#before they discovered that iron is a component of blood | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thewritingbasil · 3 years ago

Text

First time writing and publishing something like this! I hope you enjoy!

Chrome x modern!Reader

* When you find out Chrome goes out to explore on his own and lives outside the village, you worry about who will notice if something goes wrong. Since you’re curious and also love discovering things and can’t sit still in the village for a long time, you tell Chrome about the modern-day buddy-system idea and start joining him on his expeditions.

* He’d love to take you exploring and show all the exciting things he discovered! He’s never had an exploring buddy before, and while Senkuu does appreciate what he finds, Senkuu spends more of his time creating blueprints and solving problems in the lab and using what he has available, not looking for things that will maybe be helpful in the future. That’s why he trusts Chrome and, now, you to have an eye for materials that will help the Kingdom of Science grow

* At first Chrome has a lot to teach you, like how to notice materials, where to walk, and how to keep track of time and your location especially since you need to get used to not having a cell phone.

* But eventually you become a great explorer in your own right and he has a lot of trust in you as his partner. In fact, he ends up trusting you a lot when the buddy system helps out, like when he once experienced a small cave-in or when he needed emergency first aid.

* You also find things he overlooked because you both tend to look in different directions when you’re searching.

* He loves that someone else shares his love of exploring with him. When he used to search alone, it was very isolating and he could get lost in his head while walking. Now, you remind him about food and he’s willing to take slightly greater risks when trying to reach somewhere because he’s got you as an extra pair of hands and eyes and brain.

* The combined haul is also bigger, which he gets super excited about. You both chatter to each other and compare stashes when you’re organizing what you found into different baskets at the end of the day.

* When Senku compliments you both on the materials found, Chrome proudly grins at you.

* Chrome isn’t just an explorer though, he’s a scientist which means he can’t spend all his time exploring with you. He goes to work with Senkuu while you help out elsewhere because, buddy system! You’re not going on your own.

* If you’re also working in another group like crafts or the power group, you go for a period of time without seeing him because you’re working on different projects.

* However! During your trips, you both became used to showing each other your finds and communicating when working in different sections to know how each other is doing

* He also appreciated the conversations you would bring about the modern world and about yourself, and how you were eager to learn about himself and his village. So he gets used to that routine of you being there to converse with.

* Chrome ends up talking with you during breaks about what the each of you are doing and exciting progress reports and how the materials you found are being put to use. Both of you get excited learning that something you’ve found has a cool scientific purpose/property and you invite each other to stop by and watch it in action.

* He loves seeing your eyes light up in amazement as you watch and praise his work.

* When you show him your group’s work, it’s not as science-y but he acknowledges your skill and hard work and he is also a craftsman and not too strong so whether you’re in the crafting group or power group, you still impress him. He’s not shy about praising you and gives you high fives or says “Baaaad!” This also helps him get along with other people in your group since he and they don’t usually interact.

* Obviously, Chrome would take a long time to realize that he’s fallen in love with you. He’s known Ruri for over 3 years and he still hasn’t figured it out.

* But others start noticing that he goes out of his way to get you to show off something. They’d understand if the project was finished, but when it’s a work in progress, it’s not very impressive to show. But you love it every single time because you’re curious and actually enjoy seeing everything put together little by little. Then, when the project is done, you can visualize the components and hard work that was put in to create it.

* And the villagers watch how he gets more talkative when you show interest and ask questions. He brings up inventions from the modern era that you’ve told him about so you both seem to share a mysterious language that they can’t understand. Some of them start shipping you two long before he notices anything.

* During mealtimes, you sometimes eat together. You talk about your next scavenging trip, new places in the village you haven’t explored, new projects, so many things. You both can get pretty sucked in to your conversations, forgetting the food. However you’re usually the one who finally remembers that you’re eating, and you teasingly shove food in his mouth. Your cheeky grin has blood rushing into his face and he is dazed, until he shakes himself out of it and starts to eat again.

* People are watching and nudging each other.

* Soon, Chrome becomes aware of you in a way he hasn’t before. He can’t help but smile every time you make eye contact. He craves the casual way you touch him and makes sure to be within your arms’ reach so you’re more likely to nudge him or grab him to drag him off somewhere in your excitement.

* When you first met him with Senku and Kohaku, you learned that he liked Ruri and never questioned it since. Whenever he talked about her, you could tell she was special to him. You made teasing jokes like forging a hairpin from iron and giving it to her with the line of “the burning fire in my heart for you was so hot I melted the iron with it” and he got flustered and groaned over the dumb line

* Recently, when you made those types of jokes, he felt conflicted. Part of him still got flustered but when he looked at you grinning and thinking you were oh so clever, he started to wonder why you would act like he liked Ruri when, thinking about it, he liked you...wait what?? He didn’t like you!

* Sure he thought you were cool and fun to hang out with and capable but that’s just something he admires and that’s a good friend, right?

* Right, he thought, shaking his head. You were a trusted partner, he didn’t want to kiss you or anything...

* “What?” You looked over your shoulder at him. “You got quiet over there.” You two were spending the late afternoon before dinner organizing your haul and you had just said that the location today was so beautiful Chrome should show it to Ruri once Senku cured her.

* He stared at your slightly parted lips. Did he want to kiss them? He was a man of science. When he collected rocks and plants, he’d grind, combine, set on fire, and experiment to find out how they reacted. Your mouth was kind of pretty, and yeah maybe he did want to see if kissing you was enjoyable.

* Chrome’s hands stopped working and now he was looking at you with unfocused eyes and a furrowed brow. You paused in your sorting and turned fully towards him. “You got a look on your face. Whatcha thinking about?”

* He is totally used to telling you his ideas so without hesitation, he answers before thinking, “What kissing you would feel like.” Then, he realized what he said. “Noooo! Sorry, that’s creepy right?” He zoomed backwards away from you, almost crashing into a table. How could he say that to you, you were one of his best friends!

* “Uhhh...” Chrome closed his eyes and braved himself for a rejection, ready to be kicked out of his hut for the next hour. “It’s not that creepy, I guess?” He heard you say. Were his ears working properly? He cracked an eye open to peek at you. You grinned awkwardly at him, having one side of your mouth quirked up.

* “Science inquiry, right? Question everything.”

* Maybe it was the afternoon sun or him imagining things, but your face looked a little pink. Kind of tempting. Whoa, did he really like you?

* “I need to figure something out.” He looked at you intensely.

* “Let me in on it, I wanna know.” Before, you had been avoiding eye contact out of shyness but now your eyes looked into his, drawing him closer. His footsteps seemed to be drowned out by the drums in his chest. He was getting nervous.

* He stopped a little ways in front of you. Being so close to you was almost making him lose his nerves. Kissing you? That seemed impossible.

* “Come on, Chrome.” You entwined both of your hands with his and pulled him closer until you were sharing the same air.

* You closed your eyes and patiently waited. Still with his heart beating in his ears, he looked at your long lashes, your eyebrows arched expectantly, and your flushed cheeks.

* You were getting nervous standing there and you bet your hands were all sweaty now. “Did you change your mind?” You did tend to grab him and drag him places. This was something he should be able to choose without being pressured. You started to loosen your hands, and he ripped his hands away.

* Before you could get disappointed, you felt those hands suddenly on the sides of your face and your lips met something soft.

* He was kissing you.

* Despite the sudden kiss, he knew enough to not just smash your lips together. It was much more of a firm press, one that had you craving for more even as butterflies exploded in your stomach and fire rushed over your skin. But you didn’t want to push it. You simply adjusted your lips to overlap better onto his and put your hands on his hips to hold him close.

* After a few seconds, Chrome leaned back with an entirely red face. “Baaaddddd,” he breathed. That had been enlightening. And soft. And pleasurable. Okay yeah, you weren’t just a best friend anymore. If it meant you would look at him like this, wide-eyed and giddy and hungry for more, he wanted to keep kissing you.

* Your hands squeezed his hips nervously, fingers a fluttering pressure on his flesh. “Practice for Ruri?” You asked in the small distance between your mouth and his.

* “Not Ruri,” he said distractedly. His eyes were still dazed and drinking in the tempting picture you made. “I want to kiss you.”

* And your mouth curled up into a pleased grin, looking hard to resist. So he didn’t.

#dr stone imagines #chrome x reader #basil writes #dr stone x reader #chrome #dr stone

67 notes · View notes

alarajrogers · 3 years ago

Text

Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

I wrote a thing. It is a very long thing. It probably contains very little information that most people didn’t already know, but it puts it together in a way I’ve never seen it before.

Most of it will be behind the cut but you get the first few paragraphs out here where you can see them.

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

Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

So you know how you read all this bullshit about “X improves your energy” and “Y gives you quick energy but then you crash” and “Z improves your metabolism” and it all just sounds like words? Technobabble from the world of science fiction television shows?

It may surprise you to know that practically everything you’ve ever personally observed about energy levels makes sense, as do a lot of the layperson observations you’ve heard in your life, and that there are really good reasons why being sick makes you sleepy and why exercising hard on weekends when you’re a slug all week is bad for you, and that all of this is very understandable from a layperson perspective. Or maybe not, maybe you know all this. I’ve spent years knowing all this, but recently it just dawned on me that it’s all interconnected. All the things I know are pieces of an amazing whole.

So I’m going to explain this revelation I’ve had, and when you read it, my guess is you’ll come away thinking “But I knew all that already… but now I understand how it all works together!”

Metabolism

First, let’s talk about metabolism. What is it?

We usually use the term to mean something like “the speed at which my body does the things I’m not consciously controlling it to do.” Like, “I have a really fast metabolism, so food just runs right through me!” Or “I have a very slow metabolism so I have to be real careful about how much I drink.”

To metabolize means for a living thing to process something it has ingested. Metabolism is usually used to mean the process of converting food and nutrients into energy. Sometimes we use it to mean the levels of efficiency or speed at which a body does this, which is where we get “a fast metabolism”. Here, I’m going to try to use metabolism specifically to mean the process by which your body converts stuff to energy.

Life Energy

No, a vampire from an alien planet can’t suck it out of you, but you really do have life energy! Otherwise, you wouldn��t be alive.

The fundamental molecule of life energy, the thing that if it wasn’t there no life processes would be possible because they would not have any energy to work, is a battery called ATP. Its full name, adenosine triphosphate, is a bit of a mouthful, but it basically means that this is a molecule with three phosphorus atoms.

You may have learned in chemistry class, once upon a time, that chemical reactions can be endothermic – they use up energy – or exothermic – they emit energy. Fire is an exothermic reaction; you get it started with heat, usually, but it generates a lot more heat than it took to make it burn in the first place. Your baking soda and vinegar volcano from the science fair a long time ago is also an exothermic reaction. You didn’t put any energy into it to make it bubble like that. On the other hand, melting ice is endothermic. You don’t get any energy when ice melts. It uses up energy to melt.

When ATP releases one of its phosphorus atoms, it becomes ADP – adenosine diphosphate, meaning just two phosphorus atoms! This is an exothermic reaction. ATP turning into ADP is what powers pretty much every single endothermic reaction in your cells. It’s the battery that you run on.

Charging the Battery

Fortunately ADP is rechargeable! An endothermic reaction turns it back into ATP.

The mitochondria do this. You may be thinking, “aren’t they something the lady who wrote A Wrinkle In Time made up?” And you’d be close. The mitochondria appeared in the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door. Madeleine L’Engle didn’t make them up, but she did make up “farandolae”, little creatures in the mitochondria, which don’t exist as far as we know. (Although, if scientists do discover little thingies in the mitochondria that let it do its work, they’ll probably name them farandolae because scientists are big geeks.)

Mitochondria in reality are organelles, components of a cell that do work. They’re independent organelles, which have their own DNA and do all their own reproduction. The only other things we know that work like that are chloroplasts, which are only found in plants… so far. (Personally I think being able to photosynthesize from my skin would be awesome and I am eagerly awaiting the day that genetic engineering allows us to put chloroplasts in human skin, but this isn’t a thing yet.)

Mitochondria combine glucose – a molecule made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, in the formula C6H12O6 – with oxygen, an element that comprises about 22% of our atmosphere, to create carbon dioxide (there’s that di again, meaning two – carbon dioxide is one carbon and two oxygens), water (our old favorite, H2O, sometimes called “dihydrogen monoxide” as a joke about weird chemical names), and enough energy to put a phosphorus atom on a molecule of ADP. Now it’s ATP again! Glucose and oxygen combine in an exothermic reaction.

(Ever wonder why all life on earth depends on the sun? Converting CO2 and H2O into glucose and oxygen is an endothermic reaction. Plants use their chloroplasts to absorb energy from the sun so they can convert CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen. Then animals, like us, eat the plants to get the glucose, and breathe the oxygen. Without the sun, chloroplasts wouldn’t work, plants wouldn’t make glucose, and we’d all starve.)

The Basic Things We Need For This To Work

There are a lot of components going into this system.

The mitochondria need a steady supply of oxygen, but oxygen, being a highly reactive molecule, can’t just float around in the bloodstream like glucose can. (Glucose is iffy too, more on this later.) Hemoglobin, a molecule made with iron, bonds to oxygen and can carry it around safely. Red blood cells are full of hemoglobin. They float in the bloodstream, which goes everywhere in the body. Vitamin B12 is involved in the production of these red blood cells. The bloodstream also carries glucose, but hopefully not too much of it, because glucose is also a reactive molecule and if you have too much, it starts tearing shit up.

The lungs draw in the oxygen that the red blood cells carry, and expel the carbon dioxide. The heart forces the blood to go around and around in this system of blood vessels. The pancreas makes insulin, the hormone that binds up the glucose and regulates how much of it is available in your bloodstream for your cells to take. The speed with which all of this happens can be regulated by thyroid hormone, which requires iodine, and also a working thyroid.

You need all that and a million other things for the system to work perfectly. If the system does not work perfectly, you’re not making as much energy as you could be. That’s pretty obvious.

But here is the thing that’s obvious once you spell it out, and yet, we so often behave, as a society, like we don’t understand it or don’t believe it:

An optimized system still puts out a finite amount of energy at any given time.

If you were in perfect health, right now, you would still have a limited supply of life energy to work with.

We know this. But we behave as if it’s not true. As if we can power through exhaustion with willpower, because being exhausted is a flaw in the system, rather than a really obvious application of the laws of thermodynamics.

What Uses All That Energy?

We also often don’t think about the systems that use those energy, and what they use it for.

The Brain:

The brain is a huge energy hog, using up a whopping 20-25% of all of the body’s energy while awake and conscious (or dreaming – a dreaming mind is as active as a conscious one.) Asleep (but not in REM sleep), the brain still uses about 85% of that, which, lemme do some math here, is 17% if the waking mind was using 20%. A living being can drop to about 50% of that with certain types of anesthesia, but that – the minimum required for a brain to keep a body alive – is still 10% of total energy consumption.

It's not clear how much energy on top of that a very active brain needs. Estimates of how much energy complex and difficult thought consume range from 100 calories a day to 6000! It’s plainly not much on top of basic consciousness, or there’d be no such thing as a fat person doing highly intellectual work all the time, but it’s evident that it’s something.

The Muscles:

We all know about this one. Hard-working muscles use up a lot of energy. How much? Well, swimming, one of the few activities we do that can fully engage the leg muscles and the arm muscles to the same high level at the same time, can burn as much as a quarter of a normal daily intake of calories in a single hour. Most of the time our muscles are not working that hard, but anything more strenuous than vegging out on a couch does burn resources.

The Immune System:

This guy. This guy is the one everyone forgets. The immune system is hard at work all the time protecting you from infections (and, if you’re one of the zillions of people who have allergies or autoimmune disorders, things like cat dander, pollen, and yourself apparently), but when an infection has actually taken hold, the immune system goes into high gear. Most of the responses you experience when you’re sick – nausea, coughing, sneezing, runny or stuffy nose, fever – are actually things the immune system is doing to you to get rid of the infection. Nausea, to expel it through the mouth. Diarrhea, to expel it through the anus. Coughing, to expel it from the lungs, and sneezing, to expel it from the sinus cavities. Mucus, to trap it so it can be expelled. Fever, to kill it, because germs are a lot more sensitive to temperature variation than you, a large multi-celled creature, are. It takes a lot of energy to do all that. Plus there’s white blood cells and T cells and antibodies, all doing their thing.

The Digestive System:

Ever hear the expression “It takes money to make money?” That’s true of life energy as well. The work of moving your food all along the gastrointestinal tract, breaking it down, squeezing and mushing it, making the enzymes to convert it to molecules small enough to get out into the bloodstream, and then pushing the waste out – that’s a lot of effort. There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

The Reproductive System:

Making sperm costs energy. Making a lining for an egg and then expelling it if it’s not used costs energy. Firing up the hormones that cause libido costs energy. And then there’s all the energy burned by the muscles in actually having sex.

Heart and Lungs:

Typically we don’t think of these things as needing a lot of energy because, quite simply, your body’s going to take the energy it needs to run these essential systems whether you want to or not. There’s no re-allocation of baseline energy away from the heart and lungs. But in exercise, when the oxygen demands and the needs of the muscle cells to get more and more fuel increase, the heart and lungs need more energy too.

This is a rough breakdown. You have other systems – we haven’t talked about kidneys and liver and stuff like that – but we’re going to look at these systems in our simplified model.

Everything takes energy. And you have a finite pool of it. Eating more food does not give you more energy – your mitochondria can only work as fast as they can work. If you weren’t at capacity, then yes, food can give you a boost, but it consumes energy first because digestion is work, and if you’re at capacity, any extra calories get stuffed away as fat because extra circulating glucose is bad for you.

By the way, this is why sugar gives you a quick pick-me-up, and should probably be considered a stimulant! Sugar – sucrose, which is basically 2 glucose molecules smushed together, or fructose, which is glucose but in a different shape – supplies your bloodstream with glucose fast, with very little extra work. And it can start doing it in your mouth, because your saliva can break sucrose into glucose and your mucuous membranes can pull glucose into your bloodstream.

But as soon as you start ingesting sugar, your pancreas revs up your insulin production (assuming you don’t have diabetes, or that if you do, it’s type II and not so advanced that you basically don’t have your own insulin anymore.) Insulin, you may recall, is the hormone that keeps circulating glucose levels in your bloodstream down to the levels where the mitochondria can use all of it and there isn’t a lot extra. Extra glucose that nobody is using damages your blood vessels, making them harder and less elastic, which is why circulation problems are a big thing with diabetes, and why my feet are SO FUCKING COLD all winter, not that I’m bitter or anything.

So. You ate sugar, and your body prepared to balance your glucose levels with a lot of insulin. But then all you ate was sugar. You didn’t add fats or proteins or complex carbohydrates in any significant amounts to keep the glucose coming after the initial burst was over. So now you have all this insulin and it went and picked up all the extra glucose and now you know what? Not only is there no extra glucose anymore, there isn’t even enough to keep the home fires burning! Woo, dizzy. Low blood sugar hits the brain hard, because the brain is the energy hog, and feels any dip in energy levels before any other body systems do.

In short, you may have given yourself a quick burst of extra fuel, but in the long run, it may actually make your energy levels drop. And if you ate a substantial meal to go with that quick snack… now we have to send power to the digestive system. And that is why eating more food does not give you more energy unless you’re starving. (Or diabetic, more on this later.)

Energy Trade-offs:

You know the drill. Finite amount of energy. Many systems competing for it. Brain takes the most. So what happens when one system suddenly needs extra?

1. Complex thought shuts down.

I know you’ve experienced this. You’re overtired, or you’ve just done hard exercise, or you have eaten a big meal, or you are sick. You can no longer brain at the levels you expect. Study? Maybe, but retention and comprehension will suuuuck. Math? Probably not. Reading? Depending on how difficult reading in general is for you, maybe this is just the thing, but the topic’s going to be light and easy to comprehend, like fiction, or maybe this article here that you’re reading. Or, maybe reading’s out of the picture. Watching TV? For most people, this is ideal, but if you’re autistic and have an auditory processing disorder and facial recognition issues, hoo boy. Not that I know anybody like that, or anything.

2. Muscles need to be at rest.

Muscles don’t have to move a lot. You could be sitting on a couch. You could be laying in a lawn chair. You’re awake, but you don’t want to move your muscles because it’s hard.

When what you lack to burn your fuel is not glucose, but oxygen, you can get by sometimes. As long as there’s some oxygen. But the byproduct of making energy without enough oxygen is called lactic acid. Which is acid, and it’s in your muscles. Not good! Nobody likes extra acid in places where extra acid shouldn’t be. So your muscles burn. The good news is, the body breaks down lactic acid pretty fast. The bad news is, you may be building it up faster than the body can break it down.

Hard exercise? You’re gonna feel the burn. But you may run into this same problem attempting to walk to the bathroom if you’re very very sick, because all the energy has been re-routed to the immune system, so there’s nothing there for the muscles.

3. Consciousness itself shuts off.

The unconscious brain still consumes a lot of energy, but we’re cutting what we can, and you being conscious is not helping here. Shut down anything we don’t immediately need to use. That includes consciousness.

If you are bleeding out and there’s not enough blood in your body to carry the fuel –

If your blood pressure is low or your heart has stopped working and so the fuel isn’t moving fast enough to where it needs to be –

If your circulating glucose is too low because there’s too much damn insulin –

If there isn’t enough water in the body, so blood pressure drops because blood is mostly water –

If you have a fever, which makes all the chemical reactions in your body go kind of screwy and inefficient –

-- You pass out. You cannot remain conscious because your body has to cut services to keep the whole thing going, and this is how.

Sometimes stupid shit triggers this reaction. Like vasovagal syncope, which can happen from triggers like extreme emotional stress or the sight of blood. Like getting blood drawn (which is probably also vasovagal syncope but seems to have a more physiological basis than some of the other things that can cause it, given that it can occur in people who are absolutely cheerful and fascinated by the fact that blood is leaving their body and not upset about it at all. Not that I would know anything about that, either.)

4. Or, you are highly encouraged to shut down consciousness.

The digestive system is hard at work. There’s no emergency, per se, but this work would get done a lot faster and with less stress if you would just go the fuck to sleep. Thus, “carb coma” or what the cartoon “The Boondocks” called “The Itis.”

The immune system is busting its ass. Things aren’t so serious that you need to pass out. Falling asleep vs. fainting is kind of like shutting down your computer vs. suddenly losing power. You definitely want to go to sleep if the situation is not dire enough to require immediate shutdown of consciousness.

Your body needs to run nightly maintenance. Several systems that operate in low gear when you’re awake need to rev up, and your brain actually needs to do some shit to organize your memories while you’re not recording new ones, and extra energy is needed for the immune system because it’s doing nightly sweeps. Or something like that. We don’t really understand everything that sleep does for us, but we know that if we don’t get it:

- The pancreas doesn’t work right, resulting in getting fat and maybe diabetes

- Also high blood pressure

- Also memories are kind of shit

- Also the immune system doesn’t work too well

We don’t actually know how your brain would operate without sleep if it wasn’t saturated with the “go the fuck to sleep” chemical GABA, which is broken down while you’re sleeping. GABA does a lot of things, but in this context, GABA builds up in your body to send the signal to your brain to stop using so much damn energy and sleep already. And if you attempt to function mentally with high GABA levels… well, you can’t, okay? Your brain is full of GABA receptors that tell it to turn things off. So those things are turning off. How well does your computer run when it's in the middle of shutting down? I thought so.

(Actually we kind of do. There are chemicals that block tiredness. People who use these chemicals can function on significantly less sleep at significantly higher cognitive levels than people who are not on these chemicals. But the stuff like the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the immune system weakening… all that appears to still be happening. Sleep happens for a reason.)

5. Other systems that are highly dependent on energy levels shut down.

- Exercised your ass off? Now your digestive and immune systems have been tamped down because the energy went to your muscles. Eating when the digestive system isn’t working at full capacity results in stomach cramps or nausea. Forcing the digestive system to work when the muscles need maximum energy levels causes muscle cramps. This is why you’re not supposed to go swimming after a big meal – muscle cramps while swimming can kill you.

- Ate a big meal? I bet you are not feeling like having sex right now. Probably also not winning any chess tournaments. And don’t move around too much!

- Feeling sick? Cough, runny nose, sneezing? You’re probably not too hungry. (Especially not when you have a fever. Fevers burn a lot of energy.) You probably do not feel much like having sex. Your muscles ache and you don’t want to move around much. And you are sleepy.

- Feeling randy, baby? You are probably not also feeling hungry.

What Happens When We Game The System?

I briefly mentioned stimulants above – chemicals that artificially reroute energy levels back to the brain, improving concentration and mental acuity, at the expense of everything else.

Well, not literally everything else. Stimulants suppress pain to some slight extent, increase heart rate and blood flow, and make your muscles more eager to do work. Many people report that stimulant use also makes them horny. So those systems are in good shape too. But you know what took a hit? Your digestive system and your immune system. Now, your digestive system… you can feel that immediately. People take stimulants in order to lose weight, sometimes, because they’ll suppress your appetite. Energy rerouting to brain and muscles means the body shuts down digestion. What’s already there will get processed but let’s not add to it, okay?

You did not feel your immune system slow down and weaken. You won’t, today. But maybe tomorrow you’ll get sick. Maybe the day after that.

Oh, but you gotta work, right? The boss won’t tolerate you not coming in. So you stuff yourself full of stimulants – pseudoephedrine, dries up your nose and keeps you awake; caffeine, keeps you focused – and go to work anyway. With energy being forced away from your immune system to keep your brain and your muscles working. That’s not gonna work out well for you, now is it. You wanna pull the military off the front lines to have a parade, when you’re being actively invaded?

Keeping your brain functioning at full capacity, continuing to use your muscles, when you’re sick, will slow your recovery time, because you took the energy away from your immune system to pump it through your brain. Because the amount of energy you can produce is finite, and relatively fixed.

Oh, you can improve some things. Your blood and everything it does, and practically every chemical reaction in your body, is totally dependent on the presence of water, so stay well hydrated. Stock your body well with the vitamins and minerals you need to make all these things function. Are you getting enough oxygen, citizen? Eat food, but with the right balance of carbs and proteins and fats so that your digestive system isn’t overtaxed, you don’t end up with an insulin spike, and you’re not wasting resources. If your system lacked any of these things, then you can improve metabolic efficiency, and your energy levels, by providing them.

But stimulants can’t give you energy. They can make you feel like they did because the energy is going to places where your conscious mind can feel it… but they didn’t increase the amount of energy you have. Resources are being taken away from other areas. Your immune system is taking a serious hit right now. And you can’t feel that, but it’s gonna fuck you up later.

Brains That Have To Work Extra Hard At Basic Stuff

This is a simplified model, but: all brains are full of little modules that do things. And consciousness, ego, is actually pretty bad at most stuff. The little modules that do things are like dedicated co-processors for specific tasks. Spatial processing. Language acquisition. Basic math. Recognizing faces. Managing executive functions.

The neurotypical mind comes with a basic set of things that neurotypicals don’t even realize exist unless they study psychology or spend a lot of time with neurodivergent people, because they all have them. The thing that recognizes faces. The thing that processes sound into speech. The thing that generates speech from thought. The thing that picks up social rules. The thing that can look at letters and figure out easily and quickly how to pronounce them. The thing that tunes in to body language cues. The thing that’s always aware of how loud you’re talking. The thing that enables you to kind of guess how much time has passed. The thing that lets you control what you’re paying attention to. The thing that does basic math.

Many of these little modules need to be trained – language and math and reading don’t suddenly appear in people’s brains, they’re taught – but once trained, the little modules just… do the thing. The person doesn’t have to think about it. They no longer experience any sense of “I’m doing a thing”, it’s just happening.

Not all neurodivergent minds have these things. Many such minds have found a workaround. Use conscious processing power, not black box processing power, because the black box isn’t there, but main cortex is. You can apply intelligence to solve problems like “who is that guy, I know that I know him” and “what are the words those people are saying” and “how do I turn those letters into a sound”. “How do I keep track of how much time I am spending on this?” “How do I make myself do shit that bores me?” We use conscious mind processing power, not the much more efficient black boxes that people aren’t even aware they have.

But what happens when energy is sucked away from the conscious mind, and we’re reduced to vegetating, still awake but without the ability to perform complex thought right now?

If we’re routing skills through the conscious mind, we will lose those skills in proportion to how much we lose the ability to think in general, as energy is drawn away from the brain. And NTs, using the much more efficient black box modules, have no idea that this is even a thing that can happen. It would take far more drastic energy loss for them to lose the work the black boxes do.

Some of us have black boxes that the average NT does not have. I can do complex worldbuilding in my head when I’m so exhausted I can’t talk anymore. There are people who just know the answers to complex arithmetic problems the way most of us just know the answer to 2 times 5. Some people have advanced spatial processing coprocessors that mean they’re almost never lost, because they’re effortlessly creating a map of their surroundings any time they go anywhere, and something in their head is tracking what direction they are in and what turns they’ve made. But some of us do not. Not all of us get a trade, skill for skill. And some of us get black boxes that turn out to be kind of useless. Like, suppose a person more or less effortlessly memorizes the name of every dinosaur ever discovered. Unless they are a paleontologist, when is that going to help?

The important thing to note here is that even a small drop in energy can cause a noticeable drop in an ND’s ability to fake being “normal”, because they are using a less efficient means of computing to perform those skills, and it cuts out on them when energy has to draw down from the brain to go somewhere else.

Spoonies

People with auto-immune disorders are constantly using high levels of energy to do useless and self-destructive shit (not that they want to, but their immune system did not ask first), because their immune system is always on high alert against things like their own nervous system. Overactive immune system consumes energy; body parts taking damage consume energy.

People with cancer or other diseases that lead them to take chemo are burning a lot of energy trying to replenish vital functional cells that the chemo keeps killing. Chemo destroys fast-dividing cells… like white blood cells, and the ones in your mucous membranes, and the ones in your hair follicles. And you can do without hair, but you sort of need your mucous membranes and your white blood cells.

People with fatigue disorders might be suffering from an auto-immune issue, or they might be suffering from a metabolic issue. For instance, low levels of thyroid hormone will cause metabolic processes across the board to slow down, drastically decreasing the available energy.

People with depression might literally actually have a fatigue disorder that manifests in not having enough energy to process serotonin and dopamine correctly. Also, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are brain chemicals that do energy routing, having an effect on what the body is putting energy into. Failures to produce enough of those or at appropriate times, or spending energy breaking them down when you still need them, will screw with the body’s ability to deliver energy to the right places.

Whatever the reason, if you have a disorder that drains your energy… even if that’s all it does, even if it literally has no other symptoms, having something that lowers your available energy for your brain and muscles makes it literally impossible for you to function at the levels you would like to. Like, the same way it is impossible for a Chevy Malibu to go 800 miles on one tank of gas. The available energy is not there. Either it is going someplace stupid that you’d rather it didn’t, or metabolism itself just isn’t working well.

If you are neither a spoonie nor neurodivergent, odds are, your body’s working at a reasonably high level of efficiency already, so you can get a dramatic improvement when you find one of the few things you lack, and you fill that need. Hydrate? (Everything runs on water) Exercise? (Speeds up circulation, and fitness in general will cause your metabolism to be more efficient) Vitamins? (Sure, if you’re missing some, vitamins are real useful.)

But if the problem is, you’re pouring energy into activities society requires you to engage in but your brain cannot do them easily and efficiently, so they cost you a lot more than others; if the problem is, your body is wasting a lot of energy on an immune response to things that shouldn’t need an immune response; if the problem is, there’s a food your body can’t break down, so you’re eating enough to feel full but never getting enough energy from it; if the problem is, your metabolism is lacking something esoteric that almost everyone else has enough of, so it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s missing… exercise and hydration and vitamins will not help. Or, they may help, if you were lacking them, but they won’t fix the problem.

Expecting you to just push through a lack of energy through willpower is a total misunderstanding of how the brain and body work. You cannot do what you don’t have energy to do, and if you route energy to your brain or muscles to accomplish something that requires really pushing yourself, you are taking it away from somewhere else. Probably your immune system. So you’ll get sick. And then you’ll be even more overtaxed.

It’s amazing the degree to which ignorant people think that all bodies literally work the exact same way. (And yet many of these ignoramuses think that people of a different race are somehow completely different from them in some fundamental way. Make it make sense.) What’s even worse is the number of doctors who believe that the only way bodies can malfunction are the ways they happen to know about, so anything outside their experience is fake.

But if you understand how complex the system is and how variable the things that can go wrong with it are, and you understand the role of energy, and energy distribution, in the body, it becomes obvious. You can’t force yourself to do what you don’t have the energy to do without taking it away from somewhere else.

Weight and Energy

There is no question that it’s possible for a human to get to a place where their weight is a severe drain on their energy levels. But very few people are actually there.

Muscle is heavier than fat. But muscle does the work of dragging the weight of a body around. A body with good muscle tone – fat but fit – is in a much better position, in terms of energy production and distribution, than a thin body with weak muscles.

Fat actively helps with energy conservation in the cold. A fit fat person – someone whose musculature is strong and healthy enough that they have no difficulty moving their own weight – has reserves to burn in the event of a disorder that consumes so much energy, it inhibits digestion. (To be honest, so does a weak fat person, but they’re losing energy every time they move because they’re too heavy for their own muscles. But this is true of physical weakness in general.)

Not everyone can be fit! Exercise, if you recall, is one of those things that burns a lot of energy! If you already have very little energy, you’re going to have a very hard time exercising enough to become fit.

All of this is normal. It’s natural. It makes sense. Why would being fat automatically make you less healthy in all situations than someone thin? Being underweight is correlated with a significantly shorter lifespan than being overweight.

I’m Gonna Talk About Diabetes Here

We’re told over and over that there’s a giant health crisis among Americans of increased obesity, and this is causing diabetes.

Bullshit.

Consider this. Diabetes is a disorder where you don’t produce enough insulin, but many Type II diabetics got that way because their body massively overproduced insulin to the point where they wore out their pancreatic cells. Remember when I said insulin takes circulating glucose out of the blood stream and stuffs it somewhere safe? You know where it stuffs it? Fat cells. Doctors have been telling people that being overweight causes diabetes… when we know for a fact that diabetes is caused by insulin resistance, a condition where the cells don’t respond well to insulin, so insulin levels go up, and the body’s ability to produce its own insulin is worn down by heavy overproduction. Do the math. You had high levels of insulin production for years because your cells were resistant to insulin? Insulin stores sugar in fat cells, as fat? Gosh, I wonder if the condition that led to your becoming diabetic happened to be the exact same condition that caused you to get fat!

In a case like that, losing weight wouldn’t do jack shit for your insulin, but changing the way you eat so there’s less circulating sugar in the first place would, and this would cause you to store less in your fat cells, which would cause you to lose weight. But it’s not the weight loss that helped you. You couldn’t solve your problem by cutting calories, because calories didn’t get you into this position. High levels of circulating glucose did. Exercising super hard and going on a diet and actually losing weight – which would be hard, because super high levels of insulin storing all that sugar as fat, and yet your blood sugar is still high because your cells don’t respond to the insulin, but let’s say you pull it off – that does nothing. Maybe you see an improvement in your symptoms because eating very little produces very little circulating blood sugar… though now you’ve got some other symptoms. Namely, no energy. And any improvement you experienced is temporary, because you’re addressing a symptom, not the problem.

Doctors know that insulin stores sugar as fat. Doctors know that diabetic people with Type II generate higher and higher levels of insulin as their body tries to compensate for not responding to it, until finally the cells give up and the patient needs to take artificial insulin. And yet, somehow, we are still hearing “fat causes diabetes, lose weight and you won’t get diabetes!” There’s a disconnect here.

Overclocking

I’m going to talk about something as dangerous as fuck here.

When your body’s natural systems are not regulating your blood sugar, and so you can have greater than normal levels of sugar in your bloodstream… this can make the pie higher.

Remember I said you can’t increase your energy levels by adding more fuel, because the mitochondria can only work as hard as they can work? Well, that’s not completely true. Mitochondria can apparently work harder than that, if they have access to more sugar. It’s just that more sugar is destroying your circulatory system, resulting in damage to your retinas, the nerves in your hands and feet, your ability to regulate the temperature of those extremities, the speed at which you can grow back skin in an injury, and, oh, pretty much everything else.

Get to a certain level of blood sugar and you feel like absolute shit. But in the range between that – higher than you should be but lower than the levels you can actually feel bad in – you have more energy.

This is fucking awful, to be honest. Everyone wants more energy! Energy helps you get shit done! More energy to the brain makes your brain work better.

And you want the sugar. You want the high glucose. You don’t know that’s what you want, but you know you crave sweets and carbs, and when your glucose is high (but not too high), it’s a stimulant. You’re awake, you can focus, your mental energy is good. Cut down the way they tell you that you need to, when you’re diabetic, and now you’re sluggish and depressed.

It’s killing you slowly but not doing it is depressing and hard and the slow death isn’t causing you any significant amount of suffering, until it does, and then it’s too late.

Sugar is a drug and you’re addicted. But it’s food. There are no regulations to protect you from eating all the food you want. There is no social opprobrium in general against sweet foods or carb-high snacks. (If you are fat you might suffer from this, but thin people are allowed to eat whatever the fuck they want, and honestly if you’re fat you will probably catch shit for eating a nice big steak, which is a lot better for you if you’re diabetic than a piece of toast.)

You’re overclocking your brain, the same way gamers overclock their PCs to get higher performance. Except that when they melt their CPU they can just buy a new one. You are not buying a new brain anytime soon.

I Am Not A Doctor

I didn’t go to medical school. I did study biology at the graduate school level, but no medical degree.

But everything I’m saying is backed up by pretty much any source I look at. It’s just that the conclusions that I’m drawing, while they are logical outgrowths of the things I’m saying, are for some mysterious reason not the conclusion that people who go to medical school are drawing.

Bodies are all different. Bodies are very complicated with many interlocking systems. Many, many things can go wrong with bodies. Far more things than science is fully aware of yet. Therefore it makes perfect sense that if someone is tired all the time for no good reason, there is a good reason and we just don’t know what it is. If someone can’t easily do a thing another person can do, that is absolutely normal and expected, unless that other thing is something that falls into a range that most humans can easily do. Then all of a sudden it becomes impossible to imagine that a human couldn’t do it? Bullshit. We don’t understand the brain perfectly.

It is absolutely normal that when a person’s energy levels are high, they have the resources to accomplish things they cannot do when their resources are low. The notion that if you’re disabled, there’s a thing you can’t do and you can never do it and that is the way it has to be, is nonsensical. Yes, of course some people are disabled in that way. If you have no legs, then no matter how much energy you have, you will never have legs. But you might be a lot better able to tolerate uncomfortable prosthetics when your energy levels are high.

“If you could do it today then why couldn’t you do it yesterday?” I don’t know, Karen, why couldn’t you vacuum your carpet after you’d been working all day, when you were pushing that vacuum around with no trouble last weekend? People can accomplish more when they have more energy. Doing things consumes energy. Once your energy is consumed, the fact that it can only replenish at a finite rate means you have to wait to get more. While you’re waiting, you can’t do stuff, because stuff takes energy, that you don’t have, because you used it up on other stuff. What part of this is unclear?

Being fat is a symptom of underlying conditions in most of the diseases that it’s correlated with. It’s not that being fat is unhealthy, like losing weight would make you healthy again; it’s that it is a symptom of your disorder that shows up before the more definitive symptoms do. It is possible to improve your health by exercising and changing what you eat, and sometimes, this may result in weight loss, but it wasn’t the weight loss that improved your health. It was becoming fitter (more muscle) and eating stuff that isn’t poisoning you because some of your metabolic pathways don’t work. If you don’t lose weight, you may still be getting healthier.

(I suspect it’s actually true that being fat will damage your joints. You’re putting more of a load on them, so it makes logical sense. What doesn’t make sense is to say that being fat causes diabetes and high blood pressure when we know for a fact that overly high levels of insulin cause both being fat and diabetic, and overly high levels of blood sugar cause high blood pressure, heart disease, and general circulation problems, so. Um. All of these things come from insulin resistance? That is the problem? Not the weight, that’s a symptom?)

And sometimes, sugar is an addictive drug. If you’re feeling self-satisfied because you’re not an alcoholic, and you don’t smoke, and you’ve never taken an illegal drug, but you can’t do without your blueberry muffin in the morning and your ice cream after dinner… stop feeling superior to people addicted to illegal substances or well-known vices. The only difference between them and you is that you got addicted to a substance that will kill you but that is safe for most people, and because it improves your mood and your productivity, capitalism is more than happy to let you indulge it until you drop dead.

#alara original post #alara original writing #stand back i'm gonna try science

21 notes · View notes

lov3nerdstuff · 4 years ago

Text

Voluptas Noctis Aeternae {Part 7.19}

*Severus Snape x OC*

Summary: It is the year 1983 when the ordinary life of Robin Mitchell takes a drastic turn: she is accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Despite the struggles of being a muggle-born in Slytherin, she soon discovers her passion for Potions, and even manages the impossible: gaining the favor of Severus Snape. Throughout the years, Robin finds that the not quite so ordinary Potions Professor goes from being a brooding stranger to being more than she had ever deemed possible. An ally, a mentor, a friend... and eventually, the person she loves the most. Through adventure, prophecies and the little struggles of daily life in a castle full of mysteries, Robin chooses a path for herself, an unlikely friendship blossoms into something more, and two people abandoned by the world can finally find a home.

General warnings: professor x student, blood, violence, trauma, neglectful families, bullying, cursing

Words: 6.3k

Read Part 1.1 here! All Parts can be found on the Masterlist!

______________________________

Snape held up his own glass while quirking an eyebrow at her, then summoned the first bottle from one of the shelves. "We shall start easy. This is an ordinary dry wine."

Robin held out her glass for him to fill, then waited while he did the same with his. "Cheers then." She gave him a smile, clinking her glass to his before moving to take a sip. The taste was entirely different than what she had imagined, but very pleasant nonetheless. Fruity in a way, but not sweet, not at all like juice… but it didn't burn either. She took another sip, both because she quite enjoyed the taste and to differentiate between the many combined flavors.

"How do you like it?" He inquired after another moment, having finished his drink as well. There really hadn't been much in the glasses in the first place, but they were only testing things after all. For now.

"It tastes like classical literature, with a touch of night and the smell of rain." She smiled down at her empty glass, then up at Snape again. "I like it. A lot, actually."

"You certainly have a peculiar taste. I'm curious to see how this continues. A sweet wine next, perhaps?" Now it was him who didn't wait for an answer, and went to pour them the next sample. The smell of this wine was different from the previous one already, and when Robin took a sip, she pulled a face immediately.

"This just tastes like grape juice with a dash of headache." She mused down at her glass, contemplating if she even wanted to finish the rest of it. It wasn't horrible, alright, but just by far not as good as the previous one. With a small sigh, she gulped down the rest of it as well, then shuddered a little. Right… small sips.

Snape just snorted at her move, and finished his drink as well. "I have to admit, this isn't my choice of liquor either."

"Why do you own it then, if you don't like it?"

"It was a gift from Dumbledore. Or rather a bribe, considering that he expected me to do him a favour in return."

"Uuh, what did he want you to do?" Robin's eyes lit up in curiosity, and her grin spread over her entire face while Snape went to pour an amber liquid into their glasses next, after cleaning them out with a spell; probably the same they used for the cauldrons.

"You would like to know that, wouldn't you?" He asked in amusement, and Robin tried to glare at him but couldn't convey the hostility at all, especially not when she finally couldn't help laughing a few seconds later.

"You really are insufferable! And yes, I would like to know… I'm just not sure if begging or playing uninterested will do the trick for you."

"Neither, likely, but I will spare you the efforts of finding out for sure. He wanted me to deliver a letter to someone in Hogsmeade one night, without asking questions. I didn't ask, but I didn't forget either."

"Sounds reasonable. Especially with Dumbledore."

"It was a long time ago. Now, try the next one and tell me what it tastes like."

"Fine…" Robin sighed and took a careful sip of the amber liquid, then frowned to herself while she thought. After having another sip and effectively emptying the glass, she decided that she liked it, in a way. "It tastes very sweet… like honey and a little like caramel. But it's got something wine-like to it too. The sweet one, not the dry one."

"Close. It's mead, which is a type of honey wine."

"Close indeed!" She grinned, and slowly started to notice how her head grew a bit fuzzy. Like someone was slowly starting to put cotton in between all her nerves, which made it both easier and more difficult to think at once. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, but she was still somewhat weary of it. "I like it, but not as an all-evening kind of thing. More like… a snack in between."

"You really do have a peculiar taste."

"Why?"

"Most women I have encountered prefer the sweeter types."

"I've never been one for overly sweet." She shrugged, toning her own grin down to an amused smile. "Gets dull way too quickly."

"I have to agree, I'm not too fond of it either." He replied easily, then summoned the next bottle with the tiniest smirk. "It seems we have a similar taste then. How fortunate for you."

"Indeed, it's fortunate for you. Now you get to share all those lovely drinks with me instead of downing them alone."

"I definitely should have thought better of that beforehand." He sighed dramatically, pouring another amber liquid that had a clearer colour however. "Now I have doomed myself into sharing my alcohol with you for the times to come."

"As if that wasn't the intention behind this entire experiment in the first place…" Robin raised an eyebrow at him with a knowing smirk, then took a tiny sip of the golden liquid in her glass. It tasted almost like the firewhisky! But… earthier in a way, with less of a hot fiery burn and more of a tickling sharpness. "I like this one a lot. It's like the firewhisky, but with more nature in it. What is it?"

"Scotch."

"Ah, so that's why it's so similar!" Her eyes lit up, and her smile did too. "A magical whisky and a muggle whisky. Interesting comparison."

"I thought you should have an object of direct reference, at least."

"I certainly do now. It's different, but also very similar, and I appreciate that."

"I'm afraid that was the last sample I could provide for now." He said, then leaned back with a curious expression. "How would you evaluate the experiment?"

"Well, I really liked the Scotch and the dry wine. The mead was good but not for now, and the sweet wine… oh well." She thought, frowning to herself a little, which seemed to amuse Snape for some reason. "But I think for tonight I will stick with the firewhisky. Not that I should have much more in the first place, my head is already swimming as it is, and I'm feeling way too warm."

"You keep surprising me… But we have an agreement, so firewhisky it is. A good choice, actually." He said, then got up from the sofa and returned the other bottles to their places on the shelves. When he sat back down, he handed Robin a small vial filled with a dark purple liquid, then opened on for himself as well. "Drink this. It should keep your head from swimming as well as prevent some of the other… less favourable effects of the alcohol."

Robin did as he said, uncorking the vial carefully before gulping it down with a grimace. Disgusting stuff… it tasted bitter and rotten and all kinds of unpleasant. Snape however drank his without even pulling a face. As she put the stopper back into the fragile glass, she could already feel the fog in her head decreasing to a pleasant but still noticeable haze, and when she handed the vial back to him she couldn't help but frown at whatever he had just given her. She'd never heard of a potion like this… there were similar ones, mainly antidotes and neutralizers for toxins, but then again, alcohol was a toxin in a way, wasn't it? For a moment she pondered over various possibilities to alter different antidotes to have this effect on her, but she couldn't determine the exact components of the purple potion she had been given.

"Watching you think is quite entertaining, you know…" Snape finally remarked and thereby brought Robin's attention back to the outside world. "But hearing your thoughts is still by far preferable."

"Sorry." She chuckled softly, brushing the strand of hair she had been twisting around her finger back behind her ear. "I was just thinking that I've never heard of a potion that prevents intoxication, or slows it down at least. Which is ironic, really, considering how useful of a remedy that is!"

"Well, most people drink to get drunk, which obviously eradicates the necessity for a potion like this. I came up with it years ago, when I still frequented a different kind of company that made it necessary to keep a clear head at all times."

"You invented this?!" Robin's eyebrows rose up high in an instant, and a ridiculously large wave of admiration crashed over her in accordance. She decided to forego any inquiry about the company he had mentioned, for she had a decent idea of it already and no wish to let any sadness come up tonight. So she made no efforts to dim down her awe at his talent for once, and allowed herself to simply marvel. "That's incredible! Honestly, if it's not a common thing in existence as of yet, then I can't imagine it to have been easy to come up with in the first place! And it does work quite perfectly. Wow…"

"Will you stop gushing now…" He grumbled in obvious discomfort at the amount of positive attention and admiration he was receiving, and made an attempt to keep his eyes everywhere but on Robin after he'd put the vials down on a side table. "It's just a potion, not a deathcure."

"It's an extremely useful potion! And I'm absolutely certain that you could come up with a deathcure too, if only you wanted to."

"Nonsense. I invent things to solve the problems at hand, not because of some noble cause."

"I have seen only very few of your inventions and creations… I wish you would show me more. Will you, at some point?"

"I doubt that you would like them much. The potions I come up with serve rudimentary purposes, and the spells are more often curses or healing charms than anything of the impressive kind you have created." He huffed, still avoiding her eyes by staring into the flames in the fireplace with a scowl. Robin couldn't understand how he saw so very little of what she saw in him. How he refused to believe any sincere words of admiration. She would make him believe it, if he wanted to or not.

"Look at me. Please…" She tried, calmly, requesting it more than demanding him to.

No reaction, he remained sitting sideways on the sofa with one leg tucked beneath him, facing Robin in the same way as before, but his eyes were glued to the flames. Orange sparks dancing in pools of black.

"Look at me, Severus!" Robin's tone was more insistent this time, but again it was the use of his name that finally drew his eyes back to hers. She gave him a soft smile, and the utmost sincerity possible to convey with a gaze at times like this. "Everything I have seen of what you have created was bloody amazing. There isn't a single person in the world whose work I admire more. Who I admire more in general. I think your talent is incredible, as are your inventions, and it's a tragedy that you don't let people see that more often. And since I don't lie, you know you have to believe me… You know that I mean every word of it."

He didn't reply, but his eyes stayed on hers for a calm moment of drawn out breaths and the quiet sound of music, until finally he shifted in his spot on the sofa to move closer to her. Not much, only so that his knee was touching hers, only so that he could reach out to her without leaning forward. And he did, he lifted his hand to her face in a painful slowness, in careful reluctance, and when the back of his fingers ghosted over her cheekbone so very lightly, Robin couldn't stop the faintest gasp from escaping her lips as they parted on their own account. Her heart stood still as did time and thought, but when it were his eyes that flickered down to her lips for less than a broken second now, all stillness broke down into an untamed frenzy of eclectic emotions, and she remembered how to breathe when her heartbeat burst back into action. But it was mere two seconds later when his hand dropped again, and the corners of his lips lifted in the tiniest smile.

"You had ink on your skin; three black speckles on your cheek and two just above your lips. I thought you might want them gone." He finally commented, almost too quickly, too easily to be quite as nonchalant as he made it seem, but Robin was too concerned with her own emotions to try to analyze his as well right then. Bloody hell… he should not be allowed to do this to her, not when she so desperately wanted him to do more. But at least the moment had yet again been too brief for her to make a fool out of herself; that perhaps was the best outcome of it, even if her heart wanted to object. Gods, she loved every second of his touch, no matter the reason, no matter the outcome.

"Oh." Was the most eloquent reply she could muster up the will to give, and as much as she wanted to refrain from showing any reaction, her eyes dropped down to the empty glass in her hands nonetheless. Ridiculous, really… what had she been expecting?!

"I apologise if I made you uncomfortable, that wasn't my intention."

"No!" Her eyes snapped back up to meet his gaze in an instant, and she couldn't help laughing at the irony of that situation. "You really didn't, don't worry. I don't think you could do anything at all that would make me uncomfortable, actually."

"In that case, you are welcome."

"Thanks." She chuckled, and her heart rate thankfully settled back for the normal drumming. Honestly, she couldn't care less about ink stains on her face and she was rather sure that he wasn't the type to be bothered by it either, but she decided to let the issue go for now. Pondering over it would only leave her hoping for something she had no right to hope for.

"Now, where were we…" He mused, then picked up the bottle of firewhisky and raised an eyebrow in question. Upon Robin's nod, he poured them a proper glass each, then set the bottle back down and finally clinked his glass to hers now. "Cheers. To the drink I no longer owe you."

"Cheers." She chuckled again, observing him while he took a sip at first, then she went to taste the already familiar burn as well. In an odd way, it smoothed out the raging fire in her heart, and at the same time it stoked it to no end. Great.

"Would you actually want to know more about the spells and potions I invented?" He asked after a short moment, leaning into the backrest with his right side so that he stayed facing Robin.

"Yes! Absolutely!" Again, her eyes lit up in honest curiosity at the prospect and she radiated an excitement that had him rolling his eyes with a stifled smile.

"It started early on in my time as a student here, actually. I believe I was in my second year and already rather familiar with a large number of curses unfortunately, when it dawned on me how they are composed in their very core. Reading used to be my preferred pastime even back then, and soon enough I had learned enough about spell creation to start my own attempts." The smile on his lips broadened ever so slightly, wavered for a moment, but then stayed. "The first few went horribly wrong, that is safe to say. It took me a while to find a path between chaos and control that was the right degree of both to function as one. From there on I created all kinds of spells, some more successful than others. Mostly curses and hexes though, for a while at least."

His words reminded Robin of the story about why he had started wearing all black, and she didn't want him to go down into that darkness of mind again. Not tonight. "Curses are also just spells that one has to handle with a bit more responsibility." She shrugged with a smile. "They're often more useful than most charms."

"Indeed." His smile turned into a smirk instead of fading, and Robin felt immensely pleased with herself as he went on. "When I was in my sixth year, I rewrote the entire potions textbook and experimented more in that field as well. The vast majority of my time as a student went into it, and some of the spells and potions I created back then I still use today."

"That's amazing." Robin smiled at him warmly, then however had to snicker at a stray thought. "I'm honestly not surprised though. That you would be smarter than the books given to you, I mean, and probably the only capable person around. It's ironic."

"Why?"

"Because you must've felt like I do all too often these days. Especially when I am slowly becoming a somewhat qualified professional, while the dunderheads around me try to use enlargement charms on their private parts."

Snape's eyebrows rose in an instant at her words, and he almost spluttered out his sip of whisky, which made Robin laugh in return. Probably because she had shown pretty much the same reaction when Jorien and Gideon had talked about it earlier that day.

"Please tell me you weren't a direct witness of this instance." He sighed dramatically, a tease more than anything, and now it was for Robin to almost spit out the sip she had just taken.

"God no! Obviously not!!!" She protested after the burning in her throat allowed her to, while the burning in her cheeks prevailed. But she still had to laugh at his expression no matter the topic. "It's just the prime gossip among the sixth years currently. Supposedly happened yesterday evening, Friday I mean, in that dark fifth floor hallway. You know, the one with the-..."

"I know. It was already a hotspot for hormonal idiots during my student days. You might have noticed how to this day we always have avoided that particular hallway during patrols… That is why."

Robin let out a snort; everyone had heard of that fifth floor hallway before, it wasn't much of a secret, but much of a myth. Then she continued with the story. "Well, rumour has it that Friday night a Ravenclaw and a Gryffindor were caught trying to undo a failed 'engorgio' that obviously was causing immense pain for the guy who had tried to… well, use the spell for things it wasn't made for. The guy supposedly was sent to the hospital wing, and the girl landed straight in detention. I'll spare you the details I unfortunately had to hear during dinner… Jorien and Gideon made a show out of discussing it quite thoroughly."

"If that rumour should be true –which I do not even doubt at this point, knowing how idiotic the majority of students is– I sincerely pity you for having to be associated with such imbeciles."

"Thanks…" She huffed in amusement, and took another sip of her whisky. "They're a year below me, but what difference does it really make? I mean, even people in my year are so far away from me at this point that I feel out of place everywhere but with you."

"You might be the very first person to ever feel that way about my company. But I understand what you mean, I… feel the same about you, actually."

"I take that as a compliment." Robin grinned, and a wave of tingles ran down her back and arms, which she tried to cover up by speaking on. "Especially since your peers are quite alright on average, competent in some subject at least and usually with a certain level of sophistication, if one doesn't count Morgan in. Mine however consider a sloppy shag in a dark hallway the most romantic thing ever and don't know how to use second year charms appropriately."

Snape made a sound between a scoff and a snort, but couldn't help the smirk that tugged on his lips a second later. "If you say it like that, I am almost tempted to think better of my colleagues than I would want to."

"And I'm tempted to think worse of my peers than I should. Everyone is entitled to their own taste and choices of how they want to do things."

"That doesn't mean we can't judge them for it."

Robin's lips curled up into a smirk as well, and she finished her whisky with one more sip before holding her glass out to be refilled. "Precisely."

They each had another drink then, while chatting on about the latest gossip among both students and staff, and another as they discussed the events of the past day and their plans for the following one. By the time Robin had finished her third whisky, she was feeling too warm yet again, and the fuzziness was back in her head as well, but she didn't mind. It was a strange feeling rather than an unpleasant one, and it was making her drowsy more than anything else. On the other hand, it might also simply be the time of night that was making her more tired by the minute, causing her to curl deeper into the cushions of the sofa while her will to get up and leave shrunk by the second. It was past three in the morning… they usually would've called it a night by now. And yet here they were, still on the sofa, still talking. If their current state could even still be considered as 'talking' in the first place, with Robin more lying than sitting in her corner, eyes closed and a soft smile on her face while she listened to the surprisingly rhythmic flow of his voice. She didn't exactly know what he was saying, didn't hear the words as words but as a melody of the most alluring song that lasted way beyond the music they had run out of an hour ago. Honestly, she could just listen to him forever and would be perfectly happy.

"Robin…"

"Hmm…"

"You might want to set the glass down before you fall asleep entirely." He sounded tired as well, but undoubtedly humoured in a way that at last got through to Robin. Oh damnit…

"I should go…" She mumbled, brows creasing at the effort it took to speak at all. "Not sleep."

"And possibly run into Morgan in this tired state? I don't think so."

"Hmm…"

"Stay here." He said, an offer and a request more than an order. "If that would be acceptable for you."

The corners of her lips curled up ever so slightly in return, and every thought of leaving vanished into thin air in an instant. "Would love to." She sighed under her breath, relieved and content at once as she let herself sink deeper into the cushions and into sleep's sweet lure, upon which she received a quiet chuckle in return. The movement that followed she barely still registered, how the sofa rebounded at the loss of his weight, how the glass was taken from her hands and her wand removed from her hair. At the latter she merely sighed in appreciation, and a quiet goodnight was the last she heard before she was wrapped in darkness.

… … …

It was quiet sounds of agony, ragged huffs and laboured breaths that brought Robin back to her senses. Her eyes fluttered open, heavy with sleep, and she blinked a few times until she could place where she was. The sofa, Snape's room… softly illuminated by dim moonlight that barely still fell through the windows and bathed the space in gentle brushes of silver. Serene almost, the deep shadows and cold whites…

The gentle haze of heat and sleep lifted off her mind in an instant when she heard another strangled sob, the rustling of fabrics, a sharp intake of breath. She sat up immediately; her head was spinning ever so slightly at the rash movement, but not enough to cause actual dizziness even as she scrambled to her feet. This had happened before… once, a year ago, when they had accidentally slept in the lab together. On her tiptoes, Robin moved from the sofa to the other end of the room, up the steps and towards the curled up figure on the bed, and her heart broke a little when she saw the tortured expression on his face. Did he have nightmares like this more often? Her heart broke even more upon the answer she didn't dare to give herself. It hadn't been like this in summer, the two nights spent on the couch in his home… What had been different back then? What had she done last year? She had been there, close to him, offered comfort through the lightest touch… And without a doubt she would do it again.

Without a second thought she walked right up to the edge of the bed, but froze in her movement when she looked down at him, so inexplicably vulnerable for once, in a moment both surreal and painfully clear. There was no doubt that he wouldn't want her to see him like this… but Robin also had no doubt that it changed absolutely nothing for her. She had known this side of him for a while now, and it was as much a part of who he was as were the scowls and the teasing. But that didn't mean she had to make it more difficult for him by drawing attention to the fact that he was at her mercy right now, without his choice.

So she merely reached out and gently curled her fingers around his, taking a hold of his hand slowly but firmly nonetheless. Seconds later his hand tightened around hers as well, the deep lines on his face disappeared and his breathing evened out as well. A tiny sigh in sheer relief escaped his lips at last, and Robin smiled instinctively. She would do anything to keep him happy… and holding his hand all night certainly wasn't the worst of that. With a silent sigh in return, she sat down on the ground while keeping their interlaced hands on the edge of the mattress. She knew that she would definitely fall asleep if she'd sat down on the bed instead… and she also knew that Snape likely wouldn't be too happy if he woke up to find her wrapped around him. On the ground, however, there at least was no way she could fall asleep and embarrass herself… And if she couldn't sleep, she might as well spend the time resting her mind in other terms. Thus she silently summoned her backpack, and with her free hand dug out one of her favourite non-academic books. A collection of short stories, nothing extraordinary, but some of which were written rather beautifully indeed, and at the very least, she had always found them calming. So she started reading, and like she was sharing calm and comfort with him through her touch, she now tried to share these stories as well. Not by any means of actual magic, really, but just… by feeling them. Perhaps it worked, perhaps it did not, but he slept calmly without another interruption all night, holding her hand tightly as she held his, and that was all that mattered.

It was only when the room started brightening at a surprising rapidity that Robin finally stopped reading and glanced at her surroundings once more. Her eyes were burning, her arm long gone numb from being held up the entire time, and she was cold and aching all over. But she was happy nonetheless, and even the realization that an impending sunrise meant an impending breakfast at this time of year couldn't take that from her. With tired eyes and an even more tired mind, she read the last few pages of the second to last story, then shut the book quietly and put it back into her backpack; she wouldn't get through another story without her eyes turning into sandpaper. Perhaps closing them for a minute would do her good… only until Snape woke up, which surely would be the case sooner rather than later. She would have to be alert enough to see the tutoring through after breakfast, ideally without yawning every two seconds like she did right now. Really, it was ridiculous how much rest her body needed… how jittery and shaky she got when she didn't sleep, how cold she was and how unfocused. That wouldn't do for tutoring, and the thought made her sigh. But with just five more minutes of closing her eyes at least, she surely could push through it somehow. This by far wasn't her first all-nighter after all. Thus without trying to find any more reasons why this could be a bad idea, she closed her eyes indeed and leaned her head against the side of the bed. Just five minutes of closing her eyes… but it wasn't even five seconds later when she was fast asleep.

… … …

Warmth, comfort, and the sound of rain pattering against the windows was what Robin woke up to this time around, but it wasn't what had woken her up. No, there wasn't a cause for her to come to for once, none but that she was actually feeling well rested and ready to rise for once. Still, the incredible comfort she found herself in made her bury her head deeper into the pillow and hug the covers tighter around herself as well. They were so soft… so warm, and everything smelled like home. Home… what did home smell like? She frowned to herself, eyes still closed, until it started to dawn on her that the scent of home was the scent of Snape. He was home to her. Finally she opened her eyes and already found her first suspicion confirmed; she was curled up in his bed, wrapped up tightly in the dark green sheets she had been admiring before. Her heart skipped a beat, then another for good measure, and a sudden rush of delight and excitement washed away the very last remainders of sleep. She sat up with a quiet groan, and immediately found that the wide space on the mattress around her was empty. Fortunately for many reasons, and unfortunately for others. Wait a second… she had fallen asleep on the floor, dead tired and shortly before sunrise. Now it was raining, and she was nice and toasty in bed. Wide awake. Bloody hell…

"Good morning." Snape's voice made her jump immediately, and she gripped the covers so tightly that her knuckles turned white. She hadn't even seen nor heard him coming up the two steps to where the bed was perched into the corner next to the window… but then again, she hadn't been paying much attention to the world beyond the bed in general before now.

Snape was dressed in his usual teaching robes as always, but he did look surprisingly well rested for once, which likely was a difference that was so subtle that it probably was only visible to Robin. With that same odd expression he had already worn in the lab last night, he then leaned against the far post of the bed with one shoulder and merely held her gaze for a moment while the rain continued its gentle drumming against the glass.

"Good mo-… uh… What time is it?" She asked when her heartbeat had calmed back down, while she made a vain attempt to smooth down the mess of waves and knots on her head.

"Almost twelve. Not long before I would have woken you up anyway." He answered, and noticing the immediate shock that was painted on Robin's face in return, he continued straight on. "You needn't be concerned about your appointments. I let your roommates know during breakfast that their tutoring would be moved to the afternoon, due to unforeseen circumstances that were holding you up."

"You did?" Robin's eyes widened, but at the same time the tension in her body disappeared, and her shoulders dropped down visibly as she let out a relieved sigh. "Thank you! But you really just should've woken me up when you got up… I didn't mean to fall asleep in the first place, nor to seize your space like this."

"First of all, you did not seize anything. I picked you up from the ground and put you onto the bed when I got up." He murmured, and Robin hugged her legs to her chest under the covers while waiting for him to continue. "I couldn't let you stay on the ground, or even the sofa… not when you obviously sacrificed your rest to ensure that I could have mine."

"Thank you." She offered him a small smile in return, and at the same time she was more certain than ever that staying awake to let him sleep had been the right decision. "I actually didn't even want you to find out that I had done that in the first place, but I guess it's kinda hard to deny now."

"Why wouldn't you want me to know?"

"Well…" She shrugged with a small sigh. "I guess I just didn't want to make you uncomfortable. Neither about the whole hand holding thing nor about the reasons why it was necessary."

"The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the fact that I could sleep peacefully for the first time in ages, at the cost of your own rest and comfort."

"It's fine, really, I just wanted you to have a good night's sleep, which you obviously had, so all is as it should be." Robin gave him another encouraging smile, and it eased the frown on his face ever so slightly at least. "And since you were gracious enough to let me rest instead of waking me up, I certainly have gained more than I've lost; I haven't felt this good after waking up in longer than I care to remember. Your bed really is terribly comfortable, do you know that?"

Now his lips curled into an almost involuntary smile as well, but he averted his eyes nonetheless. "I am aware, yes."

"Gotta be a professor to enjoy such luxury, I guess…"

"Or befriend one who you can bribe to share."

His words as well as his tone made Robin laugh, and at the same time it set fire to her insides and electricity to her skin. Geez, he couldn't say things like that and expect her not to wonder what exactly he had meant by it. Nothing probably, as always, but she still couldn't quite suffocate the sparks of hope, the whispered 'maybe' in the shadowy parts of her mind. She shouldn't go there, no matter how tempting it was. Time for a change of topic.

"I hope I didn't keep you from anything by, uh… being here." She said, and finally convinced herself to flip the covers back, only to shiver immediately at the loss of warmth. Right… more windows meant more cold seeping in. "I just mean, usually you're not in your room during the day, are you?"

"Very true. Today however I chose to work here up until now, on the little I had to do. After lunch I will return to the office."

"Can I have your classroom? For my tutoring?" Robin asked with an innocent but very much hopeful smile, then stifled a yawn as she rose to her feet and stretched her limbs. Unsurprisingly, they didn't even ache anymore after a few hours in that cloud of a bed. Gods, if only she could wake up like this every day…

"Obviously."

With a content sigh, Robin moved to stand right in front of Snape, who in return stood straight once again and frowned at her questioning expression as she went to ask the next question that came to her mind. "Does my hair look alright? Preferably like I didn't just fall out of bed?"

"Don't make me lie to you." He replied in an undoubtedly humoured way, but he was trying to tone it down nonetheless, to hide it beneath a layer of calm neutrality, which however didn't work nearly as well as he probably would've liked.

Robin groaned under her breath and rolled her eyes to herself in return, then however decided to just go with it. "Fine… but if you don't want me to run through the castle looking like this, I'll have to seize your bathroom."

"You were the one concerned about your appearance; I am not. But feel free to seize whatever you please."

"Oh, you will regret saying that." She laughed as she skipped down the two steps, then halted at the door and turned around once more. "At the latest when I come back here ever so often and bribe you indeed. You'll definitely regret it then."

"I will…" He replied with a not smirk, just when she was about to close the door behind herself. And just when she barely was still able to hear, he added under his breath a quiet "...Never."

______________________________

Tags:

@ayamenimthiriel @chibi-lioness @t-sunnyside @alex4555 @purpledragonturtles @istrugglewithphilosophy @meghan-maria @hidden-behind-the-fourth-wall @darkestacademiaaa @nizem8 @girilimoni

General Tags:

@wegingerangelica @dreary-skies-stuff @wiczer @lotus-eyedindiangoddess @theweirdlunatic @caretheunicorn @kthemarsian @lady-of-lies @strawberrysandcream @noplacelikehome77 @theoneanna @mishaandthebrits @i-am-a-mes @nonsensicalobsessions @exygon @hiddles-lobotomy @rjohnson1280 @annwhojumps @spookycatqueen @salempoe @headoverhiddleston @fanfiction-and-stress @createdfromblue @thecreatiivecorner @themusingsofmany @kinghiddlestonanddixon @scorpionchild81 @crystal-28 @adefectivedetective @lokis-girl-in-mischief @booklover2929 @iamverity @lovesmesomehiddles @akk4rin @whitewolfandthefox @stuckupstucky @kassablanca13 @delightfulheartdream @hayalee8 @lemonmochitea

83 notes · View notes

fitlifecroc · 4 years ago

Text

11 Super and Amazing Benefits of Oat

Oats are one of the world's healthiest grains.

They are a gluten-free whole grain that is high in vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants.

Oats and oatmeal have several health benefits, according to studies.

Weight loss, lower blood sugar levels, and a lower risk of heart disease are only a few of the benefits.

Here are nine health benefits of consuming oats and oatmeal that have been scientifically proven.

What is The Difference Between Oatmeal and Oat?

Oat groats, the most intact and whole form of oats, take a long time to cook. For this reason, most people prefer rolled, crushed or steel-cut oats.

Instant (quick) oats are the most highly processed variety. While they take the shortest time to cook, the texture may be mushy.

Whole grain oats that are cylindrical in shape and raw and unprocessed are referred to as oats. They're frequently fed to animals. Oatmeal is made from rolled oats that have been thinly sliced so that it can be cooked in a matter of minutes. They have a mushier texture.

Oats are commonly eaten for breakfast as oatmeal, which is made by boiling oats in water or milk. Oatmeal is often referred to as porridge.

They’re also often included in muffins, granola bars, cookies and other baked goods.

1. Improves Heart Health

Oats are high in antioxidants and have a high fibre content. By combating free radicals, these antioxidants help to improve heart health.

Beta-glucan, a soluble fiber found in oats, lowers total serum and LDL (bad) cholesterol levels by preventing dietary cholesterol from being absorbed in the intestine. As a result, the risk of coronary heart disease is reduced.

Oats contain dietary lignans, which protect against heart disease. [nine] Oats contain vitamin E, which helps to prevent cardiovascular disease.

2. Helps Control Weight

Let's face it, we could all use a little support now and then, but did you ever consider that oatmeal could help you lose weight? Yes, that is right! A compound in oatmeal known as -glucan reduces appetite by increasing the hunger-fighting hormone cholecystokinin, according to a report published in the October 2009 issue of "Molecular Nutrition & Food Science."

3. Athletic performance

Oatmeal is a great source of carbohydrate and protein, as well as calories and electricity. When consumed 45 minutes to 1 hour before moderate-intensity exercise, oats have been shown in scientific studies to improve metabolism and efficiency.

4. Improves Bone Health

Oats are high in silicon, which is important for bone health.

Women with postmenopausal osteoporosis may profit greatly from consuming oats on a regular basis.

5. Helps you Sleep

Oatmeal has been ingrained in us as a breakfast snack, but it is also a good option before bedtime. In reality, the Scottish advise eating a bowl of oatmeal in the evening to help you relax and fall asleep.

What makes oatmeal a nice bedtime snack? According to Dr. Oz, oats contain melatonin and complex carbohydrates, which may help more tryptophan get into the brain and aid sleep. Oatmeal also contains a number of vitamins, including B6, which is a co-factor that helps the brain produce more serotonin.

6. Improves disease-fighting Immunity

Oatmeal's function in the immune system's response to disease and infection has been extensively researched. In essence, oatmeal's special fiber, beta-glucan, aids neutrophils in getting to the site of an infection faster and enhancing their capacity to kill the bacteria they encounter.

7. Stabilizes Blood Sugar

What exactly does this imply? We've all had a "sugar crash" or "mid-morning slump" after a big meal or sugary breakfast; however, this doesn't happen as much with oatmeal. Oatmeal's sugar is released more slowly into the bloodstream due to its high soluble fiber content (aka, it has a low glycemic index). Steel cut oats, as opposed to instant oats, would have a greater effect on blood sugar stabilization since they are less refined and thus contain more soluble fiber. Another advantage is that it takes longer to absorb, so you'll stay fuller for longer.

One of the best advantages of oatmeal is its low glycemic index. In reality, one study published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that eating a low-glycemic-index diet is linked to lower insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes risk, and coronary artery disease risk than eating a high-glycemic-index diet.

8. Energy Booster

Oats are high in carbohydrates, making them an excellent breakfast option. Another factor oats increase energy levels in the body is that they contain a lot of B vitamins. [page 24]

Because of the high fiber content, oats keep you feeling fuller for longer and help you avoid energy slumps.

9. Lowers Risk of Colon Cancer

Colon cancer is dreadful and can be excruciatingly painful. Researchers from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands combined their findings to show that people who consume a high fiber diet (mainly whole grains and cereals including oats) had a lower risk of colorectal cancer. This research included nearly 2 million people and discovered that adding 10 grams of fiber to one's diet reduces one's risk of colorectal cancer by 10%!

10. Antioxidany Function is Enchanced

Oatmeal is high in avenanthramides, a form of antioxidant found only in oats. Antioxidants are necessary because they protect your cells from free radicals, which are molecules that your body produces as a result of metabolism and exposure to toxins in the environment. Since free radicals are unstable, they boost the risk of cancer and heart disease.

Avenanthramides antioxidants reduce inflammation and increase nitric oxide production, which prevents artery hardening. In reality, a study published in 2010 in the journal "Nutrition and Cancer" found that avenanthramides in oats inhibited colon cancer cell spread.

Finally, it's important to understand that oatmeal comes in a variety of flavors. Oat Bran, Rolled Oats, Steel Cut Oats, Oat Groats, and other types of oats are available. They all have different flavors, nutritional values, and cooking times, in my opinion. Steel cut oats are often recommended for health reasons because they are higher in protein, iron, and fiber, and therefore take longer to digest, allowing you to stay fuller for longer. If you're pressed for time in the morning, fast oats are a good option.

11. Good for The Skin

Oats are high in zinc, which is beneficial in the fight against pimples.

Oats aid in the absorption of excess oil on the skin and are an important component of acne treatments. They also aid in the treatment of dry and itchy skin because beta-glucans moisturize the skin.

Oats can also help to lighten the skin tone by acting as an anti-tanning agent.

#healthy food list #healthy foods #healthy food #healthy food ideas #healthy food choices #benefits of oat #benefits of oatmeal #oat #oatmilk

8 notes · View notes

steadymantra · 3 years ago

Text

FOOD THAT BOOST’S IMMUNE SYSTEM IN ADULTS

In a post COVID ravaged world, everyone has just one question on their minds, “How can I strengthen my immunity from the inside?” Overall, your immune system performs an excellent job of protecting you from disease-causing germs most of the time.

But occasionally it fails: when a pathogen infiltrates your body and makes you ill. Is it feasible to intervene and strengthen your immune system throughout this process? What if you changed your diet? Should you take vitamins or other supplements? Make any additional lifestyle adjustments in the hopes of eliciting a near-perfect immunological response?

You can find your answers to all these questions and more throughout the course of this article.

How to boost immune system naturally?

The prospect of increasing your immunity quickly is appealing, but the capacity to do so has proven to be challenging for a variety of reasons. The immune system is, in fact, a complex system, and not a single organ. It requires balance and harmony to work properly.

There are still a lot of experts who despite spending years of their career studying the immune system, don't understand about the complexities and interconnectivity of different immune responses. As of now, the influence of lifestyle on the development of natural immunity is not comprehensively understood.

But it doesn't imply that the impacts of lifestyle on the immune system aren't significant and should not be researched any further. In both animals as well as people, researchers are investigating the impact of nutrition, age, exercise, psychological stress, and other variables on immune response. Meanwhile, general healthy-living techniques make sense since they are expected to improve immune function over time, as they display some other documented health advantages.

Healthy ways to strengthen your immune system

Your first line of protection for bolstering your immune system should be to live and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Following basic good-health principles is the single most important action you can take to proactively keep your immune system in excellent functioning order. When you shield your body from environmental intrusions and supplement it with healthy-living tactics like the ones listed below, all aspects of your body, especially your immune system, perform better.

Quit smoking

Consume a diet rich in fruits and vegetables

Engage in regular physical activity

Keep a healthy weight

If you consume alcohol daily, do so in moderation

Get enough sleep

Take precautions to avoid infection, like washing your hands often and properly cooking meats

Make an effort to reduce stress

Be up-to-date on all prescribed immunizations. Vaccines prepare your immune system to combat illnesses before they enter your body.

Why is eating healthy important?

The in-built battalion of your immune system starts its march within your stomach, just like any other battle force. Immune system soldiers in good health require consistent nutrition. Scientists have long observed that poor and malnourished individuals are more prone to getting bedridden with infectious illnesses. For instance, experts are of the opinion that some dietary components, such as a high simple sugar intake or processed foods, would have a negative impact on immune function. These opinions were formulated by research conducted on the impact of diet on the human immunological system.

There is some indication that different deficiencies in the body's micronutrient levels, such as selenium, zinc, iron, folic acid, copper, and vitamins A, C, B6, and E, influence immunological responses in animals, as evaluated via their test tube body fluid samples. However, the significance of these immune system abnormalities on animal health is less evident, and the effect of comparable abnormalities on human immunological response is yet to be determined.

So, what are your options? If you feel that your diet isn't meeting all of your micronutrient demands — perhaps because you don't enjoy veggies or that certain foods are unavailable where you live— taking a daily mineral and multivitamin supplement may provide additional health advantages in addition to any immune-boosting effects. Taking massive amounts of a single vitamin does not work. More isn't always better. Ensure that your supplementary vitamin dosage is regulated as per your health advisor's directions.

Immunity boosting foods for COVID

The food you consume registers significant impact on your overall health and immunity. Consume meals low on carbs to help reduce high blood pressure and blood sugar. A low carb diet can help reduce the progression of diabetes, while a protein-rich diet will keep you be in shape.

In addition, eat vegetables and fruits high in ascorbic acid, beta carotene, and other necessary vitamins on a daily basis. Certain foods, such as mushrooms, bell peppers, tomatoes, and green vegetables like spinach and broccoli, are also effective candidates for enhancing the body's resistance to infections.

If going out to buy foods isn't an option due to local lockdown in your area, you can take omega 3 fatty acid capsules to boost up your daily nutrition intake.

Ginger, gooseberries (amla), and turmeric are examples of natural immune boosters. Some of these superfoods are regular components in Indian cuisines and snacks. Garlic, Basel leaves, and black cumin are among herbs that might help increase immunity. Sunflower seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, and melon seeds are high in protein and vitamin E.

Natural probiotics such as yoghurt, and fermented foods are also good sources of rejuvenating the balance of gut bacteria, which is essential for nutrition absorption by your digestive system. These are also fantastic solutions for the elderly.

Foods that weaken immune system

The immune system protects the body from communicable diseases such as the common cold, flu, cholera, typhoid etc. Nutrition is a crucial aspect in maintaining a healthy immune system.

High blood sugar levels have been linked to a weakened immunological response in studies. Restricting your intake of beverages and sugary foods can help you regulate your blood sugar and boost your immune system.

1. Processed foods

Many processed foods are high in bad fats, carbohydrates, and chemicals. These are used to improve the texture, taste, and shelf life of a food, but several research studies demonstrate that they may impair the immune system.

Some processed meals containing a lot of ingredients are:

microwaveable meals

canned foods

chips

cakes and cookies

According to one 2017 research, consuming foods containing chemicals may raise the risk of a number of chronic metabolic or inflammatory diseases. Sucralose, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, sodium, polysorbate-80, and carrageenan were among the additives investigated in the study.

The researchers also discovered that persons who consume a lot of additives are more likely to be obese, have insulin resistance, and immune-related inflammation.

Meanwhile, according to a 2014 review, a high consumption of salt, refined sugar, and saturated fatty acids, along with a lack of omega-3 fatty acids, can all contribute to damage the immune system.

2. Foods that are high in sugar

People who consume a lot of sugar have a higher chance of developing various chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.

Common sugary foods include the following:

marmalades, preserves, and sweets

flavored milk and sweetened dairy products

cakes and cookies

sugary breakfast cereals

sugary drinks, like soda and soft drinks

A high-sugar diet may also impair the immune system's ability to fight illnesses. This might happen by a decrease in the efficiency of white blood cells that helps in boosting inflammation.

3. Foods that are high in refined carbohydrates

Processed and high-refined-carbohydrate foods, such as refined sugar and white flour, have been linked to increased oxidative stress and inflammation, both of which can impair the immune system.

Refined carbohydrates can be found in the following foods:

white rice

sweets, cakes and cookies, made with white flour

white bread

The Final Takeaway

Anyone wishing to boost their immune system should avoid diets heavy in processed carbs, additives and sugar. These foods may have an anti-immune effect.

On the other hand, a diversified, nutrient-dense diet, may help enhance your immune system and minimize inflammation.

#immunity #immune #immunehealth #healthy #food #vitamin #vitamins

3 notes · View notes

lycanthrowup · 4 years ago

Text

a compilation of every time sapphique is mentioned

Who can chart the vastness of incarceron?

It’s halls and viaducts, its chasms?

Only the man who has known freedom

Can define his prison.

-Songs of Sapphique

There was a man and his name was sapphique.

Where he came from is a mystery. Some say he was born of the prison, grown from its stored components. Some say he came from Outside, because he alone of men returned there. Some say he was not a man at all, but a creature from those shining sparks lunatics see in dreams and name the stars. Some say he was a liar and a fool.

-Legends of Sapphique

Once sapphique came to the end of a tunnel and looked down a vast hall. Its floor was a poisoned pool of venom. Corrosive steams rose from it. Across the darkness stretched a taut wire, and on the far side a doorway was visible, with lights beyond it.

The inmates of the Wing tried to dissuade him. “Many have fallen,” they said. “Their bones rot in the black lake. Why should you be any different?”

He answered, “Because i have dreams and in those dreams i see the stars.” Then he swung himself up onto the wire and began to cross. Many times he rested, or hung in pain. Many times they called on him to return. Finally, after hours, he reached the other side, and they saw him stagger, and vanish through the door.

He was dark, this Sapphique, and slender. His hair was straight and long. His real name is only to be guessed at.

-Wanderings of Sapphique

You are my father, Incarceron.

I was born from your pain.

Bones of steel; circuits for veins.

My heart a vault of iron.

-Songs of Sapphique

The eyes in the corridor were dark and watchful and there were many of them. “Come out,” he said.

They came out. They were children. They wore rags and their skin was livid with sores. Their veins were tubes, their hair wire. Sapphique reached out and touched them, “You are the ones who will save us,” he said.

-Sapphique and the Children

Walls have ears.

Doors have eyes.

Trees have voices.

Beasts tell lies.

Beware the rain,

Beware the snow.

Beware the man

You think you know.

-Songs of Sapphique

Sapphique rode out of the Tanglewood and saw the Fortress of Bronze. People were streaming into its walls from all around. “Come inside,” the urged him. “Hurry! Before it attacks!”

He looked around. The world was metal and the sky was metal. The people were ants on the plains of the Prison.

“Have you forgotten,” he said, “that you are already Inside?”

But they hurried past and said he was deranged.

-Legends of Sapphique

Down the endless halls of guilt

My silver thread of tears is spilt.

My fingerbone the key that broke

My blood the oil that smoothes the lock.

-Songs of Sapphique

“Where are the leaders?” Sapphique asked.

“In their fortresses,” the swan replied,

“And the poets?”

“Lost in dreams of other worlds.”

And the craftsmen?”

“Forging machines to challenge the darkness.”

“And the wide, who made the world?”

The swan lowered its black neck sadly.

“Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.”

-Sapphique in the Kingdom of Birds

Do you seek the key to Incarceron?

Look inside yourself. It has always been hidden there.

-The Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique

Sapphique strapped the wings to his arms and flew, over oceans and plains, over glass cities and mountains of gold. Animals fled; people pointed up. He flew so far, he saw the sky above him and the sky said, “Turn back, my son, for you have climbed too high.”

Sapphique laughed, as he rarely did. “Not this time. This time I beat on you until you open.”

But Incarceron was angered and struck him down.

-Legends of Sapphique

All my years to this moment

All my roads to this wall.

All my words to this silence

All my pride to this fall.

-Songs of Sapphique

He fell all day and all night. He fell into a pit of darkness. He falls like a stone falls, like a bird with broken wings, like an angel cast down. His landing bruised the world.

-Legends of Sapphique

He awoke and found them all around him. The old, lame, the diseased, the half-made men. He hid his head and was filled with shame and anger. “I have failed you,” he said. “I have journeyed so far and i have failed.”

“Not so,” they answered. “There is a door we know, a tiny, secret door. None of us dare crawl through, in case we die there. If you promise to come back for us, we will show you.” Sapphique was lithe and slender. He looked at them with his dark eyes. “Take me there,” he whispered.

-Legends of Sapphique

I have walked a stair of swords,

I have worn a coat of scars.

I have vowed with hollow words,

I have lied my way to the stars.

-Songs of Sapphique

Sapphique, they say, was not the same after his Fall. His mind was bruised. He plunged into despair, the depths of the Prison. He crawled into the Tunnels of Madness. He sought dark places, and dangerous men.

-Legends of Sapphique

How could you betray me, Incarceron?

How could you let me fall?

I thought i was your son.

It seems i am your fool.

-Songs of Sapphique

Once Incarceron became a dragon, and a Prisoner crawled into its lair. They made a wager. They would ask each other riddles, and the one who could not answer would lose. If it was the man, he would give his life. The Prison offered a secret way of Escape. But even as the man agreed, he felt its hidden laughter.

They played for a year and a day. The lights stayed dark. The dead were not removed. Food was not provided. The Prison ignored the cries of its inmates. Sapphique was the man. He had one riddle left. He said, “What is the Key that unlocks the heart?”

For a day Incarceron thought. For two days. For three. Then it said, “If i ever knew the answer, i have forgotten it.”

-Sapphique in the Tunnels of Madness

I could breathe fire on you,” the wirewolf growled. “Do it,” said Sapphique. “Just don’t throw me into the water.”

“I could gnaw your shadow away.”

“That’s nothing, compared with the black water.”

“I could crush your bones and sinews.”

“I fear the terrible water more than you.”

The wirewolf flung him angrily into the lake.

So he swam away, laughing.

-The Wirewolf Returns

Sapphique leaped up, overjoyed. “If you cannot answer, then I’ve won. Show me a way Out.” Incarceron laughed in its million halls. It raised a claw and the skin of the claw split and the dragonskin Glove curled off and lay on the ground.

Sapphique was alone. He picked the shining thing up and cursed the Prison.

But when he put his hand into Incarceron’s he knew its plans.

He dreamed its dreams.

-Sapphique in the Tunnels of Madness

So he rose up and sought the hardest way, the road that leads inward. And all the time he wore the Glove he did not eat or sleep and Incarceron knew all his desires.

-Legend of Sapphique

Hand to hand, skin to skin,

Twin in a mirror, Incarceron.

Fear to fear, desire to desire,

Eye to eye. Prison to prison.

-Songs of Sapphique

He opened the window and looked out at the night. “The world is an endless loop,” he said. “A Mobius strip, a wheel in which we run. As you have discovered, who have traveled so far just to find yourself where you started from.”

Sapphique went on stroking the blue cat. “So you can’t help me?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

-Sapphique and the Dark Enchanter

I fooled the Prison

I fooled my father.

I asked a question

It could not answer.

-Songs of Sapphique

A great Fimbulwinter will close down on the world. Darkness and cold will spread from Wing to Wing. There will come one called the Unsapient, from far away, from Outside.

He will plot and scheme with Incarceron.

They will make the Winged Man.

-Sapphique’s Prophecy of the World’s End

What makes a prince?

A sunny sky, an open door.

What makes a prisoner?

A question with no answer.

-Songs of Sapphique

When he was born, silent and alone, his mind was empty. He had no past, no being. He found himself in the deepest place of darkness and loneliness.

“Give me a name,” he begged.

The Prison said, “I lay this fate on you, Prisoner. You shall have no name unless i give it to you. And I will never give it.”

He groaned. He reached out his fingers and found raised letters on the door. Great iron letters, riveted through.

After hours, he had grasped their shape.

“Sapphique,” he said, “will be my name.”

-Legends of Sapphique

“The fault is yours,” the Enchanter said. How could a Prison know of Escape but through your dreams? It would be best to give up the Glove.”

Sapphique shook his head. “Too late. It has grown into me now. How could i sing my songs without it?”

-Sapphique and the Dark Enchanter

He worked night and day. He made a coat that would transform him; he would be more than a man; a winged creature, beautiful as light. All the birds brought him feathers. Even the eagle. Even the swan.

-Legends of Sapphique

People will love you if you tell them of your fears.

-The Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique

Once he had crossed the sword-bridge he came to a room with a banquet of fine food spread on a table. He sat down and picked up a piece of bread, but the power of the Glove turned it to ashes. He picked up water but the glass shattered. So he traveled on, because he knew now that we was close to the door.

-Wanderings of Sapphique

As the Beast i took your finger.

As the Dragon i give you my hand.

Now you have crawled and clambered into my heart.

I can’t see you anymore.

Are you still here?

-Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique

The dove will rise above destruction

With a white rose in her beak

Over storm

Over tempest.

Over time and the ages.

And the petals will fall to the ground like snow.

-Sapphique’s Prophecy of the World’s End

He raised his hands. They saw his coat was feathered like the wings of the Swan when it dies, when it sings its secret song. And he opened the door that none of them had seen until now.

-Legends of Sapphique

He sang his last song. And the words of that have never been written down. But it was sweet and of a great beauty, and those that heard it were changed utterly.

Some say it was the song that moves stars.

-Sapphique’s Last Song

#incarceron #sapphique

8 notes · View notes

goldrockauckland · 3 years ago

Text

What does Shilajit do for the Body?

For certain individuals, shilajit is a mystery that interests them to attempt it once. Shilajit is otherwise called the destroyer of shortcoming, which helps the invulnerable framework, further develops testosterone levels and the sky is the limit from there. You can look at the medical advantages of the normal item before you Himalayan shilajit NZ .

What is Shilajit?

Shilajit is sourced from mountain ranges across the globe, particularly in the Himalayas. The material-rich normal shilajit gold NZ was framed in a regular habitat where various plants were changed into humus in the wake of rotting because of the pressing factor of mountains.

It is a tacky substance framed hundreds of years prior, and shilajit powder NZ is one of the basic ayurvedic drugs shilajit resin presently. In addition, it is impacting your wellbeing emphatically so you can take safe enhancements no doubt.

As you probably are aware, there are a few benefits of Himalayan shilajit NZ. We have determined the top advantages that you should know. Along these lines, look at beneath and begin utilizing one of the most outstanding regular drugs for better prosperity.

Alzheimer's illness

Individuals with Alzheimer's illness have issues with memory, thinking and conduct. Shilajit is currently viewed as one of the compelling medicines for Alzheimer's illness. A couple of reports recommend that Himalayan shilajit NZ is imbued with fulvic, and it forestalls tau improvement.

As tau (protein) is viewed as one of the significant reasons for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative infections, shilajit is an optimal decision. In any case, continue on further with the examination to see better shilajit's adequacy in restoring the sickness.

Testosterone level

A couple of tests were led to comprehend the adequacy of shilajit pitch in expanding testosterone levels. In one review, men burned-through shilajit two times every day and saw expansion in Himalayan shilajit benefits levels following three months. Also, one more review directed for ninety days uncovered the huge expansion in testosterone levels in male members.

Likewise, shilajit gold NZ is a decent enhancement for male barrenness, and the proficiency of this regular enhancement is noted with the assistance of exploration. A review was directed with sixty barren individuals for ninety days, and it was obvious that men who burned-through shilajit have shown expanded fruitfulness.

Persistent weariness condition

At the point when individuals have persistent weariness condition, they experience sleepiness to a greatest level. This condition can influence individuals of all ages, obstructing their day by day exercises, and it is additionally connected with mitochondrial brokenness. When shilajit was utilized to test the effectiveness of treating CFS, the outcomes were positive, and the normal items were fundamentally tried on rodents for three weeks.

Slow maturing measure

As shilajit is a characteristic item, it instills a ton of goodness like fulvic corrosive. This cancer prevention agent and best shilajit brand in Auckland compound forestall cell harm and eases back the maturing system for better wellbeing.

Height disorder

People experience the ill effects of height disorder when presented to low barometrical pressing factor, frosty temperatures, and high speed. With an enormous inundation of fulvic corrosive and other imperative minerals, shilajit can be an ideal decision for treating elevation disorder.

Paleness

Individuals experience paleness if the blood needs hemoglobin, and a few reasons cause iron deficiency. Iron lack is one of the main drivers liable for unpredictable heartbeat, weakness, cold hands, and cerebral pain. In the event that you have iron inadequacy, it is presumably because of a low-iron eating routine, blood misfortune or less iron retention.

It is discovered that shilajit enhancements can altogether build the iron levels in your body. A review directed with 18 rodents for eleven days clarified how shilajit can ease the iron inadequacy.

Can fight infections

According to the exploration and studies, unmistakably shilajit imparts various minerals and mixtures that can assist with disposing of infections. An exploration concentrate likewise affirmed the capacity to wipe out infections in segregated conditions. However scientists have led studies to discover shilajit's effectiveness, further examination is fundamental to comprehend the total capability of the enhancement.

Heart conditions

Shilajit is observed to be a viable component in further developing heart wellbeing. An investigation discovered that shilajit admission in rodents clarified its positive effect on heart conditions. Notwithstanding, individuals with a functioning heart condition ought to counsel a specialist before they purchase shilajit NZ.

Weight

A review was directed where individuals who utilized oral enhancements had compelling exercises than individuals who didn't. Accordingly, it is fundamental to comprehend individuals' solidarity preparing can be powerful with next to zero weakness.

Aside from the above-indicated Himalayan shilajit benefits, it is viewed as the best normal solution for a few medical conditions, including diabetes, stomach related issues, osteoarthritis, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. However there are less proof to affirm these medical advantages, a few sorts of exploration are led to know the benefits of taking shilajit.

Last contemplations

From cases to powder, you can get shilajit in different structures. You can go for the best structure appropriate for you as shilajit supplements have been found compelling. Assuming you need to purchase the best enhancements, you can check our items page. As the best shilajit brand in Auckland, we have been offering shilajit at a powerful rate, and you can utilize the regular item to get the best advantages.

1 note · View note

knightsolaireofthesun · 4 years ago

Text

Made a new race for my new home brew setting! Made rules for it to be playable for some reason. I think the idea could be fun though

Fildern:

The Fildern are a race of Fey creatures and victims of a curse placed upon them that alters their appearance and physiology.

Appearance: A Fildern’s skin is jet back and even their eyes lack pigment. The only color on their body comes in the form of bone growths that push out through the skin forming natural armored plates on their body. These bone growths can vary from Fildern to Fildern, but grow most commonly on the forearms and shins. It's not unheard of though for this armor to form on the chest, shoulders, back, or hands. They usually only have these growths on one or two parts of their body, however all Fildern also have a bone mask that covers their face. The mask is smooth and featureless and only has holes for the eyes. In addition to this the Fildern also have a long, slender tail and usually have lengthy, wild black hair.

As it can be difficult to tell one FIldern from another, especially to outsiders, they take great pride and joy in adorning and outfitting themselves. Most Fildern sport paintings on their masks and bone armor unique to them, and some will even go so far as to carve designs into the bone. This is quite painful however and their masks never stop growing so such engravings are only temporary. Since their masks continue to regenerate and grow, many Fildern file them down and shape them to form horns that curve up over their head. Some however keep their mask simple while some let it grow all the way around their head, a process that normally takes decades.

Information: Fildern society is one governed by tenants of selflessness, respect, and empathy, and as such they are almost always good aligned. Their people, long since residents of the Fey wild, have many similarities with the inhabitants there. They are insatiably curious, playful, and expressive. They constantly search for new things to discover and revel in learning about new things and acquiring thrilling experiences. It is not expected for a Fildern to stay in one place for long although they typically return home for lengthy periods between adventures. Fildern can, during certain lunar cycles, relative to the material realm, travel between planes at will. They use this ability extensively to explore the multiverse, meet its many peoples, and spread their ideals. It is expected for even young Fildern to leave the tribe at any time it wishes to discover what the world has to offer.

The first tribe of Fildern still exists and maintains a steady population in the Fey wild. They welcome anyone and offer aid to travelers. It also acts as a hub for traveling Fildern to return to when need be. There are, throughout the multiverse, several other small tribes of Fildern. Some are connected to the first, some are independent. Most hold to the same values of their ancestors. While they do not typically seek to assimilate people, they do on occasion grow their populations. A Fildern can mate with most humanoid creatures, and when they do the progeny is always a Fildern. Although it may have the physical characteristics of the non-Fildern parent, the child will have black skin, a mask, a tail, and be mute. Many people in the material plane and elsewhere find the Fildern off putting or strange, and such unions are rare but help to diversify the Fildern population.

Communication: All Fildern lack mouths and are therefore mute, being unable to create even grunts or hums. They do not need to eat or drink, istead gathering energy from the living beings around them. This does not take anything from other creatures and a Fildern on its own for several months will essentially starve. Since they are mute, they have created an intricate form of sign language they use to communicate. Its movements resemble dances and involve wide gestures, jumps, and intricate hand signs. They also have a simpler form of this language used with just the hands for when dancing is not possible such as in confined areas or refined situations. They disdain using this form of talk as it is much simpler and not as expressive. They also have a language consisting of tapping sounds at different intervals. This language is even simpler and cannot convey many complex ideas. It is only used when Fildern cannot see one another. A non-Fildern creature can learn this tapping language after 4 months of study. With this in mind Fildern have a natural disdain for darkness and confined spaces and become anxious in such scenarios. Communication is sacred to them.

They have let this atribute become their strength and passion and their society is formed around self expressions as one of its main virtues. They often celebrate and host lavish festivals during which FIlderns dance and perform and create art. To an outsider, a conversation between two of them is an intricate choreography of sweeps, leaps, and signs. They can dance and tell a story at the same time and their songs are phrased in ways that use complementary motions that both look pleasing while conveying meaningful lyrics. It goes without saying that most Fildern are in terrific shape,as simply a long conversation can leave one exhausted.

Fildern also have a written language composed of runes made from intertwined, curving lines.

History: Legends say that the Fildern were once a humanoid tribe that ventured into the Feywild following tales of treasures and power. They pillaged their way through the magical wilderness in an attempt to find such obsessions when they caught the gaze of an Archfey known as “The Silvermoon Owl” who placed a powerful curse on them as punishment for their avarice and selfishness. The curse altered their physiology and mutated them into ghostly creatures. The hex also robbed them of their voices and faces. The powerful spirit gave them an ultimatum: reform their wicked ways and devote their society to pure and enlightened ideals, or wallow forever in darkness.

The Fildern at first resisted the Spirit and sought other ways to remove the curse, going so far as to try and slay the Great Owl. This proved fruitless however and it was many years before the tribe began to understand their place. In the meantime they had learned to survive in an alien world and adapted to the changes the curse had laid upon them. Once they had become strong and independent, the remainder of them attempted to heed the Silvermoon Owl’s omen and began to devote themselves to ideals of selflessness and harmony. It was not an easy process and it would be several generations before the Fildern had eventually transformed themselves into a people filled with spirit, courage, empathy, and light. Once the last of the original tribesmen died, none were left but those who had known no other life than the curse, but it bothered them little for they had no previous existence to mourn. Without any remorse, any spite towards the Owl, the Great Spirit decided that their debt had been repaid. What was once a tribe of raiders and thieves became a people of hope and purity. True to his word as any a Fey, the Owl offered to lift the curse from the people. In an ironic turn of events, the Fildern refused to have the curse removed. Poetically, as they had worked so hard to become a better people, they had also forged an identity for themselves. They were proud of themselves; their appearance, language, and customs were part of who they were now. They instead beseeched the spirit for a gift that would aid them in carrying out and propagating their new ideals. The Owl agreed and granted the Fildern people the power to walk between the planes through his influence. He told them that when the moon reaches full, and his power is at its peak, the pathways between worlds would open for them. With that, the Fildern began to spread to other planes to aid others, spread their ideals, or simply to explore.

Fildern Racial Features:

Fildern Names: Since they do not speak with syllables, Fildern names must be composed of words that exist within their language. When a name is chosen, a Fildern will often accentuate one of the movements in its sign, such as the wave of a finger or twirl of the wrist where there normally would not be one. These accentuations often connotate certain personality traits and are chosen by the Fildern when they become a young adult. Fildern names are unisexual. When translated and written out, the accentuation is written in parenthesis following the name.

Names: Gale’s Bite (Courage), Whistler Reed (Pride), Falling Spirit (Curiosity), Grace (Compassion), Sanctity (Diligence)

Ability Score Increase: Your Dexterity increases by 2 and either your Intelligence or Wisdom increases by 1.

Age: Fildern live long enough to satisfy their curiosity and desire to explore, about 250 years. They mature at the same rate as humans.

Alignment: Fildern have spent generations reshaping their society to appease the Silvermoon Owl. They are almost always good aligned but some of them, usually independent of their tribes, may fall into other alignments based on their experiences.

Size: Fildern vary wildly from just over three feet to just under seven, normally influenced by their non-Fildern bood. Your size is medium.

Speed: Your walking speed is 30 feet.

Blessed by the Owl: During the full moon on the material plane, once per month, you may cast Plane Shift without any components. Once used, you cannot cast it again until the next full moon.

Bone Plating: Your unarmored AC is 12 plus your Dexterity modifier.

Curse of Greed and Blood: You are mute, unable to even make vocal noises. You do not need food or water, but if you spend one month separated from any creature with more than 5 Intelligence, you gain one point of exhaustion each day until you die.

Fey Ancestry: You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed and magic can’t put you to sleep. You count as Fey.

Languages: You Understand and can write all three types of Fildern, as well as Common, Sylvan, and one language of your choice, but you cannot speak.

#dnd #dungeons & dragons #homebrew

16 notes · View notes

hookedonapirate · 5 years ago

Note

Hey Hannah hope everything is well during this weird time. Quarantine and all that :/ I would like to submit a oh daddy prompt if you’re still accepting those? I was thinking Emma and Killian need a Plummer or a cable guy to come to their house but it turns out to be one of Emma’s ex and killian feeling a bit territorial takes her to their bedroom to make her scream to prove a point 😉

A/N: You got it, Nonnie! Hope things are going well for you, too :)

Based on this one-shot: Oh Daddy

Other Oh Daddy Prompts: 1. You’re being an awfully bad girl l 2. Daddy, can you pass the potatoes? l 3. Better than coffee l 4. Caught In a solo act l 5. Naughty School Girl l 6. Busted l 7. Bless Me, Father I 8. Tell Me When to Grab the Cupcake

Rated: Explicit

Proving a Point

Oh, fuck. It's him.

Peering through the peephole, Emma's initial inclination is to dash to the bathroom and climb out the window which leads to the backyard. But then Killian would have to answer the door which would not be good. Her boyfriend and ex-boyfriend alone in the same room to talk about her? Oh no no no, that was not going to happen. And based on his timing, and because they were expecting a plumber, Graham must be him, because why else would he be here? No, he's here to do a job, not get her back. Besides, she’s a grown-ass adult in a committed relationship, and for once in her life, she's unbelievably happy, so she can open the freaking door to let her ex-boyfriend unclog her pipes. Ew, not in that way. Her sink’s broken and needs to be fixed. So she hauls the door open to let him in.

His face lights up when he sees her, and she doesn't fail to notice how his eyes leave her face for a second to roam down her body. She's wearing nothing but a silk pink robe since his knocking had interrupted a hot, steamy moment in the bedroom.

Yesterday, Killian told her what time to expect the plumber so she wouldn’t be surprised to find a strange man in the house when she woke up, nor would she be waltzing around the house naked (because when it’s just the two of them, Killian definitely isn’t opposed to her walking around in the nude, and in fact is always trying to enforce a no pants policy for the evenings. But because Mary Margaret and David have a key to the house and walk in whenever they feel like it, the no pants policy is out of the question). But she couldn’t help herself when Killian is in bed with her, his morning wood pressed to her butt. She thought they’d have enough time for a quickie, but they were sorely mistaken when there was a knock on the door earlier than expected. Instead, he asked her to get the door so he could take a moment to cool down.

~*~

“Emma?”

He doesn't recognize the voice when he leaves the bedroom, but he hears Emma greeting him in a similar manner as if they know each other.

“Graham…”

Killian stops in his tracks and lingers in the hallway, his brows creasing as he tries to recall why that name sounds familiar.

“It’s been a long time. How are you?” he hears Graham say enthusiastically.

Ah, yes, Graham is one of her ex-boyfriends. He remembered Emma talking about him a while back. They had a three-month fling a few years before Killian met her. He remembered Emma saying he was too emotionally unavailable after a jealous, manipulative ex-girlfriend sort of broke him when she ripped his heart out without so much as batting an eye, and he couldn’t seem to bounce back from that.

Knowing his relationship with Emma wasn’t serious, knowing that, despite the sex being the key component in that relationship, Graham wasn’t able to bring her to orgasm, and then hearing how tight Emma’s voice is when she talks to him, Killian exhales a deep breath of relief. He’s not worried.

When he steps into the living room, he notes that the guy is... somewhat attractive. Brown, curly hair, slightly defined muscles, a face that could probably qualify as aesthetically pleasing to most people. He appears to be around Emma’s age, maybe even younger, but much taller than her, Killian bitterly notices when Graham is close enough to her.

Too close.

Especially when Graham throws his arms around Emma and draws her into a hug. A hug that’s way too tight and far too long for Killian’s liking. Not to mention, very unprofessional and inappropriate. Isn’t he the fucking plumber?

Killian’s jaw ticks as he watches this complete stranger, to him at least, rubbing Emma’s back affectionately.

Who the bloody hell does this wanker think he is?!

But judging by how Emma doesn’t mold into the hug, whatever feelings Graham still harbors for her are definitely not mutual.

Killian’s presence is not even noticed yet, by Graham at least, as he enters the living room and stalks toward them.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Graham says huskily in her ear, as though he’s speaking to a lover, rather than an old fuck buddy. He pulls away only slightly, still gripping her shoulders.

And Killian doesn’t like it one bit.

Graham takes his time giving her a once-over, and Killian balls his hands into fists, suppressing the urge to lunge at this ponce and punch him in the nose. “You look good, Em. Real good.”

“She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?” Killian asks condescendingly before jumping into Graham's line of sight, placing a possessive left hand on Emma’s back and pulling her in for a quick kiss on the cheek. Graham finally tears his gaze away from her, taken off guard as Killian turns his head to look at him, extending his right hand and smiling widely—and ironically. “I'm Killian, her boyfriend.”

He can see out the corner of his eye, the slight smirk on Emma’s lips as Graham shakes his hand in hesitation. “Graham Humbert,” he says, and of course has to add very casually, “Emma and I used to date.”

“Briefly,” Emma adds quickly and turns toward Killian, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing him on the lips as though to ease his worries, letting him know anything she once felt for Graham is nonexistent.

Killian knows this, he knows Emma’s love for him runs so much deeper than anything she ever felt for Graham. No, it’s not Emma he doesn’t trust. It’s the wanker staring at his girlfriend with longing looks, googly eyes and also perhaps a hint of jealousy as Killian grabs her hips and pulls her into him. Emma responds by placing her hands on his chest, nuzzling his nose with hers and kissing him softly. Killian smirks against her lips as he feels the other bloke’s jealousy intensify.

Graham clears his throat, speaking awkwardly. “So, uh… I’m here to look at your pipes.”

Emma and Killian force themselves apart and return their attention to Graham after his words remind them of his presence.

“Right,” Emma says, forcing a smile at Graham.

As she leads the plumber to the kitchen, Killian watches as he openly checks out his girlfriend’s ass. He growls.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!

“The pipes are the only thing you should be looking at, mate,” he barks with evident disdain, emphasizing the t. But it’s not until Graham stops and turns around to look at him, when Killian realizes he actually spoke out loud, instead of to himself like he’d intended to.

“What was that?” Graham asks, cocking a brow.

Killian heads for the bathroom, passing Graham along the way and planting a firm hand on his shoulder, squeezing it with a warning grip as he murmurs in a polite tone, “You heard what I said.”

Embarrassed for getting caught staring, Graham hangs his head, whispers an apology and proceeds to the kitchen.

Killian goes to the bathroom to calm down, clutching onto the edge of the counter to prevent his jealousy from consuming him. He has to take a long, deep breath and splashes some cool water over his face to cool down, but knowing Emma’s in the kitchen with her ex in nothing but her bathrobe, knowing how unbelievably sexy she is and knowing very well Graham is taking full advantage, makes his blood bubble. He’s not happy Graham turned out to be their plumber. He should’ve just figured out how to fix the plumbing issue himself, but his attempts only resulted in him discovering that the blockage seemed to be further down where the pipes disappeared into the wall and he knew it was time to call a plumber.

He dries his face with a hand towel and returns to the kitchen to find Graham not working and instead, leaning against the counter engaging Emma in small chit chat.

Un-fucking-believable.

Graham is being all flirty and charming, and although Killian knows Emma’s only trying to be nice and is not at all interested in her ex or his attempts to reconnect, he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it one bit.

So instead of listening to any more of Graham’s bullshit, Killian swoops in, grabs Emma’s hand and tugs her out of the kitchen so fast, she giggles over the threshold. And because he wants so badly to show Graham what he’d missed out on by not caring enough about Emma’s pleasure and instead, leaving her unsatisfied in the sack (and because apparently he’s a child) Killian pulls her into the bedroom, closes the door, crushes her lips with his and throws her on the bed like a rag doll. Her giggles echo against the walls as he drags his lips down her neck, growling against her skin.

“Daddy’s not jealous, is he?” she asks in amusement while tipping her head back, moaning as Killian nips the soft skin at the juncture between her neck and shoulder.

“Of course not,” he claims breathily and undoes his pants. He rips Emma’s robe away from her lovely breasts and draws her soft nipples into his warm mouth, instantly making them hard as his cock stiffens against her nub. Without wasting another second, he takes his cock in hand and places the tip against her entrance, thrusting into her.

Emma moans and snakes her legs tightly around his waist, eagerly taking his entire length as he fucks her rough and hard, making her scream, “Oh, Daddy! Harder… please!”

Killian groans and gives his Swan exactly what she wants. What she needs.

“Yes, Killian, yes!”

There’s something about knowing her ex is just outside the door listening to Emma scream her boyfriend's name in ecstasy, letting Graham know exactly who she belongs to as he makes her come undone—something Graham could never do—that makes his blood run hot. Killian brings her to orgasm over and over again, each time making her scream so loudly, he’s sure the entire neighborhood can hear.

After they’re done, both flushed and clothed and back in the kitchen, he doesn’t have to wonder if Graham heard them or not because judging by how flustered he is, how crimson his cheeks are and how much he stutters when explaining how he fixed the sink, he definitely heard.

Killian has to suppress a smirk.

Graham gathers his tools and says earnestly to Emma, “I’m glad you found someone who’s capable of making you happy after I couldn’t.” In more ways than one, Killian is tempted to add. “It was nice seeing you again.” He glances at Killian. “And it was nice to meet you.”

Killian grins big and wide as he opens the door for Graham. “Oh, believe me when I say, the pleasure was all ours.”

Graham stumbles ungracefully over the threshold, almost tripping and falling and dropping his toolbox but catching himself on the doorframe. Killian can sense Emma is suppressing a laugh as Graham flashes them a forced, awkward smile before turning around and taking off.

Killian chuckles as he flings the door closed, never seeing a man so flustered or embarrassed in his entire life. As he scoops Emma up into his arms and carries her off to the bed again, her giggles reverberating through the house, he almost feels sorry for the poor bloke.

Almost.

#cs ff #captain swan #cs smut #oh daddy prompt #proving a point #my fic

46 notes · View notes