#but i wrote a lot so......... i share now | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whocaresstillthelouvre · 3 days ago

Text

Foxglove Downs Chapter 5: The Dinner

Pairing: Marcus Acacius x Lucius Verus x Female Reader Rating: Mature. Summary: Your parents come into town for the annual World Championships party held at Foxglove Downs. Lucius and you share a private moment in the stables, while Marcus is forced into an awkward situation when both you and Lucius have had too much to drink. Warnings: Love triangle, horse talk, jealousy, pining, angst, flirting, a kiss, another kiss, alcohol, age gap (Marcus is in his 40’s, Lucius is in his 20’s). Reader is in her 30's, has hair, and has a nickname: Sunny. Words: 4,150

A/N: I'm very proud of this chapter and wrote it off of my outline in like... two days. I wouldn't be as proud of this if it wasn't for @mothandpidgeon and @schnarfer's input mixed with @devineconjuring's input *AND* dot devouring. I can't believe there are only have 3 chapters left!

Foxglove Downs Masterlist Masterlist

Previous Chapter

—-

The smell of pancakes wakes you up early on Friday morning. The aroma’s a welcome comfort after the busy week you’ve had preparing for Rome and getting over Marcus leaving you standing half-naked and alone in your foyer. You still feel foolish for throwing yourself at him the way you did.

You pull a robe on and make your way to the kitchen to find your parents sitting at their usual spots around the table. They’ve only been here for a day and they’ve already taken over the house. It’s a yearly tradition now–they waltz in right before the World Championships, usually a welcome pair of helping hands. But this year, their presence only seems to serve as a constant reminder of your feelings for Marcus and Lucius, along with Marcus’s history with your family.

Platters full of pancakes, eggs, and bacon sit on the table. Suddenly, you feel half your age again, sitting at the same dining table where you grew up eating every meal, lovelorn over Marcus Acacius.

Your mom sends you a sweet smile as she flops a stack of pancakes on your plate. “How’d you sleep?”

“Pretty good,” you reply as you drizzle warm syrup over the fluffy pancakes.

Your dad looks up from his newspaper, his reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. "I'm heading down to the stables in a bit to help Marcus get ready for Rome.”

You nod, trying to appear nonchalant at the mention of his name.

“Oh, Marcus,” your mom sighs wistfully. “I miss having him around. He sure was here a lot. He’s always been so kind.”

You feel a pang of nostalgia mixed with a twinge of regret at her words as you take a bite of pancake.

“I have so much to do for the send-off party tomorrow,” your mom says, fretting over her to-do list.

It’s a tradition your mom has insisted upon since they took over operations of the stables from your grandparents. Every Saturday before the World Championships, a large party is held as a thank you to the staff and to wish good luck to the competitors. You find the whole thing kind of ridiculous, always concerned about how the loud music and revelry will affect the horses–but you also love a good party.

—-

The warm afternoon sun heats your skin as you make your way from the stables to the clubhouse. You grasp the brass handle of the door and swing it open.

Two heads swivel your way, and the conversation halts. Your father beams at you from his armchair, but your eyes lock with a pair of brown eyes. Marcus shifts awkwardly and glances away.

"Sunny! My girl! There you are," your father greets you, oblivious to the tension. "I was just catching up with Marcus after our session. Come, join us!"

You hesitate in the doorway, heart pounding. You remember the last time you saw Marcus–his lips against yours, your dress strewn across the foyer tiles. How can you sit beside him and chat casually with your father after that? Marcus has been your dad's mentee and protégé for years. This–whatever this is–complicates everything.

Mustering a bright smile, you perch stiffly on the edge of the sofa, hyper-aware of Marcus a mere foot away. "Good to see you, Marcus," you say with forced nonchalance. "I trust you've been well?"

He clears his throat and nods, refusing to look at you. "Yes, quite well. And you?"

"Managing. Lots to do, as always." You fiddle with the equestrian pin on your lapel, a nervous tick.

An awkward beat passes. Your father glances between the two of you, slightly puzzled, but presses on. "As I was saying…"

You try to focus on his words–something about thinking the lower quadrant of practice grounds could use a new jumping course–but your mind whirls, and all you can hear is the pulse thrumming in your ears.

"Don't you agree, Sunny?" Your father's question brings you back to the present.

"Oh, yes, of course," you stammer.

The door swings open with a flourish, and Lucius strides in, fresh from the practice arena. His hair is tousled and damp with sweat, his blue eyes brightening when he smiles at you.

"Ah, Lucius! Good to see you, champ!” your father says. “Come join us.”

Lucius saunters over, but instead of taking a seat, he perches himself on the armrest of your chair right next to you. His arm brushes against your shoulder as he leans back.

From the corner of your eye, you see Marcus stiffen. You take the opportunity to casually lean closer to Lucius, wanting to see Marcus’s reaction. His gaze bores into Lucius, jaw clenched tight.

Oblivious to the silent war being waged, your father continues on. “I must say, having the two most elite jumpers in the world call Foxglove Downs their home stable is quite impressive!"

"You flatter me, sir,” Marcus’s deep voice rumbles. “None of it would be possible without Sunny."

You feel your cheeks heating at his praise, a small smile tugging at the corners of your mouth. "I'm just doing my job," you demur, fiddling with the hem of your jacket, refusing to look at him.

Your father waves off your modesty. "Nonsense, my dear. This place is lucky to have you at the helm.”

You feel a warmth spread through your chest at his words and smile. “Thanks, dad.”

You feel like most days, you’re seeking validation from your peers, your riders, your workers. A single woman like you, running a facility like Foxglove Downs–the pressure is a constant companion, especially with Marcus and Lucius training here.

As you sit sandwiched between two world-class riders, it’s hard not to feel the enormity of your responsibility. Every decision you make affects not just the horses and staff but also the careers of these two elite athletes.

On some nights, when you walk up the hill back home, you can almost feel the ghosts of your ancestors watching, judging, and expecting you not just to uphold but elevate the legacy of Foxglove Downs. What would they think if they knew that you know how both Marcus and Lucius’s lips feel against yours?

—-

By Saturday night, you’re ready for the party. It’s been an exhausting week, filled with finalizing preparations for Rome, fending off requests from media who want a glimpse of your two handsome riders, your parents’ constant attention and doting, and your unresolved feelings for Marcus and Lucius.

Your trench coat flutters around your legs as you make your way down the path toward the stables and clubhouse. The evening breeze is always colder when it rolls off the hills, but there’s a warmth surrounding Foxglove Downs tonight.

Lucius’s familiar green Porsche pulls up to the small valet booth just as you reach the bottom of the hill. He gets out of his car, the lights reflecting off his light blue eyes. He jogs over when he sees you, looking effortlessly cool in a simple, tan sports coat over a plain white shirt and well-tailored trousers.

"Good evening, beautiful,” he says, offering you his arm to escort you into the clubhouse. “I’ve been looking forward to this night for months.”

Your mom and her event planner are miracle workers. The clubhouse is transformed–the dark wooden ceiling beams draped with twinkling lights, floral arrangements placed on every surface, and the overhead lights have been turned down, casting everything in golden shadows.

As you scan the room, your eyes finally land on Marcus. Your breath catches in your throat when you see him, his broad body clad in a buttoned-up black suit with white piping. He isn’t wearing a shirt underneath his jacket, your tongue darts out to lick your lips when you see the hint of his bronze neck and chest. It’s as if he can feel your eyes on him, he looks towards you before his eyes dart down to your arm, intertwined with Lucius’s, before his eyes quickly return to yours.

His brows quickly furrow as Lucius steps behind you to help slide your coat off your shoulders. The same cream dress you wore just last week on your date with Marcus is slowly revealed, his eyes widening as he takes in the sight of you in it; his Adam's apple bobs as he swallows hard. Your confidence blooms, much like the delicate flowers embroidered all over it, as you see something in his eyes as he recognizes the dress–regret? Desire? You ignore it. Call it petty, but you want to make him pay.

Lucius gasps when you turn towards him, his eyes roaming over your body. “Wow,” he exhales. “You look amazing.”

“Thanks,” you respond, grabbing a flute of champagne as a waiter passes by with a tray full of drinks. You can almost still feel the coolness of the brick against your back and smell the scent of Marcus’s cologne mingling with your perfume as you swallow down the bubbly, no doubt expensive, champagne.

—-

The party is in full swing. Drinks flow freely as the equestrians and stable staff mingle. You’re hyper-aware of Marcus’s eyes following you around the room as you float from group to group, making small talk and accepting congratulations on Foxglove’s successes this year.

“Dinner is served!” your mother announces, ushering everyone into the dining room.

You take a seat at the table covered with floral centerpieces and flickering candles. As you settle into your chair, Marcus approaches. His strong hands grasp the back of your chair, gently pushing you in, his fingers brushing against your bare shoulders. A shiver is sent down your spine as you turn and softly thank him.

He moves to pull out the chair next to you, but before he can take his seat, Lucius swiftly slides into the chair, flashing him a mischievous grin and a wink.

“Why, thank you,” Lucius says, his voice dripping with mock sincerity. “How gentlemanly of you.”

Marcus's jaw clenches, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looks down at Lucius. The tension crackles between them as he tries to maintain his composure.

Thankfully, your father clinks his fork against a glass, settling everyone down as he stands at the head of the table. Marcus quickly moves to take the seat across from you, next to your mother.

“Thank you, everybody, for joining us for our annual send-off party.” His voice carries across the room, warm and full of pride. “Every year, when we return to Foxglove Downs, it feels like we’ve never left. This place is more than just a stable. It feels like home, and I know many of you feel the same way.”

He pauses as he looks across everyone gathered and then at you. “To my dear Sunny, my little girl who’s grown into the most capable woman I know. My girl, you truly are the heart and soul of Foxglove Downs. To Sunny!” Your dad raises his glass high.

"To Sunny," Lucius and Marcus echo, their voices blending in your head. Lucius downs his flute of champagne while Marcus takes a small sip. You lift your champagne flute towards your dad and give him a smile, tears pricking your eyes.

As you sit back and sip your drinks while waiting for dinner to be brought out, Lucius stretches his arm along the back of your chair. His fingertips lightly graze your bare shoulder every so often as he animatedly leans over to chat with your parents. You can feel Marcus's eyes zeroing in on that point of contact, his grip tightening almost imperceptibly around his glass.

You find yourself relaxing more and more during dinner. The wine flows freely, and Lucius keeps topping off your drink with a wink.

“To the most beautiful stable manager,” Lucius declares, raising his glass towards yours.

You laugh, clinking your glass against his. “You mean the only stable manager who will put up with your BS.”

He clutches his chest in mock offense. “You wound me, darling.”

The wine has softened the edges, and you find yourself leaning into his playful banter. You can feel Marcus watching the exchange with a carefully neutral expression. But you notice the way his jaw tightens whenever Lucius leans close or brushes his hand against your arm.

—

The band starts up after dinner, and as the night wears on, the music grows louder. You begin to worry about the horses–they’re not used to this much noise and commotion so late at night. Excusing yourself from a dull conversation, you slip out of the clubhouse. The fresh air feels good, a relief after the stuffy warmth of the party as you walk to the stables.

The stable is calm, and the horses are happy–most are peacefully dozing away. A breath of relief escapes your lungs. You stop at Maximus’s stall, who’s still awake and walks over to greet you.

“Hey there, big guy,” you whisper, reaching out to stroke the velvet of his nose. “Sorry about the ruckus.”

You suddenly feel a warm weight settle onto your shoulders. The smell of spicy vanilla and citrus surrounds you as Lucius’s jacket envelops you.

"It looks like you need this," Lucius says softly, his breath tickling your ear.

You turn to face him, pulling the jacket closer around you. "Thank you,” you smile, your eyes falling to the silver flask in his hand.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself,” you observe, nodding towards the flask.

Lucius’s usually bright eyes are slightly clouded as he takes a drink from the flask before offering it to you.

“Liquid courage. I’ve been nervous as hell about Rome.”

You take the flask from his outstretched hand. “Really? You look good out there.”

He stares off into the distance as he leans against the stable wall to steady himself. “Thanks,” he says. “There are so many expectations, especially when you’re constantly being compared to Marcus Acacius…” he trails off.

"What do you mean?" You take a drink from the flask and wince as the whiskey burns.

“He casts this long shadow, you know? He’s a legend. And me? I’m still the new kid trying to prove himself.” The vulnerability in his voice surprises you. "Every time I step into that arena, the crowd is all wondering if I’ll be the one to finally dethrone Marcus.”

"But you always seem so confident."

Lucius chuckles with a hint of bitterness, his voice coming out a bit slower as the whiskey hits. "That's the trick, right? Act like you've got it all figured out." He turns to face you, his eyes searching your face. "But you… you see right through that, don't you?"

“I don’t know about that.”

“You do,” he insists, taking a step closer. “You’ve never been fooled by my act.”

"Lucius…" you start, but he cuts you off.

"Listen, I've been wanting to ask–that day at the lake, was it too much? You've seemed distant ever since."

You shake your head. "No, it wasn't too much. It's just–it’s complicated."

"How so?"

You struggle to find the right words. "I guess I never thought someone like you would be interested in someone like me. You’re young and cool; I’m just… me.”

His eyebrows rise, and his mouth drops. "You’re kidding me, right? Sunny, you're incredible. How could I not be interested?”

You feel a warmth blooming within you from his words, an invisible force making you lean closer to him.

He takes a step closer. "But what really gets me," Lucius says, his voice dropping to a low whisper, "is your kindness. The way you care for everyone here–human and horse."

You tilt your head up towards him.

“Sunny,” he breathes, and his lips are on yours–sloppy, urgent. He presses you back against the stable wall and he tastes of whiskey… overwhelmingly. Your fingers tangle in his hair, his body pressing against yours. One of his hands slides down your waist, his fingers splaying across your back to pull you closer. His stubble scratches roughly against your chin as he tilts his head, trying to deepen the kiss.

You gasp into his mouth as his fingers find the hem of your dress, slowly inching it upwards. Suddenly, you're hit with the vivid flashback of Marcus's hands on this very same dress, his lips trailing down your neck. You pull away abruptly, panting.

"Oh god, Lucius," you breathe. "What am I doing?"

"Kissing me," he responds with a sly grin, leaning in again, chasing your mouth.

You put a hand on his chest, stopping him. "I'm sorry, I just… I can't do this."

He steps back. "Right," he says, his voice tight. "Of course. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…" He trails off, fumbling for his flask. He takes a long pull, his eyes bloodshot when he lowers it.

"We should head back," you suggest gently.

He nods, swaying slightly as he turns towards the stable door. You grab his arm to steady him as he trips over his own feet.

"I should probably just get out of here," he says, fumbling in his pockets. "Where're my keys?"

You freeze. "Lucius, you can't drive like this."

"I'll be fine," he insists, his words slightly slurred.

You try to think quickly, changing tactics. “Actually, I can’t find your keys. Let’s go inside and look for them.”

You steer him towards the clubhouse, keeping a steady hand on his arm as you lead him back.

Now, you welcome the warmth and noise of the party as Lucius beelines towards a plush chair and flops down on it. “I’ll just wait here while you look.”

You nod to him and pretend to search for his keys, your mind racing. The room spins slightly, you’re in no state to drive either. You certainly can’t let anyone else at the stables know just how drunk Lucius is right before Rome.

Your eyes scan the room, desperately searching for a solution. And then, you spot your solution. Marcus is across the room talking with a group of other riders. He’s barely touched alcohol all night, sticking only to sparkling water after the toast.

Taking a deep, steeling breath, you walk over to him.

“Marcus,” you say softly, touching his arm. He turns, surprise flickering across his face when he sees you wearing Lucius’s jacket, your hair tousled and lips swollen. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

He nods, excusing himself from the group, and you lead him to a quiet corner.

"Lucius needs to be driven home," you explain in a low voice.

Marcus's eyebrow quirks up, a look of shock crossing his face.

"He's had too much to drink," you continue. "He thinks he can drive, but…"

Marcus sighs, looking conflicted.

"Please, Marcus," you implore, your eyes meeting his, your hand reaching out to squeeze his arm.

He holds your gaze before nodding. “Alright.”

"I'll go with you. You know, since I-I've been to his place before."

His eyebrows furrow slightly, and his jaw tenses. He looks behind you to Lucius and back to you. It’s as if a flash of green passes through his irises as he nods, and you make your way over to Lucius

"Lucius, Marcus is going to drive you home," you tell him gently.

Lucius pouts, his blue eyes unfocused. "Don't wanna go with Marcus," he slurs.

"I'm coming too," you assure him, and his face brightens immediately.

"Oh, alright then," he agrees easily, stumbling to his feet.

Marcus returns with your coats, helping you into yours. His fingers linger as he adjusts your lapel, his eyes soft.

“Thanks,” you softly say.

"You're welcome.”

“I’m going to go find my parents. I’ll meet you at your car.”

You quickly find your mom, pulling her aside as she animatedly talks to a circle of friends, wine glass in hand.

“I’m going to Lucius’s with Marcus.”

Your mom, clearly tipsy, giggles. “Oh my, both of them? How exciting!”

You roll your eyes. “God, it’s not like that. Jesus.” “Oh, darling,” she sighs, patting your cheek. “I do have eyes. They’re both quite handsome, aren’t they?”

Now’s definitely not the time. Shaking your head, you tell her you’ll be back later and hurry out to join Marcus and Lucius.

—-

The last time you were in Marcus’s car, his hand was on your thigh. Now, that same hand is turning white as he grasps the steering wheel. Lucius is sprawled out in the backseat, his shirt riding up to reveal his stomach.

"Nice car, Marcus," Lucius drawls. "Is the station wagon parked at home?" He laughs at his own joke as Marcus’s jaw tightens, staring straight ahead and ignoring Lucius’s jab.

“Hey, how’s the arthritis treating you these days?" Lucius slurs.

You turn in your seat. “Be quiet, please, Lucius. We’re almost home.”

He grins lazily at you. "Of course, love. Anything for you."

You hear Marcus inhale sharply, his jaw tensing as he turns down Lucius’s long driveway.

—-

You’ve had to move many stubborn horses before, but getting a drunken Lucius Verus up to his room is ridiculous. Marcus supports Lucius’s weight as you fish the keys out of his jacket pocket and unlock the door.

“And thiiiis is my hooouse,” Lucius drawls as Marcus practically carries him up the steps to his bedroom.

Lucius stumbles towards his bed and collapses on it with a big huff. Marcus lingers at the threshold before he takes a step in with a deep sigh.

He looks uncomfortable, and you understand why. He knows this is the same room you’ve slept in, the same room you dreamed about him in.

You send Marcus as close to a reassuring smile as you can while you kneel down to remove Lucius’s shoes.

Lucius props himself up on his elbows, his blue eyes swirling under a drunken haze. "You look good in my room.”

Marcus’s arms are folded across his chest as he stands by the door. He looks so intimidating yet so unsure of himself.

Cringing internally, you avoid Marcus’s eyes as you help Lucius under his covers before hurrying to the adjoining bathroom to grab some aspirin and a glass of water. When you return, Lucius is already passed out, snoring softly.

"Good?" Marcus asks quietly as you set the pills and water on the nightstand.

You nod, following him out of the room and down the stairs.

—-

Marcus is quiet and tense during the drive back to Foxglove Downs. You softly clear your throat, catching his attention.

"Thank you for helping me with Lucius," you say softly. "I really appreciate it."

His eyes flick to you briefly before returning to the road. "Of course," he whispers.

You fidget with the hem of your dress, remembering how Marcus’s hands felt on it.

He sighs, his hands tensing against the steering wheel. "I want to apologize for what happened between us last week. It wasn't right of me to leave like that as quickly as I did." His voice is low and remorseful.

You swallow hard. "It's okay.” Though you know it’s not, and it’s all you’ve thought about for the past week.

"No, it wasn’t okay. I just–I want you to know that I liked what happened between us. A lot. But there are so many complicated parts to this. I've known you for so long, you’re important to my career, and your family…"

You nod. “I get it. There’s a lot of history.”

His words sink in as hope and trepidation fills your heart. You understand all the complications, but part of you wishes to throw caution to the wind. You wish it were simpler, whatever this impossible situation between you and Marcus is.

He enters the gates of Foxglove Downs and drives up the hill to your home.

The memories of the disastrous end of your date and the realization of your adolescent fantasies flood back, overwhelming you as Marcus’s car idles in front of your home. The silence between you stretches until you thank him again and reach to open your door. You try to hide the pleasant shock that crosses your face as he turns off the engine and gets out, quickly coming around to help you out of the car.

He walks you to the front steps, each movement feeling familiar.

"Thank you again," you say, turning to face him.

He steps closer, his intense eyes searching your face. "I want you to know I'm here for you. Whenever you want me—if you want me."

Your breath catches at his words as you stare into each other's eyes. Slowly, you lean in and press your lips to his in a soft, hesitant kiss.

He kisses you back, cradling your face in his large hands. Your heart races as he kisses and savors you before he pulls away breathlessly and rests his forehead against yours.

“I’ll see you in Rome,” he whispers against your lips. With one last soft caress of your cheek, he pulls away and walks back to his car.

You watch him drive away, this time with your dress still on.

—-

Next stop!

—-

Tagging those who asked and some friends! Let me know if you'd like to be added or removed.

@ohheypedrito, @schnarfer, @magpiepills, @sawymredfox, @devineconjuring

@mothandpidgeon, @hellfire-state-of-mind, @darkheartgatita, @umnitsa, @christinamadsen

@pedrit0-pascalit0, @ace-turned-confused, @itwasntimethatdidit40, @lotusbxtch, @almostfoxglove

@lady--lynn, @chrissy-forfucksakes-wakeup, @copperhalfcent, @ferns-fics, @thesoftdumbass

45 notes · View notes

wisteriawyvern · 2 days ago

Text

AAAA Thank you so much for the tag! So mine is actually my screen name on most all platforms, and I was trying to choose a unique name that fit me when I was planning to get started streaming on Twitch. I wrote down all of my favorite things on paper, and spent at least a month throwing different combinations together until WisteriaWyvern stuck out. Wisteria is one of my favorite flowers, I love when they bloom, I love the way their petals look like lizard scales, I love the colors they turn, and I love that they are so so gorgeous, but also extremely invasive and have to be constantly tended (that spoke to me with my invasive thoughts and mental health). Wyvern is of course a type of dragon, though it's been my favorite type since I was 10, and I went through all kinds of different dragon media I could to learn as much about them as possible. Wyvern was heavily featured in a lot of my old screen names too, back when I was first starting out on the internet, so it felt right to use it in my screen name now, and I liked the alliteration of both beginning with W and rolling off the tongue~ I respond to both now, as different friends call me both Wisteria and Wyvern, as well as my name, and now I genuinely can't think of a different name I would enjoy more~ My next goal is to get good enough at art that I can draw a dragon with wisteria petals as its scales, but that's for future me to figure out!

no pressure tags to anyone who wants to share!

Tag game🎉

Tag your moots and ask them where they got the idea for their tumblr accounts name!

For my name it was a nickname I was giving back in middleschool! One of our teacher had a system where we worked with 'wifi' eachtime we talked in class we lost a bar of the "wifi" (was a weird joke and we never held count on that) All the kids usually joked if they needed 'wifi' , they would borrow mine if they wanted to talk more. (I was incredibly shy in middle school, I only talked to like 3 people at school;^;)

They called me Ms. Wifi because of that. I just thought it would be funny if I put 'miss' instead of 'ms' because of my terrible actual wifi connection I have at home lol.

That's my story! Now moots, only if you guys want to, tell us your story.

Tags-> @slipping-lately @firequeenofficial @noagskryf @twinklstarrrr @halfbakedspuds @polterwasteist @rokushi-san @mygedagtes +anyone that sees this and wants to do this as well

#barking to the void #thank you so so much for the tag and thinking of me!#it made my day!

5K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 day ago

Text

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

#pluralistic #aaronsw #science fiction #big cable #telecoms #isps #net neutrality #boston #mit #fcc #National Multifamily Housing Council #NMHC #National Apartment Association #NAA #Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center #petard

44 notes · View notes

xdexesx · 3 days ago

Text

All right, people. Let's start from the beginning one last time-

A while ago I made this-

https://www.tumblr.com/xdexesx/773053963524276224/as-a-5th-semester-animation-student-i-am?source=share

post talking a little about the animation technique used in the Wild Kratts and hinted towards my desire to talk more about it, perhaps with a little real-life demonstration.

I didn't think much of it, but the post blew up a tiny bit inside this fandom and a lot of people showed interest, which made me debate if I should really do this or not, now that attention was on it.

Ultimately, I have now decided that yes, an Animation Deep Dive will happen.

I have decided to do it in terms of a YouTube Video Essay, with video footage playing and a voice-over explaining things and giving examples.

As one might think, this is a HUGE project, and it isn't helping that I have never done something like this before. Therefor, for obvious reasons, this project will take a while until it sees the light of day. I will sprinkle updates here whenever I have something, but all in all, don't expect this to come out anytime soon.

I am very much in pre-production, thinking about WHAT even to talk about and how deep I want to go. I haven't wrote a single line of script and probably won't for a while.

Annnyhow,

To give a smal sneak into things, I have actually started setup to re-build one of the rigs from the show, mainly for practice but also to use in the video essay.

Let me explain

After searching for a good reference for FOREVER (Trust me, getting a good neutral front 3/4 pose of any character was a nightmare) I got this one of our fav blue boy. I imported it into the program and started splitting the design up into the main parts. This was done by shape-blocking over the reference and deciding which body parts have to move separately from one another, as well as which parts might have different moving behavior (More to that when the essay is out I guess??)

From there, a drawing layer for each. single. bodypart. is made. These body parts then need to be drawn out on their respective layer, something I haven't done yet but here is a screenshot of the layer-view. The highlighted part are all the body parts (and maybe I missed some idk, there is always something like extra shoulders that might randomly appear later)

Lastly, for the setting up stage, I made myself a color palette with all colors I will need working on this man. Here is where my first doubts and regrets about this project came in.

Also the reason I am making this post, by announcing this to the world I can no longer back out of this project, haha *cries*

I understand waiting is a pain, and I would like to dive head first into production of this as well, but I will need and take my time with this because I really want to make a high quality video and not just throw words at a screen. I will probably also not be working on this at all for the coming week, as I have my finals on Wednesday and Thursday and I am so beyond ready to be done with this Semester

#wild kratts #chris kratt #martin kratt #animation #video essay #Wild Kratts Animation Video Essay

19 notes · View notes

sir-fenris · 3 days ago

Text

Thank you for the tag :D <33

1. What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

Honestly, my stories are more about feelings than "lessons". But if I have to pick... it is that kindness is strenght. Cyrus does not fight fire with fire, and despite all that happened to him, he has a gentle heart, and that requires so much strenght.

2. What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

Well, fuck XD, this is hard. The ideas kinda came to my mind? The words just came to my mind and I wrote them, but there were some whump stories that helped.

This was the original drabble that started the world-building, from @floral-comet-whump 's prompt.

Destroyer, by @paingoes was the first inspiration that came to mind <3, about how it works the role of a living weapon, and Cyrus&Wilson have traces of Delta&Martino XD. Also inspired me into doing different species in the story.

Also, for different species, I got some inspiration in DnD, but since I've never actually played it, I'm using it more as a species inspiration than a guide.

Fog and Furrow from @wildfaewhump and TJ and Danny from @tendertenebrosity also helped in inspiration for how the unwilling gifted in my world are treated in the military. Those stories are super cool, so they were there in the back of my mind as I decided how to do the system.

Liam by @just-horrible-things also helped in the same way as the path verse. I really liked the story, so it stuck with me while I was writing, helping me to build up the system.

Handler and Healer also by @just-horrible-things plays a part in a part of the story I didn't post about yet, but it's also an inspiration to how the militar settlement works and the system I made.

Thank you to everyone who I took as inspiration for world-building <33

There are certainly more stories I read and that were in the back of my mind, but I can't remember them now. Also, I do use a lot of prompts to help me guide the narrative, and I do end up building words around it.

There are more protagonists to my universe than Cyrus, because I want to show different views of the system, but that's only after Curse of Withering (Cyrus story) is complete.

3. What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness or help the reader grow as a person?

Cyrus just wants peace. And in a way, so do I.

Guess the story is not much more than a whump/comfort story meant to entertain XD. I want to share my work, and Curse of Withering just took the first place.

4. How many chapters is your story going to have?

You're gonna ask me that so soon? :')

I have around 10 half-planned, but honestly there's no way for me to tell. It's gonna have as many chapters as it needs to for me to show all I want to show about Cyrus and the universe he's in.

5. Is it fan fiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

Original. And here on Tumblr :D. Might post on Ao3, but not sure.

6. When did you start writing?

This story in specific? Ahhhm... 2 weeks ago? I don't remember, but it's pretty recent.

In general? The first story I created, I was 7, the first time I wrote one, I was... idk, maybe 10? Around that age.

I'm bad at counting time, you can tell.

7. Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

I follow more than 50 writers, I have a really long list of "to read" :'), so I can't name all of them.

But words of encouragement... I think what Alia said is top tier. Write for yourself! You can still crave interaction and want people to read your work, but first comes yourself. Write for yourself, and only after let yourself look at others, or else it'll feel like a duty you'll always be anxious about.

And don't overthink. Kinda hard, I know. But trust me, theres ALWAYS someone who will like it. No matter what it is about or how well/basly written it is. Add the whole amount of tags Tumblr allows you to add, make sure it all is in your work, and someone looking for that will find you eventually.

I think everyone I would add already has been added? If any of my moots want to take this as an invitation, here you go :D

Tag Game: Author Ask Tag

thxxxxxxx @sacratos for the tag!

Question Template: 1. What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it? 2. What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding? 3. What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness or help the reader grow as a person? 4. How many chapters is your story going to have? 5. Is it fan fiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it? 6. When did you start writing? 7. Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

1. What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

Don’t be an idiot and actually communicate with those you love, lol. In all seriousness, I don’t know if my story has a main theme, but there are several themes for sure. The importance of having family that loves and supports you (whether found or biological), taking back autonomy of oneself, and the importance of community.

2. What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

Other BBU/pet whump authors! If you have written for the BBU, trust me, I have used some idea of yours as inspiration somewhere. I also use middle school me’s obsession with dystopian novels as inspiration as well.

3. What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness or help the reader grow as a person?

All my MCs are trying to heal, in one way or another and I want my readers to connect with my characters in some way. Not really teaching a lesson or having some big, major theme, but I want my characters to feel real and connect with the readers (yes, even if you want to kill them you cannot touch Star, he is immune from death)

4. How many chapters is your story going to have?

Hahahaha ha ha ha. . . yeah, no clue

5. Is it fan fiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

Original content from my brain! I post it here, and only here

6. When did you start writing?

The minute I learned what stories were. I think I wrote my first “story” (bible fanfiction. No I will not be taking questions about that) when I was about seven or so, then my first full fanfiction at nine and I have not stopped since.

7. Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

Read! Seriously, I cannot stress this enough! Read! And not just to compare yourselves with other writers–please don’t do that at all–but read to see how others write emotion, descriptions, characters, plots! Take what you like and figure out why you don’t like other kinds of writing, then apply what you want to your own writing. Also, your writing voice will develop in time. Don’t worry about that.

A large chunk of people I follow are writers! Can’t list all of them here, but they know who they are and their writings have inspired and shaped both my style and my content. Ilyasm!

Tagging (w/o any pressure!) @quietly-by-myself @whump-card @sparrowsage @whumble-beeee @whumpyourdamnpears and anyone else who wants to join in!

#Limbo Posts #tag game

46 notes · View notes

deathleadsarc · 2 years ago

Text

A Guide to Shipping

as a disclaimer: this is a comprehensive guide to how to form a bond with my muse. Including relationships of all types ; friendship, friendships of need, work related, familial, unrequited, purely sexual, or completely romantic. Such relationships are not limited to these listed, but they are the 'easiest' to dive into.

as a second disclaimer: Qistina is not a character who will change for another person. She will remain as ruthless and monstrous as she so desires, changing only by her own volition. She is rotten and wicked, and depending on the verse, highly murderous. With that being said, let's begin.

trigger warnings for: Machiavellianism, literal witch hunting, death and resurrection, horror elements, and traditionalist views.

For starters, her availability depends upon the verse she's in. Her past is the same spiritually, but its aesthetics and alchemys' rules will vary. I'll be focusing more on approaching her and learning her love regardless.

|| Traumas and Aversion to Bonds ||

Without diving too deeply into her history, as you can read that on her carrd, to put it simply Qistina is a troubled woman who does not open her heart easily. She retains the demeanor of a pleasantly delighted woman who happily makes conversation and will show much interest in your thoughts, ideals, and ethics. Qistinas heart is wounded and bleeding, unable to heal completely from the betrayal of her fellow village folk.

There is a good and compassionate heart deep down, but it is behind a murky ocean of thorns. To traverse this ocean, you have to understand something KEY to her heart : Her alchemy takes priority over everything. Her work is her treasure trove, like a dragons dream, and it can't and won't be placed behind anyone or anything. . . in special circumstances, your importance can be very subtly placed to the forefront of her obsession. There is also the high probability of her deadly attachment to your muses life. She exhibits highly manipulative tendencies, as part of her survival methods ; questioning and remembering any talks of your muses likes and dislikes, friends and family, and even your muses enemies.

Though she will not intervene, she will take careful consideration of these parts and remember your muse when certain elements crop up. She remembers birthdays, and even the most minute details ― it's a part of her love language, in a way. Her misunderstandings of how love works and how such feelings are leading to being in love with a person. She finds disappointment in inaction, contradiction, and laziness - so if your muse is highly susceptible to such bouts, they'll certainly see how far her cruel words will take her.

Though it is verse dependent that she is essentially immortal, Qistina still retains a deeply cosmic view of life and death. her connection to the soul of the earth through her alchemy, she looks at both on both technical and spiritual levels, to a point where it could possibly make your muse uncomfortable ― though, ( in some verses ) only when such a topic makes itself known. She is also openly willing to mock the more religious views of people, highly preferring more logical approaches to the human experience. What is dead is dead. When the soul is gone the soul is gone and only possible to retrieve by an extreme transmutation of value of importance by the of her person. She is highly stubborn and will 99% of the time never EVER budge.

Qistina carries herself with a sense of regality that borders on narcissism. The lightly drawn border is made by her openness to her mistakes, flaws, and ignorance of other topics ( not related to alchemy, modern people, technology, etc etc )

|| To Build a Bond of Any Sort ||

It truly does not matter to her where your muses alignment lies, Qistina can form a bond with just about anyone if her interest is there. Any sort of personality, background, or profession could potentially catch her eye - keeping in the same path of her own narcissism, Qistina will simply view her own alchemy as superior to anything. She must be interested in your muse to form any sort of bond whatsoever ( yes, this includes enemies ) it's part of the reason she can be so difficult to get under her skin or form bonds at all. She doesn't hate, but she doesn't openly love either.

|| Physical Affection ||

She has no boundaries when it comes to touch or touching your muse. She will stand nose to nose with your muse, take hold of their face or hands, and not really pay any mind to any boundaries unless she cares about your muse enough to take into consideration their feelings. As for her, when in a romantic relationship, she becomes even more invasive and snuggly. Much like a kitten in need of warmth. A safe space to be sleeping. The moment your feelings of romance are known, she'll quite quickly shift into such a state.

Perhaps her favorite form of affection is playing with hair. Petting, smelling, resting her head against ― indeed, it may just become a security blanket for her. She also greatly enjoys both the idea and the action of washing their hair and combing through the strands with a finely-smelling oil or tonic. A head in her lap or sitting closely in front of her.

|| Romance ||

The likelihood of her revealing her romantic intentions is slim to none. In any verse, she will resolve to torture herself in the one area in which she is sorely lacking ― love. Her heart has been terribly burned and torn from that centuries-old wound of being hunted as a witch, so naturally, there are significant hurdles you must climb to reassure her that you love her. That you want her. That you care. She is naturally mistrusting to her own romantic feelings and will surely put herself down regardless of how obvious your muse is.

Understand, because of her evil nature and how open she is with her intentions and wants, she has a deeper acknowledgment of how the world or a potential romantic partner shall think of her. Most good-natured persons, for example, could probably speak to her plainly as more friendly bonds ― but she does not fool herself into daydreaming of becoming closer to such people. She knows her nature is deplorable to the wider world, and that while others may be cordial to her there is little chance of love blooming within the hatred for her actions in their hearts.

Therefore there will be absolute honesty from her. She tells no outright lies because she simply has nothing to lose.

|| Sex and intimacy ||

As a woman who had been born in the 1400s she had been raised with a stern and strictly misogynistic hand, which attributes greatly to the lack of pursuing any relationship at all. It is simply 'not what women do'. For her, the mother chose a family to marry into. A dowry is given to the husband's family. She is married and raises children and cares for the home and the money coming in. Etc. Etc. Highly old and traditional, and she will mention such things ( the severity of this mindset is dependent on the verse itself, as in most alternate verses, she is not immortal ).

Even if she is feeling romantic toward a muse, she will sit and wait to be approached. If she isn't approached, she will simply think that your muse is not interested in her romantically. If your muse discovers her feelings and questions her, she may even apologize and act as if she's already been rejected. In terms of a dating sim, Qistina's path is the rarest and most difficult path to take. but once you've arrived at your destination, she will hold fast to your arm and help you even further down that path to understanding your love together.

She needs patience and passion. Open completely to give body and soul to her partner. Slowly, worshiping, gentle. Every part of her lovemaking is contradictory to the wickedness she proudly displays. Once blasphemous is now holy, once hellish is now heavenly, and other such examples. She is tender in her care of her partner, and her hands will never stray from their side. As if it weren't obvious, she will be very unlikely to have one-night stands or casual flings. She values the privacy of her body, and wouldn't want just anyone to look at her.

|| preferences ||

She is demisexual, so she doesn't have a strict preference for gender. However, she does gravitate more toward male-presenting muses. More traditionally masculine, muscular, and strong. Outward appearances rarely hold any importance to her at all, but she will appreciate a well-groomed muse. A sloppy dresser may turn up her nose, but if their personality is strong enough she may just overlook it. It's not impossible, but good luck with that.

|| Friendship ||

To be frank, true friendship with her is just as difficult as romance. She does not trust, she does not presume, and she does not expect you to stay. Those who manage to form that bond of friendship however are and always have been a certain class of muse: the unconventional. Muses who mirror her personality or murderous intentions, or muses who are simply beyond human intentions. The otherworldly, gods, demons, or other 'evil' muses. It's not impossible to truly befriend her if your muse is of the lawful good, but it could prove a task if your muse cannot withstand the onslaught of her disregard for morals and laws of nature and her openness to it.

It is much easier to be her 'friend' if you are of the same mindset as herself. . . or if you are an animal.

|| hard stops ||

aside from the triggering tags in my rules, there are threads and types of relationships I will not be a part of. Essentially, these will kill the ship faster than anything else. Any mention of cheating, noncon, treating her like a lesser being, or belittling her work in any way ( including insults to alchemy itself or even worse - insults toward her chimera Basker ) will effectively end the ship. I will not write cheating or noncon threads, and she will not tolerate being spoken down to. She would rather kill your muse for it. Period.

|| children ||

I am fine with her having biological children, as in her main verse she is several hundred years old with a husband and they have many, but I rarely write pregnancy-related threads in excess. Perhaps a drabble here or there, but I will never discuss it too often as I know many people do not wish to think about it.

When in doubt, let me know. As I've said before, she's more 'traditional' and is still within the mindset that she 'must have children with her partner' so the topic will pop up for her. Again, when in doubt just ask me about it.

|| musical undertones ||

deep cellos, weeping violins, solo six-string guitars, and sincerely resonating pianos. A dark, frightening performance with the subtly of sorrow when listened to closely. Music associated to her romances has a whistful feel to it. Something classical goth.

|| gifts ||

A simple alchemist living her life in the deep deep woods, there is not much she wants for that she cannot make for herself. Depending on the verse, she may not even see it as a 'gift', however, there are particular things that she does appreciate and will certainly endear your muse to her heart.

Handmade gifts in particular show not only a thoughtfulness to her, but show her a creative side that she may have overlooked before. It's important to her to watch creativity of some kind. Giving her something flowery that she has perhaps never seen before is also a good deal.

By far the best is gifting her new bits of information or books. Introducing her to new animals, flowers, clothing, or even quality of life upgrades to her everyday tasks that she's been doing the old fashioned way for so centuries! It's appreciated, and she'll think of you far more than usual.

|| as for me ||

I require communication and heavy plotting, so expect it to be a very long slow burn.

I have a tendency to draw our ship and throw out many, many different ideas and verses for our muses to exist in together so don't be shy about sharing your own.

the ns.fw I write for her focuses more on the emotional than the physical act of it all, and if it does happen, I prefer to have longer threads. Either on tumblr or on discord, but I am fine with implications alone and it's not a requirement of shipping with her.

Trying to make her jealous will have the opposite effect you want.

I am positive that there may be things I miss, and if so, I will add it to my carrd when necessary.

#🜎 | a witch need not fear the darkness | for she is darker | muse #i'll add this to her carrd soon. along with a pretty graphic #but i wrote a lot so......... i share now #this has utterly gotten away from me but if you arent scared off by now uhmmm #come plot with me

23 notes · View notes

cubbihue · 4 months ago

Text

Peri was very upset about a lot of things that happened. Within a span of a week, he felt like his entire life has changed for the worst!! He had a dumb bulb on his wand, Timmy was still moving away, and he had to go to a school far from everyone he knew!!!

Of course, the cause and trigger of those emotions was Timmy. But Peri can’t blame his older brother for any of that. So the next logical conclusion for a small child to reach was to blame his parents instead!!! And boy did he blame a lot on his parents.

Many of Peri’s actions in his childhood stems from misplaced grief and anger. By the time he was old enough to know better, Peri got a mixture of stubbornness and a bruised ego to admit he was wrong for how he reacted.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

Instability: [Start] > [Previous] > [END]

#fairly oddparents #fop #fop a new wish #fop peri #peri #fop irep #irep #asks #itty bitties fop au #one of peri and timmy's many shared promises was that peri ONLY wrote to timmy. CosWan were NOT allowed to see them or call him or talk or-#anyways if ur wondering why timmy was peri's primary guardian this is why #peri /had/ a lot of low contact form his parents. which just made them even MORE clingy when they did get to see him.#timmy worked hard to keep his promises to his little brother #even if it meant letting Peri spend the summers with AC and Irep instead of at CosWan's place #(timmy was the one who urged his parents to go on their honeymoon as a result. to help. yknow. distract them from it all)#also yaaayyy yipiee!!#11 whole parts!!! just for. just for 6 or so asks.#OTL #god i hope i can speed things up now #there shouldnt be any more mini stories until i reach the end of the inbox #so we can finally FINALLY get back to the present with chimmy moving and timmy dealing with HazDev

490 notes · View notes

dreamsy990 · 1 month ago

Text

hi i wanted to draw my own au so have a snippet of scene i rewrote like 12 times and will likely rewrite again

#was thinking about captioning this with uhhh the written version of the scene in my drafts #but its mostly just dialogue #so youre not missing much #i hope i convey the emotion well through expression #sigh part of the reason im hesitant about making this au a comic instead of a fic is that like. most of what ive written for it is prose-#-that doesnt translate that well visually?#a lot of the storytelling for this au i think is told better with narration #so if/when i ever like. share the whole story #it will likely just be a fic #but i suck at sharing unfinished writing on tumblr so what i post here is mostly scenes i wrote turned into comics #<- partially to gauge interest! i like knowing if people care about what im making #but also partially just because i REALLY like this au. its super self indulgent #i know i only draw angsty shit for it but i swear its about friendship ok. like half of what ive written is really sweet #.the other half is actually angst BUT THATS IRRELEVANT. ok normal tags now #doodles #ghost roxas au #roxas #sora #kingdom hearts #hmm i dont think this one translated as well as it couldve. its meant to be a sort of slow build to outright anger #bc its like. soras confusion + frustration finally building to the point hes yelling #but it feels sort of sudden here so idk. could also be that theres no context to this #roxas' reaction too reads a bit differently than i wrote it as (more angry than like. ptsd response for lack of a better descriptor)#WHATEVER WHATEVER DONE RAMBLING IN THE TAGS I HOPE YOU LIKE THE ART

45 notes · View notes

oneluckydragon · 6 months ago

Note

got hit with the echo+sora brainrot so i am once more rambling in your askbox about it. because reasons.

anywho i think there is something truly saddening about echo's struggles to make peace within herself and how she truly finds it hard to find that peace when she is so certain that if the truth about her origins were to be revealed to the world, much less to *sora*, everything she achieved, everything she worked for, all of which matters to her most, will crumble away in a moment's notice.

but the fear of losing all your life's work is none compared to the fear of losing sora. the feeling of poison that settled itself within themselves and between each other out of fear and tragedy of what had happened to them is familiar. echo's resemblance to dusknoir was already enough to set the two off because of how much it had all hurt to see someone you love and yourself turn into a mockery and a splitting image of someone who had pretended to care yet showed he never did at all, but this poison is louder. it hurts to bare, to carry, and to have none but yourself to be its sole holder.

but this poison, this feeling of heartache is different. because whereas the previous pain was something both of them felt, sora was lucky enough to not have known the truth about the person who she cares for so dearly.

echo knows that she used to be darkrai. and it haunts her to have known that her previous incarnation was so *cruel*, all for the sake of it just feeling right. wishing to engulf an entire world in darkness, solely for whatever desire she used to have.

and for how much she knows, how much she will hammer it into her own head that she is *not* like that anymore, that she looks at her past with sneer and disgust and that she will not be the barer of evil anymore, it will not matter in the slightest when she will have to look at sora if she were to ever find out.

how afraid, angry and dejected she would look when finding out, and how she will go on the defense/offense because of how much this will overwhelm her.

because when echo looks at her own shadow, she sees herself for what she is. she knows what she is, be it out of shame or guilt.

but when sora will look at it, she will see a tall, contorting and menacing shadow, towering over with a bright cyan eye doing nothing but looking at her, as if tempting her to make the next move.

and she defends herself. from someone she knows will not harm her. she raises her arms up in self defense from a hand that would never hurt her more than the world has already did.

she knows echo will not hurt her. and thats why she is afraid.

Oh my oh my OH MY, Sinnoh!!! YES YES YES!

HOW!!! IN THE WORLD!!! Are you so good at crawling into my head and creating these vivid analysis/snippets on my OCs??? I've barely shared ANY information about Echo and Sora because I've been wanting to hoard most of my stuff for when my fic is finally finished... but... I think you've broken my resolve a bit, if I'm entirely honest.

You know what? I'm so inspired by your accuracy and eagerness to talk about my girls that I'm gonna forgo my crippling anxiety regarding my writing skills and instead post a snippet of my WIP fic here as a treat for you. A teaser, if you will. Since I have no idea when the fic in question will actually be done and ready (or when I will be satisfied with it, cause the thing is currently 36,000 words and still slowly climbing). And now you've got me eager to share SOMETHING of my fic with you and anyone that might want to take a peek at it.

Please enjoy this conversation between Dusknoir and Echo. The topic deals a lot with what you'd described up above!! c:

[Note: this is an unedited part of my fic because I am still in the process of writing and it may change in the future, so please be gentle w/ me but I'd love to read any thoughts/comments that pop up while reading!! pls send asks or replies or anything really cause I love you guys]

+++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++

“I’m going to tell you something now, and you are going to listen.” Echo commands with a sharp bite in her voice that Dusknoir cannot fathom ignoring. He pauses and then offers a slow nod, waiting, wondering what she could possibly desire to tell him at a time like this, of all things.

Minutes pass as Echo remains rooted in place, still as her own shadow, and her eyes dart around as she stares at the patches of dry grass and sand beneath her paws. Her claws clench and unclench, digging into the earth like daggers as the wind of the forest (it’s trees so close, just behind them, a looming sort of presence that could engulf them whole) whistles through the surrounding branches, carrying stray leaves of many bright greens through the chilling breeze. Dusknoir watches them dance around Echo, twirling, floating down, down, down… but it’s quiet, too quiet, and Dusknoir feels a shiver pass through him when Echo’s voice finally rings out through the silence.

"When I evolved, Sora was petrified," She says, nearly a whisper, an admission that melts away her confidence and appears to bring her a flood of both shame and regret. Her face twists up then, strangely, like she’d felt a twinge of pain from somewhere deep inside the very fabric of her own soul and was unable to quell it. "She couldn’t even bring herself to look at me most days. At first, my appearance… well, it reminded her too much of you. And eventually of someone I used to be.”

Someone I used to be. At that, Dusknoir’s immediate reaction is to recall Echo’s previous life as a human, as the miserable shell of a creature surviving alongside Grovyle that he’d relentlessly hunted in the dark future. A human made of contempt and anger and apathy, who never smiled or laughed or cried or screamed like the old legends said humans would-- an entity that simply existed rather than lived. An echo of a life long dead and buried. But, judging by her tone, by her voice, by some uneasy intuition itching in the back of his mind like a swarm of pestilent Ninjask… he knows that she means something else entirely. Something that she isn’t willing to share. And frankly, that concept utterly terrifies him.

Someone I used to be. Dusknoir wants to speak, to break his own silence, wants to ask the myriad of questions bubbling up in his throat because this isn't the first time she's hinted at another life beyond being human, but those questions die at the source like a flame doused in water. And always the coward, coward, coward, instead he takes the easy way out by doing nothing at all. Whether Echo notices his surge of inner conflict or not-- the nervous wring of his hands and the tremble in his spine that he cannot control under her gaze-- she does not react.

“I’d take a step and Sora would flinch away.” Echo confesses, her markings flickering with light before going dark and dead, as if her body wished to snuff them out entirely, a deep seated rejection, a self-loathing so strong that Dusknoir cannot help but recognize it and empathize, and his heart aches, “It took ages for her to stop shaking when I’d speak. To stop looking at me like-- like I was going to…”

Echo grimaces like she’s enduring waves of grueling torture and doesn’t finish that string of thought, but it’s not hard to make an educated guess on what went unsaid. Like I was going to betray her. Hurt her. Break her heart. She’s been through so much already and I couldn’t bear to be another influence in the history of her suffering. I hate myself because of how I made her feel. When her eyes went wide in fear and through them I could see myself staring back like some sort of burden, some sort of curse.

“I am not my past.” Proud and true, Echo straightens up and holds her head high, a spark igniting in her eyes, a glint of determination, a will to keep going and going despite such circumstances and strife, despite this horrid, unspeakable past that haunts her so, “And I am definitely not you. It’s taken a while, but I know that much now. I’ve accepted it.”

I am not my past. And I am definitely not you.

A sigh, a breath, and Echo glances at him with a certain sorrow that cannot be described, a sorrow that lingers even through the veil of her tenacity, "But no matter how I feel, no matter my conviction, my shadows still find ways through the cracks. Every time I think I'm getting a grip and that I might finally understand myself… I change all over again." She admits, sounding more angry and tired than defeated now-- like a mirror of her old self, her human self that had clawed and damned and cursed him, despised him more than anything. "I hate it. I hate that I never truly know who I am. That I have to learn about my past through stories others tell me, or through fragments of twisted, broken memories that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Through conflict and pain and… and..."

"Echo," Dusknoir murmurs her name softly, an offering, a potential escape if only she would wish to drop the subject and forget this conversation had ever happened-- if she'd overstepped and needed an excuse to back out, a diversion, an understanding. And briefly, Dusknoir wonders why she is opening up about this particular information, why she would delve into something so vulnerable, so personal. Why she would bring up this hurtful history when it obviously brings her great discomfort.

And then, he gets an answer.

“You’re lucky, Dusknoir." There it is, that wildfire burning in her eyes again. A spark that’s new and bold and startling. But lucky? No, never. He'd have to disagree, accounting the mountain of evidence that was his life and regrettable deeds.

"You already know exactly who you are and what you’ve done, and most importantly why. You have more than a tattered picture of yourself that reflects broken answers. And you can change with that knowledge. I see you trying.” She tells him, searching, looking for something so deeply and Dusknoir wishes he knew what it could be so that he could give it to her, because he would, he would gladly give it to her without a second thought if it meant they could be close again. But he isn’t a fool, and he’s wise enough to know they’ll never be like they were before. “And if somehow I could change, even as half-assed as I have. Well, then what’s your excuse?”

You can do it, say her unspoken words, I believe in you.

#Sinnoh I have so many Echo and Sora feels right now and IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT HOW DO I COPE #like... i am so amazed with what you wrote in this ask i honestly don't even know HOW to reply because I'm stunned it's so perfect #my fic is from Dusknoir's POV and explores his relationship with Grovyle and Celebi and also his reconciliation with Echo and Sora #just stating that for anyone who hasn't seen my previous post about my WIP fic cause that was like... more than 6 months ago #I am... really REALLY nervous posting this because Dusknoir is very beloved by the community and I wanna do him justice #and there are SO many amazing writers amongst my mutuals and I wanna be a COOL KID like you guys #I realize this snippet is mostly just about Echo and that Dusknoir has no actual dialogue... (even tho he talks A LOT in the fic)#but the portions of Dusknoir's thoughts and descriptions I want to GET RIGHT the vibes need to be ACCURATE #(pls tell me the vibes are accurate)#note: he is majorly nervous rn tho cause he and Echo have not fully reconciled and he's TRYING to listen and be there for her now #(insert his attempt at dadnoir; he's giving it a shot guys)#Meanwhile Echo is dealing with BIG TIME problems and regrets and guilt cause Dusknoir returning to the past resurfaced all of that grief #Me; the writer; knowing that the truth about Echo's past would mess up Dusknoir for YEARS: oh my idiot ghost dad... you have NO idea bro #echo/umbreon #sora/lucario #pmd ocs #dusknoir #pmd eos #pmd2 #wip fic #Yes I have a fic title but I'm not sharing it cause it's spoilers ok

21 notes · View notes