parents for help. "Not really, no. Sorry. I kind of just need some kind of direction, mostly. I want things to be better, but I also know it's going to take time. She didn't just... start feeling this way overnight, and I don't want to minimize whatever happened that got her to this point," He tried to explain, offering Pam a small smile. "She actually got coffee with me when I first got here, so that was a positive," He quickly added, hoping to talk Princess up some so it didn't seem all bad. Then, of course, the part mentioning Sebastian came back, and he really didn't know how to answer. "Well, no. It's mostly me putting myself in this position, you know? It's not the first time I've gotten... feelings for a straight guy."

Pamela Anderson

Pam nodded. "I think she just misses her Papa and doesn't... hasn't figured out how to deal with it," she offered sadly. Pam tried to do so many things to help Princess, even therapy, but none of it stuck. "Just let her know that you won't give up. That none of us will, not matter how much she wants to pull away." Pam smiled at Blaine's effort and just offered a nod. "Well I am glad some progress is being made." Then as Blaine went on, Pam's heart just ached for her son. "Oh, anak," she said with a frown. "I am sorry." She pressed her hand to the side of his face again and ran her thumb along his cheek bone. "It's preparing you. It's all preparing you for finding the love that you're supposed to have. It will work out for you one day."

Blaine Anderson

Blaine nodded slowly and offered Pam a small smile. "I understand," He murmured, looking down at his hands for a moment. "I'll do that. I guess I need to start pushing more, instead of waiting for her to come to me. Thanks, mama," He said, glancing back up as his smile only grew. It felt like everything was starting to make more sense, and he almost wondered why he hadn't connected the dots sooner. "It is getting better, yeah. It was fun, even." When she pressed her hand to his cheek again, he maintained the same smile and nodded once. "Thanks, mama. I appreciate that. Just need to stop making the same mistakes over and over." Except he's not straight, he's just pretending to be. The thought almost made Blaine roll his eyes, but he knew better than to do that while having a discussion with his mother. That was just bound to end in disaster.

Pamela Anderson

"You're very welcome, my son," she offered with a soft smile, pulling back just in time for their food to get there. "I'm so glad I was able to come here and spend some time with all of you. And don't worry about those mistakes," she went on. "It's how we all learn. And how we grow." She pulled a small bottle of hand sanitizer out and rubbed some into her hands before reaching out and dropping some into Blaine's hands. "I'm very proud of you and the man you've become. "And so is your father." He was a little more absent than she liked and wasn't always the kindest to Blaine, but deep down she knew he loved his kids as well. "I can't wait to see what else is in store for you."

[semblanche]

love ur content! what are some writeblrs and wips you recommend?

thank you very much!! i'm afraid i rarely follow specific wips, but in terms of people i'd have to say -

@holotones - some of the most raw, real writing i've had the privilege to read. includes everything from western to scifi to dark academia - they have the RANGE, darling. i still think about a passage they posted on an oc of theirs, pavel, sometimes, and have to bite my tongue to keep from screaming

@popovs - i think everyone knows eva at this point. their writing is so ridiculously gorgeous, it feels like reading gold - if that makes sense?? their images are vivid, their dialogue hits hard, and you are going to be thinking about whatever they posted last for the next few days at least

@at-lxs - atlas doesn't post much but i maintain that her writing is literally some of the BEST i've ever read. her mind is so fucking sharp and her ideas so fucking good,, 100/10 would be mutuals with again, i love her sm

@carumens - carmen was one of the first people to reach out to me when i was starting out on writeblr and i can never thank them enough for that. they're sweet, supportive, and also have a wip (sunflowers at night) that i can't WAIT to see as a novel seated with the rest of my favorite books on my bookshelf :)

@evergrcen - relatable posts and writing that kicks you in the throat and leaves you gasping. everything elle posts will get you feeling like your heart skipped a beat, she's just That Good. and? also?? literally so nice??? i can't

@llesbianwrites - 100/10 taste in music and 1000/10 writing quality. each new character intro they post has me internally screaming to know the full story, it's so good

@emdrabbles - treasured mutual!! em is great because you can shitpost with her & then actually end up coming up with an idea that's... not half bad. beyond that, her writing is just? so good?? you get attached to all the characters and the worldbuilding is so expansive you can feel the thought that's gone into it. i in theory like none of the genres she writes in and yet i'm still obsessed, THAT'S how good she is

@bitterbodies - their writing style is the kind that feels like a repeated punch in the stomach with each sentence. they paint their scenes so beautifully it almost feels like poetry, and their ideas are just,,, oh my god

@saintsophia - i have fallen in love with every single one of her characters to no return's point, and i don't even have words for her writing style. i can still remember images from her writing that stuck with me, sentences like 'we collected the butts of her cigarettes because it was the closest we'd ever get to being kissed by her' (i am absolutely butchering that quote rn, i'm so sorry sophia) and it's all just,,, incredible. so, so, so good

@julesruleswrites - 'touch of light' is such an underappreciated wip tbh. finley and emerson are the only m/f pairing i'd trust with my life; they have such a strong, compelling dynamic. there's also magic, and gods, and disappointing your family - highkey recommend checking it out!!!

@oliviagordonwrites - along with showering me with endless support (which i'll never be grateful enough for), her own writing is just? AMAZING??? i look forward to every new excerpt, the scenes feel quick and intense, like you're hanging off the edge of your chair in anticipation. it's literally so good

@unnagi - their writing feels like soft sunsets and long walks on the beach, and i love the cultural aspect thrown in!!! 11/10 friend recommend

this probably ended up being a bit longer than you wanted, and i'm still forgetting so many wonderful people, but here are the recommendations i can think of atm!

[mechanicalriddle]

EYY ITS EXALTED SECRET SANTA OVER ‘ERE

Here are your choices for this year’s EXALTED SECRET SANTA, o secret santa. Here are your choices for this December…

(big shoutout to Tumblr for completely butchering the image quality on all of these!! anyway heres a link to a big version:)(x)

Ted is one of my first and most beloved Exalted characters and if you follow me at all you’ve probably heard about his misadventures!

Ledaal Tedeo (22, he/him) is a disgraced ex-dynast who had nearly managed to graduate from the Heptagram with his sorcerous credentials, until he exalted working on his senior thesis and had to get the heck outta there. Now he is on the run from his old life accompanied by a ragtag circle of solar misfits (and one abyssal) and having… Well. A time.

He’s a sorcerer, lore supernal, genius mathematician and artificer, Single Point initiate, clinically anxious and perpetually annoyed (by everything). In his spare time he enjoys a.) working, b.) smoking weed and c.) chillin (in a high-brow, decadent sort of manner). You might draw him toiling away at a workbench, toking off a cool pipe with a dragon or something on it, casting a spell, swinging his sword around, hanging out with his Huraka familiar, etc etc.

Special appearance notes... He has funny wispy hair due to his strong db pedigree. He also has supernaturally clean and shiny teeth due to the blessings of a teeth god. Oh yeah and an evil tattoo which is a great excuse to wear fingerless gloves everywhere. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: do not “skinny-wash” this character!! I will be very cranky if you do that!! If you don’t think you can draw a fat character, well… learn, or pick a different guy, or something.

~~~

(x)

Oh wow, cool abyssal. Huh, wait. They’re not an abyssal? NO because they are a FIRE ASPECT! They’ve not familiar with your “realm” nonsense or whatever because they were raised in a DOOMSDAY CULT! The Last Candle Lit Against the Dark (20, they/them) hails from the high north, along the fringes of the bordermarches. After their disastrous exaltation they were cast out by their kin into the frozen wastes to die. Instead, they were taken in by a lonely goddess imprisoned in a sunken city. Here they were granted knowledge, the secrets of sorcery, and a few fun little mutations as a bonus.

Candle makes pretty egregious use of their control spell, Blood Lash, instead of more conventional weaponry (otherwise opting for knives, in a pinch). They also have way too many oxbodies + the pain tolerance merit, meaning they can get slapped around a fair bit without being significantly hampered by it. You could draw them doing some kind of cool action sequence, like using their blood lash, or doing a cool backflip, or something like that. Other options… reading forbidden texts, performing evil blood rituals at a spooky altar, trying on some gaudy goth fashions, or just hangin’ out.

Their aspect markings manifest as grey hair & perpetually soot-stained fingertips. Their control spell gives them nasty, veiny markings, which become more intense and spread farther over their face/arms if they are angry or overexerted. Their evil goddess connection has a few funny effects as well- They have a second set of eyes that can see in the dark (which are kept closed most of the time) and hooves that improve their jumping capabilities (kept under their Convenient Hoof Concealing Gucci Boots) as well as a few fun effects that are a secret to everybody (except me, and the GM of course)

(cool example shrine)

~~~

Also I didn’t wanna put this guy in the ring but I ran out of time. So! here is my last option...

(x)

(note: i was running out of time so i just yanked this text nearly directly from a post I’d put together for commissioners.... so if the wording seems a bit weird thats why)

Broken Star (21, he/him) is a day caste abyssal, investigation supernal, lifelong skullstone resident, former detective, and fresh-from-the-grave Bodhisattva Anointed by Dark Waters crony.

His primary weapon is thrown daggers. Conveniently he has wings which are made of dagger “feathers” which he can remove and throw at people. In close combat he prefers paired shortswords, and fights in a sort of rough-and-tumble ‘brawler’ style.

The wings are a part of a sort of “second skeleton” artifact weapon which has been grafted onto him via necrosurgical bullshit. All the pointy metal-looking bits sticking out of him are also a part of this ‘second skeleton’. He gets some cool evocations from it! But also angst :[

He looks very mean but he is not actually!! Hes sort of a jokester and a goofball and hes pretty frequently got a big, sharp-toothed grin on his face. Which is not to say that he can't be a serious and incredibly dangerous assassin when circumstances call for it...

For things you could draw him doing… Prowling around, swordfighting, throwing his feather-daggers, doing cool flips, being a show-off are all excellent options to get you started, but if you have other cool ideas then by all means have some fun with it!

(x)

[theveryworstthing]

Pictured: three blooming Luna Mandrakes.

Field Notes: Fruit Bats

From my experience you suddenly know exactly what’s happening when you see the Blooming begin but you don’t really care about it more than any other seasonal marker. It happens every year to specific people and for some reason it just slips your mind when the physical signs are less obvious. It’s just the way things are. One of the natural mysteries here that no one really thinks about but that we all reflexively keep from outsiders.

Maybe it’s the smell that triggers the return of memories? During the day you’ll start to get tiny whiffs of their musty fruity aroma if you stand too close to the Luna Mandrakes. Not that most people stand especially close once they remember what they are, but in some cases it’s unavoidable (or just rude) to keep your distance. They’re a part of the community after all. They’re the soft spoken neighbor who lives in the house where grass grows up through the floorboards. The kind butcher who’s bare feet are always caked in blood and dirt. The school janitor who stared at the sun, eyes unaffected by the glare, every lunch break when I was in high school and told us stories about the founding of the tribe that settled here before this town was built. Every spring they and others like them go about their lives as the days grow warmer and their skin grows paler and nobody mentions the way they gently scratch at their too-long necks when the the time to bloom grows near.

The process has always reminded me of those time lapse videos of seeds sprouting. For some the buds bubble up through their flesh and squeeze cascading blossoms through the widening pores that begin to honeycomb their throats. You can even hear the thin protective membranes that re-form every morning pop open under the pressure if you’re nearby during their evening transformations. For others the flowers don’t wait for an opening to spring from, instead their skin simply twists and puffs itself into fat white knots that always reminded me of oiled balls of dough. By day they hang heavy from the knobbly stem formed from spines shrink-wrapped in velvety white skin. At sundown the buds begin to split and separate, until they eventually fan out into dramatic manes of thick white petals. The flowers themselves come in different sizes and configurations, but they all finish their evening blossoming by unfurling blood-red clusters of pistols and stamens that pulse like gentle heartbeats. Personally I find them all breathtakingly beautiful in that gross way that nature is beautiful. Almost makes me wish I had studied botany instead of biology.

How do I always forget that they aren’t human?

How does anyone ever forget?

I’ve always felt like I should be terrified by the cycle of forgetting and remembering and maybe if I hadn’t been born here I would be. It could just be that my endless curiosity about the ecosystem around my home trumps the fear. Or I’m just weird inside. Probably a mix of the three. I don’t even think I’m supposed to notice that I should be upset by it. No one else feels the same way.

No one else gets anxious around the bats either.

I think they’re harmless, I’ve been told all my life that they’re harmless, and I tell every classroom of children I visit that they’re harmless. They show up every year right as the Luna Mandrakes start blooming to feed on their nectar and in turn, pollinate them. Just like regular bats. Regular bats that are large enough that their combined wings of their relatively small population completely black out the sky for at least ten minutes every evening, the sight of which has always given me such a rush of smothering claustrophobia that witnessing and recording the the spectacle for my research leaves me shaking and lightheaded. Regular bats that only thrive in a neighborhood on the south side of the city with the densest population of Luna Mandrakes, where harsh restrictions and curfews send any human on the streets at night without a botanical license straight to jail for encroaching on the habitat of a protected endangered species. Regular bats that my mentors and I, even with our exhaustively thorough paperwork are only allowed to observe through field cameras in approved locations or by studying the occasional disfigured body found at the edge of the desert.

Regular bats that I finally saw alive and up close last night when I grabbed a burner phone and slipped out of my apartment with a fake botanical license and the promising seeds of a future panic attack.

So.

Right off the bat (no pun intended) something is wrong with the cameras we’re using.

Something about them is distorting the images into visions of creatures both more bestial and less monstrous than the bats I saw attending the lavish night market that has apparently existed here for god knows how long. Draped in finery and walking upright with ease they wandered the streets freely, stopping ever so often to converse with each other in a language I couldn’t understand or flitting from one open door or window to the next. I peeked inside one dimly lit bar and found it converted into a sort of small theater where a few bats munching on mealworms crowded around a huge flat screen tv and a human woman with a lanyard matching my forged one flipped through movies on Netflix and described each one in detail, pausing between summaries to gauge the half hearted chirps coming from her audience before moving on. Next door a supposedly closed for renovations bed and breakfast was transformed into a makeshift spa where human attendants rubbed shimmering oils into the sprawled out wings of bats being meticulously groomed by other bats with white beads braided into their fur. In the open garage of a closed auto shop yet more bats sat around watching chickens in a makeshift pen. The chickens weren’t fighting, in fact I think they were both hens? At one point a bat reached down to pet one before being aggressively clucked at and recoiling back to their seat. I still have no idea what the point was with that one.

I should have taken pictures. I mean I’m glad I didn’t because I drew enough attention to myself without snapping Polaroids like a tourist every five seconds but I have a feeling once I get some sleep this is all going to feel much less real and I’ll forget important details before I can get some solid sketches of the bats done. I wish I could draw right now but I’m still too jittery.  

Also I am procrastinating because writing out my thoughts about chickens and giant bats trying to agree on if they were in the mood to watch Spice World means I can avoid talking about the Luna Mandrakes.

As I said before, this area of the city is where most of the Mandrakes lived. I was confused at first because I saw so few out on the streets where the bats mingled but the ones that I did see looked…off. They were all bare foot and either wore off the shoulder garments or went topless, probably to comfortably make room for their floral manes. Angel hair thin tendrils of flesh peeled away from their ankles every time their feet touched the ground for more than a few seconds and gently prodded the sidewalk beneath them until they continued walking. Their half-lidded eyes had a reflective sheen to them in the glow of the street lamps and they rarely blinked as their focus darted back and forth from the market wonders to the bats that watched them with open curiosity or kept pace just steps behind them. They moved like they were swimming through warm molasses. Smooth and purposeful, but easily too slow to lose their admirers. It gave them a kind of floaty quality that would have been quite elegant if not for the fact that their hands seemed to be just out of sync with the slow down, flexing and fidgeting as if untethered from the strange spell the rest of their bodies were under.  

I followed one of the plants deeper into the residential area and watched them disappear into a darkened home. I was too afraid to join their entourage inside, but I did decide to look at some the houses with less traffic. Even with fewer bats or human officials to potentially discover my ruse, the Mandrakes’ homes were eerie enough to give myself a three house limit on investigations before I turned around and made my way back.

I made it to one.

It was a small house tucked away on a dead end street, totally unremarkable outside of a couple of trees and bushes out front that shielded much of it from view and the fact that the door was open but the windows were all shut. I should have left when I heard the guitar from just inside the dark entryway, but I didn’t. Mostly because the high of curiosity and the possibility of catching a giant man-bat monster thing maybe having a chill jam session overpowered my common sense. Instead I followed the meandering melody down the hall and tried to dodge the sticky sections of the wall that coated the hand I used to guide myself in the dark with what felt like watered down syrup. I followed it all the way to a slightly open door in the hallway where the moonlight through the windows was more than enough to make out the carpet of red stained petals I had been walking on.  

There were at least five bodies on the floor of that room.

Whatever did it had torn through the blossom manes of the Mandrakes, leaving their heads barely attached by strands of viscera to chests that seemed to have been crushed and gnawed on by some massive creature. All evidence pointed to them being dead but those who had them still slowly followed me as best they could with their cloudy eyes.

I took a step inside and tried not to meet their gazes as I tried to mentally process the destruction. Besides a few thin smears and splatters there was surprisingly little blood at the scene. Or maybe it was all nectar. I feel like my clothes stink of both now. I also think I’m probably dangerously deep in shock because my first move upon getting home from such a scene was to write it all down instead of sitting in the shower and screaming for days, which seems much more up my ally when it comes to finding a room full of corpses that track you with their eyes but that’s neither here nor there.

The Mandrake with the guitar sat in a chair by the window, clearly also a victim of whatever mauled the others but mostly intact and still breathing fairly easily. He didn’t respond to my intrusion, I don’t think he even knew I was there. The tendrils around his ankles had rooted him in place, threading themselves into the rug at his feet and winding around similar limp and blackening tendrils branching from the fallen bodies nearby. He played as if in a daze and I debated on whether I should try to get his attention or simply haul him out of there before whatever did this came back to finish the job.

This dilemma is probably what distracted me from the footsteps until I felt the clawed hand gripping my shoulder.  

“You’re not supposed to be here,” The bat said in a deep feminine voice. Their tone was light and neutral as if merely giving me a friendly reminder, but they extended their wings just enough to block my exits while long red fingers reached for my lanyard. I felt just as rooted as the Mandrake while it turned my fake id back and forth in the moonlight, purring to themselves in an inquisitive tone before eventually smiling and setting the piece of plastic back against my chest with a little pat. Their hand came back up to my shoulder and paused for a second before sliding up to grip my collar bone and smearing something warm and wet against my throat with a clawed thumb.

“You are not,” they said, quieter now as they leaned down and forced me to stare into their giant brown eyes for what felt like hours, “supposed to be here.”

I nodded.

And then they just…let me go.

They strode past me into the room, sparing the other bodies only a glance as they headed for the Mandrake with the guitar. I only stayed long enough to watch them gently brush the dark brown curls out of his eyes before my body’s flight response finally kicked in and I bolted.

And now I’m home. I kept calm and got past the barricades like I was supposed to. I discovered that a species I thought I knew all my life has a secret society that mirrors our own which brings us up to two sapient non-human species living alongside us that the rest of the world has no idea about. My plan totally worked despite the fact that it totally shouldn’t have. And I’m not sure if any of that matters because to be honest I have no idea what to do with this information. What I do know is that I got a news alert on my phone about an hour ago when a home on the south side of the city was destroyed in an electrical fire that claimed the lives of the five people inside before firefighters could arrive and thankfully extinguish the blaze.

No word on a sixth body.

No word about any dangerous creatures on the loose.

And I can’t even focus on the implications of these new mysteries because all I can think about is the shadowy courtyard just outside my apartment where I swear I’ve spotted a tall dark figure with nectar-stained hands at least twice now. I don’t think they can do closed doors and windows but mine are all locked and bolted just the same. All I can do is wait.

Forty-five minutes until sunrise.

over on patreon Shannon Leigh Legler  asked for 'big fat flowers', Sabrina Gross asked for 'cute girls of any kind', and he_walks asked for 'April showers bring May flowers.....but what else do they bring?'. the first two prompts inspired the sketches and the last prompt plus the sketches inspired the short story :)

[notquiteaghost]

i just wrote up a very barebones transcript of all the geralt & jaskier scenes in ‘four marks’, because i can’t find any online, and it took me like an hour so i might as well share it

it only takes note of action that interrupted dialogue, cuz i just wanted a reference for the dialogue, and it also only covers their actual conversation in the first scene. but other than that it should be accurate. i used netflix subtitle spelling for names

>>>  

JASKIER: I love the way you just sit in the corner and brood.

GERALT: I’m here to drink alone.

JASKIER: Good, yeah, good. No one else hesitated to comment on the quality of my performance, except… for you. Come on. You don’t want to keep a man with bread in his pants waiting. You must have some review for me. Three words or less.

GERALT: They don’t exist.

JASKIER: Whaaat don’t exist?

GERALT: The creatures in your song.

JASKIER: And how would you know? … Oh, fun. White hair… big old loner, two very, very scary-looking swords, I know who you are. You’re the Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. Called it!

>>>

JASKIER: Ah. Need a hand? I’ve got two. One for each of the, uh, devil’s horns.

GERALT: Go away.

JASKIER: I won’t be but silent back-up. (pause) Look, I heard your note, and yes, you’re right, maybe real adventures would make better stories. And you, sir, smell chock-full of them. Amongst other things. I mean, what is that? Is that onion? It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you smell of death and destiny. Heroics and heartbreak.

GERALT: It’s onion.

JASKIER: Right, yeah, yeah. Ooh, I could be your barker, spreading the tales of Geralt of Rivia, the– the Butcher of Blaviken!

GERALT: Come here.

JASKIER: Yeah?

(GERALT punches JASKIER in the stomach. JASKIER groans and wheezes.)

GERALT: Come on, Roach.

>>>

JASKIER: Reading between the lines, and the gut punches, chum, I’d say you have got a bit of a… an image problem. Were I to join on this… feat to defeat the devil of Posada, I could relieve you of that title. All the North would be too busy singing the tales of Geralt of Rivia, the– the White Wolf, or– or something.

GERALT: Butcher is right.

JASKIER: Do you mind if I hop up there with you? It’s just, I’m not really wearing the right kind of footwear–

GERALT: Don’t touch Roach.

JASKIER: –Yeah, right.

JASKIER: You know, the elves called this Dol Blathanna, before bequeathing it to the humans and retreating to their golden palaces in the mountains. There I go again, just… delivering exposition. … Geralt? Geralt? Geralt, wh-where are you going? Geralt, don’t leave me. Hello? What are we looking for again?

GERALT: Blessed silence.

JASKIER: Yeah, I don’t really go in for that. Have you, uh, have you ever hunted a devil before, Geralt?

GERALT: Devils don’t exist.

JASKIER: Right. Obviously. Then, uh, then what are we doing?

GERALT: Sometimes there’s monsters, sometimes there’s money. Rarely both. That’s the life. 

(GERALT gets hit by something.) 

GERALT: Shit!

JASKIER: Act Two begins! What was that? Looks like a tiny cannonball from a… Oh my gosh. ... Geralt, it is a devil. Ohhh, I have to see this magical, this mythi– 

(JASKIER gets hit in the forehead, and passes out.)

TORQUE: Leave me be!

GERALT: You talk.

TORQUE: Of course I talk!

GERALT: What happened with you? Your mother fuck a goat?

TORQUE: I am Torque the Sylvan, a rare and intelligent creature!

GERALT: You’re a dick. With balls.

TORQUE: Balls I got from humans, who left out filled with iron, meant to poison me!

GERALT: Ow!

TORQUE: Did your mother fuck a snowman?

GERALT: You are intelligent, I’ll give you that. So I won’t kill you. But you can’t stay here.

TORQUE: Neither can you.

(Something hits GERALT in the head.)

>>>

JASKIER: This is the part where we escape.

GERALT: This is the part where they kill us.

JASKIER: Who’s they?

ELF WOMAN: (in Elder) Beast!

GERALT: Elves.

JASKIER: Oi, that’s my lute! Give that back! Quick, Geralt. Do your– your witchering–

GERALT: Shut up!

ELF WOMAN: (in Elder) You shut up!

JASKIER: Oh, my Elder speech is rough, I only got part of that.

ELF WOMAN: (in English) Humans, shut up.

JASKIER: (in Elder) Ah, got it, thanks so much.

ELF WOMAN: Do you wanna die right now?

GERALT: As opposed to later?

JASKIER: No, please, not the lu–!

GERALT: Leave off! He’s just a bard.

ELF WOMAN: You don’t deserve the air you breathe. Everything you touch you destroy.

JASKIER: You hide in your golden palaces. You beat a bound man, too scared to even look him in the eye!

ELF WOMAN: Do you like my palace? Hmm? Does it live up to the tales you humans tell?

(GERALT headbutts her. She falls back, coughing.)

JASKIER: (laughs) Yeah, take that, pointy. … Wait, what’s–what’s wrong with her?

FILAVANDREL: She’s sick.

JASKIER: Oh, and who’s this?

TORQUE: He’s Filavandrel, king of the elves.

FILAVANDREL: Not a king. Not by choice.

GERALT: You were stealing for them.

TORQUE: I felt for them. They were forced out of Dol Blathanna.

JASKIER: Forced out? No, they chose–

FILAVANDREL: Do you know anyone that would choose to leave their home? To starve? To have a Sylvan steal for them? 

TORQUE: Toruviel, no one was supposed to get hurt.

TORUVIEL: What’s two humans in the ground when countless elves have died?

GERALT: One human. And you can let him go.

FILAVANDREL: And Posada will learn that we’ve been stealing. The humans will attack. Many will die, on both sides.

GERALT: The lesser evil. No matter what you choose, you’ll come out bloody, and hating yourself. Trust me.

FILAVANDREL: That’s the problem. I can’t. This is necessary.

GERALT: I understand. As long as you understand that it won’t be long before you follow me in death.

FILAVANDREL: Yes, because they’ve pushed us from viable soil. Even chaos is polluted. Synthetically enhanced so humans can make magic.

GERALT: Chaos is the same as it’s always been. Humans just adapted better.

FILAVANDREL: You say adapt, and I say destroy.

GERALT: You are choosing to starve. You’re cutting off your ear to spite your face.

FILAVANDREL: You think this is about pride? My elders worked with humans, and got robbed of all they had. And when they fought back, they were slaughtered. “The Great Cleansing”, humans call it. I call it digging a mass grave for everyone I loved. And now the humans proudly watch these very fields grow, our babies fertiliser for their grain. I don’t wish to bury anyone else. I was once Filavandrel of the Silver Towers. Now I’m Filavandrel of the Edge of the World. If I bring my people down from these mountains, it would mean bowing to human sovereignty. They’ll make slaves of us. Pariahs of half-blood children.

GERALT: Then go somewhere else. Rebuild. Get strong again. Show the humans that you are more than what they fear you to be.

FILAVANDREL: Like you, Witcher?

GERALT: I have learned to live with them. So that I may live.

TORUVIEL: Please, my King. There are others. A new generation. Evellien who wish to fight. Let us take back what’s ours. Starting now.

TORQUE: Wait!

FILAVANDREL: Torque, stand aside.

TORQUE: The Witcher could’ve killed me. But he didn’t. He’s different. Like us.

GERALT: If you must kill me, I am ready. But the Sylvan’s right. Don’t call me human.

>>>

JASKIER: Credit where credit is due, that whole reverse psychology thing you did on them was brilliant, by the way. (imitates Geralt) “Kill me, I’m ready”. … That’s the conclusion. They just let us go, and you give all of Nettly’s coin to the elves.

GERALT: Filavandrel’s lute not gift enough for you?

JASKIER: Yeah, she is a bit sexy, isn’t she? I do have respect for Filavandrel. He survived the Great Cleansing once. Who knows? Maybe he can do it again. Be reborn. (singing) Will the elf king heed what the witcher entreats? Is history a wheel doomed to repeat? No, that’s– that’s shit.

GERALT: This is where we part ways, bard, for good.

JASKIER: Look, I promised to change the public’s tune about you. At least allow me to try.

(JASKIER sings the opening verses of Toss A Coin.)

JASKIER: (singing) And so cried the Witcher, “He can’t be bleat–”

GERALT: That’s not how it happened. Where’s your newfound respect?

JASKIER: Respect doesn’t make history.

(JASKIER continues to sing Toss A Coin.)

GERALT: Hmm.

[blurhawaii]

yuletide 2020

dear yuletide writer,

hello and happy yuletide! i’m pretty sure my letters get longer and longer every year and yet i’m still terrible at putting what i like into words. just know that the prompts are just suggestions--if you’ve got something else in mind, go for it. and sorry this is so disjointed.

likes:

dysfunctional relationships eg. codependency, messed up father/son dynamics, enemies to lovers, power imbalances.

vulnerability in men, uncertain intimacy.

UST, slow burn, first times.

magical realism/cosmic horror. weird hints of it in an otherwise normal universe.

redemption arcs.

found family.

big loyalty kink. love it when trust is earned and kept.

praise kink.

open and honest communication between partners.

polyamory. it’s the journey of them getting together and making it work that interests me the most. or how a couple goes about bringing in a third person.

stories set in canon. or a divergence of canon. fix-it fics.

dark/bleak fics. don’t be afraid to drag characters through the mud. happy endings are welcome but i like the struggle.

i’m fine with anything from gen to porn but would be happiest with something in the middle.

canon typical violence is fine and to be expected from some of my choices.

characters and their relationships are more important than plot for me.

dislikes:

AUs that are completely disconnected from canon e.g. high school, coffee shop AUs.

established relationships

crossovers

genderbending

feminisation of male characters

fics that are entirely fluff

A/B/O fics

PWP

mpreg 

first person fics (i have no problem with second person fics tho if you think that could work.)

The Departed (2006) *Billy Costigan                    *Sean Dignam

one of my favourite films ever. i request it every year so you can't really go wrong with this as i'm just thirsty for anything.

most of my love is for dignam and his tough love attitude towards his job and the undercovers he's responsible for. i am endlessly endeared by his wild card quality, expletive fueled speech and hair trigger temperament. the father/son relationship with queenan that’s contrasted against billy’s father/son relationship with queenan. his complete disregard for everyone else in that office, especially sullivan. and how despite all of that, it's obvious that he cares. i don't think you could do a job like that and not care, and it’s those few and rare moments where we see him soften around billy --we need you, pal-- that's what i would like to see more of. that juxtaposition of good cop/bad cop coming from the same guy. shipping fic is preferred but whatever you are comfortable with is fine. due to the nature of the film i am perfectly comfortable with violence and the screwed up relationship they are bound to have. the friction born of the situation vs the fact that they need each other to get through this is what i am all about.

things that really get me with these two: codependency, power imbalances, the enemies to lovers trope, vulnerability, the whole constructing intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men thing they have going on, as seen in the gif above.

fics where billy survives are my usual go-to. i'd love something that explores the angst of billy's ‘where the hell were you when i needed you’ reaction towards dignam following queenan’s death all the way up to the ending, and beyond that assuming billy lives.

i’ve spent far too much time thinking about the line --why don’t we just meet up, sweetheart, let me buy you an ice cream. the jokey seriousness of it just kills me. if you can somehow write that happening in a believable, in character fic you would earn my eternal respect. whether that’s a clandestine meeting during billy’s undercover period or some kind of post-film scenario where dignam makes good on his promises, i have no idea.

daemon au - very curious how this would impact going undercover. daemons expressing feelings that the characters otherwise can’t. the intimacy of touching/comforting each other’s daemons.

soulmate au - either having their names on each other or their first words. this is admittedly a longshot but interests me for the same reason the daemon au does, because i’d love to see how this would work in a universe where you’re undercover.

time loop/groundhog day fic where things go better. or worse, i guess.

Godless (TV 2017)

*Roy Goode              *Bill McNue               *Alice Fletcher

i’m a massive fan of westerns. the harsh way of life, the violence, the isolation, drawn out revenge plots, the murkiness of good vs evil or sheriff vs anti-hero, the importance of honour and heroism and how that differs for men and women, especially in this universe and its town full of widows. having said all that, i’m still very much a sucker for cool cowboys in a shallow female way.

my favourite thing to do is turn every love triangle into an ot3. so i’d love a fic post canon where roy comes back once he realises his found family is just as important as his real family. i imagine bill would try to do the gentlemanly thing of bowing out and letting roy and alice be together but i’d love for alice to have the agency of choice, getting to have her cake and eating it too by choosing both roy and bill. however you jigsaw them together my main thing here is that i don’t want bill to get left out.

i feel the roy/bill aspect in particular could be explored a lot more. i love the earned mutual respect and how easily they move around each other during the gunfight at the end. (bill’s deteriorating eyesight side plot fascinates me, how it goes with his loss of purpose and comes back when teaming up with roy to defend the town.) the usual ideas of western masculinity get all twisted around when roy and bill are in the presence of alice and they both seem kind of subby towards her, which yes please. the way alice kisses the scar she gave roy and the fact that he simply lets her is *chef kiss*

i’m actually very okay with letting them be soft with each other after all of their tragedy.

honest communication between partners could work wonders here.

Locke (2013)

*Ivan Locke                            *Donal

i honestly think this film is an underappreciated masterpiece. a hour and a half long car ride that's totally compelling, and it's all down to tom hardy and his welsh accent that's not even welsh. of all the relationships broken down, strengthened, or tentatively started, it's the one between ivan and donal that interests me the most. you're given just enough background to know there is a history between these two. whether donal is his right hand man on the project or is just an assistant that effectively gets promoted because he's the only one still there willing to take ivan's call. either way, there's trust there, on top of the shared knowledge of donal's capacity to get drunk on the job --this has clearly been a problem before-- but ivan still trusts him enough to get his baby of a building built when he can't be there personally, and that fascinates me.

the film ends very much in a lurch and i can't bring myself to see the ending in a positive light. a baby with a woman he doesn't particular like is not a recipe for a fresh start and i honestly can't see ivan not following up on the progress of his building.

i have this image of ivan sleeping on donal's couch because his wife won't take him back, bethan realises she just wants the baby and not him, he's lost his job and he has nowhere else to go and so he's just backseat driving this buildings construction through donal’s position. you've got this man who's lost everything and an alcoholic just wallowing together, maybe clinging to the idea that with this buildings success, they can fix themselves.

i also ship it and if you manage to take it in that direction i would be totally into that too. i guess i'm just looking for something post film with these two.

i don't know anything about concrete farming tho so feel free to fudge that as much as you need to.

The Boys (TV 2019)

*Billy Butcher                          *Homelander

what i like about this show is that it’s dark, it’s violent and the relationships between the characters are about as fucked up and convoluted as you can get. i am specifically interested in the relationship between billy and homelander and how the power is constantly shifting. i’d love something that just takes into account every horrible reason why they want to kill each but also all the reasons why they haven’t. ship fic is more than welcome.

details that interest me the most:

all the bizarre family dynamics - their shared bad relationships with their fathers. loved the scene where billy learns about homelander’s childhood and how that tiny humanising moment might affect his view of the man. especially in season 2 where we see them both interacting with ryan. love the inverse of homelander trying to be a good dad and billy wanting absolutely nothing to do with the kid. i wish we could have seen more of the dynamic immediately following the cliffhanger at the end of season 1. what happened between that moment and billy waking up somewhere else. maybe some kind of bizarre hostage situation family in this small suburban home.

i am fascinated by the idea of having the buffer of both becca and ryan between them. not being able to kill each other at the end of season 1 because of the deal becca made, and then again at the end of season 2 with homelander not wanting to be seen as a villain in front of ryan. maybe billy doesn’t ship ryan off at the end of season 2. maybe he thinks he can keep him safest by raising him himself and you get this weird co-dadding situation where the kid is the only thing keeping them from killing each other.

the public cleaning of the slate post-season 2 with billy not being a wanted man any more and homelander having to appear as a united front with the seven. would love something with billy pushing things in public because homelander can’t do anything about it.

homelander’s desperation to be loved. the potential of obsessive one sided relationships.

thank you writer and best of luck.

[giannimaldonado]

Album Of The Day: Satan Is Watching

When most people born after a certain period of time think of the genre that is “country”, and what it has morphed into in the context of this day and age, a lot of unpleasant images spring to mind. Pretty boy, clean cut, poser rednecks who’ve never seen a farm outside of their music videos, trying to pretend to be another “honest Joe” when they couldn’t be any further from such a thing, making trashy, twangy glam rock mixed with watered down trap music/EDM for white southerners who might have interesting views on those of different races, rolling around in million dollar sports cars while adopting the moniker of “working class”...is probably what your mind immediately begins to conjure up in that brain of yours.

I honestly can’t say that I blame you. Country, or, at least, MAINSTREAM country, has lost its way completely. Luke Bryan, Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, and Blake Shelton polluted this once proud, grassroots, amazing genre with pandering, trite garbage aimed at making money off of dumb hicks in the bodies of frat boys whose trucks cost more than your own damn house.  Gone are the days when country music was filled to the brim talent, creativity, passion, and heart. Now, this “jock country” has taken its place, having thoroughly fucked country up the ass a few too many times that it has lost its way. For good, perhaps.

Underground country’s usually no better. There’s some exceptions (we’ll get to those soon), but for the most part, it, too, has gone off the rails and destroyed itself completely. It’s often just indie folk or what have you with even more acoustic guitars, though perhaps with more twang, whiny vocals that are trying (and failing) to recreate a stereotypical southern accent, a reliance on cheap gimmicks, sarcasm, and irony to carry their trash because the excrement can’t do that itself, and a musical quality that tries SO hard to imitate the great Mr. Cash, but is little more than a cheap, pale imitation that folks who wear WAY too much flannel and wire rimmed glasses will eat up like it’s the second coming of Joy Division.

No matter how you look at it, country has been thoroughly gentrified for the most part, just like many genres that were previously for a much different variety of people. Like trap music, or blues, or hardcore punk, or black metal. All of the original meaning is gone, driven out by money hungry label executives, clueless and ignorant listeners, and musicians hellbent on half-assing their way to fame and fortune.

It’s a crying shame, it really is.

But fret not, dear reader! There is still a soft, seedy underbelly of the country genre that has taken the long dead (yet forever revered and loved) sound of “outlaw shit”, as Mr. Jennings would put it so eloquently, to its most logical extreme. One that would make Nelson, Cash, Haggard, Coe, and others that might’ve been at the top of their “underground”, “anti-mainstream” game seem rather...accessible. These aforementioned artists and their peers are still greats who, in their primes, were powerhouses that made some of the greatest works the genre would ever produce. But when compared to this particular sound...they just don’t hold up as well. The rawness, the grassroots nature, the down-to-Earth (and sometimes below the Earth) attitude, the simplicity, the honesty, the bluntness, the intimacy, the melancholy...all of it gets turned way up to eleven. It’s dark, it’s mischievous, it’s harsh, it’s gritty, it’s angry, it’s bitter, it’s darkly humorous, it’s lonesome, it’s ornery, and it’s damn sure pretty fucking mean.

Call it whatever you want. “Southern gothic”, “dark country”, “death country”, “gothic country”. It doesn’t matter what name you apply to it. All that matters is that it’s country. Real fucking country. Country meant for the guttersnipes, punks, street urchins, hobos, peasants, and forlorn drifters. This ain’t pretty boy music. This isn’t nice, Christian contemporary that you can play at your local uptight establishment. These aren’t harmless tunes your the posers can get drunk and go mudding to. This is country as it was meant to be. The eptiome of the term “outlaw shit”.

There’s a plethora of wonderful bands in this scene. Sons Of Perdition, Sixteen Horsepower, whatever project Jay Munly’s got going on this time around, The Dead South, the early days of The Devil Makes Three, The Builders And The Butchers, Wovenhand, Ghoultown, Coffinshakers, The Pine Box Boys, and, of course, everyone’s favorite descendant of the Williams family tree. The third one, that is.

But all of those fall short of that truly, truly, TRULY horrific honky-tonk, old-time, folksy, backwoods atmosphere that this duo produces. One that hails from the isolated, empty thickets that lie out in rural Wisconsin. A mentally disturbed pair of “prophets of the country doom”, as they have decided to label themselves. A fine example of those who have gone completely mad, completely sad, and doing so makes them feel very glad. They revel in their craziness, and while no album sounds the same, each one is marred by a couple of recurring themes: humanity is worthy of being sent straight to the fiery depths, these boys are depressed beyond your wildest comprehension, a rebellion against both God and Satan, and a desire to document the lifestyle of society’s forgotten ones, hated ones, and feared ones.

Let me introduce you to Those Poor Bastards.

Fitting name for a couple of enigmatic, largely unknown, extremely obscure pair of men known simply as Lonesome Wyatt (impassioned orations and guitar-based melodies) and The Minister (everything else).

The Minister is completely anonymous, with no one having even seen his face, while all that’s known about Lonesome Wyatt is that he’s from Wisconsin, (probably) lives alone, and is likely of an unsound state of mind.

Why is that all important? Well, go listen to their albums, and then you’ll find out why these little intricacies are vital to the dynamic duo’s imagery, music, and cult status.

While all of their material is quite good in my opinion, today we’re going to look at my favorite album from them, and possibly my favorite album from any country artists EVER! Everyone, please proceed to throw on “Satan Is Watching.”

What you’ll first be met with Lonesome Wyatt letting out a loud, wild, manic screech that almost doesn’t sound...human. It’s not even a word. Just an unhinged howl like Lonesome Wyatt’s been possessed by some sort of demon from the pits of Hell, having taken over the “doomsday preacher boy” to spread the wicked gospel. A hell of a start to an album of any kind, let alone a country album. It’s bold, but it lets you know right off the bat that they aren’t fucking around. This is going to be a rough ride from start to finish, and you’ll be left quaking in your seat once Those Poor Bastards has pierced your mind, heart, and soul with their fiendishly unholy sound. A truly nihilistic piece of art about how this world is foul and wretched, and deserves to burn to a cinder.

But that’s just the first song.

Things only manage to get worse from there. Everything from songs about how Lonesome Wyatt’s a degenerate who revels in just how much filth and squalor he lives in, to songs (well, more like suspiciously suicidal rants) about how life is fucked and there’s just no point in living it anymore, to various “take that!” pieces towards lovers who have wronged him in times that have long since passed, presumably. Typical topics for country artists, but contorted and warped to the point where they sound like miniature horror stories being yelled and hollered by a crazy, top-hat wearing yokel than the struggles and strife that are endured by the common man/downtrodden fellow. Hell, there’s even a Johnny Cash cover! A twisted, perverted, scummy, bone-chilling, haunting, eerie take on the previously wholesome, innocent love song The Man In Black made for June. I can’t exactly look at it the same way, what with these mysterious hooligans having thoroughly butchered it.

Instrumentation is minimalist and simple. Nothing too fancy or technical here. It’s quite self-explanatory. Despite how evil it is, the rhythms are still toe-tappingly catchy. The drums, being pounded upon by the fiery hands of The Minister, provide anything from a nice, plodding beat you can stomp your feet to, all the way to a rowdy raucous of a banger that’ll have you doing some sort of line dance with the living dead. Lonesome Wyatt beats upon his acoustic guitar like it owes him money. Not even really playing it. Just smashing the strings until weird, disgruntled, odd noises come out of it. He also seems to thoroughly shatter his ability to talk without a sore throat, pushing his voice to its very limits. The bass compliments everything very well, providing a creepy, fuzzy, dirge-like texture in the background to keep the menacing tone alive and well.

All in all, while this may not “experimental”, “avant-garde”, or even “progressive”, this is certainly an album that’ll give you the heebie-jeebies, and for a country album, it is most certainly “out there”. It takes the usual country tropes, and either turns them into something out of a David Lynch movie, or subverts/plays with them to fuck with the audience and make them contort their face with confusion...and excitement. A spooky bit of acoustic noise that’ll restore your faith in country music, and remind you that there is still a small resemblance of a spark left within the dying genre.

Please, I highly recommend you check this out.

This has been another installment of “Esoteric Warfare”, and remember...

NOISE, NOT MUSIC!

[weapon13whitefang]

Challenge Ask: One of the theories out there is that Beth is part of the Whisperers. If so, what do you think Beth would have to do to get Daryl to join aswell? #BringBackBeth2019

I’m gonna start off by saying that, with one hundred percent belief on my end, Beth would not try to get Daryl to join the Whisperers unless she had absolutely no idea who he or Carol or Michonne – the only people she’d recognize at this point since Maggie and Rick are MIA – were at all.

The Whisperers in the comic would only kill people that wouldn’t conform to their belief. They shun civilization and humanity and view humans as animals. Basically, the apocalypse was a reset for them to “go back to their roots”, so to speak. Which is funny because on the show, that’s what The Wolves believed. Hell, a Wolf basically says that to Morgan and Gabriel before Carol kills him:

“We’re freeing you. You’re trapped. You need to know, people don’t belong here anymore.”

Which is why a lot of people who’ve read the comics probably thought The Wolves were going to be The Whisperers. They’re very similar after all… But it turns out it was more like a hint / foreshadowing of the Whisperers. At least in terms of dealing with people with views that are “way out there”.

Think about it this way. So far, besides Terminus and The Wolves, the other groups that TF has faced had very understandable reasons behind their actions that one could associate with human survival and mentality. The Governor was a bit mad but his choices stemmed from basic human emotions that were twisted. He lost his family and therefore it twisted him up and he wanted a cure to get his daughter back and he wanted control to run things as he saw they should be. His actions were disgusting and horrible, but he was still marginally human. A monster in his actions. But a human.

Dawn and Grady were an example of The Stanford Prison Experiment. The psychological perceived image of power and control over one’s prisoners. Dawn believed she had control and therefore she underestimated people and what they can and will do for power or to survive. If you’ve never read about the experiment or seen the tapes, fair warning that they’re hard to stomach but also really fascinating. But I can say that some of what we saw at Grady is very similar to the experiment. Especially when you focus on how each person fell into their roll and how quickly things fell apart since the experiment only lasted six days but many people left mid experiment…

Anyway, Grady still had the psychological connection to human actions. What we saw with Dawn and the other officers and the prisoners/Beth was examples of human actions when given no boundaries within boundaries. Meaning the actions of the officers were still “controlled” in the hospital because too much push could have consequences to them even if Dawn was slack on punishment for the sake of a power balance, she still had the illusion of control over things and psychologically that put people in place. Even the ones plotting against her. She was still being a cop just with very twisted views and survival choices… It’s kind of like when you deal with a teacher that thinks they can do whatever they want because they have ten year but, in the end, they still have to keep to certain school rules or risk a full-on student attack. Least in high school anyway.

Then there’s The Saviors. Negan was using charisma and intimation to rally people the way he wanted them. He was basically being an Adolf (I’m not gonna put the N with the Z word in here incase it gets flagged or something since Tumblr is on some cray with their tagging or mention issue) and he used charisma and the illusion of power to make things his way. We get a hint from Gordon (the Savior who tried to get away that Dwight killed) that things before Negan were different. That when Negan came in, everyone and everything changed:

“Thug swoops in with a baseball bat and smiles and we’re so scared we gave up everything – but there’s only one of him and all of us so why are we living like this?”

If you think about it, Negan’s reign was a very basic example of Adolf’s reign over Germany. Adolf came in, worked himself up to power in politics with cunningness, violence, and his overall charm. People liked him (crazy enough) and he was excellent at speaking and surrounded himself with people like himself that weren’t afraid of violence to fulfill their political gain… Who does that sound like? Negan. And Negan used a lot of psychological torture on people (example of letting Dwight fuck with Daryl by taking away his clothes, keeping him awake with cheery music, and feeding him dog food), something Adolf himself had done with his camps… Basically the Saviors could be an example of Germany and their fall to Adolf’s political party… And this is even more true when you think of how Germany had a hard time adapting after Adolf’s fall (I know there’s more history to it than that but I’m not going into politics and history here, just pointing out similarities).

So now look at the Terminus crew and The Wolves. Out of the two, Terminus is more human than the Wolves were. They were once a peaceful group who put up signs to bring people together to survive and have a future… But the wrong kind of people got in and stayed and used the Terminus crew and raped and just enslaved them. This broke Gareth and his brother Alex and their mother Mary. He started seeing his deeds – eating people and hurting them – as things he had to do. Not things he wanted to do. Things he had to do to survive. They needed to eat. Food was scarce, so they took a page from the Walkers. People became the food. You’re either the butcher or the cattle mentality taken to a whole new level… Those that didn’t fall in line – those that questioned the choice to eat others – became the cattle.

Really, Gareth even says it to Bob after Bob wakes up (I cut down some of the speech because it’s not really needed):

“I want to explain myself a little. You see, we didn’t want to hurt you… before. We didn’t want to pull you away from your group or scare you. These aren’t things we want to do. They’re things we gotta do. You and your people took away our home. That’s fair play. Now we’re out here like everybody else trying to survive. And in order to do that, we have to hunt. Didn’t start that way, eating people. It evolved into that. We evolved. We had to. And now we’ve devolved, into hunters… I just hope you understand that nothing happening to you now is personal…. A man’s gotta eat….”

It’s human to evolve… But it’s also an animal thing. Humans and Animals have evolved over the years to adapt to the changing environment and changing world. Gareth had a point when he said they had to evolve… But he was right in that when they evolved, they devolved as well. They went back to cave men. Because in TWD world you can’t be like you were. Like Beth said, you gotta put the past behind you or it kills you. The Terminus people became the Walkers… Humans as Walkers. So, they were the first simple example of The Whisperers in that they turned their back on civilized norm. They ate other humans to live. They weren’t too different from the walkers… Just maintained their human mind of being able to have cognitive thoughts. In the end, that got them killed cause they tried to eat the wrong people.

Then there’s The Wolves. Primitive and cult like, The Wolves used the walkers just like Terminus adapted with the walkers. Now we didn’t see a wolf eat a person (least I don’t recall seeing them try to eat a person) but they did use the walkers and took to overthrowing and raiding other survivor groups to survive. They were scavengers (taking the arc of The Scavengers in the comic, who are the ones who actually attack ASZ after Rick kills Pete). They were like wolves. They scavenged their food, mark their territory, and would grow in numbers with gathering more people to follow their way or gather more walkers to use as a trap, marking them with their W’s as well. Marking them like a farmer marks their cattle. A butcher marking their kills… Which is what a pack of wolves does. They mark their territory and take from it as they see fit.

So again, it’s easy to see why they were viewed as being The Whisperers. But I believe – like a lot of people – that they were just a “beta” version of the Whisperers for the group to face. The Wolves devolved from civilization to taking on animal qualities of a cult-pack mindset and were using the walkers to gain an upper hand against other “packs”, AKA the people they attacked. The Whisperers devolved to become those that use the walkers but walk among them… The Wolves and the Terminus crew were a buildup to the Whisperers – a buildup to Beta and Alpha. Alpha is basically like Gareth and Beta is like Owen, the former leader of the Wolves.

So, what about Beth in terms of my entire rambling? Well as I said, I do not believe that unless Beth didn’t know who Daryl was, she wouldn’t try to lure him to the Whisperers. That role seems to be going to Lydia – the girl we see telling Daryl in the trailer that “you don’t belong with these people” or so it’s being made out as… We’ll see.

Now I started writing this out before the mid-season premiere so I’ve gone and changed some thoughts, but most of the following stuff is still what I think. I think Lydia is going to try and persuade Henry and Daryl. More so I see Henry, as it seems they’re trying to play Carl’s role with Lydia on Henry, though I don’t see it going over like it did in the comics (We saw an image of Lydia violently lashing out in the future episode previews so I’m still with the belief that she can’t be trusted for now./// May change.)

Anyway, with Lydia persuading Henry, his easily impressionable and good hearted nature is gonna have him go after Lydia (SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON YOU’VE BEEN WARNED there’s going to be an exchange for Luke and Alden from Alpha to get her daughter back). Daryl is going to have to get into the Whisperers group because I’m sure others are gonna be captured (this part I do not know but I do know Daryl is supposed to put on a Walker suit and mask). That’s how he ends up fighting Beta like we see in the preview (which, ooc for this post I’m so fucking excited for just FYI ‘cause I love love love Ryan Hurst and I’m so happy to see SOA peeps on TWD… Can we get others? Please?! Lol) and that’s going to probably get Daryl captured by the Whisperers as well.

Now here is my speculation… I have a few ideas about – if she is with the Whispers – that can maybe be possible. One, I am wondering if Beth is going to be shown coming across the spiked Walker heads. Why do I think that? This:

This is Andrea after she finds the spiked heads of her friends with Michonne, Rick, Dante, Carl, and Lydia. Michonne in the comic was in a sort of relationship with Ezekiel (who is one of the heads that the group finds) and she breaks down, unable to put down Ezekiel’s reanimated head. Andrea takes a knife from Michonne and does it for her. Now… Look at how Andrea looks. She’s wearing a poncho, a hat similar to what Gabriel has been wearing (I believe it’s called a Gaucho hat or more commonly just called a Mexican cowboy hat), jeans, her hair pulled back, and the scar on her face.

The poncho automatically makes me think of Daryl. Daryl’s poncho was left back at the prison when it fell along with Merle’s bike. So unless Beth ended up back at the fallen walker over-run prison (which, hey, if she was still in Georgia when she woke up, wouldn’t be that far off though I highly doubt it) then her picking up a poncho not only would be a reference to something Daryl did but it would also connect to Maggie as Daryl let Maggie wear the poncho in S3. The hat would be a nod to Rick, as the Gaucho “Mexican Cowboy Hat” would associate to the cowboy hat that Rick wears and honestly with Beth’s jeans, would look dope as hell… Just saying. She’d look like a female Clint Eastwood, which is why Norman wanted the poncho – Clint Eastwood look.

This image of Andrea is one of the many that really paints that Beth and Comic!Andrea looked very similar. There are tons of images in the comic of Andrea that make Beth look like her twin. Especially with the new cut across her cheek she had received in Grady.

With this image in mind and being at this part in the comic on the show, I can’t help but just gravitate to it and think of Beth in general… Which is mostly just fan reaching with no solid evidence, but that’s one way I can see Beth having a connection to the Whisperers’ coming across their “handy work”.

Number two, if Beth survived the gunshot, her memory could be all kinds of fucked up. She might not have a single clue as to who Daryl or Carol or Michonne are. She might not recall that she has a sister or who Rick was or even know who Judith was/is. I always keep in mind that we were told the reunion could be bittersweet for Beth and the others… Bittersweet could mean that she doesn’t remember anyone OR that she’s partially blind and can’t recognize people OR that she doesn’t remember anyone and is a completely different person than she was… That would be the only way I’d be able to see Beth within the Whisperers world. The Beth we know wouldn’t stand for what they do. Would she maybe stick around to survive them if they captured her? Absolutely. But the moment she could, Beth would escape… Unless she didn’t know who she was at all anymore. As in who she is and who she was are not part of her and make her completely different. What’s more bittersweet than finding something you lost but it’s not the way you remember it? Ever find an old book or an old photo or something you lost, only to see it’s missing pages or is cracked in places or just not completely like you left it… That could be Beth. That gunshot has to have some kind of leftover affect on the girl… Trauma to the head isn’t gonna leave you in one single piece. Not from what I’ve studied and heard…

So of course the third thing is that she’s pretending and with the Whisperers as a means to survive because they said join us or we kill you / fuck you up. So she joins them… But if Beth saw Daryl or Michonne and her memory was still around, then she’d do her damn best to get to him and Michonne to get back to her family like she’s been trying to do FOR EIGHT YEARS. This is why I have a hard time with this whole “Boots is Beth” thing, by the way. I can see the appeal of it. And there are some strange things around it… But if Beth had any clue of where Rick or Maggie or Michonne or Daryl were, she’d have gone to them asap. Granted, she could’ve gotten held up / something bad happened to her on the way between the junkyard and Alexander. But even still, eight years is a long time to get held back…

Overall, eight years is a long ass time between Grady and now. Oh sure, it had been two years or so since they’d seen Morales and suddenly he shows up and his loose end was closed… But at least Morales wasn’t some weird ass fucking Dutch angle bullshit. He left for a new location with his family, he never made it, and he found the Saviors. That’s the basic of it… But it’s a story and it folds up nice enough to make sense… Beth’s story is an eight year fucking gap in the TWD world. For us it’s been just over five years of nothing… Would now be the best time to drop her in? Well it wouldn’t hurt the ratings right now that’s for bloody sure. I mean – I know everyone is pointing it out but why don’t I as well – the ratings for Season 1 were just slightly lower than they are now… Slightly. Not too far. But close… Season 4 and Season 5 were the best and highest in ratings out of all nine… They need to step some shit up. Not by taking away and adding in a bunch of who the fuck people… But by doing something no average viewer is going to expect. I took film classes. I studied this shit. They need to do something or the show can end up on the chopping block and goodbye big screen and FEAR and all the other ideas that were supposed to be played out.

Now… Back in 2015 – give or take – I did have a thought. This will be my final thoughts on Beth and the Whisperers, I cannot believe I’ve written something this long good god I am sorry for the long read…. But anyway, back in about 2015 or so, I wrote a post called “Liz Makes A Contribution to TD” (click to read if you want) . In that post I talked about the season five cast photos that were out at the time.

If you don’t recall which one those were, here’s a link from Skybound of them . So these photos come out and – like Skybound pointed out – there was no Tyreese or Beth or Carl. Which had people speaking up on Tumblr and I saw a few people on Twitter also comment to Skybound about how bizarre it was that we didn’t have these three… Well then we got a picture of Beth and Tyreese.

Of course Tyreese’s photo looked like everyone elses. Like they were all inside a barn (which they would end up in later… But not Tyreese) and Beth’s… Well, if you looked at everyone elseS THEN LOOKED AT Beth’s… Hers was completely different.

If you look at Beth compared to the others, hers just… Sticks out. Everyone else is inside something. There’s light coming through cracks and hitting everyone… But not Beth. She’s being completely covered in light. As in it’s shining down on her while it’s peaking at everyone else.

Now of course, if you read my post, you know that when we got Season 6 Promo pics, a lot of people flipped out and were pointing out how Beth’s picture looked like she was on the other side of the wall that Rick is leaning against and listening to the Walker on the other side.

Take a look

Even someone like me - on team fence - could still look at these images and go “Hey, Wait a minute…” and gasp at the realization that it literally looks like Beth is just on the other side of the wall Rick is against

Immediately I was thinking of Beth’s lines that she screamed at in Daryl to make a point to his drunk, angry ass. The same damn lines that many of us today have still been quoting and that many people have been pealing back layer by layer and feeling like this is important and it’s trying to tell us something.

“I know you look at me and you just see another dead girl. I’m not Michonne, I’m not Carol, I’m not Maggie. I’ve survived and you don’t get it ‘cause I’m not like you or them. But I made it and you don’t get to treat me like crap just because you’re afraid!”

How many times has TD gone over and over this line? How many times have you all found yourself just repeating that line and thinking “why did they have her say that if they just were gonna kill her” when we were told Scott had this whole damn thing planned out… Why give her that line to spit out? Or the line she says to Daryl as they’re sitting and talking on the porch?

“I’ll be gone someday.”

“Stop.”

“I will. You’re gonna be the last man standing. You are… You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.”

Of course I highlighted the important elements... I have thought really had about this line many a times and I know you all have as well… So when I thought of those lines and thought of those promo photos and what they were saying to me, I went into “Holy Shit I Get It” mode.

Beth IS A dead girl… She’s among the dead…

At the time I didn’t understand what I was getting at. I just knew Beth would return with the Walkers. I felt that deep in my gut when I looked at the images. And even now, looking back at them, my body is like “dude, wake up and look dammit!” and I’m looking… But until now, I think I get what I didn’t realize back then.

The Walkers Beth will be with… Are the Whisperers.

A living girl among the dead… Who does that? The Whisperers do that. Alpha and the Whisper do just that. They LIVE among the DEAD. The WALK among the DEAD. They ARE the WALKING DEAD. They are what Rick said that Team Family was and what Daryl said they are not.

But what exactly does that mean… Is Beth a Whisperer… Or will she come from the Whisperers.

Let me explain… You asked if I believed Beth would try to convince Daryl to Join the Whisperers… If Beth is among the Whisperers AS a Whisperer, no I do not believe she will try to bring Daryl over… But rather try to get from the Dead to Daryl and Carol (who will be the only damn people left she will know with Michonne leaving) and reveal herself among the dead…. Or this whole Whisperers arc will lead to something that will clue Beth on where to find everyone… As in the Living Dead – the Whisperers – will be with the walkers that lead Beth to Hilltop or Alexandria or the Kingdom… Something done among the dead will lead the living back.

Make sense? God I hope so.

Those images are the only reason I could see Beth have anything to connect herself to the Whisperers… She’s among the dead. I do believe that… But how she’ll be with the living again is the mystery…

I’m so sorry this took so long and is so long oh my gawd lol!

Also imma tag @twdmusicboxmystery and @bethgreenewarriorprincess and @bethgreeneishopeunseen and @wdway cause they’re more TD than me and know more shit lol

[theislesunfamily]

Three & Four (Tell Me That You’ll Kill Me More)

The following story takes place during a week-long period in which Ithanar travels on official state business during the Phoenix Wars.

A warning has been placed at the beginning of this story regarding mentions of death and blood. 

It is a small valley, untouched by apocalyptic ashes.

Trees of orange and purple leaves stand strong in the breeze, and the grass barely moves beneath shuffling boots. There’s something whimsical about this very region; how it has evaded the ravages of war, how buildings - large and small, hovels and halls - still stand, the orchards untouched and still full of ripe life.

But the people?

They are nowhere to be found.

Perhaps they believed the Alliance was coming.

Or perhaps that work has already been done. By someone else. By another.

Ithanar has his ideas. His beliefs. His suspicions.

And it makes him weary, fills his stomach with dread.

He continues his long march, playing back conversations in his head, knowing that this task will continue beyond today. Beyond this week. Beyond this month. The end is nowhere near, and it is that which fills him with fear. His hands shake at his side, and his gaze flickers left and right, alert.

A small town comes into view. It as quiet as the others, not a person in sight.

Ithanar immediately knows.

He sees it. The old elf reaches down into the folds of a satchel tied to his armor and produces a cigar, which he lights with a flick of his fingers. It’s a gesture of worry, of the war that is and the war to come.

A few more steps, and there it is. A body in the street, face down and unmoving. Ithanar leans down over the corpse, just staring, eyes transfixed on the back of the head.

Not a single person survived.

He knew. Now it is confirmed completely.

This is their handiwork.

There are bodies.

Everywhere.

Up Ithanar goes, pacing forward down that dusty dirt road and onto something more cobbled, with stones trailing to and fro. He moves deliberately past rows of houses and into a town square centered around a great fountain, the tall image of some royal family member standing tall with a sword pressed high into the air.

That doesn’t matter.

None of it does. No statue with such a grandiose gesture would catch his attention on this day.

It is the bodies that do. Some cut by the throat, and others pulverized into the dirt roads and grassy knolls.

Blood marks the cobbled streets, shifting over and around each stone, each step. Even here the buildings are left bare, any trappings or material possessions not taken or touched.

Definitely their handiwork.

They would be close too. They always are. They like to admire what they’ve done, their hard work.

“Come out, you two.”

His voice is low. Dangerous. A dagger in the dark to try and flush them out.

He knows they can hear them.

From around the corner, there is a sound: plate boots striking the stones, and an imposing figure cuts a long shadow as the sun sets over the thatched rooftops. His hair is red, strung up in a long ponytail, and his broad features almost are picture-perfect with regard to what he is.

He walks like a soldier.

“Evening, teacher.”

He talks like a soldier.

There is one of them.

Another sound, but up high. The pitter-patter of leather on the rooftops and hands helping to vault over obstacles before there’s a sudden and complete stop. Ithanar’s gaze flickers up to see the other, a woman with closely cropped brownish-red hair and the same sort of broad features much like the first.

“Have you come to join us? In this necessary slaughter?”

Her tone matches her brother’s.

She talks like a soldier, but does not walk like one. She stands as one though.

It makes sense, for they are twins, these Shattersuns.

Ithanar turns his gaze back to the brother, the younger of the two by only a few minutes, and then lets it a settle in a glare. His head barely tilts, hair shifting only slightly over his shoulders. A ring of smoke leaves his lips, and the cigar rolls along the edges of his mouth.

“No, I came by to check in on you two,” he replies curtly, his tone flat and barely rising with the fury that swells in his belly. “Having fun?”

“Do you think we are?” The sister answers as she flips down from her perch, barely making a sound in a three-point stances. There’s an unnatural sway to the way she rises, hands hanging loosely at her sides.

Her brother edges a little more closely, and it is now that Ithanar notices the large mace in hand. It is larger than the length of his body, a massive thing that one with only an incredible amount of strength could wield. Blood has already formed as a thick and disgusting crust around the edges of the thing.

But the old elf’s gaze stays trained on the woman.

“I’m in no mood for questions used as answers,” he answers sharply.

“Then what are you in the mood for, teacher?” The brother inquires, and very quickly. He’s getting closer with each deliberate step.

Ithanar doesn’t answer. He just watches them both, one from the corner of his periphery.

There’s the quick schwing of a blade being drawn from a sheath, and then another as a pair of ornate and decorated swords appear in the grasp of the sister. She swings them through the air with a practiced ease, and it draws back an old memory:

Her joyous smile as she matched blades with Ithanar.

Laughter like a song of victory.

“I have you, Ithanar! You’re mine!”

She nearly had that day.

(The blOOD of her people spilling.)

(Th E t H O U H GHT OF BEING A B AN D O N E D)

(By whom she had T RUSTED THE M O S T)

(A m I N D M ARR ed B Y A B REAK INTO T H E be y o n d)

“Are you planning on butchering the Alliance too now that they are here? Just like you did with Teldrassil?”

Her brother’s questions bring Ithanar back to there here and now.

The old elf shakes his head, a snarl beginning to unfurl across his lips, and looks in his direction. “That wasn’t me,” he answers. “I-”

“But you are part of it. The problem. The Horde,” Shanara interrupts him.

“We’re not all the-” Ithanar tries to protest, his flat tone failing and falling into fury.

“No, you are. You are all the same. Murderous monsters on both sides…” The brother cuts in as only he could do.

Shan’ran Shattersun was always like this, always the one who would think first and act later. Even with such a gargantuan weapon in hand, he never would be the first to swing it.

(AND P e r h a p s t hiS WAS his DOWNFALL)

(A nd y et ANOTHERONEOFYOURFAILURES)

(Never taught the B A L A N C E, how to F I N D)

(Keeping p e a c e with in THE MIND)

As the anger and annoyance rises, Ithanar finds himself…

Looking for calm. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, already unraveled to some degree by the sight of the massacre around him even though he has seen worse, and these twins, these-

His former students.

They know how to rattle someone, they know how to best make them hurt, make them bleed.

It was what made them such good spellbreakers.

It was what made him so good.

Another breath.

“Interesting,” he says after a few beats of silence, or at least that’s how long the old elf believes it to be. “You mentioned… both sides, and here I thought you were going to the Alliance. Here I thought what you did here was your… bargaining chip, the ability to showcase your power.

Ithanar doesn’t walk to either twin, but instead turns his back on them. He paces up to the fountain, gaze swiveling up to the statue, and notices from the corner of his eye that such an action does exactly what he wants:

Snarls on each of their lips, twins acting in such a unique unison.

“Neither of you are going to the Alliance, are you? That never was your plan.”

They always follow a pattern.

The Shattersuns look at one another.

<“He knows”.>

That voice isn’t hers.

<“Of course he does. He killed Valranis.”>

That voice isn’t his.

<“And Sinros. Slaughtered them in-”>

Ithanar turns to look at both them, one hand slowly rising to the pommel of the blade sheathed on his back. “Blood was not cold on that day. It never is,” he drawls, shaking his head.

“Then why did you not listen?” Shan’ran asks, his voice becoming his again.

“Because whatever you have to say falls upon ears that know better,” the old elf answers

The Shattersuns slowly advance, predatory and ready.

“But does the blade?” Shanra asks, twirling her twin blades again; each a simple flick of the wrist.

“You look tired, t-” Shan’ran begins to say.

“It’s Ithanar. Cut the bullshit. You never used to call me ‘teacher’...” Ithanar interrupts in a low growl, unsheathing his blade from his back. Ravensteel sings as it flashes into his hand, the black metal of the blade beginning to shine and shimmer as familiar rune etchings spring to life.

“She did not, but I did…” The brother corrects himself, and almost too casually as he brings his mace around and into both hands.

“Ithanar…” Shanra begins, her tone slowly taking on a quality not its own.

<“You look T I R E D.”>

Perhaps it was never her own.

No, it was. Once upon a time.

Blades and bludgeon drawn before one final back-and-forth of unfriendly banter.

“I’m always like this now.”

“War has turned you into something wasted, Ithanar.”

“No. Something that will lay waste to you.”

The tightening of one’s grip upon a heavy handgrip.

“You will try.”

The whistle of twin blades once again.

“You will fail.”

The high-pitched whine of Ravensteel.

The night of the blade turns to the light of a dreadful day.

“I’m sorry. For my fuck-ups.”

There is no flowing water in the fountain.

There will only be blood.

“<We know.>”

To be continued.