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theberrybrothel · 11 months ago

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Berry Brothel Christmas

“Merry x-mas girls, It's showtime!” I wake up and my nose is immediately assaulted by the smells of cinnamon, gingerbread, eggnog, and of course rum. It's X-mas at the Brothel, so management has prepared a special list of acts for the patrons who have decided to brave the cold, and spend some of their money on us.

I look in my assignment box and find my act for the night; the card is red, decorated with reindeer. It says: ‘All I want for X-mas is You’. I smile to myself, just the one I was hoping for. I get dressed for my little number. I'm wearing a sexy elf costume, tight green pants to show my ass and a low cut green crop top to show the tits. Its matched with a pair of high heels that curl at the toe ending in a bell, so every step I take jingles. I top the outfit off with a short green cap with bells around the crown so I jingle even more. Still jingling, I step out into the main hall to join my group for the evening.

Tonight I'm joined by Brenda, sporting a sexy Santa outfit complete with gloves. Can't beat the classic, and Eartha who is going for a hipster christmas party vibe. She is wearing a knit beanie pulled low over her head, covering her brown hair and an ugly christmas sweater that is sporting a malibu barbie theme. The look is completed by the converses she has on her feet. We start walking to the green room, and talking about what we are gonna do after we finish this show, and are done for the night.

“Going out drinking with Christy, Ann and Jen. They have to be back early though so I’m down to chill later” Brenda says. “They all are working the late shift upstairs covering for some of the staff that went home for the holidays' ' Brenda has worked at the brothel for a while, so she has the extreme stripper curves that so many of us get after a few months of inflation. Honestly, Management can mold us however they want but they don't want to change much from the tried and true.

Eartha is one of the few exceptions to this. Management keeps her flat as a board, in all places. For the odd duck that isn't into curves, or wants a very specific type of transformation. It's probably the reason that Management denied her request for time off. Some V.I.P with those specific tastes is going to be in town. “I think I’m going to put on Die Hard and sleep the rest of the night. I’m going to go visit the Fam for New Year since Janice can cover my clients.”

“Ugh you have the most predictable tastes in movies Earth” Brenda teases. “How about you Jordan?”

“I might head over to the Punk Rock Museum, see who is playing. It will be a nice change from the Christmas pop”.

We get to the fork that leads to the green room and the main stage.Brenda splits off to the stage. Looking through the window in the green room, Eartha and I see the stage has been made to look like a literal stage from a high school auditorium. Brenda’s client, a well dressed man sits in the single chair facing the stage. I recognize him from some of his other visits. He is a nice guy; respectful too. Bennet I think his name is.

Brenda walks out and strikes a pose. The light projectors fill in three dancers who will all be linked to Brenda’s movements. We call this a shadow dance. Brenda takes a shot of blueberry liqueur, we use that when gum will mess up the performance. As the music begins to play. Brenda starts lip syncing.

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock

Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring

Snowin' and blowin' up bushels of fun

Now the jingle hop has begun

Brenda begins by stepping forward slowly and sensually, using her enlarged assets she adds an extra jiggle and shake to every one of her steps. The Shadow dances mirror her, so when She bends over to Bennet he had four sets of cleavage surrounding him. He only gets a quick peek before . She twirls away the tell tale blue spot appearing on her nose and quickly flushes her face blue.

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock

Jingle bells chime in jingle bell time

Dancin' and prancin' in jingle bell square

In the frosty air

The other three dancers all stay their natural color as they continue to mirror Brenda’s movements.

Brenda places her hands on her thighs, and sticks her rear out. Bending over to give him a better look at her now blue tits. They have started bloating up, smoothing the wrinkles of her outfit. A sharp eye can also see the slight belly bump that is pressing on the shiny Fabric of her costume. He smiles back at her and she stands up straight, slapping her thighs in the process. She has timed it so that the blue flush is passing right through her smack.

What a bright time, it's the right time

To rock the night away

Jingle bell time is a swell time

To go glidin' in a one-horse sleigh

Now that she is fully blue, she begins to make slow hip shaking twirls emphasizing the size of her hips as they get fuller and juicer with every twirl. Simultaneously a blue band can be seen separating her red top and red skirt. She faces away from Bennet so that he can inspect her rear, bending over again so that it is fully on display for him. she gives it a bit of a shake before standing up again.

Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet

Jingle around the clock

As she stands back up the man spanks her bare ass causing it to jiggle. She turns around with a playfully shocked look on her face, repeated by the other 3 girls that circle around his chair. The four dancers line up placing their elbows on the girl in front of them’s ass they all playfully wag a finger at him. No touching until she is ripe.

When she stands up you can see the blue band has grown, her belly button is now on full display. The middle of her extreme hourglass is filling in her thighs filled with juice widening her stance. They have also become hard to bend, causing her to have to swing her legs out to take a step forward.

Brenda tries to do the sexy stride that she did when she started the dance but now it looks silly and awkward. The four girls all line up in front of Bennet facing away from him placing a hand on the dancer next to their ass cheek. they shake and rotate their hips sensually. Brenda’s inflated hips hit into both dancers on either side of her, throwing off their rhythm. The shadow dancers all turn and look at her. they mockingly look angry that her size is messing up their choreography; they all stop mirroring her and go sit on Bennet’s lap like groupies, teasing him with their perfect breasts and asses, while Brenda struggles to finish her routine. Due to her rapidly increasing size when she turns around and struts rather waddles away. my, you can see that booty jiggle! The fabric of her costume breaks away with a sharp snap leaving her naked in the middle of the room as she awkwardly still tries to dance.

Mix and a-mingle in the jinglin' feet

That's the jingle bell rock

Her breast are really out of control now, jiggling and bouncing with every tottering step she takes. her body has started the process of rounding out filling in her once luxurious curves higher and higher on her body until she is more or less round.

What a bright time, it's the right time

To rock the night away

She takes a few more tottering steps before her body has totally outswelled her legs and forces her feet from the floor. Bennet smiles at her, past the groupies as he watches her flap her limbless hands and feet helplessly in an attempt to finish dancing to the song. The three shadow dancers leave Bennet and take positions on each side of the stage. With a nod the first gives Brenda a hard shove and rolls her to the other two dancers waiting to catch her. After sending her back across the stage one of the dancers brings Bennet up on stage and positions Brenda in front of him. Another dancer places a large prop bow on her so she looks like a helpless present. Brenda looks at him with her big puppy dog eyes “Master I think Im ripe”. she says the words breathlessly trying to contain the anticipation that is in her voice. He stands up, pushing the holograms away as they look on with jealousy, and free’s he very hard cock. “Well then time for your present berry.”

Jingle bell time is a swell time

To go glidin' in a one-horse sleigh

He rolls her so that her mouth is at the level of his dick. dutifully knowing what he wants, she opens her mouth to takes his cock moaning through it and licking at it. I am told that bjs are extra good here because the guys can feel the juices flooding your mouth. plus all that swallowing is really good for getting guys off.

Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet

Jingle around the clock

Mix and a-mingle in the jinglin' feet

Bennet grabs ahold of Brenda’s hair as he begin to speed up his thrusting face fucking her with passion

That's the jingle bell

Brenda’s eyes go wide as she feels Bennet’s member stiffen in her mouth she knows whats coming and that she is powerless to stop it

That's the jingle bell

He comes in her mouth, hard by the way his body is shaking.As he finishes the lights in the room go out so that the pair can be taken to a more private playroom.

That's the jingle bell rock

Eartha ribs me as she heads out of the room “Guess it was a ‘swell time’ after all.” I roll her eyes at the pun

#blueberryinflation #blueberry expansion

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sleepydross · 11 months ago

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Chapter One, Route_B: A Hard Left Turn

A Chapter of the 'SEER' or 'Spontaneous Edifice Emergence / Reification' Storyline. This is Route_B. For Route_A, see the link included.

https://www.tumblr.com/sleepydross/736565213088858112/chapter-one-routea-clerks-too-a-chapter-of?source=share

CW: Gore, body horror, extreme death and dismemberment, surreal concepts, disgusting imagery, a lot of really quite rude words (I said fuck folks Im sorry), implications of loss, plainly stated memory alteration and manipulation, horror in general.

Excerpt, 'Dreams, And Their Implications,' Dr. Alex Sing, 2023

'…The understanding of dreams has come a long way, in recent years. We've seen sleep studies, and brain scans, and complicated medical procedures involving the implantation of probes in the brain and the use of radiological dyes. We have seen brilliant doctors, brilliant scientists, translate the language of the brain into perceptible images, things we can look at to see what people see when they sleep.

What most of you haven't seen is the secret, concealed studies that have been done into dreams and their… atypical side effects on local reality. In a number of cases, highly active psionics (Humans with the natural capability towards psychic phenomenon) have outright distorted reality around them during particularly intense dreams. This is, in fact, a detectable distortion due to the common presence of exotic particles and low level radiation.

In fact, the fabric of reality is what we are here to discuss. Some time ago, scientists working for the Department of Unnatural / Supernatural Knowledge, DUSK, discovered that this fabric could be willfully manipulated - and unwillfully. The very concept of luck is a manipulation of randomness in a local area, not a change in reality itself, but a wrinkling of probability…

And with this discovery came the first breakthrough in direct measure of the fabric of reality.

With THAT discovery, the scientists of DUSK discovered that the latent alterations made by dreams were growing more widespread, even in those not terribly active, those lacking psionic capability. Concurrently, a rise in psionic capability was recorded, and has been recorded every single year since.

But the reason why eluded them, has eluded them. Their experimentation began in 1971.

We have questions.

Did their experiment cause this? Or did they merely expand human consciousness into uncharted waters?

We don't know what could lie in those terrible, black depths, in the ocean outside of our collective thought based tidepool…

However, we are smart enough to fear it, unlike our predecessors.'

"I want to know what the FUCK is going on!" Haller shouted, standing in the action room. The site was deep black, so far off the grid and so unregistered that no one present even had so much as a dress shoe on - the FBI and CIA had erected it for counter terrorism reasons, erected being a strong word for appropriating an abandoned warehouse near a defunct rail line about six hours outside of New York City.

Outside of the blacked out windows, only forest and darkness waited. It was the middle of the damned night, and Haller had just arrived. The helicopter on the roof was already working up to beating gravity into submission, the soundproofing turning the thump-swah of its blades into weak vibrations one could only detect if they knew there was a helo taking off in the first place.

On the main screen, in place on the north wall, she stared at satellite photographs of an area approximately as far from NYC as the black site itself, which was little comfort considering that the area was apparently, very suddenly, taller than the empire state building and approximately a half mile in diameter.

"Ma'am, I assure you, we're trying to figure it out," Agent Muskwe said, quietly. Haller watched him sip his coffee and gesture at the screen. "Ground images."

An image replaced the satellite photos, digitally signed as being taken by field team November, one of Haller's favorite teams. Their names were classified, but she knew-

"What the hell?" she whispered. The image description said that the picture was taken five hundred and seventy yards from the 'border,' which had not been defined in any meaningful sense. All she could assume was that it meant the border of the gray, formless, bizarre zone they had looked at from above - a cacophony of squares and rectangles, impossible rooftop geometries laid in and around and over one another.

The 'border' looked like a wall of roiling, nearly oily fog. The next image was zoomed in, and appeared to show trees near to the border withering, branches blackened and dark and odd - wrong, stripped of leaves, coated in some shiny, slick, dark grease. On this image, the description said that even five hundred yards and change away, it stank like the parking lot of an abandoned fast food restaurant. Colorful descriptions were included, of disgusting rot stink and french fry smell and the hellish scattering of other disgusting odors…

Spoiled beef, rotting chicken, soggy and deeply moldy bread…

These descriptions were wholly unnecessary, but greatly appreciated. Haller needed every detail she could possibly get.

"Skip the pictures. November would've sent video," she said, already irritated when the next image was just a further zoom into the fog. Through it, she could see light, the pictures having clearly been taken in the dark. "Show me that, make sure everyone who needs them gets the images."

"Yes, ma'am," Muskwe replied, and the screen went dark. Moments later, a video frame opened, and then played. Compares to the hardware of the past, it was the highest quality video she'd ever seen, especially on a screen so large - save perhaps in a movie theater. Their video, however, had all sixty frames per second, crisp and clear.

"Check for the recording," November One said. "November one. Steadfast. Check."

"November two. Iron. Check."

"November three. Resolute. Check."

"November four. Eternal. Check."

"Alright, gang's all here," Steadfast, November One, said.

"Christ, this fucking STINK," Iron muttered. "We ought get goddamn hazard pay for this shit. It smells like a rotting corpse tossed in a dumpster near a particularly fucking shit drivethrough."

"Oil and diesel, too… gasoline, maybe propane. Smells like chemicals, under and around it all," Eternal added.

"Button up, whiners. Iron, light rig, take point. Etty, back him up with the shotgun, and don't fuck it up and shoot HIM. Reso, pull up the rear."

"Sir, yes sir!" they said in unison. Haller smiled. She liked November for a reason, a lot of reasons. November One's insistance they call her 'sir' was one of them. Out there, doing the work they did, they had some latitude to be weird. It was better than sitting in a goddamn field office all the time, poring over the most irrelevant shit on Earth.

The feed swapped then, to Iron's lightrig camera, and then… the rig flared on, bathing the fog in shockingly bright light. They marched across the field, orderly and in a line, a weapon in frame now and then as they walked. The closer they got the fog, the stranger it got, less white than before, and then swirling in a shiny, chemical-sick rainbow like a dribbling of oil floating on a puddle.

"Can't do it, sir," Reso said, finally. The line stopped. "I'm gonna pop, man, just fucking howl and puke."

"Professional," Steadfast muttered. "Mask up, though. Making me dizzy, too. Ought to call for hazzies. Reso, get out that vial of peppermint oil."

"It's like White River all over again," Rso muttered - but he complied, dabbing some of that oil on the filters of their gas masks. They sealed the high tech things with faint hisses, lenses shining. The peppermint oil was an old trick, from back in the before times, when Resolute was a nurse. Designated medic suited him better, with a gun in hand. "Feed's a mess, sir. We need to drop the rig. It's too foggy, ought to use mask optics."

"Make it so," she replied. In moments, after shuffling, annoyance, grunting and bad static, the light rig went dark, and then hit the ground. Pale, ugly green flooded the frame, and suddenly… they could see, the footage digitally enhanced and highly processed in near real time. "Better?"

"Clear as day," Reso replied. They returned to their march, approaching that ugly, roiling oil fog again. Through it now, a huge glowing sign could be seen, standing on a thick red pole, like-

"Huh… Megaburger," Haller murmured, baffled by that. She knew the colors, knew the ghostly specter of its shape. Silently, before the fog wall, Iron removed his camera and pointed it upwards without slowing their approach. It continued upwards apparently indefinitely, obscuring everything inside. Weather patterns in the area had gone to shit, it was what first alerted them - something was wrong when they were getting hit by sheets of rain in the middle of a New York winter.

"Rain's warm, what the fuck," Iron spat. "Feels slick, too. Droplets are milky white, contaminated with something… and I can just detect what seems to be a whiff of urine, through the damned mask. We gonna die, sir?"

"Composition from the rapid sample kit said it's just some kind of detergent, gasoline, a bit of oil… also piss, yeah, piss… yeah… it doesn't make sense, but it isn't toxic, mostly," Steadfast replied, evenly.

"Mostly! Wonderful," Eternal replied, sounding exhausted already - but they marched on, into the fog, as Iron reattached his camera. What followed was an engrossing twenty minutes of them walking in a white out, cable-clipped together so they didn't lose one another in the thickness of it. Three times, they stopped to dab new filters with peppermint and stagger their swapouts.

Whatever the fog was, it was clogging them, fast.

That made it all the more surprising when they emerged into the parking lot of…

A Megaburger franchise.

"Stop it," Haller said, and the video paused. "We have record of a Megaburger there? Lavar?"

"No, we don't. Look in the background, though, and around it… No roads. Nothing. The walls just extend outward, and then…" he trailed off, and gestured for the video to be played, and then he said, "pause. See? Suddenly, kitty corner, the bricks change to cement blocks, like… smoothly, and it becomes a Fast Jimmy's, complete with gas pumps."

"What the Hell?" Haller asked. No one had answers.

"Command, do you read?" Steadfast asked. After a long pause, she said, "no signal at all. Local comms working."

"Pull out? Something's fuckin' wrong. This shit wasn't here when we got here, before the fucking fog moved closer," Eternal muttered. "Did anyone transmit the recording, from when the fog moved?"

"Did, yeah," Iron spat. "What's the word, Steady?"

"Sir, to you, dipshit… and no. We don't pull back. No signs of life, no hostiles… we're going into that damn burger joint. I want material samples, though. Etty, split off with Reso. See where those bricks go all… blurry? Get samples there," she ordered. "Something is wrong, so we're going to find out what the fuck is going on. As soon as you have the samples, get inside."

A chorus of 'yes, sir!' met her, and she and Iron marched on, the footage continuing to follow them.

"Do we have footage from the Eternal or Resolute?" Haller asked, and got a displeasing 'nope, no transmit from them, their feeds cut out the moment they split off,' which made her want to put a hole in something. "Fucking why, precisely?"

"Interference, of some kind. That fog, maybe, something about it makes signal transmission inconsistent? We only got all of Iron's footage because… well…" he trailed off, and Haller blanched, falling silent and watching. Like every other Megaburger in existence, the restaurant that Iron and Steadfast were approaching was a squat sort of building with an overly decorative roof of red metal, atop which was perched an offensively oversized, bizarrely cartoonish cheeseburger, and a huge cup beside it. Both were lit up, casting an array of yellows and reds out into the parking lot. This was all largely washed out on the white lines of the parking spots out front by the bright fluourescent light coming through the windows that dominated every wall on the front and sides of the store, stopping right at the line where the kitchen began.

Despite that no one was visible inside, the doors were unlocked, and they pushed through them, weapons at the ready.

"It uh, appears to be a burger store," Iron said, quietly, turning slowly to film the majority of the restaurant in the sweep. Chairs were pushed out, food was piled up on tables, cups were stacked halfway to the ceiling and puddles of dark, bubbling brown liquid coated portions of the floor. None of this, critically, had been visible from the exterior. "Stead, sir, something… this place is a fucking mess. It was not, in fact, a fucking mess looking in from outside."

"I'd noticed, trust me," she muttered. "It stinks in here, like it was just jam packed and they all took a shit before leaving."

Rapidly, the camera approached one of the tables and was brought closer to the food - what was left of it. Huge bites, larger than any human mouth could make, were taken out of massive burgers, each one the size of a dinner plate. Thick beef patties steamed, red on the inside and ruddy brown on the out, too fatty, the 'ground' beef used to make them more akin to strange, mashed together chunks of flesh, a melange of unmistakably…

Meaty, fleshy colors. Biological, awful.

They were burgers in the loosest sense, the buns bizarre and over-dense and mealy looking but with an incongruous shiny brown exterior that looked like it was applied after the fact just to try and make it look good. In place of lettuce, there was some unidentifiable, vaguely leaf-patterned green gel mess, a few squirts of too dark, too bloody ketchup… mustard that was more white than yellow - or maybe it was mayo…

"Sir, this food is fucked up."

"This whole place is fucked up," Steady muttered, tiredly. "Weapon at the ready."

"Sir," he replied, and the shotgun came into frame. He squared up, following her to the counter. For a few long moments, they just peered into the half-shrouded kitchen through a cutout on the wall behind the register, and then Steady shouted.

"HEY! IS THERE A MANAGER IN THE HOUSE?"

The silence that met her in response was almost deafening. Slowly, Iron turned in a half circle, looking around - and then there came a sound, a terrible sort of sound. It overwhelmed the microphone on both his camera and its twin on his helmet, this awful air-raid siren parody that sounded more and more like hundreds of human screams forming this rising and falling tide of sonic ugliness.

As the video feed glitched and static flooded the image intermittently, they saw the building shifting, bricks and glass crystalizing outward in wobbly, overly organic sheets from the front of the store. Rumbling appeared to shake the building, and Iron was forced to grab a pillar to retain his footing. When he hunched, they got to watch tiles splitting and sliding and growing, a wholly unnatural ceramic mitosis.

When all was said and done, the entire parking lot had been subsumed, and the restaurant was twice as large from kitchen to doors, with new pillars erected haphazardly, still sluggishly sliding across the floor tiles towards presumably their final positions. These structural icebergs clawed trenches in tile that rapidly 'healed' in their wake.

Iron rounded as if reacting to something, staring at the staggered Steadfast clutching onto the counter as the tile rippled in bizarre, shattering ceramic waves drifting out from the counter, which itself was pushing her backwards towards the entrance as the behind-counter area expanded. She howled, screaming in agony, arms wrapped entirely around a cash register at that point. Red and pink and dark blackish pooled around her feet, those waves of ceramic shredding her up to the like they were made for shredding. Flaying flesh away from bone was horrifying enough, but something worse was unfolding itself.

Behind the counter, a widening, grotesque door peeled open, the wood flexing apart into shiny tendonous strings and awful flesh as a rose made of meat bloomed forth from within.

That screaming siren continued, grew louder even, and the video distortion worsened until all that could be seen, in the center of the frame, was a figure resembling a human being, if that human being was lit harshly and unevenly from the front, and cast a shadow consisting entirely of flesh, of meat and blood and bubbly yellow fat. The mass the 'person' was stuck to the front of slopped against the wall behind the creature, with the flesh seeping through the access window to the kitchen.

Sounds of hissing and popping made it through as the scream-siren trailed off into silence told them that this creature had carpeted over the fryers in back with gore, not giving a singular microfuck about the consequences thereof.

"What can I do for you?" the terrible, blistered avatar asked, a few moments after the screaming siren stopped. This mocking, sick parody of a human torso was still clawing and pulling its way from the meat mass, and as the stunned operators watched, clothing 'grew' over it. Disgustingly, it appeared to be made of woven hair, a chaotic hellscape of interwoven white and black that formed a button down shirt and a tie that were all one piece. Thick pads of calloused skin came next that blackened into a kind of belt-like construction, whose buckle was dark, blackened fingernail approximating shiny plastic polymer.

This same black fingernail formed an approximation of a tie clip, and then a nametag - unreadable.

There was a face, if one could insult the concept of faces so grotesquely, with a lopsided slash of a mouth where the lips were simply just bloody, blistered, skinless facsimiles, dribbling red and this sickly yellow syrup that made its chin all pink and slick.

"F-Fuck, I was just-" Steadfast said, slurring, sounding half drunk with blood loss and pain, but midword… the building went still, and her voice simply ceased. After a long moment, she half turned to Iron. Her lips parted, and thick black and red flooded out - and then the nearly naked bone of her right tibia and fibia, clothed only in tatters and leaking veins below the knee, broke. She staggered, and the top of her head fell away.

For only a moment they were treated to an awful anatomical cross section of her lower brain before blood covered that up completely.

Iron screamed bloody murder, cracking, and in the last frames they could see a thick meaty tendril draped over the counter, forcing what looked a lot like french fries into the sticky black-oozing meat that kept all of Steadfast's thoughts for her, one by one. With each salty new stick of nightmares shoved into what remained of he brain she twitched, or gurgled wetly.

The last man standing legged it, out into the parking lot, and then into…

Another parking lot, leading towards another building.

Towards a Pizza Jam.

"No, no, NO FUCK NO!" he barked, frantic. The poor man rounded, camera directed towards the burger joint, which was rapidly filling up with what looked like squirming, barely human bodies, a pale pink slurry of meat and breading, and enormous waffle cut fries so big they could've been swimming pool rafts. "FUCK! FUCK FUCK!"

While he shouted fuck several more times, he dug in his equipment pack and drew out a gray plastic box, slamming it on the ground and opening it. In a flurry of movement, he tugged something out, pressed something that beeped, and then jerked the camera off of his vest and turned it to stare in the lens.

"Look, I don't know what you FUCKING SHITFUCKS sent us into, but if you don't find a way to EVAC ME, I am going to haunt you until the end of time! EVERYONE IS FUCKED!" he barked, before setting the camera on what was identified in a small block of text in the corner as a transmission relay meant to burst transmit large quantities of audio visual data. He stood up then, and pumped his shotgun. "I'm getting the fuck out of here. If I make it out… I'll get back, I'll call in, I don't know. I gotta move."

When he stepped aside, they could see that strange plant-like structures were growing rapidly from the pavement of the parking lot. In seconds, they formed into beetle coated monstrosities nearly metallic in apperance. Seconds after that, the crawling, bug-covered blobs resolved into passable (At a distance) imitations of cars.

They then promptly rotted, leaving thick black sludge on the ground, from which more bugs, more plants and more cars began to rise.

"Fuck this," Iron panted, and he booked it out of frame.

The video ran for two more four to six minute cycles of 'cars,' and then… abruptly ended in static, with a disquietingly wet crunch.

For a long, long time things were silent in the action room (which was still just the main, large, open area of the . No one spoke. No one so much as breathed, not in any meaningful or audible way.

Finally, Agent Haller said, quietly…

"Well, what the fuck was that shit?"

"Ma'am, that was the last transmission from Iron. It was digitally signed, with little corruption beyond the visual distortion caused by that… management… thing," Muskwe replied, softly. "I did not feel it prudent to warn anyone of the nature of the footage, as… I was… concerned."

"You were fucking concerned? Muskwe, I'm FUCKING CONCERNED! What were YOU concerned about?" she demanded, a cold, hard edge to her voice.

"I was concerned, to be honest, that I had gone gloriously insane, sir," he replied, evenly. "…and I did not have time to ask one of the others to watch it, to confirm or deny my own madness."

"Well, you're not fucking mad unless we all are," she muttered, tiredly. "Everyone saw all of that, yes? Confirm with a yes or no. We saw a team enter a construction hellscape through a wall of oily fog and then get lost or massacred near a fast food restaurant that appeared, to my highly… highly trained eye, to be a fucking LITERAL NIGHTMARE."

A chorus of 'yes' came, then, like a soft rainfall made out of agreement. Really, Haller had hoped for one to thirty answsers of 'no,' because having simply gone batty would have been much easier and much less terrifying. This, this reality, that they had all borne witness to, was truly quite awful.

It bordered on deeply shitty that it hadn't been, in fact, some manner of hallucination - though that alone might have convinced her to go visit a bureau shrink.

"…so what's our theory?" she asked, softly.

"Theory is so often inadequate in the face of actual answers," a soft, faintly accented voice said. This voice was cool, steady, like a small stream flowing in the coldest days of early spring - and it was faintly processed, oddly digital. "Quite a bummer, really, that all of you are now in the fold. I really do find it tiring to orient newcomers, but, perhaps I will assign that task to someone else."

Every firearm in the room was trained on the newcomer before they finished speaking. This… person, of sorts, stood there right next to Haller - or had been next to, but was then in front of, having Haller's gun pressed to their forehead. All of this was well and good, as they had the intruder isolated and contained under threat of-

Death?

Haller stared at the gleaming lenses, lenses staring back at her. The creature, whatever it was, was covered in metal plating, their head all polished glass that might've belonged to a helmet if it weren't for the exposted struts and odd pistons of the neck that emerged from under their chin and around the base of the jaw.

"What the sam fuck are you?" Haller demanded. They chuckled, a strange sound like chimes and rings layering over one another. It was a musical sound, understandable only as a laugh because this creature's head bobbled a bit with it in unmistakable mirth.

"That is a big question with a complicated answer, Agent Haller - but I am, to keep it brief, a robot of a kind - but not a robot, really. Think of me as a mistake made right, but in the weirdest way possible," they replied, a smirk touching their smooth but undeniably digital voice. "I am Doctor Alex Sing, or… that is the name I use now, to conceptually distance myself from who I used to be - security reasons, you see. I've come to tell you all what you just saw."

"And what, the fuck, is that?" Haller asked, losing her patience rapidly - and she didn't have much of it to begin with.

"A 'Spontaneous Edifice Emergence and Reification' event. We call them SEER events, for convenience," Dr. Sing replied, quite pleasantly, waving their hand vaguely at the screen. "We know precious little about them… but we are aware that this is a new, far worse form than we have yet seen. You will ask for credentials. Here, look at this."

Haller looked, the machine person having produced from seemingly nowhere a badge holder. The badge ensconced in said holder insisted that the good doctor was part of an organization called DUSK - the Department of Unnatural / Supernatural Knowledge. In place of a typical shield and eagle so popular in governmental insignias, this bore a strange kind of… seal, or sigil.

"I've seen this before," Haller said, dizzily. The sigil was a pentagram, but its outer circle appeared to be a serpent, devouring its own tail - and in the central pentagon, there was a familiar sign. Brimstone, sulfur, the Leviathan Cross, in all its distorted, time-twisted glory. "I've… I've seen this…"

"A brimstone symbol? Yes, the satanists are rather fond of it, but we were using it first, before even the founding of this nation and our adoption of the DUSK name," Sing replied, blandly, as if this was all very boring to her mechanical ass self. Haller tried not to stare at her hand, a thing plated and padded to function like a human hand, but with open gaps showing moving metal beneath, rods and pistons and tiny little gears. For a moment, there was silence, and then Sing lowered the badge and leaned in, her camera lenses whirring as apertures tightened. "But you don't mean… brimstone. You've seen the DUSK insignia before? Fascinating, and of course, perfectly understandable."

"How the fuck is it understandable? My head hurts," Haller said, her last as she stumbled back and sat down. Muskwe rushed up, and handed her a handkerchief.

"Your nose, ma'am," he intoned, and she pressed her fingers to it, finding they came away bloody.

"Am I going to die?" she asked, a bizarre dread settling in her gut.

"No! My goodness, now, silly, no. You've clearly been geist hexed, some time in the past. You'll be getting memories taken from you back, which is so exciting, isn't it?" Sing replied, brightly. Silence so profound it weighed down on the room like a flow of molten lead followed this, and the doctor tilted her robotic head. "…or perhaps… not, to normal… people. Well, I will enjoy it, anyway, for your sake."

"Goodie for you. Someone fucking shoot her," Haller muttered. No one moved, so she stood herself, bleeding profusely into Muskwe's hankie, and drew her sidearm. Sing did not so much as flinch at the weapon being pointed at her - instead, she leaned in, peering at it.

"Custom work? Very nice, Agent. That's a real stomper of a pistol, and not remotely enough to do me harm," she said, pressing her 'forehead' to it. "I understand. I've violated protocol, entered a black site unannounced, and freaked you right on out. Go ahead. Blow a hole in me, if it'll help. The faster we get you FBI nerds acclimated, the better."

Haller, in a moment of raw rage, confusion and vague nausea, pulled the trigger. Dr. Sing's head snapped back with a loud CLANK, and then… with several heavy ratcheting noises, it returned to its previous position.

"Very nice," Sing said, one of her 'eyes' shattered, a curl of smoke drifting out of it. "High powered, effective, and you're strong enough to muscle down the recoil. Gorgeous weapon, truly."

"F-Fucking what?" Haller demanded. "You're fine?"

"Robot, nerd. Kind of," Sing replied, evenly, as if disappointed. With that, she clapped her odd mechanical hands together and turned to face the room at large. "Congratulations, everyone. You've been formally recruited into DUSK. Your lives as they were are officially over, bummer, but the pay is fantastic, our insurance is better than you'd even believe, and… you get to know all the things you haven't been told about. Vampires, psychics, magicians, nightmares and pretty little machines like me. Ghosts, demons, people who can alter their bodies, secret dimensions and dark dreams that don't die. Your families will be justly compensated after your mock funerals."

"Fucking WHAT!?" Agent Crenshaw demanded, stepping out of the crowd and stalking up to her. "Fuck you! I have a DAUGHTER! She was just BORN!"

"Then unrecruit yourself, dipstick," Sing told him, dismissively. "Divide yourselves into two groups! People who want to give up everything you have, go over there! People who want to keep your lives and forget this moment… over there!"

"F… Forget?" Crenshaw asked, his pale, watery blue eyes wide with a mixture of confusion and panic. "How?"

"Geist hexing will eradicate the memories, sever the pathways to them in an irrecoverable way, effectively removing it all from your mind. A cover story will be generated, and provided to you upon your waking," she explained, patiently, as if speaking to an infant. The doctor raised her arm, and pointed behind her, the limb at an unnatural angle so that an index finger could be directed right at Haller. "You, of course, have no connections, so you have nothing to lose, Agent Haller. I'd like you on this case."

"You can't just MARCH in here, you fucking ROBOT FREAK, and TAKE CONTROL of a literal FBI BLACK SITE. What I am GOING to do is detain your ridiculous metal ass and then call someone higher up the chain to tell me what the HELL is going on!" Haller all but shouted, thoroughly fed up with the utter helplessness she felt as that robot's head slowly tilted backwards like it had when shot, but slower, until it hung down her back and the camera lenses whirred, apertures tightening as they took her in.

"Agent, I am your superior, now," she said, simply, raising a hand. She snapped her fingers, and then… brought her head 'upright,' again, turning around. Haller ignored this, instead staring at her people, all of her people. They were frozen, creatures carved from dyed ice, flickering crystal effigies of themselves. They looked tesselated, rock candy, like models from some kind of videogame showing their triangles as each vertex undulated faintly outward and inward about its origin. "I really need you to stop freaking out, Haller. You're special, I can feel it, and I need your help with this. This is a problem, Haller, one that will kill people - a lot of people, if left unchecked."

"T-The… meat creatures? The manager, the… fast food place? That'll kill people" she asked, softly.

"There's worse about this than all that. Figments that fully instantiate are difficult to kill, for starters, and it will continue to spread… BUT, you have the ability to convince these people that what they do in my service will save the world. I can't convince them of that," Sing told her, quietly. "Get it together. You saw what you saw. That SEER event ATE your people. Working together, we can potentially reverse it, before it eats others."

"Doctor Sing, if you can just make us forget, why do you need to do this? Recruit us? Recruit me?" she asked, after a long pause in which she approached the frozen-mid-stride Agent Crenshaw. When she touched him, she touched what felt like softly undulating planes of glass, a few millimeters from his skin - but this glass was warm like flesh.

"Because you are necessary. When I have feelings, strong ones, I've learned to listen to them. If we are going to stop this, I… need YOU, Anna," the doctor said. Haller looked to the robot, and didn't bother to ask how Sing knew her first name - no one knew it, that was part of her position. She was an enigma, as fake as fake could be, because it kept her insulated from the threats they faced.

"What did you do to my men?" she asked. Sing approached, and drew from the pocket of her suit jacket a handkerchief. When she dabbed at Haller's cheeks, it came back damp, and the Agent didn't even know why she was crying.

"Nothing. There are six men in stupid robes outside, all of whom are affecting what DUSK calls a 'working,' using what we call a 'castgram.' Your men are unaffected, but in this place, time is having a bit of a problem moving forward, except for us. It's not something done… to them, but to the space they occupy, in a sense," she replied, quite forthrightly. Haller was deeply unsure how to deal with this information, but she was forced to accept it. Muskwe was in the middle of spilling a coffee, and it looked like a cascade of crystal that had made it only halfway to the floor. Touching the undulating crystalline surface just above that coffee, she hissed between her teeth and drew her hand back.

It had been scalding hot.

"Thermal energy makes it out," she said, softly. "They're going to freeze to death."

"Perhaps that's why I need you - you've only just seen what civilians call 'magic' for the first time, and you're already working out the flaws. It's true. In about six hours, they would reach a cold point so deep that unfreezing them would, ironically, flash freeze them - their arrested bodily functions no longer warming their insides and all," Sing told her. "So… return to your previous position. I will signal to the men outside to drop the working. Get your shit together, and ride the lightning into an exciting new career in saving the world."

"You're fucking insane," Haller said, shakily. "You know that, right?"

"I'm afraid sanity and insanity are far more complicated than you have been led to believe, Agent. Want to find out how?"

Haller stared at this machine, this woman, this doctor, this interloper and mystery and strangeness of a person. Her eyes, green and stippled with odd flecks of brown, were wide with a kind of feverish anxiety mixed with uncommon mania.

"Yes, I do. I do, god and fucking Jesus Himself Christ damn me."

"Your Christ has been dead a long time, and his so called father with him," Sing murmured, stepping close to touch the cross that Haller wore around her neck. "But, perhaps he was never your god. This was never your cross to bear."

"How could you possibly know that?" Haller rasped.

"I know what I have to know - and it's tarnished, and worn, and has not been well cared for," the doctor told her, in a soft, slightly processed whisper. "It is not something you love… it's someone you remember."

"I hate this," Haller said, in reply.

"You get used to it," Sing insisted, earnestly.

"Do you?"

"Not really. Are you with me?"

Haller stepped back, finding her feet had left softly glowing blue prints on the floor, showing her where to stand. The mechanical doctor sing reached up, and unscrewed what appeared to be the housing of the camera that Haller had shot out. As soon as it was removed, it started sparking and fizzling, molten metal running off of it. Sing threw it carelessly over her shoulder, and a metal plate slid into place beneath the hole, sealing it.

"I am, if that wasn't clear," the Agent murmured.

"Oh, yes, I had figured."

And the robot snapped her fingers, and time lurched back into motion with a sickening blurring of all lights and figures, and a heavy smattering of air shuddering around them like patches of broken, floating glass.

#fiction #writing #gore #surreal #supernatural #conceptual #story #SEER storyline #Fantasy #Horror #body horror

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hilltopsunset · 2 years ago

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Scarlet/Violet’s Poor Performance Overshadows Bigger Problems

Preface – What follows is not a proclamation arguing that no one should have fun with the new Pokémon games. People are allowed to enjoy what they enjoy. That sentiment can coexist alongside the fact that the game deserves a heavy amount of criticism. Criticism is not synonymous with hate. Often times, we criticize what we love most, because we want more for it/them, we want to see something/someone succeed, so we offer criticism as an opportunity for growth and improvement. If your initial reaction to criticism of something/someone you love is anger, it may be helpful to take a few deep breaths, consider the intentions of the criticism, and try as objectively as possible to examine whether there is any merit to the criticism before attempting to shut it down.

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who is mostly OK, but doesn’t put in much effort? Sometimes they’ll do something special to remind you they care, but usually sacrifice other aspects of the relationship along the way? And you've loved them so long it's hard to acknowledge the faults, and even harder to let go?

That’s Pokémon.

We are now at the end of the first weekend following Scarlet and Violet’s (S/V) release date, and what a weekend it was. Anecdotes about the horrendous performance alongside galleries of glitches have flooded the internet over the past few days, highlighting example after example of poorly optimized gameplay and occasional game-breaking bugs. The situation has gotten so severe that many players are requesting refunds for spending money on a triple-A official release that seems more like an alpha or beta version of the game. While the jury is out on exactly who is to blame (Gamefreak? Nintendo? The Switch hardware?), the answer to that question is a moot point—the fact remains that the game was released in this state despite similarly ambitious titles releasing on the same hardware with little to no problems at all, and now players are experiencing the consequences.

The biggest problem with the hype around performance issues is this: performance issues aren’t the game’s biggest problems. I definitely think they are the most egregious problems, and probably the most universally obvious ones, so maybe it’s good that these issues occurred so that the Pokémon community can start more seriously considering the criticisms players have been vocal about for years. I myself wrote a piece following the release of Sword/Shield (Sw/Sh) discussing my disappointment in the game and the franchise as a whole, followed by another blog post offering suggestions on ways to breathe new life into the games while still maintaining the charm and allure of its predecessors.

Yet the games continue to demonstrate apathy toward innovation and improvement in a way unprecedented for the highest-grossing franchise ever. Even if the performance of the game was immaculate, running at 60fps 100% of the time with no visual glitching anywhere to be seen, I have identified a collection of recurring and new issues that I’m grouping under the single umbrella of “immersion” issues. Textures are still reminiscent of N64 era resolutions, the game’s animations are still extremely low-quality, and Pokémon are still just roaming around aimlessly with no purpose or sense of belonging in the world. They even reverted the out-of-battle catching mechanic that made Legends: Arceus (L:A) feel so fluid and improved over the old “fight-and-catch” method, and have made a number of new poorly executed additions specific to the new games.

But why does immersion matter? Similar to how a book draws readers into a story, videogames should draw players into the gameplay. When reading a good book, people often forget they are even reading, mindlessly turning pages while completely engrossed in the pleasure, excitement, fear, or romance created by the words on the pages. Video games have the ability to offer a similar experience. Now, imagine you’re reading a book and encounter an entire page where each letter is a different color, and there is a random image behind all the letters with even more clashing colors on it. Or maybe you turn the page and suddenly the book slams shut, forcing you to remember what page you were on and relocating it. This would be distracting to the reader, and likely would disengage them from the story. Similarly, the aforementioned issues with the Pokémon games often pull players away from the immersion of the gameplay and create a dissatisfying experience.

Many of us remember the infamous tree from Sw/Sh. When it was first shown in a preview for the then-upcoming games, fans were understandably concerned. Many voiced a hope that the textures would be improved before the official release of the game. We’ve now seen similar or worse textures in 3 games since—Sw/Sh, L:A, and now S/V. Textures are often so bad that they are difficult to look away from. Just like the example of the colorful page in a book, the poor textures draw attention away from the game itself and ruin any immersion players may have been feeling up to that point.

Image: Giant human hands strike the enemy Pokemon.

Similarly, it is extremely distracting to see massive white-gloved human hands suddenly appear out of thin air to strike enemy or friendly Pokémon when using moves like Arm Thrust or Double Slap. There is no justifiable reason for this anymore at this point. The human hands and feet served their purpose within the 2D games due to graphical limitations, and were forgivable on the 3D handheld games due to limitations once again. But now they are just a slap in the face to players. Pokémon should be allowed to use their physical bodies to physically strike other Pokémon during battles. To be honest, it’s embarrassing that these artifacts from bygone generations continue to plague modern-day Pokémon games.

And then there’s the issue of Pokémon themselves popping into existence out of thin air as you approach them. This issue was present in Sw/Sh and L:A and doesn’t seem to have been adequately dealt with for S/V. When Pokémon do show up from a distance, it is often at an extreme lack of framerate, sometimes dropping to what looks like probably 3 or 4 fps. Framerates in S/V are constantly hit or miss from the few streams and examples I’ve seen floating around. The very first stream I went into showed a classroom full of children kicking their feet and swaying their heads at a solid 4 frames per second.

twitch

And when Pokemon do show up on the field, what are they doing? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which brings us to the issue of wild Pokémon behaving like automatons rather than real, living creatures. Ever since Pokémon started appearing in the overworld beginning with Let’s Go: Pikachu and Eevee, I have been yearning to see Pokémon behave more like real creatures. This issue has existed within every title since then: hoards of monsters just meandering in bushes and open fields, walking in circles and waiting for players to come battle or catch them. There is no reason so many creatures should just be hanging out in the open, often in groups integrated with other species which one may expect to be more hostile, and the only thing that causes any sort of reaction from them is the player’s existence. Every Pokémon in the wild exist solely for players to battle and/or catch them, and the games make no attempt to hide that purpose or integrate Pokémon more seamlessly into the world.

Image: Pokemon just...standin’...standin’ around...

Alongside better Pokémon integration with the world, making finding/catching Pokémon more meaningful and exciting would do wonders for the games. Players got a sense of this in L:A. Imagine if many of your encounters felt the same way as the first handful of alpha Pokémon you dealt with? Finding strong or rare Pokémon in the world should feel scary, tense, and/or exciting, and battling or catching them should feel challenging and fun. With that being said, I think they should move forward with the out-of-combat catching mechanic from L:A still in place. I don’t think I will ever play a Pokémon game again if that mechanic does not return, as it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a Pokémon game, despite L:A having plenty of other problems. In fact, finding a way to make battling occur while still being able to control the player character would open up a LOT of opportunity for interesting interactions and gameplay (I’m imagining something like Kingdom Hearts style combat where you can move around while choosing commands for your Pokémon, but this is a big jump and not something I expect).

Besides these recurring issues I’ve had, I know that there is a new problem in S/V of level-scaling—i.e. there is none. I have already seen players charting out best paths to take where you are more likely to encounter challenges within your team’s levels. A simple scaling mechanic would have done well in this game to allow players to choose their own paths while still encountering reasonable challenges all along the way. I’ve also read anecdotal experiences of folks lamenting the lack of interior exploration available in the game with buildings only existing as facades, and some buildings leading only to a store menu. I was watching a streamer play through a part of the game within a school, I believe, and to get from one room to another, the player walked to the doorway and POP! a menu screen asked where the player would like to go. Was modeling an interior so difficult? They couldn’t just let the player explore the building as they like? What is the purpose of requiring a menu to go to a room that is likely just down the hall? Anyway, regarding the stores, I’ve also read that they are exactly the same in each city/town, leaving no reason to make a journey from one location to another for unique goods, which could have been an interesting motivation for players to want to visit new locations.

None of these problems would be solved by the performance issues being resolved; they are inherent parts of S/V that ruin game immersion and bring what could have been an absolutely incredible addition to the franchise down to a barebones minimum, scarcely managing to crawl across the threshold of acceptability even for some of the staunchest supporters of the games. Coming from the most affluent and popular franchise to ever exist, the bare minimum is not good enough, especially when taken in combination with an absolutely atrocious technical and graphical performance on release.

We as players and Pokémon enjoyers need to hold Gamefreak to higher standards and draw the line somewhere if we ever want to see a main-series Pokémon game grow and innovate. If you purchased the game and are having fun with it, I’m genuinely happy for you. If I played it, I’m sure I would have fun, too. However, I want more for the main series, and I can’t bring myself to support Gamefreak financially knowing they are perfectly happy to release a complete mess of a game and call it finished. I will not be purchasing S/V.

#pokemon #pokemon scarlet #pokemon violet #scarlet #violet #gamereview #gaming #gamefreak #nintendo #criticism #pokemon gen 9 #gen9 #game review

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daysofourlivesrecaps · 1 year ago

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Monday, 10 July 2023

Chad and Stephanie are touring the set that will presumably be their new apartment, because there’s absolutely no chance the crew put together this much for a single episode.

It’s been a long-held belief in our household that the property values in Salem are extremely low, what with all the kidnappings, murders, Satanic possessions and general international intrigue. Which kind of explains why we’ve been watching a number of couples and individuals competing for the same rental properties for weeks now — it’s like how competitive New Yorkers get over rent-controlled places. eg, here’s Brady, nipping at the heels of our young lovers, hoping that he could be the first to snatch up this three-bedroom place for himself and his daughter.

Sorry, Brady. You snoozed and so, in accordance with fundamental principles of society, you losed.

Over at the Kirakiseseses, Alex has decided that it would be best for all involved if he moved out. Because seriously, JOHN ANISTON DIED BACK IN NOVEMBER AND WE ARE STILL PRETENDING THAT VICTOR IS JUST OVER THERE IN THE NEXT ROOM.

Also there’s the whole “Maggie fired him and then became his sworn enemy pretty much out of nowhere” thing, which makes living with her a little uncomfortable. Alex continues to work on his conflict management skills thanks to the tireless efforts of Dr. Marlena Evans and does not rise to any of Maggie’s attempts to reignite the bizarre conflict between the two of them.

He doesn’t actually have a place to live yet, “but how hard could it be to find an apartment in Salem?” he thinks, and heads over to the vacancy he heard about earlier today...

…where Chad and Stephanie have already decided to move in. Which sucks for Alex, but again: by their accounting, this is a three-bedroom place! I realize you’re moving out of a mansion, Alex, but you may have to set your sights a little lower.

Nevertheless, he returns some time later to hand Stephanie the rental agreement for this place. Which he picked up from the landlord. When he signed his own papers for the place right across from them.

Stephanie, Chad and Alex had a pretty intense love triangle happening somewhat recently, but I can’t imagine this will in any way impact them all being neighbors now.

Gwen runs into Kristen in the town square (official motto: you’re probably going to run into someone you know here and if you’re Nicole, that person will definitely be Eric) and they have a chat about Gwen accepting Dimitri’s proposal.

Kristen doesn’t mention her knowledge that Dimitri is just marrying Gwen so he can receive a massive influx of cash from his ill-defined Eurotrash family. But Kristen’s had a lot going on lately, so it probably just slipped her mind?

Kristen returns home and shortly thereafter, witnesses the “secret” passage opening.

There are easily half a dozen reasons why this is all very stupid, but I cannot deny that I was legitimately excited to see who might emerge from the tunnel. Especially since we’ve accounted for the two people who know of its existence: Megan fled town on her Definitely Real Submarine and Leo is upstairs with Dimitri. (Don’t worry; I’m getting to that.)

But it’s her daughter, Rachel!

Much like how she stole her dad’s cell phone to take an Uber to visit her mom in prison, this time Rachel has ditched camp to come here and confront her mom about why she didn’t come say goodby before she left for camp. Kristen explains that she was tied up in the incredibly secret and secure tunnel (the very same one this eight year old girl knew about and just emerged from) and then they begin scheming about how they can be together permanently.

Yes, that’s little Rachel saying “I thought we were fighting that.” That being custody of her. Which is a privilege currently enjoyed by her father, Brady.

Then Brady shows up, having just received a call from Rachel’s camp informing him that she’s gone missing.

We don’t hear the other side of that conversation, but the fact that it ends very quickly says to me that they just kind of threw their hands up after reporting this to him. “Yep, she’s gone. We told you. We’re off the hook now.” Which probably explains why he looks so pissed.

He confronts Kristen, who insists she hasn’t seen Rachel today.

We’ve seen this attempted kidnapping happen five or six times since we started watching and I root for Kristen every single time. There’s a burgeoning supervillain in that little girl — one that could be even more insanely over-the-top than her Auntie Megan — and the only way it’s ever going to develop further is under her mother’s tutelage.

All of that being said, I can’t imagine “nope, she’s not here” when she is, in fact, here, is going to work for very long. Because, supervillain family or no, Kristen is actually really bad at this.

Over at the Spectator, Xander is lamenting a serious decline in ad revenue when Chloe comes in with this hilarious (?) cactus-based ad for Southwest Airlines.

It’s extremely weird for this show to be so specific about a brand (the only other time I can remember it happening — apart from the clumsy Peacock references — was the above-mentioned Rachel incident where they actually said “Uber” instead of “ride share”), so I can only assume this was paid promotional consideration of some kind.

This will take the paper out of the red and Xander is so pleased by this development that he convinces Chloe that they should fuck right here in the office.

So they do.

And then Gwen walks in.

Naturally there are a couple of cactus/dick jokes. Which is a little odd since Leo isn’t even in this scene. (I told you, I’m getting there! I need like… two more sentences, okay?)

Chloe runs off, Xander gets dressed and he and Gwen discuss her engagement. Xander is jealous, but then they actually kinda talk things through like grown-ups and he ends up expressing a genuine desire for her to be happy with Dimitri.

And we pick up where we left off with Dimitri: he’s entered his room, and discovers Leo, who has himself discovered the paperwork detailing the whole “marry Gwen, get rich” scheme. So Dimitri kisses Leo.

At the end of Friday’s episode, Leo looked terrified, like this was non-consensual and we were about to go someplace truly unpleasant. But Days has absolutely no qualms informing you that you must have been mistaken — our hero did indeed get out of the cockadoodie car in time. And, oh look at that, Leo is now suddenly a lot more into this.

Dimitri then proceeds to convince Leo that he (Dimitri) is not actually straight — the Von Leuschner family insists that he marry a woman to receive his inheritance, but he (Dimitri) is, in fact, gay.

He also insists that he finds Leo irresistible. Which is where the lie breaks down for me, personally.

But Dimitri is extremely committed to this ruse. That, or he really does have awful taste in men.

Either way, this is now where we find ourselves: with Dimitri insisting to Leo that he’s a secret gay and convincing him not to tell Gwen. Which Leo, for all his protestations of being Gwen’s BFF, agrees to.

And this will all probably be fine since they’re the only two who know about any of this. Except…

OH SHIT! Could this be the greatest cliffhanger ending this show has given me so far? I think it might be!

#days of our lives #dool #peacock #soap opera

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dilfs-bitch · 2 years ago

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Jake Lockley X Reader - Tire Shop

Summary: You found this rude customer more attractive than you should.

Word account: 685 [ I'm not sure, wrote this on tumblr]

Tags: Jake being a little mean, pet name, degradation kink [I guess]

A/n: This definitely sounded better in my head but anyways, this is my first time writing on tumblr, so be kind. Also english is not my first language so I wrote this with translator helps. Sorry if there any grammar mistakes.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

____________________________________________________________

Any kind of work was tiring, working as a manager in a tire shop was ten times worse.

The worst customers were not the rude and not the drunk, but the aggressive ones. You came running from your small office every time you heard threats towards Chad, the poor guy did not know how to defend himself and just put up with the insults and threats. Inside the little room, you heard Chad mumble an apology and then a strong New York accent ask for another tire, that man’s audacity was enough to get you out of your office for the fifth time in the day.

"Is there a problem here, sir?"

"Sí señorita, I got this free coupon for another tire. Y yo tengo prisa" He splashed his hands on the counter aggressively making the kid flinching hard. You turned your head to Chad direction warning that he could go before turning your attention to him.

"I need to see the coupon first, sir" Him looked right at you with single eyebrow raised, throwing the small paper to your hand. You nodded after realizing that coupon expired.

"If you look a little closer, you'll notice that the promotion was valid until the last month. So if you want a new tire, I suggest you pay for it"

The man took a deep breath, drags his hands across his face and tossed his taxi driver hat onto the counter gazing your face with anger. Now you could clearly see how handsome he is, even grumpy "No ponga a prueba mi paciencia, Todavía estamos en agosto, all you need to do is ser una buena puta and give me the fucking tire."

A smile making its way up to your face, after hear his insults, ready to be as annoying as him. You leaned over the counter his gaze right to your cleavage. " We were in August, five minutes ago! As I said if you want another tire, pay "

Him snarled, grabbing the paper and turning into a small ball, throwing onto the counter " Cheeky bitch, I won’t pay for another tire"

"There's the door sir" You smiled gently pointing to exit, he just walked away murmuring something and then kicked the door. If you ever had doubts that you needed therapy, that doubt no longer existed, not when you found extremely attractive the way he was rude and aggressive to you. Who could judge you? He’s the most handsome man you’ve ever met in your life. From his taxi driver’s hat to the blood-stained leather gloves that made you so horny that you had to turn around to hold the inside of the counter, feeling your panties get wet, and even though him was the definition of red flag, you should have asked his name.

" Dame tu número" The sudden voice low, gravelly and now calm made your heart race, scaring you.

" I'm not interested, sir" You turned looking to him that had a charming smile now. Now was his time to leaned over the counter licking his lips gazing to you.

" Cariño... no necesitas mentir" his gloved hand roam to your back pulleding you closer to the counter. " Tú me deseas" He whispered in your ear. "Now be a good girl and give me your number, I won’t ask again

A large smile come out of his lips when you taked his phone that was on the counter, you almost dropped it with how trembling your hands were.

" Good girl " He praised when you gave his phone back. Grabbing your hair, he pulled you close to him catching your lips with his own, kissing you rough and quick "Better answer when I call, o no te va a gustar si aparezco aquí otra vez princesa.

He had an cocky smile when he walked away, leaving his card on the counter and making his way to the exit. The card said "Jake Lockley call me if you need a ride " Maybe only a ride would not be enough for you.

_________________________________________________________

Translate

Dame tu número - Give me your number.

Cariño... no necesitas mentir - Honey... no need to lie.

Tu me deseas - You want me.

O no te va a gustar si aparezco aquí otra vez princesa - Or you won’t like it if I show up here again princess.

Ser una buena puta - Ne a good whore

No ponga a prueba mi paciencia - Don’t test my patience.

Todavía estamos en agosto - It's still August .

Y yo tengo prisa - And I’m in a hurry.

Sí señorita - Yes miss.

#mcu #moon knight #jake lockley #jake lockley imagine #steven with a v #steven grant #marc spector x reader #marcsteven #jake lockely x reader #oscar isaac #jake lockley x you #moon knight imagine #jake lockley fluff #moon knight x reader

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slow-button-off · 2 years ago

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I went and transcribed the imo most important Ferrari bits of Charles BBC interview if you don't have the 30 mins to listen give it a read. It'll make you feel better about Ferrari!

First of all, I wanted to ask you on one level you’ve had a brilliant season 7poles 3 wins driving better than ever probably. But other things haven’t gone so well so how are you feeling about the season so far generally?

Yeah, as you said it's a bit of mixed emotions. I mean it's been a season where emotions run extremely high. Whether it was in highs or lows, there was no race with no emotions. It's either win, or leading and then some problems occur or whatever. So, it's been a first part of the season with quite a few things happening. But after the last two years first of all it was amazing to see that we finally got back into fighting for wins. On the other hand when I look back at it I am extremely happy to be fighting for wins again but on the other hand we haven’t managed to maximise all the potential we had. And this is a bit its not great but we still have the second part of the season to catch up I hope and I’ll push at the maximum but the last few races have been a bit difficult

So, you still believe in the Championship

Yes, I do until it’s mathematically over then I still want to believe in it. This is what gives me motivation and I’ll believe in it until the very end even though it just becomes more and more difficult

Reliability problems are one thing and actually you and Max have had 2 reliability failures each and 2 driving mistakes each actually, but obviously strategy questions have also been a story of Ferraris season. What are you and the team feeling about those situations that you’ve found yourself in and how to solve them

Let’s say that we know that we need to work on that. And this as a team we know and we want to do absolutely everything to get better in every single thing we do and obviously looking at the first part of the season there’s been some strategy mistakes, there’s been some reliability problems and also there’s been some driving mistakes. On reliability we are working extremely hard to get better, on the strategy we are also working extremely hard and after a mistake we always go through the e exactly the same process which is to try and analyse where the mistake comes from and why did we take the wrong decision at a certain point in the race in order to go forwards. As soon as you understand the mistake then you can move on but yeah, we need to understand those mistakes to then move on.

So, the team is recognising that they are mistakes because sometimes it doesn’t feel like that from the outside when Mattia is giving explanations and so on after the race. But internally you recognise them that do you?

I mean overall it’s not always the clear picture what we say to the outside world. I think it’s amazing that we can work inside the team. I think this is the way that we’ve been working in the last two years this is the way of working that brought us to where we are now in terms of performance. Inside the team it’s very clear where we need to improve, and this is the most important.

How involved in those discussions do you get?

Well, very involved, we are a piece of the puzzle because a Formula 1 team is basically loads of people working for one goal, but I think in some situations then the drivers can have feelings that are probably not exactly in line with the numbers or whatsoever because there is also the feeling part of it so we need to be involved in those discussions and we are with Carlos. The good thing with Carlos is that we have the same feeling in the car, we more or less need the same things in the car, and this helps to push in one direction. Which also gives me the confidence that it will get better.

What gives you that confidence exactly?

The way that we work. Because I know how tough it’s been to get back to where we are and I know that we arrived to that level because we for two years we’ve been working on those weaknesses of the car and we still have weaknesses and we need to work on them but if we work as well as we did in the last two years on other weaknesses I am confident that we will overcome them.

Now you talked a few minutes ago about the highs and lows of the season so far. How has that affected you how have you dealt with it?

It depends which ones, I am extremely tough with myself, so I always deal with my errors, I mean it’s much more difficult to deal with my own errors than whenever it’s a team error even though we are obviously one team and we lose and win together. I’m always harsher whenever it’s me who does the mistakes. And obviously France was one of those which hurted quite a bit Imola also a little bit but there weren’t as many points involved because I could go back on track. But whenever I go through these though times I go through the same processes as a I said before. Trying to analyse what was wrong and it’s mostly mentally what is the mindset that I had at that particular moment of the race that pushed me to go over the limit and do a mistake. And to understand this and to think about it seems quite easy but it’s not always easy to actually pinpoint exactly what was going on in your head tat that moment. But I think it’s a strength of mine and helps me to improve as a driver after every mistake.

In the past when I’ve talked to you you’ve talked about mental training. Does that get involved in this process?

I don’t think it does in the way to analyse the mistake, because I haven’t worked personally on that. It’s very difficult to work, it’s part of the experience it’s part of the path pf anybody in whatever work you do at one point mistakes will happen and every individual will react in a different way. And this is my way of reacting to it and I’ve always felt the benefit of reacting in that way, being honest with yourself and just grow from it. It’s not something that I’ve worked on. But the mental training has helped me in many other different situations just in the way to put me exactly in the zone to be able to always be able to be at 110% whenever you get into the car whatever the outside pressure or whatever is happening around you this is where the mental training is extremely helpful.

You said you are very hard on yourself I mean some drivers I think back to Michael Schumacher he never admitted he made a mistake ever you know. Why do you take this approach?

Because to be honest I really don’t see the point of hiding it. And sometimes it’s also so obvious for everybody that the mistake comes from the driver. I just don’t understand the drivers that are trying to have excuses with the wind or whatever. I mean sometimes it can happen but it’s 1 out of 200 crashed that you’ll get something strange happens. I just don’t like to lose time with finding excuses that’s exactly when you start to get with these things that you lose time, and you just don’t go forward.

You’ve obviously been Ferraris team-leader effectively de facto anyway for a couple of years now. You probably wouldn’t refer to yourself that way, but that’s the reality as far as the outside world thinks. Different drivers have different philosophies about how they work with the team and those feed into their individual personalities what would you say yours was?

I can’t speak about mine now because I believe that it has, I mean improved. It has got, how do you say that with experience I have changed massively. I arrived in Ferrari and I obviously didn’t feel like a team leader because I was next to Sebastian Vettel. Seb who was in the team for many years who had achieved and still has achieved much more than I did in this sport and obviously coming alongside Seb was more of a learning process for me than anything else. But now obviously it’s a bit of a different situation it’s been few years that I’ve been with the team and I feel home and so the way I work is obviously to try to work as a team. I hate to say I, I like to say we and to obviously involve absolutely everyone that I can because I feel like every individual can make the difference when they are happy in the environment they are working in. And also honesty, again I am very honest with myself but it’s also good for t he people that working around me because they know that whenever I do a mistake that I am going to be very honest and I hope that it’s going to be the same for them so then everybody can just learn quicker. And it is the case in Ferrari and that’s amazing.

In English we say there is no I in team I know there is in French but I guess that’s the philosophy you are talking about. Now, when I interviewed Mattia in Monaco he was talking about the target for this year was to be competitive but he thought it might take time to win a championship. Which didn’t mean you weren’t going to try to win the championship year but it wasn’t the target when you started so you weren’t going to change targets now. Obviously those remarks caught peoples attention. Had you discussed that approach internally?

I mean yes of course whenever you start a season you fix yourself targets and I think these were clear but as a driver I am extremely optimistic in whatever I do and so I understand Mattia because he needs to be rational and realistic with the targets whenever you are speaking to a whole team it’s normal. On my side I’ve also got my personal targets and I can tell you that in all the F1 seasons I have done that most of the time they were not really realistic. But that’s the way that I approach the seasons. I mean even in 2020 or 2021 whenever the car was not at the level my realistic target whenever I got into the car before starting a race was to win the race. There was nothing else that was coming into my mind. And I would do absolutely everything to achieve that target even though it is an unrealistic target. But that is what motivates me day and night, it’s wining it’s the feeling of winning. But I completely obviously understand the targets of Mattia.

I’m gonna explore that point in a minute but just what does Ferrari mean to you. You know you’ve been with them, a bit like Lewis with Mercedes, you’ve been with them since you were 11 years old or something. I can’t remember the exact age maybe you can tell us but it’s been a long time. And here you are competing for the world championship with them following in the footsteps of legends and now in that position becoming one yourself. What does that whole picture mean?

It’s incredible obviously, it’s a dream come true for me. I’m born in Monaco and obviously F1 is quite a big thing in Monaco and I’ve always watched the races. And I’ve always watched the red car in general even before knowing that the name of the red car was Scuderia Ferrari. For some reason I don’t exactly know why. And the obviously all my karting years were done in Italy. So I’d go to Italy and in Italy everybody talks about Ferrari when you are on a karting track everybody speaks about Ferrari. So I could hear Ferrari a lot and obviously watching Formula 1 it’s always been a dream of mine to be part of this team and now it’s been quite a few years that I’ve been part of this team. I’ve always had a special relationship with Italian people Idk if it’s because I grew most of my years when I was younger, especially in my karting years I was a lot in Italy, I got along and I knew Italian people very well. But the team just feels like a family, and I know many drivers say that but I do believe that in Ferrari there is something special and I feel very close to loads of the members, especially of the race team because obviously we are spending so much time together and its amazing to feel that type of connection.

What’s been different about competing for the championship, have you had to adjust anything else?

Not really, not really. I’ve never really felt too much the outside pressure, for me this doesn’t change much. Yeah, it’s just more happiness I guess because whenever you are doing a great job you are rewarded with a victory which is much more rewarding than a 5th place like last year whenever we were doing the perfect job. So yeah, it’s good and it also beautiful to see the smile on the faces of all the people back at the factory and at the track after two very difficult years whatever we were doing it was quite frustrating because you will never get the result that you actually wanted. Now we have the possibility to get those results that we want. So it’s good

Then just finally 9 races to go 80 points behind, how are you gonna approach the season is it all out just completely you know no holds barred, can’t lose now, nothing to lose, or what? How are you coming back in Spa in 3 in weeks’ time?

I really feel like the first part in the season has been my strongest in F1 and the way I’ve worked and the way we have worked as a team in terms of finding the right setup, in terms of building up to the qualifying lap in Q3 or just preparing the race has been the best I have ever done in F1. So, I think there is no need for me to change that approach. Again, try and grow from the mistakes of the first half, but also perform as well as the first half. Because the performance I’ve given in the first half I’m extremely happy about and this I want to keep. So no there wont be any significant change we just have to try and work as a team to put a weekend together for the 9 remaining races and see where we end up

#charles leclerc #scuderia ferrari

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floral-poisons · 2 years ago

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a small vent post about creating

if you come across this post, you can feel free to ignore it. but i kind of need to get this off my chest and i’m posting it on here because i truly believe that what i have to say has value. and maybe this will gain traction, maybe it won’t. who knows.

i haven’t gotten to my drafts in over a month. in truth, i am exhausted. it’s hard to write when your energy is low. but also, part of my disappearing motivation, which kind of disappeared within a snap, is because of how my posts just plummeted.

maybe it’s because the interest in twisted wonderland went away. things come and go in cycles after all. but either way, seeing my posts plummet in numbers suddenly made me not want to create anymore.

it’s really easy to say “create for yourself and the rewards will come.” but in my opinion, every single post i’ve seen about that (and that i have even reblogged) comes from a privileged standpoint.

creating fandom content is work, unpaid work, and often underappreciated and also heavily scrutinized. i was fortunate enough to have the energy to make content and share it to others and even more so to have people take interest in my work.

but it’s extremely disheartening to watch my posts plummet and essentially bomb. and to say “create for yourself and x will come” is privileged because it tells me that your voice has always mattered. it matters to the point where you are fortunate enough to have the patience to wait for the rewards to come.

for me, i’ve been told my voice hasn’t mattered for, essentially, all my life. since i was born. seeing my posts get interactions, seeing people like what i write, comment on it, proves to me my voice does matter. it’s solid, inevitable proof that people appreciate my hard work and a craft i am still attempting to perfect for myself.

the way my spirits just collapsed when i wrote my twst dorms hanfu series and seeing just the lack of interactions. it broke my heart in so many ways. i wanted to write something connected to my culture in a way that is appreciative, in a way that isn’t fetishized and viewed with a skewed lens of racism. the way those posts plummeted told me that my culture and therefore my being didn’t matter anymore. this fandom got its angst and fluff and general writings and left. it’s so easy to tell when readers are only interested in reading if it fits their whiteness.

(of course i can’t even begin to address the fact that my posts do much more poorly in comparison to posts that are tailored to fem! readers alone and the politics behind that)

to say “create for yourself (and only yourself) and the rewards will come” and that validation isn’t necessary just strikes me as so so privileged. some of us writers need, and like, validation because it brings a certain message. our voices matter, our stories matter.

on top of that, i pride myself on my personal beliefs. i grew up in fandom spaces tailored to white readers (specifically white girls/women). those spaces created very real insecurities in myself and only enhanced my self loathing as a person. i want to make stuff that doesn’t just stick to the usual formula. i purposely craft my language to be inclusive. no descriptions of skin tone or outright descriptions of blushing or hair textures or eye colors or height or body shape or anything. and yet my reward for being inclusive? posts that just don’t gain traction.

i don’t just want to create for myself. i want to create for other people to give them the fandom spaces and fics that i didn’t have, let them see themselves in fics that would normally exclude them. and yet, the work is so exhausting. and it feels like creating for myself isn’t enough because what my posts tell me is that my work doesn’t matter. my culture doesn’t matter. my existence and voice don’t matter.

i’m grateful for the followers i have amassed, for the people who interact with my posts regardless of what they are, for the people who appreciate the lengths i go to to create a space for everyone. i can’t write everything sadly. i wish i could. but people in those groups can and their voices deserve to be heard.

i don’t spend much time on here on purpose. i have schoolwork, applications, friends, a life outside of this. getting caught up online only leads to my already poor mental health to being poorer. i am just so busy and my interests also change quite a bit, causing my motivation to decrease in, say, twisted wonderland but increase when it comes to anything related to ghost (the metal band).

this is not supposed to be a post that’s a pity party. i don’t want pity nor comfort. this is also not a call out or anything. just a general observation i’ve personally noticed.

i just want people to listen and to consider the fact that saying things like “create for yourself and x will come” and “you don’t need validation” comes from places of privilege. those places told you your endeavors, personhood, voices, products matter.

be careful about your wording even if it’s meant to be appreciative and you had good intentions.

and algorithms, you fucking suck. probably because whoever coded you was all kinds of -ists and -phobics.

#floral poisons talk #flora vents #tumblr algorithm #twisted wonderland #twst #disney twisted wonderland #disney twst #content creation #burnout

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fortheloveofwonderland · 4 years ago

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Sixty Six Percent [Spencer x fem! Reader]

A/N - This is for my “girls night out” square on my CM bingo card for @cmbingo, which you can find the masterlist for here. Also loosely based off this prompt I’ve been wanting to write for a while - Our best friends are that awful “cute” couple that make out in public and call each other “sweetie” and “sugar” and god they’re awful, let’s talk about how awful they are – develops into “oh we’re that awful couple now”. Includes some Galvez and is set circa season 14 ish. Bottom right image taken from Kirsten’s Instagram.

CW - not much really - just drinking and fluff.

In which girls night takes an unexpected turn when it coincides with boys night.

WC: 2.2K

Find my full Masterlist here.

Western’s bar in DC on a Friday night had been a must for girls night out. It was known for its cheap drinks, loud music and packed dance floor. Everything you and the girls were looking for.

When your closest friends worked for the FBI, arranging girls night was always a near impossible feat. You’d lost count of how many times Penelope, Emily, JJ and Tara had to bail on your plans because another case had come up.

You understood, you’d been best friends with Penelope for years now and you appreciated their schedules were hectic but you were always left downtrodden when they’d had to cancel again.

But finally after weeks of cancellations and rescheduling, tonight they had been free for girls night.

Shots were flowing and you all showed off your moves on the dance floor. You and Tara being the only single ones of the group danced with a few men but it was all harmless flirting, nothing serious.

You weren’t looking to take someone home tonight.

It was nearing midnight and you had all taken a break from dancing to rehydrate with vodka. You noticed Penelope’s eyes shift away from the girls across the room and her perfectly sculpted eyebrows knitted together.

“What is it, Pen?” You asked her, having to speak loudly to be heard over the music.

“We can’t just have one night.” She rolled her eyes but then her face broke out into a large smile. “Excuse me.” And with that she sauntered off.

Your gaze followed where she had gone to see her throwing herself into the arms of her boyfriend, Luke Alvez.

You chuckled to yourself, nudging Emily in the arm.

“They just can’t stay away from each other can they?” You laughed.

“It’s disgusting really.” Emily also laughed.

“Looks like they're having a boys night. We should probably go and say hi.” JJ shrugged.

“I suppose it would be rude not to.” Tara agreed.

The four of you followed in Penelope’s footsteps across the room. You’d met most of the team over the years thanks to Penelope and you said your hellos to Luke, Rossi and Matt.

The last man you came to had incredible hazel eyes, which even in the dim lighting of the bar you could see were flecked with gold. He had a light stubble on his cheeks and untamed curls you had a sudden desire to run your fingers through.

Spencer Reid, you assumed. You’d heard of him countless times but for whatever reason the two of you had never met. You got the impression he avoided social situations in lieu of more academic pursuits.

You’d heard stories of his time in prison and looking at him now it struck you that there was a hint of sadness in those hazel eyes and you assumed that must be why.

“You must be Spencer.” You smiled a little shyly at him. You had no idea he’d be so attractive. “I’m Y/N.”

He smiled at you but you noticed it was stifled. Like he knew the fact you knew his name meant you knew what had happened to him.

“Yes, I’m Spencer. I’ve heard a lot about you Y/N, I can’t believe we’ve never met before.” Despite the sadness about him, his eyes seemed to sparkle as they looked at you and it made you feel hot under the collar.

“Me either.” You couldn’t help but beam, had Penelope been hiding him from you? He was just your type.

You turned to look at your friends briefly but were surprised to find them gone. Tara, Emily, JJ and Matt were now dancing in the middle of the floor while Rossi propped up the bar, sipping his single malt.

A few feet from where you were standing with Spencer, Luke and Penelope were swapping saliva in an extremely NC-17 fashion.

He had his hands on her voluptuous backside and her fingers were clawing at his shirt.

“Are they always like this?” You turned back to Spencer with a grimace.

He shrugged.

“Not always but often enough not to be phased by it anymore.” He chucked a little.

“Young love.” You laughed too.

“They’re actually pretty cute when they aren’t pushing the boundaries of public displays of affection.”

“Pen always refers to him as bunny, it makes me sick.” You laughed harder.

“Oh gosh.” Spencer pulled a face. “They flirt over the phone on cases all the time. It takes forever to get an answer out of Garcia because they have to flirt in every single call.”

“I bet he hasn’t described to you their sex life in graphic detail. Because Penelope has.” You shudder a little. “I know more about Luke’s anatomy than I ever needed to know.”

“That’s...that’s unfortunate.” Spencer laughed.

“Yeah that’s one way to put it.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” His smile was much less sad now, and more genuine as he looked at you. The way he was smiling at you made you feel weak.

“That would be really nice.” You nodded.

You followed Spencer to the bar where he ordered you both a drink and paid. He then led you over to a small booth away from the chaos where you sat next to him to allow you to be able to converse over the music. At least that’s what you told yourself.

It had nothing to do with the fact you wanted to be close to him. Absolutely nothing.

“One time we were on a case in Boston and I called Garcia and for whatever reason she thought I was Luke and she started graphically describing what she was going to do to me, Luke when I got home. It was...disturbing to say the least.”

“Oh wow. That sounds...horrible.” You laughed.

“I’ve not been able to properly look her in the eye since.” Spencer pulled a face.

“They are the definition of sickening. But they’re happy. I guess that’s all that matters.” You shrugged, sipping your drink. “They’re lucky, one night stands have never worked out that well for me.”

“No?” Spencer looked inquisitive. “I’ve never had one.”

“Really?” You raised an eyebrow at him. “I thought everyone had had at least one.”

“Statistically only sixty six percent of American’s have had a one night stand before.”

“I forgot Penelope told me you were a genius.” You laughed again. “That’s a surprisingly low number.”

“It’s still over two hundred and sixteen million people.” he didn’t even look as though he had to think to know something like that. You were impressed and felt slightly inadequate in comparison to him.

“Oh, in that case I suppose it is a lot.” you didn’t really know what you could say to that. “Can I ask why you’ve never had a one night stand?”

Spencer contemplated his answer this time. Facts and statistics rolled off his tongue but when he had to speak of personal things it often took him a moment to find the right thing to say.

“I suppose I’m a romantic at heart. One night stands seem kind of...disheartening to me. I’m not saying never but I’ve never felt the need thus far in my life.”

“See I don’t agree.” you turned in your seat so you could look at him properly. This close you could really see his incredible bone structure, high cheekbones and a sharp jawline. You wanted to run your fingertips over the delicate curves of his face, kiss the stubble on his soft skin and make your way to those plump lips of his. “Being single is hard, especially when your best friend is Penelope who is and is all loved up with Alvez. One night stands provide a little solace from the loneliness I guess.” you shrugged, trying not to sound like you were throwing a pity party for yourself.

“But isn’t it just lonely all over again when it's over?” Spencer leaned closer to you and your eyes were fixated on his lips.

“I don’t know.” mirroring him, you leaned closer. “We could always find out.” you smirked at him. You had just met him and you knew being so brazenly flirtatious could be dangerous territory. But you’d gone all these years without ever crossing paths so you supposed if this went south and Spencer rebuffed you then avoiding him wouldn’t be that difficult.

His facial expression didn’t change so you had no idea what he was thinking or how he had taken your advances. He leaned even closer and your eyes were still locked on his lips.

“Are you asking me to come home with you Y/N?” his eyes were dark, lust perhaps?

“I’m asking you to join the sixty six percent Spencer.”

For a few long seconds neither of you moved or spoke. Spencer eyes fell over you, lingering longer on your lips. You shifted a little in your seat feeling hot under his intense gaze. He leaned even closer and you thought he was about to kiss you, but just as he inched towards you, a voice snapped you back to reality.

“Y/N there you are!” it was Emily. “And Spence, hey.”

“Hi Emily, what’s up?” you would never forgive her if she had gotten in the way of Spencer kissing you.

“Come and dance, it's girls night!” she tugged your arm, pulling you so you were on your feet.

Spencer shuffled out of the booth behind you. As Emily started dragging you towards the dancefloor, he came close to your ear and whispered “I’ll come and find you later.” and then he headed over towards Rossi who was still propping up the bar.

You danced with the girls for hours, even Penelope when she came up for air and pried herself away from Luke for more than a few seconds. The drinks kept flowing, laughter was aplenty; it was a great night all round. It had been worth waiting for.

Around three am you and the girls decided to call it night. You were a little tipsy and your feet hurt from all the dancing. You had lost track of Spencer earlier in the night, you were a little disappointed but it was probably for the best. A one night stand with your best friend's colleague would no doubt only end in disaster.

You said your goodbyes outside, hugs and cheek kisses were dished out and they all promised you would have another girls night as soon as their schedules allowed. You lived on the other side of town than the girls so you waved off their cab from the curb and awaited the next one. It wasn’t long before another cab pulled up and to your confusion the rear window rolled down as it came to a stop.

“Told you I’d find you later.” Spencer smiled at you from the backseat.

You tried to hide your blush as you slid in next to him.

“I thought you left.” you buckled yourself in and almost immediately Spencer took hold of your hand.

“Not without you.” he leaned closer and then his lips pressed against yours in the backseat of the cab and you felt your whole body turn to jelly at the sensation. He used his free hand to cup your face as he deepened the kiss.

You felt a jolt of electricity coarse through you, something you had never felt before. Your lips moved in such a synchronized fashion it was crazy to think you had never done this before. You felt as though you’d waited your entire life for this moment.

The kiss lasted a few minutes and when it ended you both panted slightly, trying to grasp at the air that had escaped your lungs. He kept his hand on your cheek, stroking small circles on your skin with his thumb.

“Are you ready to join the sixty six percent club Spencer?” you smirked at him in the dark.

He kissed you again, softly this time, more cautiously.

“I’m quite comfortable in the minority. And I already know I am not going to be able to settle for one night with you.”

Your heart melted at his words, and the loving look he was giving you. You squeezed his hand, kissing him once more.

“If you take me for breakfast in the morning, you can have as many nights as you like.” you winked at him which made him blush a little.

“I’m sure we can arrange that, my love.”

“Thirty four percent it is then.” you laughed, settling your head on Spencer’s shoulder. He wrapped his arm around your shoulders and kissed your head.

You would have to berate Penelope for not introducing you to Spencer sooner. But you might also need to cut her and Luke some slack, because you had a feeling you and Spencer were going to become an awful, cutesy couple just like them. But when it was happening to you, you didn’t mind so much. Maybe you’d even let Spencer call you bunny…

...On second thoughts, maybe not. Somethings would never change. You’d leave the cringey nicknames to Penelope and Luke. At least for now anyway. Tomorrow was another day.

#spencer reid #dr spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #cmbingo21 #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #penelope garcia #luke alvez #emily prentiss #tara lewis #jennifer jareau #david rossi #matt simmons #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x fem!reader #spencer reid x you

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therealvinelle · 4 years ago

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How do you believe Carlisle feels about Esme? How would their break up go? Would he ever cheat on her? I mean like emotionally?

He loves her.

I don’t doubt that his feelings for Esme are genuine, that he respects and cherishes her and wishes to spend his life with her. Esme, too, worships the man.

My complete lack of faith in this ship comes from the fact that they’re together for the wrong reasons and not compatible.

The Bad Beginning

Carlisle had spent centuries searching for likeminded, he never did. In the end he succumbs and starts creating his own, first Edward and then Esme, and to his joy they both agree to do the diet.

Esme’s transformation was entirely an impulse on his end. He saw this delightful, vivacious young woman he’d known ten years ago lie broken and dying in the morgue, a Jane Doe declared dead, she was all too easy to steal. She was too far gone for him to have time to think it over, and so he went «alright let’s do this. I imagine it seemed rather like God had sent her to that morgue specifically. We learn from Midnight Sun that romance wasn’t on his mind at all (even if it was, that wouldn’t make their marriage more functional) and he expected nothing of her. He bit her because he didn’t want Esme Platt to die.

Esme, of course, wakes up into this new life under surreal, heavenly circumstances. Her child is still dead - but here is the mythic, pedestaled Dr. Cullen, now her savior and more wonderful than ever. To back myself up with the books:

Esme had already been in love with Carlisle—much to his shock—but not through any mystical, magical means. She’d met Carlisle as a girl and, drawn to his gentleness, wit, and otherworldly beauty, formed an attachment that had haunted her for the rest of her human years. Life had not been kind to Esme, and so it was not surprising that this golden memory of a good man had never been supplanted in her heart. After the burning torment of transformation, when she’d awakened to the face of her long-cherished dream, her affections were entirely his. (Midnight Sun, chapter Bloodtype)

Carlisle, on his end, hadn’t had the idea at all until Edward said “Dude, she’s into you, go for it.”

I’d been on hand to caution Carlisle about her unforeseen reaction. He’d expected that she would be shocked by her transformation, traumatized by the pain, horrified by what she’d become, much as I had been. He’d expected to have to explain and apologize, to soothe and to atone. He knew there was a good chance that she would have preferred death, that she would despise him for the choice made without her knowledge or consent. So the fact that she had been immediately prepared to join this life—not really the life, but to join him—was not something he was ready for.

He’d never seen himself as a possible object of romantic love before that moment. It seemed contrary to what he was—a vampire, a monster. The knowledge I gave him changed the way he looked at Esme, the way he looked at himself.

More than that, it was very a powerful thing, choosing to save someone. It was not a decision any sane individual made lightly. (sic)

I’m not entirely void of authorial intent - I get that this was supposed to be romcom where the cute nerdy guy has no idea the girl is interested.

But, what I see is that after centuries of being alone, never finding anybody who shared his values, Carlisle finally has these two people who share his ideals, the only two in the world. He’s had countless friends, but it never worked out because of that damn diet. But, now he has these two people, and one of them is a beautiful, kind, wonderful woman who’s in love with him.

I imagine falling for Esme was easy. It was just so perfect, simply by being Carlisle Cullen he could make her happier than any other man, and given their shared diet, he wanted her by his side always, just as he did Edward. And this was it for him, really, to Carlisle Cullen Esme might as well be the only woman in the world because she’s the only one who'll share his lifestyle. He also felt responsible for her.

I don’t at all doubt their sincerity or affection for one another.

However, they did not fall for each other for each other’s sakes. Esme fell for the ideal since childhood, and Carlisle fell because she was perfect. Stick them in an AU and it won’t happen.

The Slippery Slope

Where they run into trouble is firstly that Esme doesn’t share these ideals, nor value human life for its own sake. Now, I’m not asking her to be a saint - but over the course of these books we had some lapses that I find pretty damning.

She wanted Edward back in Forks, when this would almost certainly mean the death of Bella Swan, simply because to Esme having Edward nearby > a person’s life. This wasn’t the case for Carlisle, he made it extremely clear he wanted Edward to leave.

During the “Kill Bella?” vote, she was in favor of whatever meant Edward would stay.

Carlisle, having failed to get anywhere with talking sense into Edward, sends him home to his mother for an intervention. What happens next is that Esme gives Edward her blessing to eat the delicious girl if he wants to. Now, we can’t know specifically the talk Carlisle and Esme had before this, but I can’t imagine it was this. Also, damn, what a miscommunication.

Esme simply doesn’t have a problem with the deaths of individual humans, and she will put her loved ones above all other things, even if it’s a minor inconvenience. Keeping Bella alive only becomes her priority after Edward makes it clear he wants this.

Now, Carlisle’s standards have been worn down over the centuries, he just wants his family to try not to eat people on purpose, that’s how low the bar is. Tragically for his marriage, Esme is stumbling over said bar.

The further trouble they run into is that I don’t think they’re very compatible people.

Esme means well, but she’s peculiar, to put it extremely nicely. Her ambition in life is to LARP the human life, right down to being a master chef of something her species can’t eat, which could be sweet if she did other things. She doesn’t, the closest she gets is designing homes for her family. There’s being single-minded, and then there’s Esme, who appears to have honed herself into someone who exists only to be the housewife.

This leads to bizarre behavior - for instance in Midnight Sun when Edward has realized he’s in love, he sits around laughing to himself like a lunatic while playing the piano. Something happens with Rosalie, who runs out of the house in humiliation. Esme, responding to all this, gives her infamous “the best and brightest of us all” pep talk.

It’s just such a weird scene, even accounting for the inhumanity of Twilight vampires this is weird.

Mostly, thought, it is Esme’s interests and desires in life that I find so at odds with Carlisle’s. She wants to be an improved human, living the shinier, better, life without actually embracing the inhumanity of vampirism, while Carlisle is doing the human thing because he wants to be a doctor and save lives. Before that, he was travelling the world, living with normal vampires, using his eternity to study and pursue meaning in life. Now, they end up in the same place, with similar goals - wanting to blend in with humans - but the motivation is the polar opposite.

Which in turn means that as the world turns and their lives inevitably change, the way they live will have to change. This will spell trouble.

There’s also me having a strong suspicion these two don’t have much of a physical relationship, if any. Meyer specifically referred to their relationship as spiritual, and that fits the vibe we get from them in the books. Quite notably, Rosalie and Emmett were impossible to be around when they were newlyweds, while Carlisle and Esme weren’t a problem at all.

Not to mention what Esme longed for all those years was very much an ideal of a man, which to me doesn’t immediately point to a very physical attraction.

The Penultimate Peril

Would he cheat on her, you ask. Answer is yes, they’re both cheating emotionally with Edward. No.

He’s with her because he wants to be, and feels responsible for her. More, developing the kinds of feelings necessary for an emotional affair isn’t really on the table for him, since everyone else in the world is either a. one of his kids or the Denali, b. an unrepentant man-eating demon. So, unless Tanya’s feeling frisky, Carlisle doesn’t have anybody to cheat with.

(I’m here defining an emotional affair, which as I understand it is a bit hard to define, as a romantic, but non-physical entanglement. The cheating party has to know their partner wouldn’t be cool with it for it to count in my eyes.)

As for physically cheating on her, nope. God no, not ever. Unless something really convoluted like the plot of Blue Moon unfolded, but that’s really more a case of Esme pimping out her husband to her daughter-in-law, so everyone’s to blame here.

The end

I think the breakup can happen in any number of ways, but I think either way it will be sudden.

These two aren’t going to go “you know, I think we’ve grown apart” because Esme would never acknowledge that nevermind walk up to Carlisle and say it, and if Carlisle realized things aren’t working he’d still want to stick it out for her sake.

I think it’ll be sudden, it’ll happen as the immovable object that is them is hit by an unstoppable force. One will go someplace the other can’t follow. Maybe when the Cullen coven splits down the middle, and they’re on each their own side of the chasm, or maybe some other cause entirely.

It’ll devastate them both, but given the people these two are, I think it’s inevitable.

#carlisle cullen #esme cullen #carlisle/esme #twilight #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #hope you all think the header theme was as funny as i did #a series of unfortunate events aka-#Anonymous #ask

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morsartis · 3 years ago

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That [Redacted]

It was no secret that trolls reacted differently to things concerning romance, as someone who was somewhat well versed in quadrants by now you could say that there really was some method to the madness. Truth be told it was all extremely straightforward- unless you were a clown. Gods above and below did that throw a wrench in things. From symbolism and ritual all the way down to the odd taboo clowns just loved to make things interesting- and often contradictory- despite being in a relationship with Marvus for as long as you had been those damn clowns still confounded you.

Still, you’d learned to pick up on certain tells. Little mannerisms your matesprite couldn’t help himself from doing each and every time. Sipping at your drink as the troll next to you continued to ramble on- about what you had long lost track of- it was very clear they were getting on Marvus’ nerves. Really, he wasn’t subtle. Not anymore. The twitch of his ears every time your companion laughed at something they’d said, the flex of his hands around his cane when they leaned into your personal space. Honestly it was starting to get a little funny. They weren’t even hitting for your red quadrant- just making over the top and cartoonishly exaggerated small talk- but clearly Marvus had different feelings on the matter. Some time between them plopping down in your booth and throwing an arm around your shoulders Marvus had started inching his way closer and closer. He made a good show of it, of rambling and ‘wandering’ around the club. To the untrained eye he’d only ‘accidentally’ find himself back at your table. “Ohmygoddd is that Marvvvy Xoloto? I legit can’t! Are you two here together?” The teal was now half sprawled across you to gawk openly like a stereotypical drunk sorority girl. One hand wrapped around a solo cup and the other still clinging to your shoulders. It was clearly getting to Marvus as you saw his brow twitch and his grin become a little more forced. Taking the solo cup from their glitter smeared claws you set it on the table and carefully guided them back into a sitting position. Your newly appointed bestie still refused to remove their arm from around your shoulders and while that didn’t bother you it was clearly bothering your matesprite more and more. “Like Baaabeee, you should totally ask him to hang out with us!”

You couldn’t even attempt to stop the barking laughter that statement caused. The straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back as Marvus all but appeared at your side to sneer a wide grin down at your companion- you should really remember their name because they seemed like a blast- and placed a single hand down on the table to lean over the two of you. Abruptly your companion stopped giggling along with you in favor of staring gobsmacked up at him. “Omg babes did I like black out or did he teleport cause dayum!” Marvus’ near livid red eyes softened a shade towards orange in confusion. “Exactly how drunk are you right now?” You asked them in amusement. “Ooooo what’s that earth show saying thang??? Oh! Oh! Oh! I found a liquor store and I drank it! Yeah! That’s the one.” “Let’s call you a cab then.”

“Awww but I wanna party!” Their arms wrapped around you in a vice as they pouted down at you. The shiny metallic sequins of their crop top were digging into your skin and you had a suspicion that there would be glitter in your hair for days to come. A low growl emanated from above you and to both your horror and amusement the teal blew a raspberry at him.

“Ay tealz, wat tha fck you think you doin?”

“I am having a great time with my new bestie! Now buzz off grumpy pants!” They pointed a finger right in Marvus’ face causing him to go cross eyed and threw their legs over you to practically sit in your lap. Oh, you needed their name and number because they were now your favorite person. Giggling hysterically you patted their knee. Marvus was starting to look somewhere between murderous and exasperated.

“That’s my matesprite yo’ dumbass is feelin’ up tealz.”

“Omggg you two are together together?? That’s adorable!” And yet they didn’t budge an inch.

“Marvus could you help me get them into a cab?” You asked earning another whine from them.

“But the party isn’t even over yet!”

“Ye, but it be lookin like you dun had enough.” Marvus ground out.

It took you wrapping an arm around their waist and half dragging half herding them towards the exit before they stopped whining. Marvus had been more than happy to clear the way and get them a cab which is when the night went from interesting to insane. Marvus had been trying to subtly goad the teal off of you as you waited for a cab but they had simply wrapped themselves more firmly around you. As the time for the cab dragged on Marvus continued to grow more agitated until finally, finally, the cab pulled up.

“We should go to another party.” Ellari- you’d finally gotten a name- slurs cheerfully attempting to drag you with them to the cab. Marvus takes a step towards the both of you. “I think it’s closing time for you.” You reply. Ellari pouts exaggeratedly and pulls you into a hug. “Well you better call meee! I need a party buddy!” “Of course, of course-,” You yelp suddenly when they pull back and with a wicked grin move faster than any drunk has any right to move. “See ya next time babe!” They shout diving into the cab as quickly as their stilettoes would allow.

“You sneaky mother-,” Marvus snarls suddenly lunging for the cab as it speeds off. He spends a moment swearing at the rapidly speeding cab as it escapes and you place a hand on your rear still stinging with the slap. As the situation finally catches up with you a laugh begins to bubble up. Marvus whirls around to look at you completely bewildered as you start to cackle until tears streak down from the corners of your eyes.

“Wats so damn funny babes?” He asks warily eyes narrowing slightly. You shake your head still laughing too hard to speak as he approaches you. Its not until he bends down to be level with you that the laughter begins to die off. There’s a look in his eyes that’s familiar and sends your stomach in nervous knots. A plotting look of suspicion that turns his eyes dark.

“Were you tryna make a clown jealous baby?”

Oh shit.

A shark like grin spreads across his face and before you can explain he has you up in his arms.

Officially screwed is putting it lightly.

#I THOUGHT I POSTED THIS EONS AGO #GODDAMN YOU TUMBLR WHY #I apologize anon I have failed you #so here it is #hopefully living up to the expectations #Ellari is my personal fantroll #Think Elle Woods from legally blonde #I am kinda dissatisfied with how this turned out #not enough dunking on the clown man #BUT ITS SO OVERDUE OH GOD #anyway hopefully its not as bad as I think it is lol #Marvus x reader #request #yes requests are still open just taking them slowly #and I apologize for the wait!#marvus xoloto #hiveswap #friendsim

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buckyownsmylife · 4 years ago

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Lucky - Logan Howlett smut

The one where Logan catches you touching yourself when you’re supposed to be his.

Warnings: masturbation (f), oral sex (f), slight voyeurism, playful possessiveness, reader is a dumbass, Logan is in love, p in v, dirty talk, unprotected sex, a single spank, kind of a cum kink?, creampie

A/N: If a man tries to control when you can orgasm without your consent, please ignore him and get yourself another one. Logan here is obviously jesting and even if he were to create such a rule, he’d only enforce it with his girlfriend’s acceptance, of course. Day 4 of kinktober and the prompts were masturbation + eating out.

Y/N’s P.O.V.

As soon as I hear my room’s door close behind me, the stress of the day started to leave my tense muscles. Just being surrounded by my stuff, that I’d been carefully collecting since my arrival in Charles’ academy four months before, was enough to send the message to my brain: you’re home, relax. No one is going to disturb you here.

It wasn’t necessarily true, of course, which was one of the cons of living in the same place that I worked, but the probability of one of my students coming all the way here to ask for help, advice, or any other sort of guidance was extremely low, thankfully. As 5pm approached, the youngsters too began to relax, opting to look for social activities or hobbies to occupy their time instead of training and studying. In all my time here, no one except teachers had come to bother me in my own bedroom, and even that was extremely rare. Everyone seemed to understand the need for some alone time after a day of responsibilities.

So that’s why this room that was designated to me had this ability to instantly make me feel better, I guess. Up until now, the only other place that managed to make me feel so safe wasn’t actually an environment, but a person.

Logan.

We’d been some sort of unspoken thing for a while now, only about a month. Despite his usual grumpiness that seemed to be directed to keep me away from him right after my arrival, the fact that I didn’t seem to care quickly made him curious, and this curiosity soon became a particular interest in seeing me underneath him, moaning pleasurably in his bed.

He made me feel safe, and the truth was that I didn’t care that after a month, we still hadn’t decided to give a name to what we had. All that mattered to me was that he wanted to spend time with me too and that he treated me right.

But he’d been gone for the last four days on a special mission assigned by Professor X, so that meant that my current situation couldn’t really be blamed solely on my student’s behavior for the day. Oh, no. This particular tension came after my body had grown accustomed to being treated to multiple orgasms night after night, only to be abruptly denied those treats.

I missed him. I hadn’t had to touch myself in over a month and I’d spent the last few nights depriving myself of it because I knew I could never give myself the kind of pleasure that Logan could. Only he wasn’t here, and I was going crazy, especially since no one had any idea of when he would be back.

I needed him.

So I decided to grant me at least some sort of relief, as pathetic as it’d be, in the hopes of calming my longing body. The first thing I did was strip down to nothing. My favorite pampering activity was a nice warm bath after a stressful day of classes, and from Logan’s comments, I knew he liked it when I took the time to lather myself up in essential oils, too. On more than one occasion he commented that it made me smell “good enough to eat”.

It was only after said bath that I laid down on my still-made bed, spread out to appreciate the silkiness of my own skin after a good hydration session. The smell of coconuts from my favorite cream helped to ease me into the right state of mind, that I so desperately needed so I could start softly running my fingers over my thighs without that stupid inner voice that wanted to make me recoil in embarrassment.

I was a grown woman in the privacy of her own room. It was stupid to be timid about needing to touch myself, so I focused on the desire I could feel rising through me, and not on any other pop-up thought that insisted on making its way into my brain.

It became a lot easier when I thought about my lover.

Oh, how I wished Logan was here. He’d love to see me in this position, legs spread open for his eyes to take. Only the thought of his piercing eyes fixated in my naked body was enough to get me wet, and that elicited another memory of him. How he’d groan when the smell of my juices hit his nose, immediately prompting him to get on his knees in front of me and bury his head between my thighs. He’d lap me up eagerly, hungrily, like I was an entire feast dedicated to him after a life of restraint. As passionate a lover as Logan was, I don’t think there was anything he loved more than eating pussy.

If he was here, he’d say mine was the only one that provoked such an animalistic reaction from him. I’d laugh, refusing to believe anything that came out of his mouth when all he could think about was burying himself inside of me, but I’d blush nonetheless. A part of me wanted to believe I was special to him, despite his years and the number of women he’d most certainly laid with, mostly because he was special to me, too.

But I couldn’t afford this sort of thought, so I opted to focus on the memory of how Logan’s tongue felt against my clit. I let a single finger touch it, trying to mirror the same pattern of movement he’d make. It was nowhere near the same sensation, but it was enough to prompt me to release a little moan of pleasure.

We were starting to get somewhere.

Logan’s P.O.V.

After four long days of fuckery, the only thing I could think about was going back home straight to my girl’s arms. So as soon as we were through the academy’s doors, I took the stairs two at a time to go directly into her room, having memorized her schedule long enough to know that she’d most likely be there.

No one tried to get in my way. They knew better.

Much to my surprise, as I approached the now familiar doors to her room, a familiar scent engulfed me, prompting me to tune into the sweet sounds that I’d dreamed about these last nights. They were very discreet, but for someone with my enhanced abilities and extreme focus on her body and reactions, it was very obviously there.

Blindly, I reached for her door, slowly pushing it open and welcoming the warmth and overwhelming perfume that I’d come to associate with her presence, especially during the times she was releasing these delicious little moans. Immediately, my ears picked up on another, much dirtier tune: the squelching sounds her fingers elicited from her sweet pussy as she fucked herself.

I almost fell to my knees, as my legs suddenly lost the ability to keep me upright, but I was able to hold myself back just in time. Wouldn’t want to miss the show, especially when it was making me so fucking hard.

Finally venturing further into the room, I came face to face with the beauty waiting for me. She hadn’t noticed my arrival yet, too preoccupied with her pleasurable activities, her eyes closed shut in concentration as her mouth fell open in that delicious silent scream I liked to swallow so much.

I watched as she touched herself a bit more, attentively looking for the telling signs that she was close to her release, and just when the muscles on her thigh began to clench, I leaned over her and wrapped my hand around her wrist, pulling her fingers from inside her cunt. The surprised gasp she let out made me smirk.

I sucked on her fingers, enjoying my first taste of her after what felt like forever. A deep groan erupted from my chest at her sweetness invading my mouth. “Missed me?” I teased when I finally reopened my eyes to find her staring back at me with a lustful expression.

“You have no idea just how much,” was her answer. I was enough of a man to feel proud of her response, but it also became clear just how much I had actually become soft for the woman under me - a stark contrast to the hardness I could feel restricting my jeans.

When she first arrived at the academy, I hadn’t expected her to become as important to me as she had now, but just as I struggled to take off my clothes as quickly as possible before kneeling before the bed, pulling her by the ankles so she was spread out just in front of my face, I couldn’t really deny it. I’d do anything to keep her with me, just like this.

“I think I have some idea of it…” I teased her just as I softly ran my fingers over her pussy lips, simply collecting the wetness that had gathered there.

Y/N’s P.O.V.

He once more wrapped his lips over his wet fingers and moaned at my taste in his mouth. “How are you this fucking sweet?” Was all he asked before he delved right in, parting my thighs with his large hands and licking from my puckered hole to my clit.

“Fuck!” I cursed, throwing one of my hands over my head, to find something to hold onto, while the other found its way into his hair, pulling on it just the way I knew he liked. I felt his groan reverberating through me before he chuckled, briefly stopping his ministrations to stare up at me with his lower face dripping from my wetness.

“I love when I can make you curse.” Biting my lip, I accepted that I couldn’t retaliate his teasing while he continued to eat me out. His tongue easily engulfed my whole pussy, so just that was enough to bring me to the edge of an orgasm in a way I could never grant it to myself. “Come on, sweet girl,” he admonished, slapping my thigh. “Ride my face. Give me what I came here for.”

I obeyed him without even thinking about it. This was just how it was when it came to us. He asked me to strip, my panties were on the floor before he finished his sentence. He ordered me to get on my knees, my mouth was instantly watering at the sight of him.

But God, did he deliver. My compliance came very easily when it came to a man like him, so eager to please beyond what his body could already offer. I’d been with many men before who, while obviously not as well-endowed as him, had been on the bigger side, and they always left me needing more, like they believed their dick’s length was enough to satisfy me without any real effort from their part.

Not Logan, though. Oh, no. Logan thrived on making me cum, over and over again. He liked to say he’d live on my pussy alone if possible, and by the way he very hungrily ate me out for hours on end at times, I knew he was being honest.

I sometimes liked to entertain the idea that I was the one who brought out that side of him, but I knew better. Someone like Logan had a lot of experience, I was dumb to think that I might be somewhat special to him, somehow. So I didn’t.

Instead, I allowed the filthy sounds of my wetness being gurgled down by him to bring me back to this moment, choosing to focus instead on how delicious his tongue felt against my clit, how he happily accepted my movements as I buckled up, in search of my orgasm.

I was right over the edge, in need of just a little something else to push me over it when Logan suddenly decided to open his eyes and focus them on me. The sight of his darkened eyes and dilated pupils was enough to make me throw my head back against the soft pillows of my bed as I reached bliss.

When the stars of light disappeared from my vision and I came to my senses, Logan was still in the same spot in front of me, his thumbs softly caressing the inside of my thighs. “You’re back with me, darlin’?” He asked in that deliciously gruff voice of his, and I shivered, nodding breathlessly as I wetted my lips. “So now, let’s have a talk. Who said you could touch yourself while I’m away, huh?”

I blinked once, then twice. My mouth was slightly agape as I looked down at Logan, still sprawled out for his viewing pleasure while my mind raced to make sense of his words. “I-I don’t understand,” I finally confessed, my eyes following his movement as he climbed up on the bed until we were face to face for the first time since his return.

Logan’s P.O.V.

I tsked teasingly, leaning down to deposit a quick kiss on the corner of her lips. “I asked you…” I breathed out on her ear, watching as goosebumps raised over her skin. “... who said you could touch yourself, darlin'. Because last I checked…” I cupped her cunt with one of my hands, chuckling lightly at how I was able to cover it with my palm. “... this pussy was mine and only mine.”

“I-it was?” Now, hold my heart (and my cock) but she just looked too fucking cute with that confused look on her face, her eyebrows frowned as she stared at me like I had grown two fucking heads.

“Of course, sweetheart. Now, I know we hadn’t talked about this before, so I’ll let your pretty little ass spank free this time, but be warned…” I leaned over her again, my nose touching hers as I felt her little breaths against my own lips. “... next time you’re feeling horny, you ask your boyfriend to help you deal with it. And if he’s not around, you wait.”

Now, I was expecting some kind of reaction from my little rule, and I was 100% ready to negotiate, but what I wasn’t expecting was for her eyes to grow twice their size as she suddenly sat up on the bed, forcing me to lean back and take a seat, too.

“Boyfriend?” She definitely looked confused, her eyes searching mine for something I didn’t know since I was just as puzzled. Opting to stay silent, I simply stared back at her, both of my eyebrows raised high as I waited for her explanation. “You mean… you?”

The familiar fire of anger rose up quickly inside my chest, and I had to curl my hands into fists to control myself. “Of course it’s me, who the fuck would it be? Are you sleeping with anyone else?”

Rationally, I knew my problem was less anger and more disappointment. I’d let my guard down for her - way too quickly, faster than I’d done for anyone else throughout my life. And I’d done it because she touched my heart in a way no one else had. I was falling for her, and I thought she felt the same way too.

“NO! Of course not!” She all but jumped, her hands reaching out to cradle my face and I found myself actually relaxing against her touch, as my heartbeat started to slow down at the knowledge that she really was all mine. “I just… I didn’t know… I didn’t think we were dating. I thought you saw me as…”

She didn’t seem to have the courage to finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. I understood what she meant, and as realization fell upon me, I found myself throwing my head back and full-on laughing, much to her displeasure. When I managed to calm down, she was pouting at me, which only made the arousal that had dissipated by the fear reappear that much stronger.

“Oh, darlin’...” I started, pulling on her ankles to force her on her back again as I hovered over her, watching, analyzing. “I’ve fucked you every single night for the last month. Now, I know I’m not the kind to talk about my feelings, but I figured that made it pretty obvious…”

Leaning down, I took possession of her mouth to give her a breathtaking kiss, forcing her to accept my eager tongue, to taste herself on my lips. Then I went further, kissing her jaw, her neck, until I reached her collarbones, where I sucked a bruise, all the while rubbing my aching cock against her clit before pushing it inside of her in one forceful thrust.

“... You’re mine. Only mine. Mine to fuck, mine to bruise and mark, mine to cum into.” Her mouth immediately fell open at the feeling of my hardness stretching her open, and I couldn’t help the smirk that took over my lips. “You okay with that, sweetheart?” I asked, waiting for her to adjust to the feeling of being invaded as I nibbled on her earlobe.

Finally, after a few minutes of her struggling to breathe as I felt her squeezing my biceps, she nodded. “Y-yeah.” Grinning, I took that as an okay to start moving and immediately started to pound her against the mattress, just like I loved and had come to learn that she did, too. Her nails bit on my flesh, but it only added to my own arousal, making me growl against the skin of her chest.

“This fucking pussy… You really thought I’d just treat you like a fuckbuddy?” Abruptly pulling out of her, I manhandled her onto her hands and knees before pushing her face down against the mattress, all the while laughing at the little scream of surprise she let out. “I’m never gonna stop fucking you, pretty thing. You better watch out.”

She was moaning desperately now, just how I’d dreamt of hearing while I was away from her, and it made my sack even heavier as it slapped against her clit with each thrust I gave. “Fuck… ‘m gonna cum, sweetheart. Do you want it? Say you want my cum in your pretty little pussy, come on.”

After a gasp that followed my slap on her ass, she flipped her head back, looking at me with those fucking sultry eyes that I loved so damn much. “Please, Logan, cum inside of me. Wanna feel it dripping from me, please, I need it so bad.” And this is why I was convinced she was some sort of siren or whatever. The second that our eyes connected, I was fulfilling her wishes, releasing all of my milky cum inside of her throbbing pussy, as she came at the same time as me.

Once I was able to breathe again, after having thrown myself by her side on the bed, I pulled her so she’d rest her face on my chest, chuckling to myself over how much of a cuddle lover I’d become ever since we’d started sleeping together.

“Hey, Logan,” she called out my attention, making me hum in response as I looked down to find her staring up expectantly at me. “I hope you know that this goes both ways.” I blinked twice as I waited for her words to make sense to me, but before they did, she was giggling, already clarifying her meaning. “You’re mine too.”

To say that those words filled me with the happiest kind of warmth would be an understatement. I didn’t know what to say, I’d never been good at this lovey-dovey shit, so I settled for pulling her back to me again and giving her forehead a kiss.

“Believe me, darlin’... I know.”

#logan howlett #Logan Howlett smut #wolverine #wolverine smut #smut #my fics #logan howlett imagine #logan howlett imagines #wolverine imagine #wolverine imagines #logan howlett fanfiction #logan howlett fan fiction #wolverine fanfiction #wolverin fan fiction

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souichioneshots · 3 years ago

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Adult Souichi x Reader (2 day fic; day 1)

uhhhh idk

i was thinking about why souichi would even bring reader home and i figured there needed to be a 'logical reason' for him to do so.

So i wrote this???

its part 1 of the 2 day fic and also a slight introduction of who reader is?? idk idk

please enjoy

（oh shit forgot to mention, this fic only makes sense if you read the binzo x reader fic I wrote!!! ehehe sorry)

When Souichi was first introduced to you, he was told that you were a creature like none other. In simple terms, he was explained that you were a 'wild-cannibalistic witch'. But not just any ordinary witch, you had the ability to take and give power to others. Sort of like a vessel of power. But, because of your instability, you were passed from master to master, never staying with anyone for long.

With the fangs you were sporting, there was no way Souichi could doubt you had cannibalistic tendencies. They weren’t as large in number or as long as his son’s, but they still looked like they could cause quite a lot of damage nonetheless. However, the ‘vessel of power’ part was not something he’d ever heard of before. He was extremely skeptical.

However, all his doubts about you quickly disappeared when you physically touched him.

When the seller was explaining something to Souichi, he had accidentally gotten a bit too close to the cage you were held in. When you reached your hand out and grabbed his wrist, he was terrified that you would try to rip it off. But you did nothing of the sort. A tingling sensation surged through his hand as you looked at one another, almost like he could physically feel the power flowing through his veins. He knew then and there that he had to have you.

The seller then explained that although you were able to transfer power to others, it would only be possible when you were truly happy. A light would become ever so slightly visible in your eyes, indicating your preparation to do so. However, there was also a downside. If you were ever displeased, the counterpart would be drained of their own power, and in extreme cases, of their life force as well. Souichi was finally able to understand why you had been passed around so many times now. But he was determined to get more powerful, so he took the chance and purchased you. If anything, he could just throw you away if you ever became a danger to him.

When he first brought you to his haunt, he expected you to have a bit of a hard time adjusting to his lifestyle. However, you settled in quite quickly.

His older brother and sister were extremely displeased by his sudden addition to the 'family', but they soon came to like you. He often wondered if you had used your power in secret to make them feel such a way towards you.

His son, Binzo on the other hand… He decided to make your life a living hell. He would pull on your hair and tear up your clothes whenever you got too close. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to put you in a different room. But unfortunately, Binzo’s room was the only one properly equipped with chains to hold you back from running away. For now.

Although he could feel a bit of your power transfer into him whenever you ran your hands through his hair or held onto his hand, it wasn’t enough. It was nothing like the first time you two had touched. He wanted to feel that sensation again. He wanted to see how much more powerful you could make him.

That’s when Souichi decided to pull you from the haunt and treat you to a little pampering. That’s something you obviously never experienced before. Hopefully, it would make you happy enough to give him the power he so craved.

Souichi watched from the sofa as you looked in the mirror and shook your freshly cut hair side to side, your new dress also flowing in the air. Although you still had your mask on, he could tell that you were smiling widely.

Even though all the things you two did today made you happy, it didn’t last long. Every time you would be pulled away from Souichi so you could get your hair done, or be fitted for clothes, the light in your eyes would quickly fade away. Leaving you to be a nervously, low growling mess. He needed to figure out a way to make that light come back and keep it there long enough for him to harness your power.

“What time do we get the Kimono again.” You asked as you took off your mask.

“Around 4.”

“And then we go back home?”

He laughed through his nose at the word “home”. You had only been with him for a couple of weeks, yet you already considered his home yours. He wondered if you assimilated this easily into your other old master’s lives.

“Yeah. We go home tomorrow.”

Although he had initially planned on only going out until the afternoon, because the kimonos he had ordered for you wouldn’t be ready until the next day, you two were forced to stay overnight at a local hotel.

His eyes followed as you walked around the spacious room, examining each and every item. You picked up and put down the phone multiple times, and swirled around the desk chair until you couldn’t walk straight.

He could swear that he heard you say Binzo’s name as you played around by yourself. For someone who got tortured by his son daily, you wouldn’t shut up about him. During the entire time you two were out, you mentioned Binzo over 20 different times.

“What’s this?” You asked, tapping your long fingernails on a black glass box.

“A TV.” Souichi responded.

You repeated the word with wonder. “So… Is it like a black mirror or?...” You brought your face up close to it, examining your own reflection.

Have you really never seen a TV before? Souichi figured with the number of times your seller mentioned you were passed around, you would have been a bit more knowledgeable about the world.

Grabbing the remote from beside him, he turned the TV on. Souichi laughed as you jumped back and growled at the tiny people that suddenly appeared in the box. “Relax. It can’t hurt you.” He said as he took out a cigar from his suit jacket and lit it.

Souichi's eyes stayed glued to the TV as a large duck-like character reported the current weather. It had actually been a while since he watched tv himself.

Finally calming down, you cautiously walked over to the couch and took a seat next to the older man. Souichi passed you the remote, allowing you to flip through the channels. You barely stayed on a single one, curiosity forcing you to examine what each channel had to offer. However, due to you both staying in a hotel in a small town, you only got CS channels. In other words, 6 channels. 7 if you counted the channel with NHK’s giant logo asking its viewers to pay to watch. For some reason, you seemed to like that one the most.

Starting to feel a bit bored, Souichi turned his head to the side and called for your attention. Your eyes quickly shut as he released the smoke in his mouth onto your face.

A smile prematurely grew on his face as he expected you to turn away and cough from the smoke, but you didn’t. Instead, when your eyes opened, a small light was visible in the depths of your pupils.

You actually liked that?

Souichi’s hand snaked down to touch your exposed thigh. The light started to glow brighter. His hand tingled as you looked up at him with pleading eyes, asking him to do it again.

Bringing the cigar to his lips, he gathered up smoke in his mouth.

The smoke he exhaled towards you briefly dissipated as you breathed it in. A look of content spread across your face as the man repeated this action once more.

Souichi's eyes moved down to look at your slightly parted lips. He knew he shouldn’t…Your teeth, although nothing compared to his ex-girlfriend, were dangerously sharp, and if you misunderstood his action, there was a possibility he might get hurt.

But he just wanted to try this once…

Taking his hand off your thigh, he grabbed your chin and moved your face closer to his. Taking a quick puff from the cigar, he blew smoke into your mouth. As the smoke escaped you, Souichi pressed his lips against yours.

His free hand moved back down to your thigh, traveling further into your dress as he gave you small pecks. Your own hand moved onto his suit pants, copying his motions.

Your small hand briefly rubbed over the bulge in his pants, causing him to let out a shaky breath. He hadn’t been touched by someone like that in so long.

Souichi’s head felt like it was spinning. His entire body was tingling from the sensation of being in contact with you.

Could this be the feeling of power transferring into him?

A small whine escaped your lips as he pulled away. Your body leaned forward, pleading for him to kiss you again.

Looking at the cigar still burning in his hand, Souichi spoke to himself. “I wonder…” He moved the cigar to the tips of his fingers and, with confidence, threw it in the air.

Souichi’s eyes widened in surprise as it suddenly disappeared. He had never been able to successfully do that before. Souichi spoke in an excited voice, asking if you saw what he had just done. However, you didn’t reply.

The smile on his face quickly faded as he looked upon your tired face. Your eyes were on the brink of shutting and your head nodded back and forth lazily.

“Maybe I went a bit too fast…” Souichi said, worried that he might have pulled the power out of you a bit too suddenly.

Picking you up from the couch he placed you on the bed.

Souichi waved his hand in the air, making the cigar appear once more. A wicked smile spread across his lips as blew smoke down onto your resting body.

Getting power from you is gonna be easier than he expected.

#adult souichi #binzo x reader #binzo #souichi x reader #//nsfw?

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itsthenovelteafactor · 3 years ago

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Fall of the House of Hargreeves

So I mentioned a while back in my Superhero Gothic meta that there were a number of parallels between the season one finale of The Umbrella Academy and the Edgar Allen Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher and that I could probably write a whole meta on that if anyone was interested. Shout out and love to the anon who requested that I do that!

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these long form metas, but I am very excited to get back to writing about two of my favorite things: gothic literature and chaotic superheroes.

Part I: The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher (which I’ll call House of Usher for convenience for the rest of this meta) is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe first published in 1939. It is considered a classic gothic short story, and deals with themes of family, madness, inheritance, and isolation.

Since it’s in the public domain, I’ll go ahead and link a pdf to the story here. If you aren’t interested in reading, though, or just want a refresher, the story follows an unnamed narrator going to visit his ill friend, a man named Roderick Usher in his isolated (and very spooky) family estate. Upon arrival, he discovers that Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, is also ill, and has a tendency to fall into dreamlike trances.

Over the course of the visit, Roderick confesses to the narrator that not only does he believe the house is alive, but that it is connected to the fate of the family which, at this point, only includes Roderick and Madeline. He later comes and tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and enlists his help in order to bury her in the family tomb beneath the house. They do so, but for the next couple of days Roderick is suspiciously...on edge.

Then, one dark and stormy night, Roderick shows up in the narrator’s room incredibly worked up, and throws open the window, and starts low-key (read: high-key) having a breakdown. The narrator is unsure as to why until he hears ripping and tearing sounds coming from somewhere in the house. These ripping and tearing sounds are revealed to be Madeline whom Roderick and the narrator buried alive whose appearance scares Roderick to death, right before she collapses, also dead from the strain of tearing through the foundations of the house.

The narrator decides this would probably be a good time to leave and is very much right about that because as soon as he leaves, the house (which was already in pretty bad shape) splits in two and collapses into the lake surrounding it. The end.

Part II: Umbrella Academy as Gothic

So, there are probably a couple similarities between House of Usher and The Umbrella Academy season one that stand out right off the bat, but I’d like to start by taking a step back to talk about thematic parallels between the two works. If you’d like to read a very long winded explanation of why I consider The Umbrella Academy to be a modern gothic tale, I have a really long meta about it.

If not, here’s a quick overview:

Gothic does not have a clearly defined set of requirements as a genre, but its purpose is to explore the contradictions and the failing edifices of convention in a way that is dramatic and often fantastic.

Gothic fiction plays with reality, but usually in a way that is representative of the characters and story.

It often situates itself during times of great change, as there is something haunting about the irreversible passage of time, particularly for those that struggle to acknowledge it and hide behind conventions that have grown increasingly irrelevant.

Poe is considered one of the classic authors of gothic fiction (though the genre significantly predates him), and is decidedly one of the best well-known examples of it.

The Umbrella Academy is a family drama about former child superheroes dealing with their trauma while trying to prevent an apocalypse that their every move seems to set further in motion. It explores the messy and complicated relationships between siblings who have been abused and pit against each other for years. And yeah, it’s fun with great music and talking gorillas and dance sequences, but the premise is kind of hard for me to read as anything other than gothic.

Part III: Parallels

Like House of Usher, the first season of Umbrella Academy takes place in a massive, largely empty mansion where siblings gather with disastrous consequences. Both works explore a family that is past their prime and disconnected from the present. They also both explore the psychological toll of isolation, the consequences of tyrannical family rules, and why it is a really bad idea to lock your unstable sister in a basement and just leave her there.

Let’s start with some thematics parallels. Everyone in House of Usher is extremely isolated, and the absence of anything resembling the modern world amongst the house full of relics is part of the horror. All of the siblings in Umbrella Academy are defined by their isolation as well, physically (Luther, Five, and Ben), socially (Vanya, Diego, Klaus, and Allison), and emotionally (legit all of them). It is this isolation that drives the conflict of the story, feeding into every characters’ choices.

In both House of Usher and Umbrella Academy, the main characters are trapped in this isolated state as a direct result of their familial legacy. In House of Usher, the titular house is a character itself, a manifestations of the obligations Madeline and Roderick hold as members of an aristocratic family that is so far divorced from wealth and status that it keeps them from ever fully moving on and rejoining the real world. In Umbrella Academy, the characters are similarly trapped by their familial legacy, this time in the form of the specter of their abusive father, and the roles he created for them. Like the Usher siblings, the Hargreeves have no way of maintaining the roles their family left out for them – they were never given the tools to function in the real world and it cripples them – but are trapped in them regardless.

Part IV: The Woman* in White

*As of the time I am writing this, nothing has been said regarding Vanya’s gender identity being written to match Elliot Page’s. I am using she/her pronouns for Vanya, as that is what has been used for the character thus far.

Aside from thematic parallels, however, the most direct connection between the short story and series, and in fact the reason I was inspired to write this meta in the first place is the way both of the stories end: with a sister trapped beneath the house clawing her way out to face her brother(s and sister) and creating a disruption of the family legacy so great that the entire estate crumbles.

Madeline Usher is described at this point as wearing a white dress, strained with the injuries she sustained from physically breaking herself out of the basement tomb her brother buried her alive in. Vanya, of course, becomes at this moment the White Violin, and though she has not yet had the epic violin-music-so-powerful-it-changes-the-color-of-her-clothes scene, the principal still stands.

As characters, there are also a couple of noteworthy parallels between Vanya and Madeline. The narrator at one point describes “the illness of the lady Madeline had lone been beyond the help of her doctors. She seemed to care about nothing” (Poe, 27). The reader never knows what illness precisely is the cause of Madeline’s apparent madness, but we see the effects. It dulls her emotional responses to situations and leaves her withdrawn and powerless. Similarly, we learn over the course of the first season of The Umbrella Academy that the medication Reginald Hargreeves prescribed Vanya for her anxiety is actually a power suppressor for her abilities that has much the same effect – because they are strengthened by extreme emotion, the drugs numb Vanya’s emotional responses and deprive her of the ability to access her powers.

Additionally, the final scene of the story story shows Madeline escaping her tomb during a great storm and going to face her brother who put her there, the storm itself being a metaphor for her anguish that tears the house apart. Vanya’s connection to the destruction of the house is a bit more literal, but it is similarly a manifestation of her anguish and trauma. She sees flashbacks of her siblings being distant and rude to her in their childhoods and the anger she feels rips the foundation apart.

It is not entirely clear in the short story why Roderick buries Madeline alive – there are a lot of theories: he genuinely believed she was dead, he wanted her out of the picture, he himself was succumbing to the madness of the house, etc – but the guilt he feels for doing so manifests as him hearing her scraping her way out for several days preceding her escape. The justification for Vanya’s imprisonment is more clear in text, but the series of flashbacks make it clear that it is not just the imprisonment that has driven her over the edge. It it guilt for her sister, anger at her abusive upbringing that is much more easily directed at her siblings than her father, the newfound emotions experienced by being off her medication for the first time since childhood, Leonard’s manipulations, etc.

In both cases, amidst a spiral of emotions and experiences folding in on themselves, Vanya and Madeline experience a single, cold moment of clarity that drives them to escape, and it is that moment of clarity that breaks the shadow of the family legacy. They observe the situation as it stands and realize that it is completely unacceptable, and it is the realization that leads everything to crumble. Because gothic literature is focused on the complexities of maintaining that which is out of date, the realization that things must change can break the spell.

Part V: Conclusions

As per usual, I have no great theories on why this is or what it means. One of the reasons I love gothic literature is that it is rife with meaning that can be more easily felt than deciphered. I welcome any and all interpretations, theories, (politely worded) disagreements, and comments.

Thanks for taking the time to read; I have a lot of fun doing these. Enjoy spooky season, y’all. 💛

#The Umbrella Academy meta #TUA meta #The Umbrella Academy #TUA #The Fall of the House of Usher #House of Usher #Edgar Allen Poe #back here with the long metas on gothic literature and superhero tv #Vanya Hargreeves #Madeline Usher #happy spooky season y'all

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hellomynameisbisexual · 3 years ago

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Travis has had both boyfriends and girlfriends since high school. But when his coworkers discovered his dating history at a board game night, they told him he couldn’t be bisexual. “Bi men don’t exist,” they said. “You’re just a confused gay guy.” Travis, 34, had brought his girlfriend with him that night, but they started calling her his “roommate” after they found out he was bi.

Santiago got an even harsher reaction when he came out to his family. “‘Bisexual’ is just code for insincere gay man” is how he said one of his relatives reacted. “He didn’t use the term ‘gay man,’” 24-year-old Santiago told me, “but I won’t repeat slurs.”

In the past couple of months, I’ve heard dozens of stories like these from bisexual men who have had their sexual orientations invalidated by family members, friends, partners, and even strangers. Thomas was called a “fence-sitter” by a group of gay men at a bar. Shirodj was told that he was “just gay but not ready to come out of the closet.” Alexis had his bisexuality questioned by a lesbian teacher who he thought would be an ally. Many of these same men have been told that women are “all a little bi” or “secretly bi” but that men can only be gay or straight, nothing else.

In other words, bisexual men are like climate change: real but constantly denied.

A full 2% of men identified themselves as bisexual on a 2016 survey from the Centers for Disease Control, which means that there are at least three million bi guys in the United States alone—a number roughly equivalent to the population of Iowa. (On the same survey, 5.5% of women self-identified as bisexual, which comes out to roughly the same number of people as live in New Jersey.) The probability that an entire state’s worth of people would lie about being attracted to more than one gender is about as close to zero as you can get.

But the idea that only women can be bisexual is a persistent myth, one that has been decades in the making. And prejudice with such deep historical roots won’t disappear overnight.

👬👫👬👫

To understand why bisexual men are still being told that their sexual orientation doesn’t exist, we have to go back to the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s. That’s when Dr. H. Sharif “Herukhuti” Williams, a cultural studies scholar and co-editor of the anthology Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, told me that male sexual fluidity got thrown under the bus in the name of gay rights—specifically white, upper-class gay rights.

“One of the byproducts of the gay liberation movement is this…solidifying of the [sexual] binary,” Herukhuti told me, citing the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as a pre-Stonewall period of relatively unstigmatized sexual fluidity.

Four decades later, the gay liberation movement created a new type of man—the “modern gay man,” Herukhuti calls him—who was both “different from and similar to” the straight man. As Jillian Weiss, now the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense Fund, wrote in a 2003 review of this same history, “gays and lesbians campaigned for acceptance by suggesting that they were ‘just like you,’ but with the single (but extremely significant exception) of [having] partners of the same sex.” Under this framework, attraction to a single gender was the unifying glue between gay men, lesbians, and straight people—bisexual people were just “confused.”

Bisexual people realized that they would have to form groups and coalitions of their own if they wanted cultural acceptance. But just as bisexual activism was gaining a foothold in the 1980s, the AIDS crisis hit, and everything changed—especially for bisexual men.

“AIDS forced certain bisexual men out [of the closet], it forced a lot of bisexual men back in, and then it killed off a number of them,” longtime bisexual activist and author Ron Suresha told me.Those deaths hindered the development of male bisexual activism at a particularly critical moment. “A number of men who would have been involved and were involved in the early years of the bi movement died—and they died early and they died quickly,” bisexual writer Mike Syzmanski recalled.

The AIDS crisis also gave rise to one of the most pernicious and persistent stereotypes about bisexual men, namely that they are the “bridge” for HIV transmission between gay men and heterosexual women. As Brian Dodge, a public health researcher at Indiana University, told me, this is a “warped notion” that has “never been substantiated by any real data.” The CDC, too, has debunked the same myth in the specific context of U.S. black communities: No, black men on the “down low” are not primarily responsible for high rates of HIV among black women.

For decades, bisexual men have been portrayed—even within the LGBT community—as secretly gay, sexually confused vectors of disease.

In 2016, bisexual men are still feeling the effects of the virus and the misperceptions around it.

“We’re still underrepresented on the boards of almost all of the national bisexual organizations,” Suresha told me, referring to the fact that women occupy most of the key leadership positions in bisexual activism. And in a new, nationally representative study of attitudes toward bisexual people, Dodge and his research team found that 43% of respondents agreed —at least somewhat—with the statement: “People should be afraid to have sex with bisexual men because of HIV/STD risks.”

For decades, bisexual men have been portrayed—even within the LGBT community—as secretly gay, sexually confused vectors of disease. Is it any wonder that they are still fighting to shed that false image today? It’s hard to convince people that you exist when they barely see you as human.

👬👫👬👫

It’s not that bisexual women have it easy. Both bisexual men and women are much less likely than gay men and lesbians to be out of the closet, with only 28% telling Pew that most of the important people in their life know about their orientation. Collectively, bisexual people also have some of the worst mental health outcomes in the LGBT community and their risk of intimate partner violence is disturbingly high. Bisexual people also face discrimination within the LGBT community while fending off accusations that their orientation excludes non-binary genders. (In response, bisexual educator Robyn Ochs defines “bisexuality” as attraction to “people of more than one sex and/or gender” rather than just to “men and women.”)

And on top of these general problems, bisexual women are routinely hypersexualized, stereotyped as “sluts,” dismissed as “experimenting,” and harassed on dating apps. Their bisexuality is reduced to a spectacle or waved away as a “phase.”

But it is still bisexual men who seem to have their very existence questioned more often.

Suresha pointed me to a 2005 New York Times article with the headline “Straight, Gay, Or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited,” the fallout of which he saw as “a disaster for bi people.” The article reported on a new study “cast[ing] doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.” The study in question measured the genital arousal of a small sample of men and found, as the Times summarized, that “three-quarters of the [bisexual male] group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.”

“It got repeated and repeated in all sorts of media,” Suresha recalled. “People reported it in news briefs on the radio, in print, in magazines, all over the place.”

As the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force noted in its response to the article, the original study had some clear methodological limitations—only 33 self-identified bisexual men were included and participants were recruited through “gay-oriented magazines”—but the Times went ahead and reported that the research “lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.”

“Show me the quest for scientific proof that heterosexuality exists. It begins and ends with even just one person saying, ‘I’m straight.’” — Amy Andre, Huffington Post

The article fueled the devious narrative that male bisexuality was just homosexuality in disguise. The lived experiences of bisexual men don’t support that narrative—and neither does science—but its power comes from prejudice, not from solid evidence.

And unsurprisingly, the 2005 study’s conclusions did not survive the test of time. In fact, one of the co-authors of that study went on to co-author a 2011 study which found that “bisexual patterns of both subjective and genital arousal” did indeed occur among men. The New York Times Magazine later devoted a feature to the push for the 2011 study, briefly acknowledging the paper’s previous poor coverage. But many in the bisexual community were unimpressed that the scientific community was still being positioned as the authority on the existence of bisexual men.

“Show me the quest for scientific proof that heterosexuality exists,” Amy Andre wrote on the Huffington Post in response to the feature. “It begins and ends with even just one person saying, ‘I’m straight.’”

👬👫👬👫

One of the most tragic things about society’s refusal to accept bisexual men is that we don’t even know why it is still so vehement. Dodge believes that his new study offers some hints—the persistent and widespread endorsement of the HIV “bridge” myth is alarming—but he told me that he would need “more qualitative and more focused research” before he could definitively state that HIV stigma is the primary factor driving negative attitudes toward bisexual men. (Research in this area is indeed sorely lacking. The last major study on the subject prior to the survey Dodge’s team conducted was published in 2002.)

In the meantime, bisexual advocates have developed plenty of compelling theories, many of them focused on the dominance of traditional masculinity. For example, Herukhuti explained that “we live in a society in which boundaries between men are policed because of patriarchy and sexism.” Men are expected to be “kings of their kingdom”—not to share their domain.

“For men to bridge those boundaries with each other—the only way that we can conceive of that is in the sense that these are ‘non-men,’” Herukhuti told me, adding that, in a patriarchal society, gay men are indeed seen as “non-men.” The refusal to accept that men can be bisexual, then, is partly a refusal to accept that someone who is bisexual can even be a man.

Many of the bisexual men I interviewed endorsed this same hypothesis. Kevin, 25, told me that “it’s seen as really unmanly to be attracted to men.” Another Kevin, 26, added that “the core concept of masculinity doesn’t leave room for anything besides extremes.” Justin, in his mid 20s, said that “men are one way and gay men are another way [but] bisexual men are this weird middle ground.”

Our society doesn’t seem to do well with more than two—especially when so many still believe that there’s only one right way to be a man.

And Michael, 28, added that bisexual men are “symbolically dangerous”—a “big interior threat to hetero masculinity” because of a shared attraction to women. It’s easy for a straight guy to differentiate himself from the modern gay man, but how can he reassure himself that he is nothing like his bisexual counterpart?

The answer is obvious: He can equate male bisexuality with homosexuality.

The logic needed to balance that equation, Herukhuti explained to me, is disturbingly close to the racist, Jim Crow-era “one-drop rule,” which designated anyone with the slightest bit of African ancestry as black for legal purposes.

“For a male to have had any kind of same-sex sexual experience, they are automatically designated as gay, based on that one-drop rule,” Herukhuti said. “And that taints them.”

To see that logic at work, look no further than the state of HIV research, much of which still groups gay and bisexual men together as MSM, or men who have sex with men. Dodge, who specializes in the area of HIV/AIDS, explained that “when a man reports sexual activity with another man, that becomes the recorded mode of transmission and there’s no data reporting about female or other partners.” Bisexual men have their identities erased—literally—from the resulting data.

“A really easy way to fix this,” Dodge added, “would be to just create a separate surveillance category.”

But when it comes to categories, our society doesn’t seem to do well with more than two—especially when so many still believe that there’s only one right way to be a man.

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The situation of bisexual men is not hopeless. Slowly but surely, they are expanding the horizons of masculinity. The silver lining in Dodge’s study, for example, is that there has been a decided “‘shift’ in attitudes toward bisexual men and women from negative to more neutral in the general population” over the last decade or so, although negative attitudes toward bisexual men were still “significantly greater” than the negativity directed at their female peers.

“Put the champagne on the ice,” Dodge joked. “We’re no longer at the very bottom of the barrel but we’ve still got a ways to go.”

That distance will likely be shortened by a rising generation that is far more tolerant of sexual fluidity than their predecessors. Respondents to Dodge’s survey who were under age 25 had more positive attitudes toward bisexuality, perhaps because so many of them openly identify as LGBTQ themselves—some as bisexual, some as pansexual, and some refusing labels altogether.

That growing acceptance is starting to be reflected in movies and on television, once forms of media that were, and still often are, notoriously hostile to bisexual men. A character named Darryl came out as bisexual with a myth-busting song on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and, as GLAAD recently noted, other shows like Shadowhunters and Black Sails are starting to do bi male representation right. The HBO comedy Insecure even made biphobia into a powerful storyline when one straight female character, Molly, shunned her love interest when he told her that he once had oral sex with a guy in a college. But other shows, like House of Cards, are still using a male character’s bisexuality as a way to accentuate his villainy.

Ultimately, bisexual men themselves will continue to be the most powerful force for changing hearts and minds. I asked each bisexual man I interviewed what he would want the world to know about his sexual orientation. Some wanted to clear up specific misconceptions but so many of them simply wanted people to acknowledge that male bisexuality is not fake.

“It’s important that bisexuality be acknowledged as real,” said Martyn, 30, adding that “there’s only so long someone can hold on to a part of themselves that seems invisible before it starts to make them doubt their own sense of self.”

“I am happy being bisexual and I’m not looking for an answer,” said Dan, 19. “I’m not trying things out, I’m not using this as a placeholder to discover my identity. This is who I am. And I love it.”

Samantha Allen is a reporter for Fusion’s Sex+Life vertical. She has a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and was the 2013 John Money Fellow at the Kinsey Institute. Before joining Fusion, she was a tech and health reporter for The Daily Beast.

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