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hightidespiritshop · 4 years ago

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☀️High Tide Knowledge Vibes ☀️ 📖Book Club📖

🌱Book One🌱

So excited to kick this book club off with

" A Little Bit of Crystals- A Beginners Gude to Crystal Healing " By Cassandra Eason

“A little bit of” is a series of books written by multiple authors that covers various metaphysical topics such as palmistry, meditation and astrology. They are quick but informative reads that retail around ten dollars each.Today I am going to be looking at “ A Little Bit of Crystals- An Introduction to Crystal Healing” by Cassandra Eason.

The book starts with an introduction that touches on what crystals are, shape and color meanings, local crystals and crystals in traveling, crystals in various cultures, a quick look at healing, and ends with a ritual to charge crystals with intent. This intro is jam packed with beginner information.

“A little bit of crystals” consists of eight short chapters, so I would like to talk briefly about each one. Chapter one is called “beginning crystal exploration”. First, the author tells us about twelve crystals every crystal user should have, and what each one represents. This book is intended for beginners, and there are so many options to choose from when crystal shopping, so I think having an organized list such as this one could be very helpful for someone just starting their collection.

The twelve crystals Cassandra Easson recommends are:

Clear Quartz- life force

Moonstone- intuition

Red Jasper- courage and change

Carnelian- creativity and independence

Citrine- learning and speculation

Aventurine- good luck

Sodalite- wisdom

Amethyst- state of balance

Tiger’s eye- gaining advantage

Rose Quartz- kindness and nurturing

Hematite- hidden fire and justice

Onyx- Protection

Next the reader is given an activity for asking for guidance from crystals. I have personally never used crystals this way, but it is somewhat like pulling a daily tarot card. I really love this idea, and will be making a separate post about it in the future. In each chapter after this, the author provides us with five additional crystals she suggests having in your collection. This chapter also gives us nine different ways to cleanse crystals using water, amethyst, mother earth, fragrance, sound, light, salt, crystal pendulums, and breath. Then we learn how to program and empower our crystals.

Chapter two is about crystals in the home and garden, and begins with a ritual using crystals and their colors. This is the first time we see the author mention angels as guides. The somewhat frequent use of angels in this book is something I was surprised to see.This is intended as a guide for beginners, so i think the inclusion of angels could be potentially confusing.

We are next given another activity, this one is essentially a table of crystals that encourages peaceful family time and is a quiet space to unwind. I really like this idea, it is the perfect integration of crystals into the home and family life.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Blue Lace Agate

Green Calcite

Rutilated Quartz

Tree or Dendritic Agate

Jade

Chapter three is called “crystals, love, and happy families”. In this chapter we learn about some “love crystals” to attract love, increase commitment, and create perseverance. Some love crystals include, amber, carnelian, emerald, moonstone and rose quartz. Admittedly I am not the biggest fan of the concept of mixing any type of magic and love, especially if it includes imposing your will on a non consenting person.

A quote from this chapter I did appreciate is “Increasingly, people who are single or alone choose a favorite love stone to wear on their wedding finger to mark that they are complete within themselves”. That is a message I can get behind! Next the book gives instructions on how to empower a crystal for a love ritual. Lastly, there is a section on crystals for fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, children, and pets.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Amber

Unakite

Turquoise

Malachite

Banded Agate

Chapter four is about crystals in the workplace. In this chapter we learn a ritual for applying for a job, starting a new business, or seeking a promotion. We also learn about using crystals for protection and balance in the workplace and for other workplace issues such as gossip or unpleasant coworkers. This chapter also discusses ways to use crystals to represent elements in the workplace, types of careers for each element, and the qualities it brings into your work space. We are then introduced to crystals for self employment and for attracting career opportunities.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Blood stone

Green Chrysoprase

Fluorite

Lapis Lazuli

Obsidian

Chapter five is all about crystal amulets for prosperity, good fortune and safe travels. First, we learn the difference between amulets and talismans, and are introduced to charm bags. Some ideal travel crystals are smokey quartz, turquoise, and amazonite. This chapter also includes crystals for prosperity, including tiger’s eye, cat’s eye, and peridot. We also get instructions and suggestions for creating charm bags.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Amazonite

Blue Goldstone

Goldstone

Iron Pyrite

Sunstone

Chapter six is titled “crystals for health, happiness, and well being. In this chapter there is a calming ritual with crystals and candles in the colors of the rainbow. Then there is an activity that teaches the reader about crystal grids, with step by step instructions on how to make one. Next is a section on how to make crystal infused waters, including a non direct soaking method. This chapter is more instructional than informative, providing some great hands on activities for crystal users.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Ametrine

Lemon Quartz

Snowflake Obsidian

Rhodochrosite

Ruby in Zoisite

The next chapter, chapter seven, covers “sending healing through crystals”.This chapter does include a disclaimer that states that these methods are not a substitute for conventional medicine. First you will learn how to curate a set of twelve crystals for healing that are suited to you. You choose one crystal for each color the author lists, and each color has a list of ailments that could possibly be treated using the crystals of those categories. Next we learn an “all purpose” self healing method, as well as methods for healing others, absent healings, and healing animals.

Five crystals to add to your collection:

Aragonite

Chrysocolla

Howlite

Petrified and fossilized wood

Selenite

The eighth and final chapter is titled “personal crystals” and is pretty short to wrap up the book quickly. It covers zodiac crystals, angel associations, anniversary gemstones, and an extra gentle method for cleansing and empowering.

Overall, I think there is a lot of great information in this very small book. Even though it is an introduction to crystals, I believe an experienced user could still learn something new. I was pleasantly surprised by how much new information I obtained from this book. I do wonder if the repeated use of angels and candle magic would be confusing to some readers, but overall it does a good job of representing the use of crystals in different facets of spirituality.

Personally, I do not use crystals for healing physical ailments like we see in chapter seven, and I do think that is where a lot of the stigma around crystals come from. I am curious to hear from other readers if they do use crystals in that manner, and if this book did a good job describing that process.

Something I thought was missing from this book was pictures. The “A Little Bit of” series as a whole is lacking in imagery, that may be because of the length and price point. A beginner will need to look up images of each crystal from another source, so this book is not necessarily the best crystal guide or resource for identifying unknown crystals you may have.

As a whole I really enjoyed this book, it is such a short read that i think it’s worth reading for any beginner, experienced or prospective crystal user. There is most likely something to learn for everybody.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

By Chapter:

1. Are there any crystals from chapter one you do not have? Are there any alternatives you would suggest? What is your go to method for cleansing?

2. Where in your home do you use crystals?

3. What are your thoughts on the use of crystal magic to manipulate someone's feelings?

4. Is there a crystal you need to have in your work space?

5. What are your favorite ways to use charm bags?

6.Do you use crystal infused waters? What are your favorite uses for them?

7. Have you ever used crystals to heal others? What was that experience like?

8. Do you feel an extra strong connection to any of your zodiac crystals?

General questions:

1. If you're new to crystals was this book clear and helpful?

2. If experienced, did you learn anything new?

3. If new to crystals, was there anything you hoped to learn that was not covered in this book?

4. If experienced, what else would you add to a beginners guide?

So share your thoughts on this book in the comments! Feel free to answer any of the discussion questions! what other books would you like to see me cover? would you want to see more of the “A Little Bit Of”series? Happy reading!

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ask-de-writer · 5 years ago

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SEA DRAGON’S GIFT : Part 13 of 83 : World of Sea

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT

Part 13 of 83

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

140406 words

written 2007

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

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Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights. They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact. They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions.

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

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New to the story? Read from the beginning. PART 1 is here

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Chapter 4: Preparations

Captain Mord easily held the long tiller bar of the Longin under his right arm, and concentrated. He was staring at one of the few fluffy clouds near the horizon to help him relax and feel, through the action of the deck beneath his feet, the long tidally generated waves. He was only just now finding out, after a lifetime at sea, that they held a wealth of information for the navigator. Kurin sat on a coil of rope on the upwind side of the Longin. She was just out of the ‘tiller-walk’, the specially roughened area to improve the footing of the folk who steered the Longin. With her were four children, from ten to fifteen, and six officers of the ship.

These, along with the Captain, were her class. They were also concentrating. Captain Mord said, after considering things a bit, “I am feeling a change. The wave has gotten uneven.”

“Well done, Captain,” said Kurin quietly. “Does everybody else feel it?”

The children all raised their hands and two of the six officers. Hesitantly, Glor, the Second Officer of the first Night Watch raised a hand. Kurin had high hopes for him. He was very good, but lacked confidence in what he was feeling.

“That isn’t what I feel,” Glor said.

“What are you feeling?” she asked, hoping for his often clear analysis.

“The wave that we have been quartering, the one that you said is from the Naral Current, lifts the ship and rolls us a little to port, as we come up from trough to crest. I still feel it. The port rolls are still happening evenly. What makes it feel uneven seems to be another wave that is rolling us to starboard, but it isn’t quite as long as the Naral Wave. That appears to be what makes waves feel uneven.”

Kurin was delighted. “Exactly right. Which way should we turn if we are to go straight into the new wave?”

They all thought that one over. Bron, who was only twelve and a cabin-boy, but very sharp both with mathematics and intuition, raised his hand. “We should turn to port, about … ,” he screwed his face up as he thought, “about twenty or twenty-five degrees?” he ended questioningly.

Around the class heads were slowly nodding as people felt out the waves and arrived at the same conclusion.

“Lecture time,” said Kurin brightly. It was her mannerism to say this before any information that was of special note. Several of her students took out tallow-slates, rimmed flat pieces of Strong Skin filled with Glue Fish tallow. These were used for temporary notes and general correspondence. The more expensive parchment made of paperfish skins was reserved for the important, usually after it had been composed on a tallow-slate.

“The Naral Current is over there,” she pointed to starboard, “about two leagues off. Over there,” again she pointed, but this time to port, “is the Cliftos Current. As Glor noticed, the waves from it are shorter than the waves from the Naral Current, but they are also higher. What does that mean?” She waited for her class to come through.

Silor, fifteen Gatherings old and until recently, the lead deck-hand, said with a smirk, “It means too much work for deck-hands. Changes of course aren’t needed, and that’s what you’re getting to, isn’t it? The Gathering is south and some west. That’s all that we have to do. Just hold course.” He raised his voice into a fair imitation of Kurin’s, “Four things affect these waves, the tides, the currents, the shape of the bottom and the depth of the bottom.” He let his voice lapse into his own, and went on, not noticing the gathering storm on the faces of his Captain, the Officers, and the irritation of the other children. “It’s all from dry land anyway. I can see the currents pushing waves around, but the bottom — — — Please! She’s just guessing.”

That, along with previous outbursts and sly ‘witticisms’ aimed at casting doubt on what Kurin was teaching, was enough for Captain Mord. “Silor Elon Longin, if you do not want to listen or learn, that is your privilege. Kurin alone wanted you in this class. You have done well, except that you try to scuttle what we are learning at every opportunity. I want to learn. Everyone else here wants to learn. You mock. Go back to your watch, and be prepared to change course, soon. Twice. Go.”

It was a shaken Silor who got up, and went forward. He was wondering how this could happen to him so soon after his other disaster? It’s as if the Captain’s her puppet. As if the white-haired little witch runs the whole ship by some kind of Dragon magic … . The last thing that he heard from the class was Kurin saying, “The Cliftos Current runs SSW at three and a half miles per hour. That will save us a lot of time getting to the Gathering.”

Shortly, the tocsin drum beat orders for a new course and, a few hours later, for another. In spite of being heavily laden, which should have made her slow, the Longin arrived at the Gathering three days early.

Captain Mord volunteered the services of the ship and crew. It was help that was greatly appreciated, for there was much to do. They pitched in to assist the organizers in making everything ready for the other ships when they arrived. The road-stead, or anchorage was at a place where the bottom was only fifty to sixty feet in depth over an area great enough to allow the whole Naral fleet to tie up. Each ship needed room to swing about with the wind and tide changes.

The Gathering also needed a place where people could meet and trade could take place. Huge rafts were stored here, sunk to the shallow bottom, and secured to the coral of the sea floor until needed. These rafts, almost four hundred feet long by nearly two hundred feet wide, were designed for building the hulls and masts of new ships. They were the single greatest investment of capital possessed by any fleet and every fleet had at least one. For the Gathering, the great ship construction rafts were raised from the bottom. When they were stored, their decks were a full thirty feet under the sea, safe from storm or Dragon tide. Air was pumped into their floats until they lifted up from the coral bottom. Supported between ships, big decks just awash, sea water was pumped out of the floats of the rafts.

When they were done, the decks were about a fathom above the sea. Divers had to scrape the submerged parts of the floats free of marine life. Men in small boats went under the deck areas to free them of barnacles, limpets and seaweeds. The decks had to be prepared and marked out for lanes, booth-spaces, squares and dock areas. Strong nets with big meshes were hung over the side in the dock areas to serve as a combination of small boat tie-up and ladder. Heavy bumpers of woven rope were hung between the rafts. Finally, they lashed the rafts together and moored them into place with large cables fastened securely to the sea-floor. Only then did the ships holding them cast off.

The rafts were large and massive enough to simply ignore the wind driven waves. The long waves that Kurin had been teaching her class to feel were a different story. The rafts gently rose fell, rocked by a sea that never rested, stirred as it was by a sun and three moons. The joint between them was about three feet wide, and constantly shifting up or down, side to side as much as a foot at times.

All of the mooring floats had to be raised from storage on the bottom, air filled, cables checked, and everything cleaned for service. The Council Pavilion needed to be set up, and the Captains’ benches got out of storage and set in place for the opening meeting of the Council.

The rest of the Naral fleet arrived a ship or two at a time. In a few days, the several hundred-strong fleet was riding at anchorage all about the ship construction rafts that made up the meeting place and market square of the Gathering.

The Dorton, Dolthin, and Grython as sponsors of the Gathering, had their booths up and ready. However, there was one booth that everyone came to, even before they had signed the Gathering Log Book or begun to set up their own booths. It was the only one actually open for business. The Longin had been feeding the sponsors’ crews from a new food booth. It sped the work and made everything more pleasant. Now the booth was ready and serving all of the new arrivals.

This new booth was already a popular addition to the rest of the Longin’s stalls. The bill of fare advertised fresh steamed crabs, crab-cakes, fish, fish-cakes, mussels and clams all piping hot from big solar ovens. Marad, one of the Longin’s journeyman cooks had persuaded the crew to add this enterprise and now he presided over all of the bustling activity in the booth. No other booth was actually selling anything yet and the delicious aromas from Marad’s handiwork drew newcomers like Strong Skins to bloody bait.

TO BE CONTINUED

<==PREVIOUS NEXT==>

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

#SEA DRAGON’S GIFT #Part 13 of 83 #World of Sea #Written by De Writer

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sparklyjojos · 5 years ago

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THE SAIMON FAMILY CASE recaps [1/13]

These will be full recaps of the latest JDC book, The Saimon Family Case (彩紋家事件) from 2004, which is a prequel taking place in the late 70s. While it’s a prequel, it can be read without any knowledge about the series. (It does spoil one death from Carnival at the end, but I feel like everyone already knows about this particular one).

It won’t be obvious in the recaps, but the book consists of seven parts seven chapters each (similar to Maijo’s Tsukumojuku) with two additional parts at the end.

The novel is light in terms of content warnings (for a murder mystery, anyway), but small kids WILL die in this, and we’ll be talking a lot about a specific type of systemic xenophobic violence near the end.

See that big family tree above? Save it somewhere for future reference. Believe me when I say you will need it. (Also, as always in the recaps, family name will be given first, Japanese-style.)

Well then—has everyone found their seats? Is everyone ready to witness the most splendid illusion?

Let's start the show.

PART 1

A note at the beginning informs us that soon 20 years will have passed from the end of the famous Saimon Family Murder Case, often called the “Crime Revolution” because of its impact on the future of similar complicated incidents. The details of the case have been hidden from the masses, but the time will soon come when everyone will learn the truth.

It’s the very last day of the year 1999. The mysterious first person narrator of the framing device is an older gentleman attending a New Years celebration in Las Vegas with his wife. They watch a fairly young blond magician perform close up magic for the guests. The magician borrows a 10,000 yen bill from the narrator, seals it in an envelope, sets it on fire, and it suddenly turns into a rose in his hand. When the narrator is asked to check his wallet, inside he finds a bill with the same denomination and serial number, but of a noticeably larger size… among a few other stunning differences.

“Happy New Millenium!” the magician exclaims.

This little illusion awakens memories from that case in both the narrator and his wife. As the world heads towards the new century, they are the only people left who were so closely involved in those tragic events of old.

It's September 19th 1977, and the entire Saimon family celebrates the 99th birthday of their old matriarch, Saimon Tamako. The celebration takes place on a performance stage next to the family's main residence in Tsuwano, Shimane Prefecture. Tamako’s daughter Akiko pushes the matriarch’s wheelchair towards the stage.

A perceptive guest may notice two other old women in the crowd who look astonishingly like Saimon Tamako, though they are a little younger (97). These are twin sisters called—if you can believe it—Tsukumo Tamako and Tousen Tamako. The three Tamakos look near identical, and in fact once used that similarity for their magic acts: all secretly shared the single stage name of Soga Tenju. That was decades ago, of course. The Tamakos no longer look like the beautiful young woman (actually women plural) known from her most famous illusion, Courtisane and Bell.

Once Akiko and Tamako take their place on the stage, all the lights suddenly go out for just a second, and in that brief darkness two things happen.

One: the red-and-white stripes of the celebratory curtain decorating the stage suddenly turn into black-and-white stripes of a funeral curtain.

Two: Saimon Tamako dies.

Saimon Tamako is ruled to have died of natural causes, not unusual at her age, and the curtain changing color must have been just someone’s attempt at a distasteful joke.

However, the threat of something darker going on still seems to lurk in the background. There’s a lot of people with bad intentions in this world. As part of the Saimons, Akiko is well aware of that. She recalls what she knows about the family's past.

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, Saimon Tamako made her living performing magic with a traveling circus group. Eventually she met a rich man, married him, and with his financial help established the Soga Tenju troupe.

Of course, the magician Soga Tenju was actually three women, all looking identical, all having similarly unclear pasts and wandering with the same group, all being called simply Tamako because no one even knew their real names.

It happened that three rich men of Tsuwano, who all have been friends—Saimon Taishin, Tsukumo Taigen, and Tousen Taikun—fell for the same “Soga Tenju”, and upon discovering the secret behind the magician decided to marry one member of the trio each. Since this was the era it was, the women didn’t really have a say in the matter. (Akiko hopes for more emancipation in the future and feels sad that she probably won’t live to see it; she’s over sixty herself.)

The tendency for similar names came with all sides of the family, it seemed. The three rich men were themselves a little weird, and that shared “Tai” in their names was something they added intentionally to show their bond. Their respective firstborn children—Tsukumo Haruko, Tousen Natsuko and Saimon Akiko—were given names referring to haru (spring), natsu (summer) and aki (fall). Since the Tamakos were so similar looking, their daughters also looked close enough that one could mistake them for triplets.

Akiko herself has three sons—Taishi, Akio, and Takayoshi—but now that they are all adults, they no longer feel so close to her, especially the youngest Takayoshi, who never felt inclined to stage illusion and broke all contact with the family. He didn’t show up for Tamako’s birthday and even now, a month later, hasn’t contacted them yet.

On October 19th, Akiko is busy sewing new props for a magic routine, the Five-Ball Cascade, in which juggled balls seem to change colors between red and white in mid-air. Remembering her times as the young magician Soga Tenshuu, she attempts the act just one more time. As she throws the balls in the air, she feels a stabbing pain in her chest and suddenly sees familiar faces in the balls—her mother, her husband, her sons—changing from white to red, like a bloody cascade. As they fall to the ground, Akiko does too.

A month later, on November 19th, a few members of the Saimon family are combing the Tottori sand dunes in search for young Saimon Yuuta, who went missing the previous day after announcing he’d like to show them something at the site. Everyone’s on edge; it’s barely been a month since Akiko's death.

A rope is found sticking out of Umanose, the famous “horse-back” dune, and several people pulling on it manage to unearth what looks like a giant card—four of diamonds—and Yuuta’s corpse tied to it.

Not even a few years have passed since JDC’s founding when young detective Ajiro Souji and his wife Mizuki take part in Saimon Tamako’s tragic birthday celebration.

The couple feels at home in Shimane, both because Mizuki was born in the prefecture, and because Ajiro has been friends with the Saimon family ever since receiving their help during the Ajiro Family Murder Case—the experience which prompted him to create JDC in the first place.

That case, as usual, was solved by his grandfater Soujin and mentor Shiranui Zenzou [and if you want to know more about it, read Carnival]. Both of them are splendid detectives, but decided young Souji should be the one to become JDC’s representative instead.

...but we keep saying "JDC" here, and the truth is the tiny group doesn’t call itself by the fancy English name Japan Detectives Club yet. It goes simply by Nihon Tantei Club and occupies the third floor of an office building filled with boutiques, clinics and the like.

Aside from Ajiro the representative, the staff consists of six office workers and twelve detectives (not counting Soujin, who is almost always out on business). The detectives are divided into the Shiranui Section and Kirigirisu Section, named after their respective leaders. There is some tension between the sections: the Shiranui part puts more value on past experience and doesn’t approve of choosing young Souji as their representative, while the Kirigirisu part praises his potential and thinks of the organization’s future.

So far Nihon Tantei Club is pretty unknown, no dramatic and giant solved cases to their name, and everyone has a strange conflicting feeling: at once wishing for the peace to never end and wishing for the inevitable tragedy to just happen already; to just get to the point where what should be unusual becomes the new normal, because everyone knows deep down it has to happen one day.

On November 22nd, Kirigirisu Tarou as usual takes the train to work, thinking about how the world will inevitably change as the new century comes around—though, of course, he can’t be sure he will actually get to see it, as nobody knows what will have happened in over twenty years.

Maybe he’s mulling over the passage of time and worries about the future so much because he's a man without a past. Kirigirisu lost all his memories to head injury a few years ago, at the same time when he was wrongly accused of murder. Fortunately, he was proven innocent thanks to both Ajiros, could begin new life as a detective, and even found a wonderful wife called Kano. He would love it if this usual everyday life could continue indefinitely… although without crime, a detective like him would be out of a job. For now he wants to focus on helping the Ajiros as he can.

Kirigirisu arrives at the office, which is mostly empty this early in the morning. Well, except for the delinquent detective Raiouji Rokenrou, looking just like you’d expect a punk named after rock’n’roll to look like (sunglasses, a lot of hair gel…) and taking a nap on the couch. Apparently Ajiro Souji had a long meeting with him about something last night, and now wants to talk to Kirigirisu.

Ajiro Souji is a sharply dressed 29-year-old man, easy to mistake for a normal office worker in the crowd. (Kirigirisu always flinches a bit seeing his elegant tie; he himself has a strange phobia of wearing anything around his neck, which he suspects has to do with an unknown event forever hidden behind his amnesia).

They each light a cigarette and have a friendly conversation. Ajiro mentions that he recently tried to switch to cigars, but alas, it seems that it’s still “too early” for him to appreciate them; about forty years too early, according to grandpa Soujin. [Seeing as Ajiro is a huge cigar fan in most of the series, grandpa miscalculated by at least two decades.]

Soujin is a thin man of short stature who hardly looks like someone in their seventies, although his hair is just as white as his usual suit, with just a black bowtie breaking the color. He always gives off the air of a mafia boss, his sheer power of personality taking hold of everyone around. Soujin apparently feels constant wanderlust, so he almost never shows up at the office. In fact, Kirigirisu hasn't seen him in over two months now. Who knows what he’s doing.

But back to the situation at hand, Ajiro wants Kirigirisu's help. For the next few days, they will investigate a case together in another prefecture, Rokenrou taking care of Kirigirisu’s section in his absence.

The case surrounds a strange series of deaths. First, Saimon Tamako dying (seemingly) of old age on her birthday on September 19th. Second, her daughter Akiko suffering a (seemingly) accidental death on October 19th, when a misplaced sewing needle stabbed into her heart. And third, a very strange but (seemingly) accidental death of another Saimon family member that has just happened on November 19th. Ajiro and Kirigirisu are to investigate whether or not the perfectly spaced string of incidents may be an act of serial killing.

The case is of personal importance to Ajiro. After all, the person who requested their services is the same man that helped solve the Ajiro Family Murder Case: Saimon Ryuusui, known better as the great magician Soga Tensui.

(The third person narration swaps here to a completely different font, and informs us helpfully: but ah, before the two detectives could head to Tsuwano, they would go to Yamaguchi first, to watch the magic show of the Saimon family, a marvelous experience that Ajiro has already had a few times because of his friendship with the family, and that Kirigirisu would witness for the first time.

And from the very moment they were invited to see the show first, they felt uneasiness settle inside them. Only much, much later would one realize just how deep the hidden meaning of the show really was, and that solving all its mysteries was crucial to solving the Saimon Family Murder Case.

You could even say that the show itself, filled with so many wondrous mysteries to solve, was the true Saimon Family Murder Case. If so, then the magician Soga Tensui could be defined as its culprit—and if so, then Ajiro and Kirigirisu have just walked right into a marvelous illusion indeed.)

[>>>NEXT PART>>>]

#sparkly reads the saimon family case #maijo and jdc stuff

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irenedonnee · 6 years ago

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At Last 1. Alone and Blue as Can Be

A/N: New fanfic alert! Yes, I know I still have to finish Kind of Woman and Attachment, but I promise I will! This story is inspired by the book Jamie writes about Claire in my other fic The Writer Who Loved Me. It tells the story of Jamie Fraser, a soldier who moves back home in Inverness after the end of the war. He meets Claire Beauchamp, a bookstore owner, and find a muse in her. Since it was @julesbeauchamp who forced me to write this fic, I decided to post it on her birthday 🤓 happy birthday gurl😘 I would also like to thank @curlsgetdemgurls for doing the beta of this chapter! Enjoy!

Jamie never thought he’d live to see the end of the war. He had nothing of a soldier except his physique. Lieutenants and commanders loved his height, his long legs that made him run faster than the other men; they loved his build, his strength to carry weapons or injured mates. Everything they loved about him, it disgusted Jamie.

Before this bloody war started, Jamie was a writer, fresh out of university, living in New York with his mother and sister. He had just started to work for a local newspaper when the United States joined the Allies in 1941 and he was sent to the front. Not as a journalist, but as a soldier. The first time he held a gun during the first week of training, he thought he was never going to see his mother’s face again. He was young, only twenty six years old with a lot of life yet to live.

He still remembered the day he learned that the war was over. He was in a field hospital, confined to bed with a bullet in his knee, hallucinating because of the morphine. After being transported back to London, he stayed in rehabilitation for a few weeks and was sent back to his family in New York, but a few months after he came back, his sister got married and he was alone with his mother.

Of course, his mother and sister were in heaven to see him back alive, even if he constantly needed the help of a walking stick. Jamie, on the other hand, regretted every moment he spent breathing. He couldn’t bear being alive, the beating of his own heart made him sick. He didn’t deserve to live, not more than any of his friends who had lost their lives in Europe.

In addition to his disgust of being alive, Jamie couldn’t write anymore. He spent months moping around the small apartment, unable to write down words. There was nothing he could do that could make him feel alive.

He never told his mother about it, but he tried to kill himself two months after he came back. He didn’t know what was worse, his nightmares or the inability to write. Before the war, he couldn’t spend a day without writing. He always carried a pad and a pen around, writing about everything and nothing. When he was twelve, his mother bought a typewriter for his birthday, with which he wrote his first novel, a novel he never published. After the war, every word that came out of his mind made him want to hide with shame. Shame of being alive, shame of living to write such stupidities.

So one Sunday night, after spending the day in front of this old typewriter machine without touching one key, he took a cab to the Brooklyn Bridge. He stood facing the rushing water forty meters underneath his feet for hours, tears streaming on his face until he finally decided to painfully walk back home. He would have to bear his skin for the rest of his life.

“Maybe ye should go back home to Scotland,” his mother told him one night they were dining together.

He looked up at her, brows furrowed. Jenny had moved back to Scotland with her husband. They lived in a small flat in Edinburgh, but he didn’t want to be a burden for them.

Jamie shook his head. “Scotland is no’ a home anymore,” he said, looking down at his plate.

“New York is no’ a home either.”

“I canna go back to Scotland…” he whispered.

Growing up in Scotland, Jamie had spent his childhood in his ancestral home, Lallybroch, a castle standing tall in the valleys of clan Fraser. When the Great War was declared in 1914, Jamie’s father was sent in France to fight with the Allies. Pregnant Ellen Fraser decided to move with her sister to North Carolina during the war. Brian Fraser was killed in 1915, a few days after receiving a letter from his wife, saying he was the father of a beautiful, red headed son.

When the war ended, they went back to Lallybroch but it felt different, estranged, like they had never lived there before. After running out of money, the Frasers decided to move back to the United States in 1920. Ellen found a job and thought it would be best to be on a soil that wasn’t destructed by bombs. Jamie lived in a city he hated in an apartment he hated for years until he enrolled. He had no place to call a home and it would always be this way. At least, that’s what he told himself. But when his mother mentioned moving back to Scotland that night at supper, he didn’t reject the idea.

For days he thought about it and thought that maybe going back to his roots would help him with his writing. He was ready to do anything to find inspiration, to write like he did before. Passionate, fearless and simply brilliant.

Without moving permanently, he decided to go back to the motherland for a few months. He told himself he would only come back once he wrote something. He tried to set a goal, a hundred pages, two hundred, but he thought it was pointless. His expectations were very low.

***

Jamie landed in Scotland in May 1946 with nothing but a small suitcase, his typewriter - the same one he had since he was twelve - and his walking stick. He didn’t want to stay in Edinburgh and even less in Glasgow, so he bought a train ticket for Inverness. What Jamie needed was calmness, serenity and silence. He thought Inverness was the perfect place for it, even if it was a little too close to Lallybroch for him.

He arrived during the afternoon and stopped for tea at Mrs. Graham’s, a small coffee shop facing the River Ness. He asked her if he could leave her his suitcase for the day while he wandered around Inverness. But before he went out, he slowly drank, finally tasting good tea after years of horrible yellow piss. He closed his eyes and sighed. While eating a scone, he read the local newspapers, but closed it as soon as he turned the page on an article about the war. He couldn’t read it just now. He wanted to know more about this event. He needed to really know what he had been part of, the reason why he had killed men, the reason why thousands and thousands of people had died, the reason why his leg was crippled for life, but it was too soon. He left money on the table, drank one last sip and put his hat on his head before he walked out.

He noticed a bookstore right next to Mrs. Graham’s. He decided to go, thinking maybe a good book would help him during sleepless nights. Maybe reading would help him better than desperately trying to write.

He saw a ‘Room for rent’ ad on the door and pulled it opened, a bell ringing when he stepped inside the place. It was much bigger from the inside, rows filled with books everywhere. Too many rows. There was a comforting smell of mint and plants in the air, a smell that pleasantly tickled his nostrils. He felt peaceful, and almost smiled. He noticed the gramophone next to the cashier, from which My Love For You by Frank Sinatra was playing.

“One minute!” he heard a feminine voice call from behind the store.

He took his hat off, starting to wander around the bookshelves. The books were dusty, ordered by the writers’ names. Jamie didn’t know exactly what he was looking for until he saw her.

“Hello! Can I help you?”

Jamie opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. She was beautiful, with rebellious brown curls flying around her head and with shining beautiful whisky eyes. Her lips were pink and luscious, begging him to kiss her.

She lifted her dark brows, waiting for an answer. “Has the cat got your tongue?” she smiled. The most beautiful smile he had ever seen. For the first time in months -if not years- he felt seen. He found himself smiling back, something he hadn’t done in a while. At that moment, when the corners of her mouth curled up, he knew she had cast a spell on him and that he could never leave her. Or at least, not without being haunted by her voice until his heart stopped beating.

“No,” he finally said. “I… I am looking for a book.”

“Well, you’re at the right place for that,” she smiled. He blushed, looking down at his feet. “Are you looking for something specific?”

“No,” he was speechless. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t say a word. He knew he looked ridiculous, but he didn’t know what was happening to him. Jamie had never been in love, maybe it was like that.

“Alright… Well, I’ll let you look around. I’ll be in the back if you need me.”

She turned around and walked to the backstore. She was wearing trousers stained with dirt and he couldn’t help but look at her bum. Swearing in his head, he looked at the books, not finding anything interesting to read. He could only think about those whisky eyes.

After checking around, he took a deep breath and hesitantly walked towards the backstore. “Uh… Excuse me?” he asked. She came out of a room, dirt on her cheek. “Maybe I need help, after all.”

She smiled and wiped her hands on her pants. “Alright,” she took a sip from the cup of tea that was resting on one of the shelves.

“I havena read in a verra long time. In six years, actually. I havena read a book in six years.”

He saw a shadow cross her face as she did the math, but she immediately smiled back. “Well, I can help you find something that will fit you.”

“Nothing too… Nothing about the war, nothing about… Something different.”

She frowned, a smile still glued on her beautiful lips, thinking seriously. “Maybe it’s a stupid question, but have you ever read Agatha Christie?”

“No…” he said, blushing.

“Well, that could be a choice. Follow me.” He followed her to the front of the store were dozens of books from this writer were waiting together. “You have the choice between the elderly, amateur detective British woman Miss Jane Marple or the retired Belgian detective Hercule Poirot based in London.”

“Which one is your favourite?” he asked, the corner of his mouth curling up.

“Well… I love them all, but if you have to read one to begin with…” she looked at the books on the shelf and handed him one. And Then There Were None. “Ten people compliced of murders -but not convicted- are invited on a mysterious island where they are killed each at a time.”

Revenge, bloody trials, he thought he was going to like it.

“I’ll take it.”

“Great!” she smiled. “I hope you will like it… I’ve never seen you around… Are you traveling?”

“Yes, you can say so. But I am staying here for a while. How much for this?”

“Oh,” she waved her hand. “Nothing. It’s on the house.”

He looked into her eyes. “Just because I have a walking stick doesna mean that I canna pay for my own books.” His voice wasn’t mean, it was only the truth.

It was her turn to blush, her cheeks turning crimson red. “I didn’t mean to… I just…”

“Dinna worry,” he smiled warmly. “I saw that ye are renting a room.”

“Yes. Are you interested?”

They walked upstairs to the room that was for rent. It was a small room with a double bed by the window facing the river. There wasn’t much in the room: a small sofa and a small kitchen. “There is only one bathroom to share with the other room.”

It was simple, but Jamie thought he could make it a home, especially if she was just next to him. “I’ll take it.”

“Great! Oh! and by the way, I am Claire.”

“Jamie,” he smiled, shaking her hand.

***

Of course, it rained that night.

Jamie was lying in bed, looking at the water drops falling against the window. He felt surprisingly peaceful, hearing the echoes of a Ozzie Nelson record playing in Claire’s room. He found himself smiling at the thought of her.

When he came back from the army, when he went back to New York, Jamie never thought he could be happy again. Just smiling was difficult and it took all the effort in the world to convince his mother that he was alright. When he came back, there was a heavy weight on his chest, crushing him, cutting his breath short. There was a hole in his heart that was slowly swallowing him alive. There were images burned in his head, images he could never forget and that came to haunt him when he was least expecting it.

But when he walked into the bookstore, he had felt at peace, as if he had entered a safe haven. And when he saw her, he felt as if he could breathe again for the first time in his life. When she smiled at him, it was as if the sun returned and cast out the darkness.

There was something about her that he found intriguing. He wanted to know everything about her, from her childhood to the reason why she owned a small shop in Inverness. She was English, that was for sure. He immediately recognized the accent when she spoke to him. He didn’t think she was from London, though. He’d known londoners during the war and they didn’t speak like she did.

He’d seen the dirt on her trousers and by the smell in the bookstore, he thought she might be gardening in the backstore.

Clearly, she wasn’t married. She was not wearing a ring and he had not seen a man enter the place since he first came in, almost ten hours ago. He was ashamed just to think about it, but he was happy that she probably wasn’t.

He didn’t know much about her, but he decided that during the following months in Inverness, he was going to get to know her.

Suddenly, he felt the need to get up and write. Putting on his pants, he got up and walked to the small table in the kitchen. He took the typewriter out of its box and sat in front of it. His bum wasn’t even seated when he typed the first word.

She was a woman of mystery.

He couldn’t help but smile, thinking about the way her curls rioted around her face. Claire. He wanted to say it aloud, hearing how it sounded on his mouth, but he wouldn’t risk her hearing it.

Still, Jamie was not at ease with the idea of thinking about her this way. But he couldn’t help it.

Elizabeth. He was going to name her Elizabeth.

Jamie just started to write about this Elizabeth. He knew nothing about her, but as the words came out of his mind, as he filled pages and put them on a pile next to him, he started to get to know her. She was simply inspiring.

The hours passed and Jamie started to yawn, his eyelids becoming heavy. It had been a long day. He decided to go back to bed, bringing the papers with him. He sat against the wall, and with the light on the bed table on, he read for hours, a smile never leaving his face. He didn’t know if the reason for it was the thought of her or the accomplishment of writing pages he didn’t want to burn.

After a while, he put them on the nightstand, turned off the light and closed his eyes, lying down on his back. He sighed, letting his mind wander. Elizabeth. He tried to think of how he was going to tell her story. Of course, he couldn’t write about a bookshop owner in Inverness. Yet, every time, his mind came back to this. He knew it was the story he had to tell. Her story.

He listened to her footsteps in the room next to his, feeling reassured by her presence. He slowly fell asleep to the words of the music playing in Claire’s room.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you

Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you

But in your dreams, whatever they be

Dream a little dream of me

#outlander fanfic #at last

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laurelsofhighever · 5 years ago

Text

The Falcon and the Rose Ch. 49 - The Blood-Soaked Tower

Chapter Rating: Mature Warnings: Canon-typical violence Relationships: Alistair/Female Cousland Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Fereldan Civil War AU - No Blight, Romance, Angst, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort Chapter Summary: Rosslyn and Alistair enter the Tower to save everyone they can.

Chapter 1 on AO3 This chapter on AO3

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Almost immediately, the stench of the dead overpowered them. Alistair groped in the darkness for the wall so he could brace against it, pushing up his visor as he retched. Around him, he heard the sounds echoed in the others, and at last Rosslyn’s voice, wry but strained as she declared they should have asked Greagoir for a torch.

“I – I can help,” Amell stuttered, and whispered something under her breath.

Warm, yellowish light like a candle grew from the crystal at the point of her staff and chased away the darkness. But then they found what was causing the smell, and she screamed. Not six feet ahead of them, a pile of corpses lay rended and bloody, torn apart like broken toys beside the splintered remains of the Circle’s inner door. The low light turned their already tortured expressions into something grotesque, locked in their last final desperate cries as their hands reached out to the gate for the help that hadn’t come, that must have stood by and listened to the screams and done nothing to at least attempt a rescue. Rage coiled in Alistair’s gut, squeezing his revulsion into something colder, harder, which had no name. The bodies looked small in the dark, but only once Rosslyn knelt down to examine the closest one did the full disparity of size become apparent.

“No more than twelve,” she muttered. “All the injuries are to the back, days old – they were running away.”

He stepped forward and laid a hand on her shoulder as she turned her frown towards the door. With all the armour in the way, he doubted she could feel the press of his gauntlet, but the weight was there nonetheless. Her breath came steady, shallow, every muscle still as she collected herself to move on. There was a clink of mail as she straightened.

“The apprentice dormitories are along here,” Amell managed. Her eyes, wide and liquid black in the low light, were still fixed on the bodies.

“Why is it so dark?” Alistair’s voice was brittle.

“There aren’t any windows on this level. One the candles burned down…”

“Ser Cullen, is there a defensible position somewhere nearby – somewhere we can get the survivors to congregate?” Rosslyn asked, staring straight ahead. Whatever grief welled in her had drained away, and the tightness at the corners of her eyes now was only the steel of her battleblood, the keen rush of calculation that allowed her to take in the whole engagement and decide life and death without compassion.

“I asked a question, Knight-Lieutenant.”

“Your Ladyship…” Cullen swallowed. “Yes. “There’s… the library, further on this floor, or the refectory upstairs. It can house everyone.” He paused. “But wouldn’t it be dangerous? What if we corral the mages and they turn out to be maleficar?”

Amell shot him a withering look. “What do you mean, ‘corral’? Are we just sheep to you?”

“What? No! That’s not what I said –”

“Sounded like it.”

“We’re here to save as many people as we can,” Alistair interrupted. “And the best way to do that is to keep everyone in a secure location while we clear the halls. Any mages left that haven’t yet become abominations aren’t likely to. We should get moving,” he added quietly to Rosslyn. “Try and do some good before Greagoir comes in on his high horse.”

“Or before anyone else has any bright ideas about how to deal with mages,” she agreed. She leaned into him for a brief instant of reassurance before she sighed and turned back towards the darkness. “We stick together, sweep the place floor by floor, keep our eyes open.”

The corridor was silent, deserted. The same unnatural pressure that had weighted the air outside magnified as they made their cautious way through the apprentice dormitories into the depths of the tower. In every room, the remains of battles stained the walls, gore and burn marks and shattered pieces of furniture. Every so often Cullen or Amell would point out smears on the floor that marked the destruction of a demon, but those were too few when counted next to the number of the dead.

And not one templar among them, Alistair noted with a frown as they cleared the last of the long dormitories.

The high-arched ceilings recounted their footsteps, their buttresses visible above their little bubble of light only as brief, thrown shadows against the ancient stonework. If not for the crisis at hand, Rosslyn might have paused to examine the patchwork quality of the architecture, the recent facing upon Imperial Tevene upon the solid, sure foundations of the original Alamar builders. Their time slipped away more with every moment, however, and took an uncounted number of lives with it, so she pushed them on through the empty foyer that led down to the cellars, towards the first glow of light they had seen that wasn’t their own.

And yet, the library was empty as well. The light came from complex runes carved into the ceiling, positioned into clusters over the long reading tables. Piles of books still sat open on the polished wood, next to scattered chairs and ink-splattered notebooks, as if the researchers had not even had time to put down their pens before being forced to run. The question was only which direction they had chosen.

“How do we reach the next level?”

Amell pointed. “The stairs are past the Librarian’s office.”

The door was barred.

Alistair knocked. “Anyone alive in here? I promise we’re not demons, we bring word from the Knight-commander.” For a moment he listened, picking up whispers and movement through the wood, and then stood back as a bolt scraped back and the door swung open.

Three templars greeted them, as well as a dozen or so human and elven mages crammed onto a tiny dais at the centre of the room. Many were children. The air held the stale, sour odour of any small place where people have been forced to cohabit for a period of time, and the inhabitants looked exhausted. A barrier shimmered over the door at the top of the stairs, which had also been blocked with a pile of bookshelves and a sturdy desk, shunted onto its side and pushed as far up the steps as it could go.

“Maker’s breath, you really aren’t demons are you?” The leading templar lifted his visor to reveal a man with a trimmed moustache just entering middle age. “We’ve been trapped in here for over two days, getting by on conjured water and roast rats. Knight-Lieutenant Dunn – this is Knowles and Owen,” he added.

“This is Prince Alistair and Teyrna Rosslyn Cousland,” Cullen supplied.

“More and more surprising! I hope you’ll forgive the informality – I didn’t recognise you.”

“Have you come to rescue us?” one of the smaller children piped from the corner. They sat in the arms of an older mage who eyed their weapons warily, like a dog that has learned the shape of its master’s stick.

Rosslyn pursed her lips and didn’t reply. “What do you know of what’s happened?” she asked Knight-Lieutenant Dunn.

He shook his head. “Must have been, what, five days ago, six? The alarm came down from the upper floors to say something had got loose, so I ordered most of the lads up to lend a hand. To be honest, we thought it was a drill – they close off the gate, fight a few fires, and then everything’s fine and dandy. And then demons appeared in the hall. We got what kids out we could, and pulled back here when they broke through into the library. We might’ve held them with more numbers, but…” With a half-glance behind him and a subtle nod towards the corner of the room, he took Rosslyn and Alistair aside. “What’s the word from outside?” The set of his mouth confirmed what he did not say: he knew the Right had been invoked.

Alistair cleared his throat. “We’re here to find First Enchanter Irving – the knight-commander said he would only listen to him.”

“I wish you luck with that, Your Highness,” the templar replied. “Irving was on the upper levels, and we haven’t heard anything in days. I’d be surprised if anyone is still alive up there.”

“If we find any survivors, we’ll be sending them to you,” Rosslyn said. “They’re to be kept safe.”

“I understand, Your Ladyship. We’ll try and keep everyone calm.”

“Thank you. Hold out a little longer, and we’ll see an end to it, without bloodshed.”

“Aye, Your Ladyship.”

Stepping around him, she nodded and called to Amell, who had bent to talk with the apprentices and offer them some comfort. Perhaps she had also told them about the Right of Annulment, but Rosslyn didn’t pry, only offloaded a packet of dried meat from her pack and slipped it into the knight-lieutenant’s hands.

“The children first,” she instructed.

“Aye, Your Ladyship.”

Cullen was already helping his fellow templars clear away the barricade. One of the eldest apprentices lowered the barrier. She offered a nod and a faint, trembling smile as the party passed, and once they were through the door followed Knight-Lieutenant Dunn’s directions and retreated to the library.

“Maker’s blessings, Your Ladyship, Your Highness,” he said, lingering at the door. “You do your job and I’ll do mine – I don’t want to have to say I failed in my duty.”

Alistair managed a grimace. “Neither do we.”

The level above the library opened out into a narrow space with doors leading off in many directions, cluttered by shelves and not much else. It clearly served as a spare storage space for those items that weren’t considered important enough to be properly locked away. There were windows, tiny and high up on the walls, but they only let in enough light to deepen the shadows in the corners of the room.

The demon attacked them without warning. It boiled out of the wall behind them, a towering mass of flame and molten slag pulled into a rough shape not quite human or animal. Its first swipe caught on Cullen’s shield as he leapt to defend Amell, and a shriek of rage like tearing metal bubbled up from somewhere deep inside its body.

“If we weaken it enough, it’ll be pulled back into the Fade!” The young templar shouted. “Karyna, stay behind me – don’t let it touch you.”

With its path to the mage blocked, the demon whirled on Rosslyn and Alistair. It had no eyes, but its blunt head lowered as if it were peering at them, assessing as it advanced. Rosslyn didn’t give it time to come to any conclusions, and struck forward, bashing it with her shield to expose its side for the cut of her sword. Talon sang as it descended. It remembered the depths of the cave it knew before its forging, the cold dark and the rising water, and gleamed as it bit deep. The molten flesh crumbled around the blade like pumice, its roar this time one of pain instead of rage.

“It doesn’t like the cold!” Rosslyn cried as Alistair made his own strike on the demon’s opposite flank.

“Oh – I have a spell for that!”

The fight did not last long after that. Between the flurry of ice spells and the precision strikes of the warriors’ swords, the demon stood no chance. It got a lucky hit against Alistair’s shield that sent him sprawling with a cry of pain, but bit by bit it chipped, and crumbled, until Cullen thrust one final time into its armpit and it collapsed in on itself like a fire exhausted of fuel.

“Are you two alright?” Rosslyn asked as she knelt to help Alistair to his feet.

Across the room, Amell jumped as Cullen brushed her arm. For an instant, she leaned towards him, but reeled back with a reluctance born of habit. Rosslyn knew the feeling well. She turned away to run a critical eye over Alistair, ignoring his worry for her when she realised he favoured his left shoulder.

“It’s fine,” he told her. “Pulled muscle.”

“And we have three floors to go. Enchanter –”

Something scraped on the stone behind them. As one they turned, weapons raised, and were greeted by a tired-looking man in mage robes, with a mark on his forehead in the shape of a sunburst.

“Owain?” Amell lowered her staff.

“Enchanter,” the Tranquil replied in a flat tone. “You remember me – and you, Knight-Lieutenant Cullen. I am not familiar with your companions.”

“They’re – Owain, what are you doing here? Didn’t you try to leave?”

“Yes,” came the reply. “But when I encountered the barrier on the library door, I thought it best to return to work. The stockroom is in a state not fit to be seen.”

“We have bigger things to worry about,” Rosslyn interrupted. “What do you know about how this began?”

Owain turned to her, unbothered by the sharp edge to her voice. “There was a large explosion on one of the upper floors,” he said, as if reading from a book. “The templars stationed here and in the apprentice rooms went to investigate. Soon after, demons came to kill or capture the mages on this floor. I was in the stockroom and they did not see me. I suppose I should count myself lucky.”

“Why are they taking the mages?”

“I do not know. Perhaps Niall will succeed and save us all.”

Alistair frowned. “Niall?”

“He came here with several others, and took the Litany of Adralla,” the Tranquil explained.

“But that’s to protect against blood magic, isn’t it?” Amell rubbed her forehead. “Wynne mentioned it to me. If there are blood mages involved in whatever’s happening, we’ll need the Litany to stop it.”

Rosslyn bit down on a curse. She had seen the power a single blood mage could command, and the memory of it sent a cold shiver across her shoulders. There could be a thousand summoned demons between them and any help First Enchanter Irving could offer, if he even still lived, and an army of undead and abominations besides, enough to easily overpower three warriors and one mage with only so much strength between them. And yet, duty bound them now, just as surely as the blocked path behind them. The tower’s architecture would be their best defence, its narrow corridors and curving walls able to act as a shield against superior numbers and ranged magical attacks that relied on line-of-sight to cast with accuracy. They would have to move quickly, and try to reach the source of the destruction before it could spread plaguelike and overwhelm them.

Having watched Amell set a healing spell in Alistair’s shoulder and with orders for Owain to go down and meet the rest of the survivors in the library, she led the way across the shadowed hall, aware of each discordant ring of their footsteps on the stone. Talon all but hummed in her hand, resonating with the nearness of the Fade and eager for another taste of ichor. As the walls closed in again, they found bodies sagged against the walls or lying crumpled on the floor, with blood staining cloth and armour both. Any one of them might rise in an instant, without warning, ungainly but fast enough that Rosslyn nevertheless kept watch out of the corner of her eye. The lack of flies betrayed the unnatural nature of the deaths, and the silence set her teeth on edge.

They made it to Irving’s office unscathed. With most of the mages already defeated or beyond reach, few demons had ventured to the lower levels, and the undead that ambushed them had been new, the spirits unused to their host bodies and the constraints of the physical world. This meant their skirmishes had been sporadic, but the rest granted by the First Enchanter’s quarters was no less welcome, as the spells and protections laid on it would repel all but the strongest demonic energies. As long as they remained quiet, nothing would trouble them.

Rosslyn laid a hand on Amell’s shoulder as she passed her the waterskin, comforting her as best she could. The enemies they had cut down were recognisable, and considering how many people were as yet unaccounted for, there would likely be worse encounters ahead. Cullen sat a careful distance away, checking his gear. He had taken off his helmet to breathe more easily, and as he ran a distracted hand through his hair, his freed curls bounced against his sweat-damp forehead. Rosslyn stepped around the desk trying not to think about how much older than her he might be while still looking so young, and nudged her elbow against Alistair’s side.

“Anything useful?” she asked.

He turned away from the bookshelf. “Not really. Spellbooks, that sort of thing. There’s a map on the wall that says we’ve got two floors left to clear before we get to the top, which isn’t entirely comforting.”

“At least we’re halfway.”

“See?” He grinned. “That’s what I love about you, you’re always so optimistic.”

“And is that the only thing?” Her eyes flicked to his mouth, then to the others, and back.

“Maker, no. But we don’t have time for me to stand here and list everything.”

“I’ll have to ask again when this is over, then,” she teased, with a growing smile.

A scream from outside cut off Alistair’s answer. They raced out of Irving’s office, weapons drawn and armour hastily jammed into place as a young man in mage robes careened down the stairs to the next level, ducking just in time as a templar blade cleaved the air above his head. He saw the party ahead of him, focussed one the Sword of Mercy etched into Cullen’s armour, and screamed again.

“I’m not one of them! I swear it!”

Rosslyn stepped around him to face the group of advancing templars. Their movements were jerky, disconcerting, and she raised her shield.

“Lower your weapons!” she called. “We’re not your enemy, we’ve come to help.”

The templars paused, wobbling like puppets.

“Do not listen to such lies,” purred a catlike voice from the shadows. “Is your faith so weak that you would submit to the tricks of demons?”

A woman stepped out behind the group of templars. The robes of a revered mother hung from her shoulders, but something in the shine of the thread made her hard to look at. Her smile was too wide, too sharp, her limbs ever so slightly out of proportion.

“That’s a demon,” Alistair growled, stepping to Rosslyn’s shoulder.

Amell was already winding a spell between her hands. “It’s enchanted the templars. If we can get to it, then –”

“There!” the demon shrieked, cutting her off. “You see! They are hiding a blood mage in their midst!”

“Brothers, please –!” But Cullen’s voice was drowned in the sound of the templars’ charge.

Rosslyn and Alistair drove forward. Their shields butted against blank face plates and their swords flashed in the momentary advantage. One templar went down. The next took his place before he had even hit the floor. Amell hurled an ice spell into the throng, and then another, until Rosslyn, beating back two enemies at once, snarled at her to focus on the demon instead, and slowly, they were pushed back. Even bewitched, the templars had the backing of a lifetime of training, and they had the advantage of numbers, as well as the demon to bolster them as they struck out again and again. Amell’s magic was wearing it down, confusing it, but the templars served it absolutely, energy and bodies both, and every killing blow only made it stronger.

“We need to clear a path!” Rosslyn shouted. She opened her mouth for more orders, but in that instant a greatsword curved down over the edge of her shield. She raised her arm to block, but the movement came too late. Her armour stopped the blade from slicing her flesh, but the impact reverberated down to the bone and she staggered back with a cry. Someone called her name. She blinked and shoved forward again with a snarl, driving through the disorientation to bring Talon up in blunt arc that cut into the templar’s groin.

The fight after that became a haze of pain, and raising her sword even to her shoulder lit fire along her nerves. And still, she hacked at anything that strayed into her line of sight, teeth bared behind the Falcon helm, desperate only to keep her footing as bodies piled up before her. At one point, she felt a flash of magic through her veins, dimming the ache in her muscles and the agony in her arm, and she pushed through, just in time for an unearthly shriek to lance through her skull. The last of her enemies fell, leaving her a clear view of the demon, shocked of its illusion now and impaled upon Cullen’s sword. Arms caught around her waist as she sagged. Gloved fingers scrabbled at her chin to loosen the strap and get her helmet loose.

“Rosslyn – Rosslyn.”

“Huh?”

The demon was flaking, falling away like wood ash in the wind.

“I can do it through the armour, it’s fine,” someone was saying, and she rolled her head to the side to find Amell feeling along the length of her upper right arm.

“It’s just a hairline fracture,” Amell told them. “I can heal it, but it will be weakened. It shouldn’t be used for any heavy lifting for a while. At least as far as you can,” she added, with a rueful glance at their surroundings.

“Do what you can with it,” Rosslyn grunted.

Alistair was still holding her. “That’s twelve templars accounted for, including Dunn and the ones we passed on the way here,” he calculated. “How many would have been in the tower when the gate was shut?”

“Shifts have a full complement of thirty-three.” It was Cullen who answered, his gaze low on the bodies of his fallen comrades, on the blood congealing on his sword. “The number should have been greater, if mages could do this.”

“Demons did this,” Amell corrected, still pushing healing magic into Rosslyn’s arm.

“And who let the demons out?”

“It doesn’t change out plan,” Rosslyn interrupted, before another argument could start. “We have to find this Niall, and then whoever is behind this.”

“Umm…”

They had forgotten the mage the templars had been chasing. He huddled against the wall like a rabbit watching for a hawk, not quite ready to trust them but flicking his gaze from Amell, to Cullen, to the pile of dust that was all that remained of the demon.

“Did you mention Niall?” he asked.

Rosslyn frowned at him. “Do you know where he is?”

“We got separated…” The young mage shook his head.

“What happened here?”

“Uldred,” came the reply. “It was Uldred. He told everyone Loghain was going to help free us of the Chantry, and in return we would be supporting him. Some said they wanted to stay neutral, and then the fighting started. He rounded everyone up and took them to the Harrowing chamber, but I don’t know what he’s doing to them.”

“Just when I think I can’t hear more bad things about Loghain,” Alistair scoffed. “How well do you know this Uldred, Enchanter?”

“Not well,” Amell answered. “He’s one of Irving’s aides.”

“Is he powerful?”

“He’s maleficar,” Cullen interrupted. “Who knows what he’s capable of.”

Rosslyn’s focus was still on the mage they had rescued. “What’s your name?”

“Godwin,” the mage answered. “Please, I didn’t do anything, I’m not one of them. Niall had a plan to take the Litany of Adralla to First Enchanter Irving, but there were so many demons. He’s still up on the next level somewhere.”

“Will you come with us?”

Godwin stared. “Are you mad? There’s too many of them to fight – I thought I’d, uh, find a cupboard instead and just be very, very quiet.”

“There’s a group of apprentices hiding in the library,” Amell offered. “We cleared all the demons between here and there.”

“Uh… no, I don’t trust –” He glanced at Cullen. “I mean, I’d rather stay here.”

“Suit yourself.” Rosslyn shrugged, and winced. “Just make sure you stay hidden. We don’t want another abomination sneaking up behind us.”

Godwin squeaked at that, but nodded. Then he cleared his throat again and wished them luck with a tentative smile and a mention that he had seen Niall put the Litany into a pocket before they were separated. The party didn’t look back as they climbed the stairs, as grim determination settled over them once more.

“I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this,” Alistair confessed to Rosslyn quietly a little while later. They had stepped from yet another narrow corridor into a high, vaulted room that must once have served as a common area or refectory, until something had stormed through like a dragon on the rampage and cast the now-shattered remains of the furniture against the walls. The aftereffects of whatever magic had caused the destruction raised gooseflesh even under all their layers of armour, and the silence boomed like the pause that hangs between a flash of lightning and the oncoming roll of thunder.

“South Reach was worse,” she told him, her eyes keen on the shadows.

“We’ll be out of it soon,” he said, almost to himself. “I, for one, am looking forward to a long, hot bath.”

“With bubbles?” she asked.

“And lavender-scented soap, and maybe even one of those painted wooden ducks to keep me company.”

She chuckled. “Those are children’s toys.”

“Ah, but I am a prince,” he pointed out. “If I have painted toy ducks, it’ll start a trend.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?” She sighed and dropped her voice. “How do you think our friends are holding up?”

Alistair glanced over his shoulder. “Honestly, not well. This is their home – they know these people, and…”

“They’ve fallen on opposite sides of a very old argument,” she finished for him. “It’s only going to get worse. We need to finish this quickly.”

They trudged on. What little could be seen of the sky outside showed the hours passing as they carved their way through those remaining in the tower and slowly lost hope that they would find more survivors. Pustules of what looked like raw flesh grew like mould on the walls, oozing and growing bigger the closer they stepped to the fourth floor, and every inch increased the latent hum of magic in the air. Rosslyn lost count of the number of abominations that fell to Talon’s edge. At the base of the stairs to the tower’s final floor they found Niall’s body crumpled against a wall, and only managed to fish the litany from his pocket after facing down a blood mage who came at them with half a dozen demons dancing at her fingertips. The parchment was faded, the writing smudged in places where the mage’s blood had soaked it, but Amell read it with confidence, memorising each phrase at one reading. It would have to do as their only secret weapon, because there was no doubt anymore that Uldred knew they were coming. They rested, tended their wounds, ate and drank what was left of their supplies, and moved on.

Nothing attacked them on the fourth floor. The fittings here were richer than the ones they had passed below, more comfortable and more decorative, and the windows were bigger. Late afternoon sun lit the brightly coloured spines of dozens of books and intricate Antivan carpets, and stands of polished swords that stood in racks next to spare shields blazing with the templar Sword of Mercy. It might have been a cosy scene, if not for the tang of metal that coiled at the back of the throat, and the growths of flesh that bulged even more thickly out of the walls. The air was hot, and ripe, and utterly still.

They found the remaining templars at the foot of the last set of stairs up to the Harrowing chamber. Only a few were left alive. They had been stripped of their armour and thrown into a cage of light, their bodies broken, their minds fled. Babbled words grated through chapped lips, and they did not react to the newcomers, not even when Cullen called them by name and tried to smite the prison wall.

“Poor buggers,” Alistair muttered. There was a hard line between his brows, and a muscle ticked in his jaw.

Rosslyn touched his elbow, remembering what he told her about almost being made a templar. “There’s only one way to help them now.”

“Right. Let’s get this son of a pig and be done with it.”

Uldred was waiting for them. The body of a mage lay unmoving at his feet, and a sickly kind of smile split his face as Rosslyn and the others barged in behind their shields. His baldness made his age difficult to decipher, but he held himself with the absolute confidence of a man in complete control of his surroundings, the very picture of hubris. A crowd abominations lurked behind him, grim distortions of people with melted skin, standing guard over the handful of mages who were left to be put to whatever torture he had in mind for them. An older man was among the group, dressed in finer robes than the others, and his mouth fell open as he watched the four approach, whether to shout a warning or simply out of shock.

“We’re here for Irving,” Rosslyn declared. With her helmet covering her face, the words echoed in her ears.

“Are you now?” Uldred replied, and smiled so all of his teeth were visible. “I must admit, I’m impressed you made it this far. I sensed my demons fall, my prey escaping, the eddies of the disturbance ringing through the Fade, and who is it who comes? Why, the pernicious Falcon of Highever and the bastard brat King Cailan decided to make a prince. I’ll get accolades for ridding Loghain of the two of you.”

“Is he your master then?” She edged away from the door, towards the captured mages.

“There are no more masters,” Uldred snapped. “No more chains. But wait, what is this – Irving’s star pupil.” He advanced, dark eyes fixed on Amell. “You’ve seen how it is for mages, out among the wide world. The fear, the contempt. You’ve seen how unjust the Chantry is to people like us. But you don’t have to suffer like the rest of them. You could join me. I could teach you to –”

Cullen stepped in front of her, sword raised. “You won’t touch her.”

“Don’t be so crude.” Uldred swept his hand to the side like he was swatting a fly, and without warning the templar was picked up by some invisible force and flung across the room.

“No!”

The abominations lunged. Amell was beaten back by the swipe of long, malformed claws even as she tried to push past them to reach Cullen. Rosslyn and Alistair flanked her, catching the blows on their shields, but they were outnumbered, and these abominations had been draining the lives of countless mages for days. Even with more ice spells to slow them down, they barely seemed to feel the wounds inflicted on them.

Uldred ignored them.

“We all knew you fawned over her,” he sneered, prowling towards Cullen. He raised his hand, bringing his prey to his knees in prison of crushing light. “Following her movements like a cat watching a mouse. Did you think we didn’t notice? You and all the others, leashing us, forbidding our true potential.” He squeezed his fist and Cullen cried out. “Did you like what we did to your friends? They proved most interesting diversions.”

“Uldred, stop it!”

He turned at that, his face twisted into a sneer all the more sinister for the evenness of his voice. “Uldred? He is gone. I am Uldred and yet not Uldred. I am more than he ever was. I offer you one last chance –”

“No!” Irving interrupted from across the room. His teeth were bared with the effort to speak through whatever enchantment was holding him. “You must stop him. He’s building an army – going to destroy the templars, and then –”

“Enough! You’ve said too much, old man, and I wasn’t talking to –” His words cut off in a yell as Amell used the distraction to douse him in fire.

For an instant the abominations fell back, disorientated. One screeched as Alistair severed its arm, the sound cut off when Rosslyn lunged and cut out its throat, but before they could turn and press their advantage, the flames licking at Uldred’s robes flickered, then dimmed until there was nothing left but the scent of charred cloth.

“Some people can be so stubborn. Resistance, everywhere I go.”

The mage raised his hands again, curling his fingers into claws. A force gripped their limbs, burning through their veins and slowing their movements, and the abominations advanced once more, their horribly broken mouths pulled wide in anticipation –

And then the pressure was gone. The world swam into focus again, along with Amell’s voice, chanting low and melodic from behind a shimmering green barrier. Rosslyn raised Talon and cleaved through the nearest abomination, no longer caring about the ones that closed in behind her. Uldred was the goal. Without him, the rest would flounder. She ducked under one outstretched claw and bashed another aside with her shield, but even running flat out, she wasn’t fast enough to stop him. His form was shifting, growing, his robes tearing at the shoulders and across the waist as his body morphed into the true form of the demon sharing his soul. Chitinous black spikes burst from his skin, his teeth sharpened, and as Rosslyn pulled her sword back to strike, his eyes bled scarlet and any trace of the man he had once been succumbed in a bellow of rage. The creature turned to the attack, conjuring a ball of dark energy in one fist, and in the instant Rosslyn’s blade would have pierced its throat, it hurled the spell at her feet.

#dragon age #dragon age: origins #dragon age origins #da:o #alistair x cousland #alistair theirin #rosslyn cousland #cousland #the falcon and the rose #cullen rutherford #amell #broken circle

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theartoflovingthomashunt · 5 years ago

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Red Carpet Diaries Masterlist

[All Thomas Hunt x Alex Spencer Masterlists]

My best attempt at a chronological list of my stories set in the Red Carpet Diaries Universe.

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

During RCD Book 2

> Seeking Advice

>Morning Coffee (Teen)

>What had to be Done (Teen)

>In a Field

> For the Love of Coffee

>The Day After The Last Duchess Party: (Teen) - Two Parts

Telling Chazz about hooking up with Hunt (Part 1)

Letting Thomas Know How She Feels (Part 2)

>Good Morning Hollywood- Promoting The Last Duchess: - Two Parts

Promoting The Last Duchess with Leland St. James (Part 1) (Teen)

Dressing rooms with Thomas after the show (Part 2) (Teen)

Inspiration: Photo Post-Fashion

> First Date (PG)

Photo Edit: First Date Photo and additional Short Fic

Inspiration: Photo Post-Setting: Old Man Bar (LA)

Inspiration: War of the Worlds Broadcast

> House Party

>Lake Tahoe: A Weekend Getaway -Three Parts

Photo Edit: Thomas & Alex at the Lake House

Part One - Road Trip

Part Two - Dinner Date

Part Three - Next Steps ***There are intentional gaps in the weekend so I have the option to add more at a later time

>The Last Duchess Opening Weekend (four+ parts)

Part One: Viktor’s Wrath (Teen)

Part Two: Taking Back the Narrative

Part Three: The Red Carpet Premiere

Part Four: Just Like the First Time (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

Weekend Warriors

>Good Morning Hollywood - Talking about Viktor (Teen)

>Pride

RCD 2.5 (After Book 2, but before Book 3)

> Coffee Run (going public)

> At the Park

> An Evening Drive (early in relationship)

Thomas and Alex take an evening drive to get away from the city.

>Spring Forward (takes place the first March they’re together)

Alex gets an unexpected calendar alert.

>Alex & Thomas Fight

>Double Agent Find (Mature)💎

>I Love You Or Not (two parts)

Part One: Alex

Part Two: Thomas

>Moving In Together (Teen)

> Not So Subtle (Teen)

>Reading Massage

>Mr. Hunt in the Study (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

>Santa Monica (Happiness)

>Let the Rain Fall

>Long Distance (in progress)

Part One: Something New

Part Two: Choices

Part Three: Departure

Part Three (and a half): Halex (photo edit)

Part Four: Trying (Teen)

Part Four (and a half): Who wore it best? (photo edit) (Teen)

Part Five: Faux Pas

Part Six: Dear Thomas, aka Love Letters

Part Seven: Sleeping Together

Part Eight: A Taste of Things to Come

Part Nine: Fall Fun (Teen)

Part Ten: Pumpkin Date (Teen)

Part Eleven: Tricks & Treat Drabble (Teen)

Part Twelve: Candy (Teen)

Part Thirteen: The Diagnosis (Teen)

> Faux Pas

Part One/Part Five of Long Distance: Faux Pas

Part Two: (Not so) Long Distance (Teen)

Part Three: Emphatically No

Part Four: L.A. Baby (Where Dreams are Made of to be broken)

Part Five: (I’m sorry I can’t be) Perfect

Part Six: I’d Do Anything

Part Six (and a half): Faux Pas Cover: Special Edition (Photo Edit)

> Back to the Start (Thomas’s Journals aka Faux Pas Part Seven)

> I Need You (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

> The Man in the Mirror (Thomas’s Journal)

> A Promise

> Always and Whatever Comes Next + Art 🖼️

Alex finally has a chance to teach Thomas how to ice skate

Movie Night (one-shots--not in chronological order)

#1: Clue (during RCD 2.5)

#2: Ghostbusters (After RCD3 -- baby hunt)

#3: Citizen Kane (Just before RCD3--1 year anniversary)

#4: Jurassic Park (RCD 3- After Chapter 3)

During RCD Book 3

>Mile High [Chapter 1---Plane Ride Extension]

[Part One] (Teen)

[Part Two] (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

[Part Three] (Teen)

>For No One But You [Chapter 1---New Scene]

>I already said yes [Chapter 1--New Scene]

>And Back Again [Thomas Journal Entry about Chapter 1]

>Sunrise Engagement Photos [Chapter 1--Original]

>Extended Stay [Chapter 1---Original] (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

>Being Exclusive with Thomas [Chapter 2-- Rewrite+ Extension]

> Be Present [extension of art exhibit scene]

> An Act of Love

>Oysters [based on a conversation from Chapter 3]

>Nostalgia [based on a conversation from Chapter 3]

>Scotch & Movies (Teen) and Movies & Scotch (Teen)

>Just Perfect

>First Day [Chapter 7]

>Wedding Invitation [Chapter 7- Extention ]

>Dream to Live

>What if this is it for me?

>Let Me (Teen)

>Don’t! (Teen)

>I’ve Got You (drabble)

> A Reminder (drabble)

>Sage Advice

>Iowa Trip [Chapter 14]

Iowa State Fair [Rewrite + Extention]

Into Darkness (Iowa State Fair)

Save the Date [Extension]

Thunderstorm [ Extension]

>Cake Tasting (Teen-ish)

>Cake by the Ocean (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

> The Red Carpet Picture Show [Rocky Horror] (Teen)

Photo Edits: Red Carpet/Rocky Horror Edits

>Crash’s Birthday

>The Right Time

>A Californian Road Trip

Here We Come

Who Are They?

An Afternoon Detour

>Memories

>Seducing Mr. Perfect (Teen+)

>MCM<FCF (Teen)

>Remember [Chapter 15 Extension]

> Past

>The Wedding:

A Venue (PG)

Love Among the Stars [HWU crossover]

The Night Before

Sisters

An Adventure

Music of their Hearts (Drabble)

A Wedding Gift

Revelation

Post Book 3:

> Distraction: Thomas is the guest of honor at a party in December, but our favorite grumpy director would rather be somewhere else.

> Eiffel in Love

> Forever & Always

> Love Among the Pages: Thomas and Alex enjoy a quiet afternoon reading. [+ Art]

> Happy New Year + Art 🎨: Alex and Thomas spend New Year's Eve at a Charity gala.

> The Love They Shared

> Smile: Alex decides that Thomas should smile for the press every once in a while.

> Stars and Stripes: Alex has the perfect idea for a Fourth of July celebratory photo in mind.

> Together as One: Thomas and Alex enjoy a quiet movie night in. [+ Art]

> Garden Interlude: Alex and Thomas enjoy a quick break in the gardens outside the gala. 🖊️ 🎨 . [+ Art]

Not Time Specific

All are post book 3 unless otherwise stated. Listed in alphabetical order as most are not time specific.

> A Chance Encounter (a Halloween story 🧛‍♂️ 🎃 )

>A Flurry (part one) & Snowfall (part two)

> A Little Bit Longer

> A New Kind of Holiday: Alex introduces Thomas to a new, but very important holiday.

>A Moment

> A Quiet Moment

> A Reminder: Thomas found the perfect new mug for Alex.

> An Afternoon Picnic (+Picta) : Thomas and Alex finally have an afternoon off together so they have a picnic.

>Baking Cookies (Teen)

>Be Still My Heart (Teen)

>Boo-tiful (carving pumpkins)

>Boots (Teen)

>Burnin’ Up

>Distraction (Teen)

>Game Day [Super Bowl/Puppies]

>Giving Back (post Book 3)

>Good Luck

>Flip, Drink, Strip? (Teen)

>Fortune Cookie Drabble (Teen)

>Hiccups (Teen)

>Hot Air Ballooning with Crash and Chazz:

Trust

A View from The Sky (Teen)

Passion (Mature/Explicit/18+only) 💎

> In Another Life

> In The Stillness of Sunrise: Thomas and Alex share a soft morning moment

>Inseparable (Mature/Explicit/18+only) 💎

> Jump With Me

> Just Because (+Picta): Thomas visits Alex on set bearing gifts.

>Last Night Thomas (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

>Late…Late… For a Very Important Date! (Teen)

>Let’s Have Dinner

> Life Begins After Coffee

>Love is...

> My Light

>Oh, the Horror! –Professor Hunt is a Meme!

>On My Heart Just Like a Tattoo

> Open Before Christmas (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

>Paper Cut

>Party Drabble [ Part One ] [ Part Two]

>Peppermint

>Perfect Love

>The Pleasure of Pain (Mature/Explicit/18+only)💎

>Relax

> Restless

Alex is having trouble falling asleep… for some reason….

>Snowflakes

>The Moments In Between (a poem for Alex from Thomas)

MOVED to their own masterlists:

>>> Baby Hunt : Felicity & Vincent

>>> Bogart Hunt : adventures of Puppy Hunt

#thomas hunt #thomas hunt fan fiction #red carpet diaries #fan fiction #masterlist #taolth #alex hunt #alex x thomas #thomas x alex #halex #the art of loving thomas hunt

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splendidlyimperfect · 5 years ago

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:TW for major dysphoria and some self-harming behaviorsSting’s life has been a mess ever since he was eleven years old and Rogue told when he’d promised to keep a secret. Now Sting is an adult, and the only way he knows how to cope is by getting drunk and forgetting the world. When drinking nearly kills him, he gets a chance to turn his life around, and maybe become the kind of man that Rogue deserves to love.

Chapter Summary: Sting's slowly adjusting to his new life with Uncle Wes, but he's still not who he wants to be.

Chapters (7/?): 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Rogue Cheney/Sting Eucliffe, Natsu Dragneel/Gray Fullbuster, Sting Eucliffe & Natsu Dragneel, Sting Eucliffe & Weisslogia Characters: Sting Eucliffe, Natsu Dragneel, Rogue Cheney, Gray Fullbuster, Weisslogia Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Past Child Abuse, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Trans Character, Trans Sting, Friendship, Childhood Friends, Sting-focused story, Sting is a disaster, Natsu’s a great friend, Rogue tries to do what’s right, Tumblr: FTLGBTales Series: Part 2 of i’m still standing

**TW for major dysphoria and some self-harming behaviors

-----

dys·pho·ria | \ dis-ˈfȯr-ē-ə noun : a state of feeling very unhappy, uneasy, or dissatisfied

v autumn age eleven

Kelly comes by a few days after the hospital, like she said she would, and she and Sting sit out in the back yard on the porch swing while she asks questions Sting doesn’t want to answer. She talks a lot about big things like court and guilty pleas and prison, and Sting just nods and picks at his nails.

“Do you like staying with your Uncle?” Kelly asks. Sting doesn’t answer at first, just kicks his feet under the swing. “Do you feel safe?”

As soon as Sting nods, it feels like a betrayal. He knows his dad is far away and part of his heart hurts because it’s his fault. No matter how many times Kelly and Uncle Wes tell him it’s not, he doesn’t believe them.

If he’d listened, he’d still be with his dad.

Sometimes, Sting wants that. He misses his bedroom, the view of the garden, the path he took to get to school. He misses his favorite teacher, Mrs Dempsey, and the way she would let him stay after school to help her shelve the books when he didn’t want to go home.

Mostly, he misses Rogue. He’s tempted to ask Kelly if she can talk to him, but every time Sting thinks about it, all he can hear is Rogue telling his mom when he promised he wouldn’t.

Something’s wrong with her.

Her dad’s sick again so she had to sleep here.

I don’t understand why.

“I know this must be confusing for you,” Kelly says gently, and she doesn’t mention it when Sting shuffles over and leans against her. “It’s a big change. Is there anything you need to make it easier?”

Continue reading on AO3

Sting shrugs. Uncle Wes took him shopping yesterday and they bought new clothes that fit and don’t have holes in them. At first Uncle Wes had pointed out things like patterned leggings and bright shirts, but when he’d seen Sting looking over at the boy’s section, he’d smiled and guided Sting over to the jeans and hoodies.

Watching the price go up and up at the till had made Sting’s stomach hurt. He’d spent the afternoon thinking about the piggybank he left at home where he’d saved up his money from taking dad’s bottles to the depot.

“I don’t have my money,” he says quietly to Kelly. “Uncle Wes paid lots for my clothes.”

“That’s okay, sweetie,” Kelly says. “You don’t have to pay for your clothes. That’s a grown-up job.”

“But…” Sting sighs in frustration, dropping his forehead to his knees. “I feel stupid.”

“How come?” Kelly asks, and Sting shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut and hugging his legs closer to his chest. “You’re not stupid, Abbey.”

Don’t call me that, Sting thinks. It hurts when she says that name, but he doesn’t know how to tell her that it doesn’t fit.

“I know things are different here,” Kelly continues, leaning back against the swing. Sting peeks up at her, then leans his head against her shoulder. It feels safe here. Safer than anywhere else, anyway. “You don’t have to worry about things like that anymore, okay? Money, or food, or anything.”

“I don’t understand,” Sting says, rubbing his eyes.

Kelly sighs, wrapping her arm around his shoulder. “I know, kiddo,” she says. “But I promise it’s going to be okay.”

Living with Uncle Wes is strange at first. He’s always awake when Sting gets up, drinking his coffee and doing his crossword in the kitchen, smiling and asking Sting how he slept. There’s always food in the fridge, and Sting is allowed to have it any time he wants. When he tries to clean, Uncle Wes helps him – sorts the clothes, puts the dishes away, mops after Sting sweeps.

“I can do it,” Sting says quietly one day while they’re folding laundry. Uncle Wes just smiles him and takes the next shirt out of the basket.

“I know you can,” he says. “But I can help you.”

Sting frowns at him. It doesn’t feel right. “I don’t need help,” he insists. “I can do all of it, you don’t have to…” He trails off when Uncle Wes raises an eyebrow. “I can cook stuff, too,” Sting says quickly, and he can’t figure out why his hands are suddenly shaking.

“Abbey,” Uncle Wes says gently, setting down the shirt and sitting down at the table next to Sting. “You don’t have to do everything yourself.”

“But…” Sting stares at his hands. He can do it all – cook food, do the dishes, use the washer and dryer. He’s good at those things, and he doesn’t understand why Uncle Wes won’t let him do them. Maybe Sting’s not doing it the way Uncle Wes likes.

“Having you around is wonderful,” Uncle Wes says, reaching out and taking Sting’s hand. Sting tenses but doesn’t pull away. “And I’m very proud of you for being able to take care of yourself so well.”

“Then why—”

“Abbey, you’re eleven,” Uncle Wes says. Sting wants to cry, but he doesn’t know why.

“I’m not a baby,” he whispers. He’s not. He can get stains out of the laundry, and cook scrambled eggs, and unload the dishwasher without making any noise.

“I know you aren’t, sweetie,” Uncle Wes says, shaking his head. “You’re so grown up. But you don’t always have to be. It’s my job to take care of you, not the other way around.”

Sting’s cheeks flush hot and he holds his breath to keep himself from crying. He doesn’t need anybody to take care of him – not his dad, not Kelly, not Rogue’s parents, not Uncle Wes.

Sting doesn’t need anybody but himself.

Schools starts two weeks after the hospital. The cut on Sting’s head is still healing and his arm’s still in a cast, and when the kids in his new class ask what happened, he tells them he fell off his skateboard. The boys all think it’s cool that a girl skateboards, and all Sting can think is, I’m not a girl. I’m like you.

Despite that, things start to get better. A month goes by, then two, then six, and Uncle Wes doesn’t yell or drink or throw anything. When he finds the hoard of food that Sting has hidden in his dresser drawer, he doesn’t get angry, just reminds Sting that he can take food from the fridge or pantry any time he needs. When Sting insists on cooking supper, Uncle Wes thanks him, then helps do the dishes afterward.

Eventually it starts feeling normal. They do things together like going to movies and riding bikes, and Uncle Wes even gets Sting a laptop so he can play Minecraft with his new friends from school. Uncle Wes is there every day when Sting gets home, smiling and asking how Sting’s day was while he helps Sting with his math homework.

When Sting turns twelve, Uncle Wes bakes him a cake and takes him out for dinner, just the two of them, at a fancy restaurant. When they get home and Sting starts to cry, Uncle Wes just hugs him and tells him that he loves him over and over again.

And then, just when Sting’s finally starting to feel okay, it all falls apart.

A month after Sting’s twelfth birthday, he wakes up to his sheets covered in blood and a sticky feeling between his legs. It takes him a minute, but when he realizes what’s going on, he feels like he’s going to be sick. He knew it was going to happen – they had health class at school and had to watch a stupid movie about bodies and changes and all the things that terrify him. But he’s not a girl, doesn’t want to be a girl, and this can’t be happening to him.

He tries to hide it from Uncle Wes, but he can’t. Uncle Wes is calm and kind, washing Sting’s bedding and buying him pads and giving him a heating pack when it hurts so much he thinks he’s going to puke.

That afternoon, Sting barricades himself in his room, pulling his dresser over to block his door so Uncle Wes can’t get in. He hides in the closet, pressing himself back into the corner and crying. It starts out as small whimpers, but works up to loud, wracking sobs that tear through his body and ache, deep in his chest. He’s wrong, this is wrong, and he wishes and wishes for another body that fits.

Eventually he throws up from crying so hard, but that just makes it worse, and after that Uncle Wes takes the door off its hinges so can get into the room. He sits down on the floor near Sting, not saying anything, just crossing his legs and waiting patiently. Sting presses himself further into the corner and shakes his head, digging his nails into his arms until he feels blood under his fingertips.

“Abbey,” Uncle Wes says gently, moving closer to the closet. “I don’t want to touch you if you don’t want me to, but I can’t let you hurt yourself.”

“Go away,” Sting whispers, jerking his head up and wincing when he hits it against the wall. Pain sparks through to his temples and clears the frustrated haze in his mind, so he does it again, and again, until Uncle Wes pulls him close and wraps a hand around the back of his head. “Stop it!” Sting yells, pushing hard against Uncle Wes’ chest. “Go away! Leave me alone!”

“I can’t,” Uncle Wes says sadly, hugging Sting tightly to his chest. “Part of me loving you means I have to keep you safe, even from yourself.”

“Let me go!” Sting shouts, twisting desperately in Uncle Wes’ arms. He hits Uncle Wes’ chest and tries to kick at him, but Uncle Wes just holds him closer.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pressing his cheek to Sting’s hair. “I want to help, sweetheart. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

“No!” Sting screams, shoving harder at Uncle Wes’ chest, but he’s too strong and Sting is so small and stupid and wrong, wrong, wrong. “I hate you, let me go!”

“Abbey, it’s—”

“Don’t call me that!” A loud, aching sob bursts from Sting’s throat and he gives up, slumping against Uncle Wes’ shoulder and crying. “Don’t… it’s n-not, pl-please, I don’t want… I c-can’t…”

“It’s okay,” Uncle Wes says, loosening his hold on Sting and rubbing his hand up and down Sting’s back. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not right,” Sting whispers, hot tears dripping down his cheeks and leaving dark, damp circles on Uncle Wes’ shirt.

“What’s not right?” Uncle Wes asks, and Sting can’t hold it back anymore.

“I’m not a girl,” he says, voice breaking, and when Uncle Wes doesn’t freeze or flinch, Sting grips his shirt tightly and doesn’t let go. “I’m not, I don’t w-want to, I’m a b-boy, pl-please—”

“Okay,” Uncle Wes murmurs, kissing Sting’s temple and pulling Sting into his lap. He’s warm and gentle and safe, and Sting is suddenly exhausted.

“Okay?” he repeats uncertainly through the tears as the tight, hot knots of anger dissolve into a heavy weariness.

“Yes,” Uncle Wes says gently, “yes, of course it’s okay. You’re okay. I love you. You’re safe.”

Everything Sting’s been holding in his body suddenly dissipates – years of tension and fear and uncertainty rushing out of him and leaving him feeling like wet paper, ready to tear at the smallest touch. He trembles against Uncle Wes, who holds him gently, kissing his forehead and reassuring him that it’s going to be okay.

Sting’s not sure he believes it, but he’s too tired to be afraid.

#fairy tail #ftlgbtales #ftlgbtfics #nbm2019 #nonbinary month #stingue #sting eucliffe #rogue cheney #trans character #fanfic #new chapter #update #tw: dysphoria #my fic

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godaddywebsitebuilder285 · 4 years ago

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Figure It Out

Color is, without a doubt, the visual element most often misunderstood and misused.

As mentioned earlier, when designing visual representations, color is often the first visual encoding that people use. It’s also quite limited to about a dozen, distinguishable colors. It’s a potent visual element, but one fraught with accessibility and perceptual problems. A general rule of thumb: Save color for things you want to draw people’s attention to. Start with grayscale representations. Add in color only later, where it might be really, really useful. That’s it. We can move along.

Except…

We need to dispel some popular beliefs about colors, beliefs that are often held up as truth, when, in fact, this is not the case. What’s presented in this short chapter is more foundational knowledge than tips for immediate application. But also, this understanding of color is—we found in retrospect—a powerful lens for understanding the concepts shared throughout this book. We see in our exploration of color this pattern: while many of the absolutes we cling to are social constructs (varying across cultures and over time), behind these changing constructs we also find some universal human constants.

How Many Colors Are in the Rainbow?

Let’s begin by unpacking the statement above, suggesting that we only see about a dozen colors. Actually, the human eye can perceive many more colors, perhaps a million or so. Of this million, it’s estimated that each of us—individually—can distinguish somewhere between 130 to 300 colors.[1] But within a cultural group, we can only share about a dozen such colors. These limitations have little to do with personal visual acuity, but rather with language: a group’s ability to see and perceive a specific color is determined by language. Do we—as a society—share the same named color value associations?

We can talk about something being “red” and feel confident in what we all see. From both a developmental perspective and an anthropological perspective, red is the first color (after white and black) that most cultures are aware of. But if I describe something as magenta, do we have a shared agreement as to what that named concept refers to? Perhaps you see hot pink where I see a vibrant, purply-reddish color? Another example of this language-color dependency: the Russian language has a specific word for the color that we (English speakers) perceive as light blue.

To put this shared vocabulary into perspective, let’s start with something that is constant and beyond our language: the visible spectrum of light that is a rainbow.

When Colors Are Constant

Around the world, the meteorological phenomenon we describe as a rainbow is a constant thing. Light refracts across water droplets to create a spectrum visible to humans. What we see as colors are the wavelengths of light visible to the human eye (see Figure 8.1). On either end of this visible spectrum are ultraviolet and infrared waves, which while invisible to human eyes, we know they are visible—that is, seen—by cameras and some nonhuman creatures (cats can see certain infrared frequencies, for example). Beyond this visible spectrum, we have things like gamma rays, X-rays, and radio waves, which all make up the entire spectrum of white light from the sun.

Figure 8.1 The visible light spectrum is a small part of the broader electromagnetic spectrum. Starting from this perspective helps us recognize the subjectivity of what is “seen” and how this might vary with different creatures and devices.

But let’s stay focused on the portion of this light spectrum that is visible to humans, the part that allows us to see. Within this spectrum, the rainbow possesses millions of color combinations, as there are no clearly defined boundaries between the colors.

Why then, should diverse cultures over thousands of years arrive at the same set of color language definitions? Are colors an absolute thing? Not exactly.

The Subjectivity of Color Identification

Consider “ROYGBIV,” which is the acronym we all learned to name the colors of the rainbow. How did we conclude, at least in Western cultures, that a rainbow has seven colors? Why not five, or six, or eleven? We have Sir Isaac Newton to thank for this.

These seven colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—were not the result of any serious scientific inquiry. Rather, Newton was fond of the number seven. Just as there are seven musical notes in a scale, Newton believed that colors should follow a similar pattern. He might have connected this with seven days in the week or the seven known planets (at the time) in our universe. In other words, ROYGBIV was an arbitrary choice based on mystical superstition.

Understanding how we arrived at these seven colors sheds light on the subjective nature of color identification. This may also explain a bit about the challenge that so many people have with indigo—that odd color that sits somewhere between blue and violet—as a separate color!

But here is where we have to be careful, as we are stepping into a decades old debate: Do the number of basic color terms and the location of color category boundaries vary across languages? Or might there be a universal pattern to the color naming systems of all cultures?

This Wikipedia entry sums up the debate rather nicely:

There are two formal sides to the color debate, the universalist and the relativist. The universalist side claims that the biology of all human beings is all the same, so the development of color terminology has absolute universal constraints. The relativist side claims that the variability of color terms cross-linguistically (from language to language) points to more culture-specific phenomena. Because color exhibits both biological and linguistic aspects, it has become a deeply studied domain that addresses the relationship between language and thought. [2]

An Argument for Relative Linguistics

We can characterize what Newton did as imposing an arbitrary number of colors upon the color spectrum. And we might conclude the same thing has happened throughout history as different people groups formed words to describe the world around them.

Indeed, various studies of diverse cultures reveal that “although the physiological basis of color vision is essentially the same for all humans with normal trichromatic color vision, there is considerable diversity in the way that different languages segment the continuum of visible colors.”[3] In other words, the rainbow has no natural boundaries; how we slice it up into colors is a subjective thing that varies across different cultures and time. (See Figure 8.2 for an illustration of this concept.) From one research paper, we learned that “some languages have been reported to use as few as two terms to describe all visible colors (Rosch Heider, 1972). Others have been reported to use between three and eleven (Berlin & Kay, 1969), while some (e.g., Russian; Davies and Corbett, 1997) may have twelve.”[4]

Specific examples in support of this argument:

In Russian culture, there is no generic concept of blue. Rather, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy).

The Japanese language (before the modern period) had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green. It wouldn’t be until the year 1,000 that the word midori would be introduced to distinguish a greenish shade of blue

The Himba tribe from Namibia recognizes five basic colors.

The Berinmo of Papua New Guinea has also reached a different conclusion as to the number of colors they recognize. While they draw no distinction between blue and green, they do “draw a distinction within what English speakers would consider yellow, with the word nol on one side and wor on the other.”

From this, we might conclude that the colors of the rainbow do seem to be arbitrary and dependent upon language. (Connect this with earlier points we made about thoughts and cognition as layers upon layers of prior associations.)

Figure 8.2 This comic from Randall Munroe of xkcd nicely illustrates the subjectivity of the shared color language for English speakers.[5]

But surely, you may be thinking, color identification isn’t entirely subjective? Here’s where the research gets interesting: despite these regional differences, a fascinating and consistent pattern begins to emerge.

An Argument for the Universal

In the late 1960s, after studying color terms across many different languages, researchers Berlin and Kay introduced the idea that there were eleven possible basic color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. They argued a universalist theory: that color cognition is an innate, physiological process rather than a cultural one.

While their research has been challenged on different grounds, what has since followed is some agreement that for all noted language differences, there is a fixed order in which color names arise. The ways in which color language evolves across cultures suggest maybe there is a universal pattern governing the direction of patterns in the evolution of colors. All cultures start with the ability to distinguish dark things from light things. This is followed by the recognition of red. After that, it might be the addition of yellow or green. And blue always seems to come last. Not every language follows the exact same path, but they adhere to this same general pattern.

While the broader debate is not necessarily concluded, the general consensus seems to be that “in color, relativism appears to overlay a universalist foundation.”

Why All the Fuss over Color?

While this is certainly fascinating, how is this useful? We include this as a mirror to challenge assumptions. If we turn a critical eye to the commonly accepted color wheel, this was likely influenced by Newton’s original color wheel sketch. But is this the “right” way to think about colors? Primary colors combine to make secondary colors, which in turn allow us to describe tertiary colors. We learn this from an early age and accept this way of thinking about color as absolute. But this is just one frame. This is just a way of thinking about visible light. And this singular perspective has limitations, especially when used in medical, scientific, and engineering visualizations. Research papers such as “Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful”[6] question the value of the rainbow color spectrum in data visualization applications. The point is simple: there are other ways we might think about color. We can look at alternatives such as perceptually ordered color spectrums, an isoluminant color map, or simply use representations of color that aren’t derived from a wheel. Tools such as ColorBrewer 2.0[7] or the NASA Ames Color Tool[8] are incredibly useful for choosing a palette more suitable for visualizing data.

Since this book is concerned with how human creatures understand information, and because we so often use color to clarify, we felt it worth calling out that color and color recognition are not necessarily universal things, but are dependent on cognition, language, and biology. Understanding this allows us to challenge common assumptions about what is “true” about color and perception.

Which leads us to…

Color, Cultures, and Universal Associations

Red means stop. Green means go. These concepts are universal, right? Not so fast. Across cultures, colors do not necessarily convey the same concept. And where we may have the same ability to identify a color, the associated meaning is just that—a learned association. Concluding that red means passion, vitality, or energy, because blood and fire are red things is not a universal idea. Neither is associating green with growth, just because nature involves so much green. (In some Chinese cultures, green can be associated with death.) At this point, please throw away those blog posts and posters about colors to choose for different cultures. While we’re keen to seek out human universals, color has proven to be something that does not have consistent meaning across cultures, or even within a culture group. Rather, the concepts we associate with particular colors are highly contextual and local, not just to a particular culture, but sometimes to smaller social groups. The meanings we point to—blue as a safe, corporate color, for example—are highly generalized assumptions, highly contextual, and mostly learned associations.

The Color Purple

Let’s take purple, as an example. For many centuries, purple dye was expensive and rare. Procuring purple dye was labor intensive and required collecting a secretion from sea snails. Historian David Jacoby remarked that “twelve thousand snails of Murex brandaris yield no more than 1.4 g of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of a single garment.”[9] As a result of this laborious process, the high cost of producing purple clothing made this color a status symbol among kings, queens, and other rulers. If you could afford to wear purple, you were quite wealthy. The conceptual association then is one of scarcity (in this case of a particular dye), signaling something to be valued above other things. While we may still see the lingering effects of this history (the Purple Heart is among the highest honors awarded for U.S. military service), the constraint of purple as a scarce color is no longer true. As such, this color is able to take on new meanings.

“Pink Is for Girls, Blue Is for Boys”

To put this into perspective, let’s investigate the idea that “pink is for girls, blue is for boys.” From clothing choices to marketing toys to how we decorate bedrooms, most of us grow up believing there’s some inherent gender association built into the colors pink and blue. But, were we to travel back in time—just over 100 years—we’d find no such distinction. Or we might find the opposite association.

According to University of Maryland historian Jo B. Paoletti, author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, pink and blue weren't always gender-specific colors. For centuries, young children mostly wore a functional white dress, and then in the early 20th century, things began to change. Consider this quote, pulled from the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants’ Department, a trade publication:

The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.

A Smithsonian review of Paoletti’s book,[10] goes on to add:

Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene's told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle's in Cleveland, and Marshall Field in Chicago.

By the 1940s, this association had flipped. Manufacturers had settled on pink for girls and blue for boys (see Figure 8.3 as an example of this association). Baby Boomers were raised with wearing the two colors. The point of this narrative? Color associations are learned things and can change over time. Even something as seemingly strong as the pink/blue binary was a manufactured association. To be clear, this doesn’t mean a color association is any less powerful in the moment, at a particular point in history, but these color associations do not represent any universal truths.

Figure 8.3 - The “blue is for boys and pink is for girls” concept was a manufactured one, originating in the first half of the 20th century.

Accordingly, it’s good to be wary of generalizations such as “blue is a safe, corporate color.” In the case of corporate associations, one generation’s “safe” may—depending on the media and actions—signal stuffy, inauthentic, or distrustful to the next generation. It all depends on the learned associations embraced—for a time—by a particular culture.

Not All Colors Are Created Equal

We tend to treat our color palettes like interchangeable parts. Just pick a color. Or pick some colors we all find pleasing. Consider how many of us use the default color palettes built into software tools like Excel or PowerPoint. We usually choose a pleasing color palette, with the sentiment being “as long as you can distinguish one color from another, it’s okay, right?”

Not exactly. Not all colors are created equal. In terms of visual perception, some colors jump out at you while others recede into the background (see Figure 8.4). This is because of variances in hue and saturation.

Figure 8.4 The range of colors perceived by humans is uneven. (Equiluminant colors from the NASA Ames Color Tool)

A very bright color is going to draw more visual attention than a more desaturated color. This makes sense if we consider how things farther away from us tend to be hazier and desaturated. If something in the distance is noticed, it’s likely because it’s moving or contrasts with the surroundings.

This same disparity applies to color hues. We tend to look at color charts like this one and assume that the extreme ends of red, green, and blue are on equal footing.

However, because of the wavelengths of these colors and how our eyes perceive color, we see green as brighter than red, which itself is brighter than blue.

How Is This Knowledge Useful?

While it’s nice to think that precise color values are interchangeable (setting aside any cultural associations), your perception doesn’t work that way. In the same way that certain frequencies on the radio come in clearer than others, certain colors do the same. You need to account for, or at least consider, the unevenness of color perception.

In the example in Figure 8.5, you see the same eight-segment pie chart. The example on the right uses all high-saturation colors while the example on the left mixes high- and low- saturation colors.

Figure 8.5 Two pie charts showing identical information. The chart on the left uses colors of mixed saturation, meaning some colors will naturally stand out more than others, making this an uneven representation.

Functionally, these both communicate the same thing. But consider how you perceive each. With the example on the right, use of high saturation is consistent; no color should be more prominent than another. But when you mix high and low saturation, as with the example on the left, the higher saturation colors tend to “pop” more—drawing you to these segments. While this chart is more aesthetically pleasing (as it uses half as many colors), it’s also a bit misleading—notice how your eye is drawn to the orange segment in the upper right. The lesson? Assuming the goal is objectivity and truthfulness, you’d want to avoid mixing saturations and hues that are unevenly perceived. If the goal were the opposite, to draw attention away from or toward a particular bit of data, you could manipulate perception by adjusting saturation and hue (not that this is being recommended!). This ability to direct attention by using bolder colors is something that everyone should be aware of and intentional about.

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suzanneshannon · 5 years ago

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Figure It Out

Color is, without a doubt, the visual element most often misunderstood and misused.

Except…

How Many Colors Are in the Rainbow?

To put this shared vocabulary into perspective, let’s start with something that is constant and beyond our language: the visible spectrum of light that is a rainbow.

When Colors Are Constant

Why then, should diverse cultures over thousands of years arrive at the same set of color language definitions? Are colors an absolute thing? Not exactly.

The Subjectivity of Color Identification

This Wikipedia entry sums up the debate rather nicely:

An Argument for Relative Linguistics

Specific examples in support of this argument:

In Russian culture, there is no generic concept of blue. Rather, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy).

The Himba tribe from Namibia recognizes five basic colors.

Figure 8.2 This comic from Randall Munroe of xkcd nicely illustrates the subjectivity of the shared color language for English speakers.[5]

An Argument for the Universal

While the broader debate is not necessarily concluded, the general consensus seems to be that “in color, relativism appears to overlay a universalist foundation.”

Why All the Fuss over Color?

Which leads us to…

Color, Cultures, and Universal Associations

The Color Purple

“Pink Is for Girls, Blue Is for Boys”

A Smithsonian review of Paoletti’s book,[10] goes on to add:

Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

Figure 8.3 - The “blue is for boys and pink is for girls” concept was a manufactured one, originating in the first half of the 20th century.

Not All Colors Are Created Equal

Figure 8.4 The range of colors perceived by humans is uneven. (Equiluminant colors from the NASA Ames Color Tool)

This same disparity applies to color hues. We tend to look at color charts like this one and assume that the extreme ends of red, green, and blue are on equal footing.

However, because of the wavelengths of these colors and how our eyes perceive color, we see green as brighter than red, which itself is brighter than blue.

How Is This Knowledge Useful?

In the example in Figure 8.5, you see the same eight-segment pie chart. The example on the right uses all high-saturation colors while the example on the left mixes high- and low- saturation colors.

Figure It Out published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

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thegrvoflightning · 8 years ago

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How After Twelve Pages I Hated A Novel

I set myself two rules to always follow in life.

1. I shall never enter a church for a religious purpose. 2. I shall never read the Bible cover to cover.

Those two rules exist as I am a strict practicing Athiest. However I later made a third rule: I shall never read Twilight in my life.

Well. Seven reviews in and I’m throwing the third rule out the window. Mainly because I only wasn’t wishing to read it due to what other reviewers had said but considering following the crowd is something to not do as a reviewer. I chose to do the first book of the series.

(NOTE: I am using an Online PDF for this review.)

The book begins with a verse from Genesis 2:17. Ok. Religious ideals. Already. We’re off to a great start. The preface refers to character who is facing death at that moment, Before the book enters into the first chapter.

We soon get this gem of dialogue. (NOTE: Italics represents text from the book.)

It was to Forks that I now exiled myself— an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks.

I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city. “Bella,” my mom said to me — the last of a thousand times — before I got on the plane. “You don’t have to do this."

"I want to go,” I lied.

Are. You. Serious. In three pages I’m already questioning the logic. Why would Bella go to a city she hates when she can stay with her Mum in a city she likes.

On the drive to her Dad’s house, she is told she is to be presented with an old truck as a “homecoming gift”. Quickly after this Bella following thanking her dad for the truck, states in narration “…No need to add that my being happy in Forks is an impossibility.”

So why did you choose to go to the place then if you didn’t like it?!

Soon after Bella notes that Forks is beautiful while also saying. “It was too green — an alien planet.” So. Beautiful nature makes a place alien now?! Well then. By that logic. You Bella would find the Amazonian Rainforest and the Blue Mountains as alien planets. Which I cannot comprehend whatsoever.

Upon actually arriving to her Dad’s house, she discovers the truck and states in regards to the truck “Wow, Dad, I love it! Thanks!” Following a detailed description of the bedroom, The reader is given a description of Bella’s traits and appearance and in all honesty, this line actually poked out at me cause I can connect with it. “I didn’t have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating myself — and harming both myself and anyone else who stood too close.”

I’m similar. I watch sports a lot. (Yes. I’ll review a sports match at some point.) Although. I’ve never really played sports myself because I’m bad at them.

Following more detailed descriptions of certain things, the following line is stated.

“The sloshing of my new waterproof boots was unnerving. I missed the normal crunch of gravel as I walked.”

YOU. DID. NOT. HAVE. TO. COME. HERE. I am six pages into this PDF and this book has as yet not provided a reason as to why Bella chose to go to Forks. To misquote the Nostalgia Critic. Explain book, explain!

The book then enters into more descriptive detail regarding the truck and provides an introduction to Bella’s first day at school tomorrow

Following a student (Eric) introducing themselves to Bella. The following exchange occurs.

“So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, huh?” he asked. “Very." "It doesn’t rain much there, does it?” “Three or four times a year.” “Wow, what must that be like?” he wondered. “Sunny,” I told him. “You don’t look very tan.” “My mother is part albino.” He studied my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn’t mix. A few months of this and I’d forget how to use sarcasm.

It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn’t mix. A few months of this and I’d forget how to use sarcasm.

EVEN IN CONTEXT THAT MAKES NO SENSE. No seriously it doesn’t. How do Clouds & a sense of humor even go together, in addition how would a few months of “this” lead to you forgetting how to use SARCASM. I’m eight pages in and it feels like this is going to be a long ride.

Following that, The novel states this.

“The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught”

So… You hate the TEACHER because he teaches a SUBJECT you don’t like. Ok. That’s a great moral for teens: If you hate the subject, hate the teacher.

NO. THAT’S NOT HOW IT SHOULD WORK. AT ALL. You hate the subject, you don’t hate the person teaching it unless they do bad things to make you dislike them in addition to the subject.

and Then the novel presents us with this gem.

“After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map.”

Ok. SCREW THIS. YOU ON THE FIRST DAY LIED TO PEOPLE WHOM TRIED TO BE FRIENDLY. WHAT A BITCH AND TO ADD TO THAT. YOUR MAIN CONCERN WASN’T THAT YOU LIED. IT WAS THAT YOU’D REQUIRE THE MAP?! YOUR PRIOTIES ARE OUT. OF. ORDER. (I admit sometimes my prioties are out of order too but not to this degree.)

After that horrific line. The text continues the descriptive detail that has been a feature of this book by describing the students at lunch. Following that is the first mention of Edward. After a long plot development ideal the novel states "That’s Edward. He’s gorgeous, of course, but don’t waste your time. He doesn’t date. Apparently none of the girls here are good-looking enough for him.“

So we have a lying bitch as the main character and a shallow boy who doesn’t date girls solely cause they’re not beautiful as an eventual main. OK. WHO THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO LIKE THEN!

Following all of that the text eventually brings this up. “As I walked down the aisle to introduce myself to the teacher and get my slip signed, I was watching him surreptitiously. Just as I passed, he suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face — it was hostile, furious. I looked away quickly, shocked, going red again. I stumbled over a book in the walkway and had to catch myself on the edge of a table. The girl sitting there giggled.”

Ok. I actually don’t know what surreptitiously means. (Considering SpongeBob also used this word once I’ll say the following. BIG WORDS MEAN NOTHING IF YOUR AUDIENCE CAN’T UNDERSTAND THEM.) Also why is Edward so hostile and furious when first seeing Bella. BELLA DID NOTHING TO HIM!

You know. I’m sorry. Upon reading this “I sat frozen in my seat, staring blankly after him. He was so mean. It wasn’t fair. I began gathering up my things slowly, trying to block the anger that filled me, for fear my eyes would tear up. For some reason, my temper was hardwired to my tear ducts. I usually cried when I was angry, a humiliating tendency.” I quit. I gave this a fair chance. I read a chapter and hated it. There is no way after that I even wish to continue this. Alright… I need something to make me happy. What’s next?

The Crowning Moment of Awesome of my favourite cartoon?

(NOTE: Edited to remove criticism of referring to other authors.)

#twilight #hate #review

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genkidesurun · 8 years ago

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I’m bored and have no story (or curhatan) to share... so it’s time to duel answer some questionnaire! Actually, the original post [here] got more than ninety questions, but I’ll just pick the ones I’m interested in and alter some of them a bit.

1. If you had to be gay for a day, what celebrity would you most like to take on a date?

It’s arduous to project the kind of girl that’ll draw my attention. But since I have the hots for nerdy guys (with fast-paced speech, silly gesticulations, and, of course, glasses!) like John and Hank Green, I’ll probably go for girls with such similitudes. Hmmm... Emily Graslie, perhaps?

6. What are the top five most contrasting songs on your playlist?

When you have both metals and nasyeeds in your playlist... It’s like what Wali called ‘tomat’ (red--tobat maksiat). All those fucking and shitting and hell, to praising The Lord and acknowledging your penitence and baper-ing; repeating over and over and over and over...

8. If you could make just ONE change to this world, what would it be and why?

Erase the notion of witches (wow, I’m feeling like Madoka; ups, spoiler alert). Can I wish for immortality?

9. If you could wake up tomorrow and be fluent in three additional languages, which would you choose?

Quenya, Parseltongue, aaaaannddd SIMLISH, YEAH! Have you listened to Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night sung in gibberish--I mean--Simlish? You really should!

11. What are the top five movies to make you cry?

Hello Ghost

The Green Mile

Hachi: A Dog’s Tale

You’re the Apple of My Eye

Miracles in Cell No. 7

Yes, I’m such a crybaby. Hello Ghost and The Green Mile made me ugly the most.

12. What’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had? Describe it in detail.

Uh... overslept and missed exams. Good thing they were just dreams!

13. Would you rather raise 25 children or have the chance of ever having children taken away? Why?

WHY SHOULD I OPT FOR RAISING 25 CHILDREN?! AIN’T NOBODY HAD TIME (AND MONEY) FOR THAT.

17. If you had to lose one of the five senses, which would you choose and why?

Rather than senses, it’s probably better to discard emotions.

21. If your life was about to become like Cheaper by the Dozen and you were going to be saddled with twelve children, what would you name six girls and six boys?

Let’s say those children were orphans taken care by me. I’d happily give them the names of fictional characters! Before I familiarize you with my kids, let me introduce myself first: Karlisha “Kirun” Runa Niephaus, the caretaker and the custodian, along with Raine Virginia Sage and Damuron ‘Raven’ Schwann Oltorain.

(Boy) Vandesdelca ‘Van’ Musto Fende The big brother of Tear. As the result of his upbringing as an orphan at early age, as well as being the oldest in the orphanage, he became precocious, looking after his sister in their parents’ absence and willing to help the caretakers attending the other children while also struggling on his study. He was an amiable fellow and well-respected throughout the orphanage. Currently in the last year of senior-high and busy preparing himself for a law school.

(Girl) Mystearica ‘Tear’ Aura Fende Van’s baby sister who adored him dearly. She had grown into somewhat a wallflower; a shrinking violet. Although shy around people, Tear was a girl with a strong moral compass, never quivered to defend her friends from bullies. Like her brother, she had a beautiful, melodious voice that had brought her to become a choir member in both the town’s church, alongside Van, and her school. Currently a seventh-grader.

(Boy) Ffamran ‘Balthier’ mied Bunansa Both dashing and quick-witted, Balthier was the conspicious of all. His charm and eloquence could easily impress anyone he met, thus making him the most popular kid around. Albeit a bit self-centered at times, Balthier could show his altruitic side, especially when it came to his bestfriend’s affairs, Ramza. Currently a ninth-grader and a valuable player of his school’s basketball team.

(Boy) Ramza Lugria Beoulve A boy who survived from a wildfire that burned an entire village, including his parents, his beloved sister Alma, and his bestfriend Delita Heiral. His meek and tender disposition clicked perfectly with Balthier’s smug and jaunty manner, therefore creating a bridge of trust between them. Ramza had an eye for world history, spending most of his time in the library to read books and write essays. Currently a ninth-grader and established a close relationship with the history teacher Goffard Gaffgarion.

(Boy) Edgar Roni Figaro Sabin’s older twin brother who was an electronics hobbyist and a gamer. He was the technician around the house, repairing the appliances and, sometimes, modifying them. Knowing very well that he had insufficient funds to begin with, he befriended Cid Del Norte Marquez and worked at the latter’s workshop as a part-timer. Though a geek at heart, Edgar didn’t constrain himself as a mere geek; he was surprisingly flirtatious, but to no avail. Currently an eleventh-grader.

(Boy) Sabin Rene Figaro Edgar’s younger twin brother. Unlike his prudent and erudite twin, Sabin was quick-tempered and straightforward, and excelled at physical activities, particularly martial arts. Under the tutelage of his karate master Cyan Garamonde, Sabin achieved black-belt in a no-time and had won many tournaments. Of all their differences, he and his brother shared the same unflappable determination and ambitions. Currently an eleventh-grader.

(Girl) Estellise “Estelle” Sidos Heurassein Cute, courteous, and bright; Estelle clearly caught everyone’s attention, but still being humble as she looked up to Philia. She was one of those bibliophiles who could even recite various passages from heart. After the incident involving her two bestfriends, Yuri Lowell and Flynn Scifo, Estelle promised herself to become a splendid doctor, thus leading her to be studious, hoping to obtain a scholarship. Currently a tenth-grader, a model student, and a member of the science club.

(Girl) Margarita “Rita” Blastia Mordio A curious prodigy with an IQ of 160; however, lacked of social competence. She liked to correct people whose perceptivity was wrong, which inadvertently annoyed them unbeknownst to her. Rita was close to Raine’s little brother Genis due to their similar level of intelligence and close age, and to Estelle who always welcomed her presence. Currently a fifth-grader.

(Boy) Genis Kloitz Sage The genius younger brother of caretaker Raine whose brain power could disparage the grown-ups’. Even as a child, he could solve his sister’s undergraduate math problems and sometimes engaged in Edgar’s projects. Due to his superior intellect, he demonstrated repellent disposition and was cynical towards others, but would greatly respect everyone with the same intelligence as him. Currently a sixth-grader and had a crush on his P.E. teacher Presea Combatir.

(Girl) Rutee Atwight Katrea An upbeat, tomboyish lass with misunderstandable attitude. Having a firm moral sense yet being irascible at the same time, Rutee could easily pick a fight with anyone she deemed erroneous. Despite this shrewish demeanor, she was in fact solicitous and attentive towards her close relations. Due to the hapless circumstances, Rutee became eager to earn money, working as anything as her employer wanted her to be. Currently an eighth-grader.

(Girl) Philia Clemente Felice Like your everyday bespectacled girl, Philia was smart, genteel, and naive; pretty much a foil to Rutee. A devout Christian, she highly regarded her belief and attended the church every week. Through her science teacher Batista Diego, nature and chemical experiments had greatly interested her as she aimed to be a chemist in the future. Currently an eleventh-grader, a model student, and the chairwoman of the science club.

(Girl) Rydia Asura Mist The youngest and newest in the orphanage, being five years in age. She was rescued by the sailors Cecil Harvey and Kain Highwind from ship drowning, a disaster that killed her mother and developed her fear of waterbody. She loved animals dearly as she often visited the town’s farm and pet house with the company of one of the caretakers.

25. What’s the most frightening thing you’ve ever seen in your life?

Failures.

26. Name five books you think everyone should read and give a brief synopsis for each.

Too lazy for the synopsis. Just check them out on GoodReads:

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (by Agatha Christie) Lemme proudly present one of Christie’s masterpieces. I personally found this more exquisite than And Then There Were None.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (by Bill Bryson) I know Sagan’s Cosmos and Hawking’s The Brief History of Time are popular as hell, but hell... they were published in the 80′s (but still gold though, you really should check them out). We need newer ones and Bryson’s is certainly the best--for me, at least, at this time--in elaborating big history and the development of science.

Why Evolution Is True (by Jerry A. Coyne) A nifty allusion for Darwin’s The Origin of Species. No. Don’t protest. Dawkins probably produces more of this kind of books than Coyne does and, of course, is far more popular than any evolutionary biologists alive. Dawkins is a brilliant writer and all, but Coyne has the apt for making the theory easier to comprehend.

Little Women (by Louisa M. Alcott) Still the best bildungsroman. Ever.

Speaker for the Dead (by Orson S. Card) Sci-fi, philosopy, anthropology, politics, religion; all in one. Yes. I’m such a weirdo to enjoy the second book far more than the first one.

27. Do you believe one can fall out of love?

It’s a fact. Why bother asking anyway.

28. What are your three favourite sounding words?

Peculiar Don’t you think the word ‘peculiar’ has such a peculiar pronunciation?

Halcyon Archaic one, yes. So old-fashioned that Kirun--who fancies classics--is indulged by its subliminal beauty. Moreover, it was used as the title of a Bleach’s chapter: ‘Goodbye, Halcyon Days’. Aren’t ya romantic, Orihime?

Preposterous I like to shout out this word--in my solitude, of course--whenever expressing my disbelief.

31. List the seven deadly sins in order of the one you feel you commit the most to the one you feel you commit the least.

Pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, then lust.

32. What’s your current desktop picture?

46. What’s your favourite ever television commercial?

youtube

49. What’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to you?

“Kirun kan pacarnya aku.” -- by some girl

51. Name five facts that the vast majority of people won’t know about you.

I’m a girl (see? I knew you’d be surprised).

Clearly not a fujoshi. What? You guys don’t believe me? Fine then.

Though having [too] many guy friends, all of my bestfriends are girls; which are, of course, very few in numbers.

Yes, I’m very aware that I love Gaara so dearly, but I’m still normal too, you know, since I had crushes in real life. And they were boys. I know, I know, I’m so gay, right? Wait, what am I exacly; male of female?

Contrary to popular belief, I’m actually a piiiipp who wishes to openly express my opinions and matters without worrying any prejudice nor distressing the ones I love.

54. Share five goals you want to complete in the next 30 days.

Sing Asterisk (of Orange Range’s) fluently. This one’s freaking hard.