#but the ENERGY coming off that book compeled me to buy it
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No context, just like the back of this book gave me.
reject booktok culture. go to the library and get a weird little novel you’ve never heard of in your life and read it all in 2 days like god intended.
#found a book called “American Hippo”#in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore#the back tells you nothing about what youre getting into#but the ENERGY coming off that book compeled me to buy it#even the bookstore owner was confused on why he had this book in his store#needless to say I've been enjoying this weird little book when i have time to read it
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Are you afraid of deciding on your own because you might fail?
Well, there are several reasons where you got that mentality, but you know it usually comes from your family.
Especially when they're controlling and narcissistic.
They don't let you decide on your life without their permission, be it buying a car, a house, deciding on a degree, your partner, even your fashion. They think they own you, and they should be deciding for you. This makes you dependent on their decisions.
Some might like that, but you know, that's not a happy life to live. Just following the path set by someone else. You are promised safety, you are promised success, but you look around and see yourself actually stuck. Not even your brain is functioning properly anymore.
You try to get out of their road, you fight them, and they will end up saying, "Fine! Get out! You'll come back to us begging."
That's actually a prayer for your failure.
A normal loving parent would pray that you stay safe, and that you become successful.
They don't care what will happen to you. They only care about the notion of owning you.
Are you still afraid to decide? Are you afraid to take risks? Well that's understandable, as you are just going out and are basically still a baby.
To gain confidence in your venture forward,
(1) You first must accept that failure really happens, and we must learn from them. Give yourself space for failure. A lot of people fail several times before learning the tricks of life.
If you want to minimize your failures, do research, observe people going towards the same fields, and always have a backup plan.
(2) Don't tell them what you wanna do. You might be compelled to tell them your next steps because either you're used to that, or you just have a big mouth, or you wanna prove that you have a vision. No, don't do that. They will implant a seed that you cannot do it. It will come off as 'I did it this way and I'm successful', making you doubt your process.
You have to accept that people have their own process. What worked during their time might not work for you, heck maybe it didn't actually work and they're just lying, because if it worked and trusted their own process, they wouldn't be too controlling and emotionally immature.
(3) In your venture forward, think about establishing your own place. Quite materialistic, but having your own place is a mental assurance that you have your own place to stay, and that you will not come back begging (as you are very afraid of that). It will be hard at first, all these legalities, real estate prices, and decision makings are complicated. You might get scammed if you don't research enough. But stay strong and well-informed. Always ALWAYS research. Why am I emphasizing research here? Well, because they never taught you these life skills, so you are parenting yourself now. You can do it.
(4) Let's talk about energy. Children with controlling narcissistic parents are always surrounded by negative energies. Do you often have consecutive strings of bad luck? Like printer not working when you need it most - kinda thing? It's a long psychological explanation, but you must invest to get out of that envelope of energy (it's just perception on life, but you know). To gain confidence and trust in yourself, you must look at the things you always get lucky at. You also need to venture out and believe that you get lucky on important things. For example, whenever I book Airbnb, I always get the best cheap places. Before, I would be afraid to decide on a place. I was even scared of ordering on Jollibee counter. Now, it makes me think that I'm good at deciding about this, leading me to believe that I can choose the best real estate, I just have to believe in myself. I just have to pray.
Remember, they are praying for your failure, so your prayers for success must be stronger. It's also helpful to attract friends and partners who believe in you.
This is the year that you must notice where you're headed in life if you stay. You must notice the negative energies so you learn how to escape it. You must gain confidence to walk your own path.
Happy New Year.
#i hope this helps because this us more like a message to myself#controlling parents#narcissistic parents#getting out#independent living#you can do this#unrelated
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Second Chair Spark Ch 5
Warnings: Language, lots of it, fighting, gossip. Shoutout to @bluetodie who not only gave me the prompt but also had the hysterical conversation of how the squad would start to deal with Casey x Reader’s situation.
*****
Over the next few weeks as your separate trails commenced, you didn’t see much of Novak, just brief passings at SVU or in the halls of the D.A.’s office, usually so buried in casework to bother each other. There was no sense going out of your way to talk to someone you didn’t like very much anyways. You’d gotten a couple of texts about how the D’amico trail was going, thankful for the updates, especially more thankful when the judge deemed the undercover footage enough and you didn’t need to testify.
The Taylor case was progressing with not quite as much ease, domestic violence was always hard to get through, but usually with a dead victim you’d at least have a chance at the murder two charge. You were going up against Nikki Staines, so at least you didn’t have to deal with the slime that was Buchanan through this entire thing. Judge Donnelly had agreed to keep the 9-1-1 call as evidence, you weren’t planning on putting Jackson on the stand, poor kid had been through enough.
Casey had successfully wrapped her own case with a guilty verdict on multiple counts of rape and figured she’d swing by your courtroom to check up on things. She’d obviously seen you work before, but she’d never really watched, usually too busy double checking notes, witness stories, or making sure you were sticking to the book. She found herself awestruck as you moved meticulously through your questioning, not leaving out a single ounce of ferocity against the man sitting in front of you. She particularly enjoyed that you pulled the power move of not even standing up before you started your questioning, as if Taylor wasn’t even worth a shred of your energy. You made a very compelling argument, she was proud to see how far you’d come over the last few months, wondering how much influence she had to do with that. Nikki was making just as a convincing defence, the jury seemed to be buying into both sides pretty easily. Casey could see the sigh of frustration tense your body as the head juror came back saying they were hopelessly deadlocked. She ducked out of the courtroom when she felt her phone go off, before you even noticed she was there.
***
About an hour later Casey had wrapped up for the day, she made a brief pit stop at your office just in case, then headed around the corner to the bar where she knew she’d find you. She felt bad about having to boot you off her case, then having yours end up in the toilet, she could at least buy you a truce drink before you both exploded at each other at work. Truthfully it was the watering hole for most lawyers after a day in court, she figured you’d be nursing a scotch at the bar, downtrodden about the verdict. What she definitely didn’t expect was to find you cozied up at a small table with Nikki Staines, both of you laughing hard enough there was a glimmer of tears in your eyes. Casey had never even seen you that elated, it piqued her interest and raised a bit of a red flag to see you so comfortable with the defence attorney you’d spent the last two weeks battling it out in court with. She decided it was better not to interrupt, avoid the blowout in the middle of a public bar, lips pursed tight, she, once again, left before you could notice her.
***
The next morning you’d nearly slept through your phone going off, murmuring groggily to Liv that you’d be down at the 16th right away. There was enough time for you to quickly brush your teeth, tossing your hair into a low slightly messy bun, swiping on a hint of makeup, grumbling to yourself since you’d been continually putting off laundry, grabbing the crispest shirt you could find, tucking it into a clean skirt before practically racing out the door.
On arrival you found Novak alone outside interrogation one, arms crossed tightly across her chest, body tense, a scowl on her face, either this was a nasty case, or she was in a pissy mood…great… She didn’t bother looking up at you when you joined her side, simply stating:
“You’re late.” You rolled your eyes, it was gonna be like that today.
“I got her as fast as I could. Almost missed Benson’s call.” Casey sure didn’t like the sound of that, things were not looking good right now. She quirked a brow, slightly turning toward you, you could feel her eyes burning into you as she took in your appearance. Today was not the day to judge you on your clothes. You swore her body got even more rigid as she turned back to the glass.
“You know it’s a very fucking stupid decision to get involved with someone who works for the defence.” You were completely taken a back, a frown taking over your face, you didn’t know where she was getting her information, but she was so far off the mark it hurt.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” If 8:43 A.M. was an appropriate time for Casey Novak to start swearing, it was an appropriate time for you to start swearing, hell you hadn’t even had any coffee yet. She turned from the glass, coming at you, arms dropped as she enunciated her words with them, voices raising about the somewhat subdued conversation you’d been having.
“I’m talking about finding you all cozied up with Nikki Staines last night at Ward 3!” You let out a bark of a laugh, voices continuing to raise.
“OH my GOD! What, you following me now to make sure I don’t fuck up in my personal life too?!” You rolled your eyes, “This wouldn’t have mattered three weeks ago, it would’ve just been two colleagues having a drink! Fraternizing with the enemy at best!” Bringing up that she’d practically outed you herself (didn’t matter that it was only to her own knowledge) she had no clue you even had an interest in women until then.
“A defence attorney isn’t a colleague!!”
“Oh so, if you’re there to babysit and Rita offers to buy us a drink, that’s fine? But GOD FORBID I go out on my own?! What the fuck Novak, I always need your supervision or something?”
“I went to check on you after your case got deadlocked and I find you looking happier than ever with the lawyer who’d been working the opposite side, raises a few RED FLAGS Gerard!” You rolled your eyes, letting out a frustrated growl of a yell before quieting your voice so hopefully the entire precinct couldn’t hear it.
“I’m not fucking Nikki Staines…” And it was back to the yelling, “Not that it’s any of your Goddamn business anyways!” You let out a huff, leave it to Novak to get under your skin before 9 in the morning, quieting once again, “We went to law school together, and believe me, that woman is as straight as they come.” You anger got the best of you, as if Novak had the audacity to not only delve herself into your personal life, but accuse you of this kind of thing at work?! “I can’t fucking believe you.” You swung your coat on, spinning to leave, practically slamming into Rita Calhoun, her eyebrows raised, look of bewilderment drawn on her face.
“I’m here for my client…everything okay?”
“IT’S FINE!” Both you and Caseyshouted, the frustration directed at each other, not the older woman.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Novak called after you,
“To get a fucking coffee! I’ll meet you back at the office, unless you plan on kicking me off another case!!” You were halfway across the bull pen by now, the two of you holding the attention of the entire squad, Cragen even coming out of interrogation to find out what the hell was going on (he was both surprised and more than relieved to find out it wasn’t his team in the heated screaming match). As you stormed off to the stairs, too frustrated to bother waiting for the elevator, Fin spun his chair to face Amanda at their connected desks, leaning back into it, feet held up off the floor.
“Man they fight worse than you and Amaro do….” Amanda laughed at his comment,
“You’re not wrong…” She paused, realizing something, glancing up to make sure Casey had disappeared into the interrogation room with Rita, “Wait…do you think they’re sleeping together?” Fin dropped down, arms hitting the desk,
“I mean…that was a lover’s quarrel, but if they were at least getting off they wouldn’t be so wound up.”
“Guys!” Olivia’s voice broke their slightly hushed conversation, “You’re adults, you can’t go around making those kind of assumptions about people.”
“Oh please Liv,” Fin started, “Y/N said I wasn’t her type, anyone who says that definitely isn’t straight.” That made Amanda cackle, Elliot made a move to grab a donut from the box on her desk,
“Besides, you ever see Novak with a bat? No straight woman is that good at softball.”
“Jesus, you guys…” Olivia rolled her eyes, moving over to interrogation to catch up on what was going on over there, preferring to pay attention to work over the office place gossip mill.
#casey novak#casey novak x reader#second chair spark#law and order#law and order svu#svu#law and order#law and order special victims unit
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(I typed this up for my Japanese study log lol but it was so funny to me, I figured I'd also share it here)
Okay, so...
I was looking at my Japanese study Notion library page and kind of wanted to clear out a slot for Dungeon Meshi, since I wanted to be able to track my progress with the chapter count. I’d had 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い ("Crossplay Love: Otaku x Punk" in English) volume 3 in there since literally the day I created that page, I think. I had sort of given up on it last year because it was too hard for me to read at the time for what my level of investment was in the story, plus I got sort of busy with the translations and ran out of time/energy for manga reading projects, so I’d basically shelved that book for the time being.
I had gotten like halfway through the volume already, though, so I thought why not just read the rest of it so that I can move it out of my currently reading section? So I started reading it again and abruptly realized that I didn’t super remember a lot of the details in the story. At the time when I had started reading it, volumes 1 & 2 had been translated into English, but 3 hadn’t been translated yet, hence why I had picked it up in Japanese. Fortunately for me, though, the English translation has gotten a lot further now!
So what I did was speed-read up to the chapter I left off in English, then I finished the volume in Japanese. Hooray! I could remove it from my currently reading section!! 🎉
Except… after finishing volume 3, I wanted to know what happened next, so I just kept reading (in English) and quickly finished volume 4, then 5, 6, 7…
(You can probably guess where this is going.)
I reached the end of volume 7 and was like “aw man, I want to know what happens next, but I’m not sure if I care enough about this series to take the time to read it in Japanese… I’d rather just wait and read the English translation of this one and spend my energy on things like Dungeon Meshi instead.”
But I have spectacularly poor impulse control when it comes to this sort of thing, so just like what compelled me to buy volume 3 in the first place, of course I ended up caving immediately and buying volume 8 in Japanese, and I ended up back in the exact situation I had tried to resolve in the first place, with the series still technically on my currently reading list… 😩
Thankfully, my Japanese is better now than it was a year ago, and I can read manga way faster now, so I ended up sort of, uh, inhaling the series, or at least reading it about as fast as it was humanly possible for me to read it. In English, I can easily tear through a volume of manga in under half an hour. In Japanese, it probably takes me like 10x that.
I was on a bit of a deadline because I’m trying to stay super caught up on the TJPW translations to the best of my ability, so I had a narrow window between finishing the previous translation (for the last VOD show after the VOD went up on Wrestle Universe) and getting started on the next translation (which is for another VOD show, so I usually wait until the show gets uploaded before I start translating it, which is usually three days after the show happened).
I finished my first draft of the 2.17 show translation on Tuesday, February 20 (the day I watched the VOD), got my questions posted by early Thursday, and got it edited and published by early Friday, which was the date of the next show (with a 3-day timer after that until the VOD goes up and I need to drop everything else to translate).
So I had roughly a 5-ish day window with essentially no translation workload. I read a chapter of Dungeon Meshi, then finished 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い volume 3, then ended up reading volumes 8-12 in Japanese basically as fast as I could because I was invested in the series and I also really didn’t want to have to stop reading to work on my translations (the surprise 2.26 press conference from TJPW happened fortuitously at the end of this period). In total, I think I finished five volumes in about four days.
…And the huge reveal that I’ve been waiting for the entire series, which is the main reason why I felt compelled to read on, still hasn’t happened 😩. Never start reading a slowburn romance when the story is still in progress… 😔
I saw at the back of the manga that the series apparently updates on the fourth Monday of every month, so I ended up finding it on pixiv, and I got there just in time for chapter 107’s release (volume 12 ends with chapter 105, so there are two new chapters available on pixiv), so I’ve now read literally every chapter currently available.
I’m in the same boat as the Japanese fans now, I suppose! Waiting a whole month to get drip fed a little bit more of the story at a time… It brings me back to my days of following webcomics as they were happening, which I was never very good at, so we’ll see if I fare better reading serialized manga.
I guess to review 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い, difficulty-wise, I found it honestly harder than Dungeon Meshi, because even though it takes place at a high school and theoretically has more normal vocab, like every single character in the story talks weird in way that is totally different from how the other characters talk weird, and there’s far more slang and stuff written out in a way that isn’t super parseable by Yomichan (which I'm able to use on the book thanks to Mokuro). So my lookup tools didn’t account for my weaknesses nearly as well as they did with Dungeon Meshi.
I can see why I dropped it last year, because I lacked some of the grammar back then that I understand a lot better now. It’s the kind of story that is best enjoyed as easy reading, so once you take away the ease of reading, I think it’s hard to push through the difficulty in order to keep going.
Reviewing the story purely in terms of enjoyability, well, obviously I did enjoy it, haha! It’s a very unique story and it went to some surprising places in terms of the themes and story developments, considering the fact that most of the plot revolves around what I can only describe as Shakespearean comedy levels of ridiculous crossdressing drama.
The main point of interest to me was the LGBTQ themes, and I would say that it honestly surpassed my expectations there. We’re not at a point where “these characters are trans” is part of the explicit text of the story (and it might never go there), but the main relationship is gay no matter how you slice it, haha, and there’s another major character whose story reads as very much a trans narrative, and there’s a canonical lesbian couple as well.
Something I really appreciate about it is that interactions with those characters are some of the major driving forces in the relationship between the two main characters. Like, there’s a sense of commonality and shared experience between them and those other characters, and sometimes a sense of alienation and yearning at what the others have, which the main characters feel that they’ll never get to experience because they’re trapped in a situation where they can’t be their authentic selves.
A friend asked me how yuri it is, and honestly I'd say very? I don't think it bills itself as either GL or BL (and people who read exclusively either would probably both be unsatisfied with it). But to me, the core relationship and the conflicts that the characters increasingly grapple with as the story goes on feels more like the kind of thing you’d see in yuri. There’s a whole lot of yearning.
I was amused by this panel from volume 8 because there’s some slang in there and a few non-WaniKani/non-textbook words, but I’d learned literally all four of the new words from translating TJPW, including the one with a non-WK kanji in it (and two of the words were tricky translations so I remember them pretty clearly haha), so I was able to instantly read this panel without needing lookups:
If I'd timed it a bit better and waited for a 50% coinback sale on Bookwalker, I could've gotten a great deal on it lol but I was too impatient to wait fdjkghdfjkg. At least the Japanese edition is way cheaper than the English one...
#i'm currently writing a fic for it that will be incredibly annoying to 99% of the people visiting the AO3 tag because it's for the jp manga#so it's based on a bunch of canon that most of my potential readers don't have access to yet and won't for many more months 💀#barring a fan translation project appearing out of nowhere i guess. but that feels unlikely lol#Crossplay Love#~
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The Pass
It’s bright as shit out for my nocturnal loving ass, but I cope. I seethe and cope.
The air is at least a bit on the chill side as I sit out on one of the chairs outside the cafe with my hot chocolate and e-reader. My coat and its leather keeps me warm enough in the torso that I don’t mind the slight sting of my cold ears and nipped nose. My sunglasses help, too. Keeps the brightness of the sun from assaulting my senses.
It’s a weird thing, I know. What, with the lack of functional jelly based eyeballs and all. There’s something about sunlight that remains, to me, aggressive. The UV radiation is merciless and cuts through more than physical shade. It likes to overwhelm metaphysical and metaphorical shades, too. And so, it still hurts my eyes a bit.
My arms and hands seem alright. Though the gap between coat sleeve and glove cuff still feels like I’m wearing hot bands of metal at times. I try not to think about that.
I try not to think a lot about much of anything, if anyone recalls. However, I esepcially do my best not to think too hard about my spiritual matter I call ghaster.
A tap on the screen of the e-book gives me a new page to look over. Though my eyes often dart up and around without moving my head. I can see behind me too through the back of my head, but I still keep track of shadows and reflections. Even some of the best killers forget about minding them–or figure no one pays attention to them like my batshit ass does. Either way, this habit was one I cherished for its ongoing ability to save my carcas from danger.
I’m reading a book called ‘Before And After’. It’s an unusual, but compelling apocalyptic read.
The exchange of information is seamless. At some point a young man with an apron on comes out to check on me and collect his payment and tip. He leaves a tiny thumb drive the size of a fingernail under the receipt he leaves next to my mug with a practiced sleight of hand. I pick both up like I am only picking up one and inspect the receipt a moment before shoving both carelessly into a coat pocket.
The delivery address replaced the address for the actual establishment I was at uptop of the receipt which I memorized before pocketing.
Deed done, I take time to finish the page, my drink, and close the cover for the device in hand before standing. Delivery is a town over. Thankfully, my truck was only a street away. I make my way.
People don’t try to be in my way by instinct. I’m too tall and too grim looking. It suits me. Makes it easier to tell if somone is making a beeline at me with a concealed weapon. No one does. Today.
My truck is a basic bitch of a truck. Something of a ford (I miss my Volkswagen Rabbit that I can no longer find on the market in good enough shape to buy for parts let alone for driving) from not too many years back. It’s a bit off the ground to most people, but I get in behind the wheel easy enough. Does the job. Starts up fine if a bit loudly. I try not to get too attached to cars anymore, more often than not they get absolutely thrashed. Insurance for me is a nightmare.
Out comes my phone so I can plot out a path to the delivery address. I sink freehand into the radio, yes into like a ghost, and absently manipulate the energy in it to flip channels while I fiddly phone with the other the mundane way.
I can’t find anything I care to listen to and leave it on a local news station. The weather and traffic outlook is mind numbing enough to settle my brain as I plunk phone into dash holder and start following the Map instructions it gives me to leave town.
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1. "You misunderstand me. I'm a powerful feudal lord. I demand tribute. This is about traditions."
PLAISANCE - "Now hey there." She raises her finger. "Sounds like someone isn't taking responsibility for the energy they bring into this space..."
"Tribute, power... these are not the traditions we're used to in this part of the world."
2. "A curious pendant you're wearing." (Narrow your eyes mysteriously.)
PLAISANCE - "Oh yes, helps to have an anchor in these times." She clutches the pendant and narrows her eyes as well.
3. "So, are you the owner of this store?"
PLAISANCE - "I am. The proudest owner of our little shop of culture." Her voice, high-pitched, sounds familiar -- you've talked to her before, through the doorbell.
SUGGESTION [Medium: Success] - She has fine-tuned her voice to find the most welcoming approach for attracting new customers. It doesn't work.
"What if I want to buy a book?"
"The girl outside mentioned that this place is cursed."
"Your daughter is the one standing outside the store, right?"
"Farewell, for now, book peddler!" [Leave.]
PLAISANCE - "Then why are you talking to me? Everything is on the shelves to browse. Don't you feel *compelled* to buy anything?" She fiddles with her pendant, then waves her bony fingers directly at you: "See those shelves there, go, be drawn."
"So what types of books do you have?"
"Alright, I'll take a look then." (Conclude.)
PLAISANCE - "Everything is on the shelves, take a look yourself." She nudges her glasses. "The shelves compel you, don't they?"
2. "Alright, I'll take a look then." (Conclude.)
PLAISANCE - She smiles and nods, seemingly relieved.
2. ""The girl outside mentioned that this place is cursed."
PLAISANCE - "*Cursed*? Who said that, Annette?" She blinks. "I will have a word with her... This place is not cursed, it has a robustly *magnetic* energy. Good for commercial activity. My business is *thriving*, sir!"
EMPATHY [Medium: Success] - Doesn't feel like it's thriving. Feels ghostly.
3. "Your daughter is the one standing outside the store, right?"
PLAISANCE - "Annette, yes. My daughter. I hope she wasn't slacking off again with her nose in science fiction! Tell me, was she at her post, doing her job like a proper girl?"
"Yes, of course."
"No, she was definitely slacking off."
"It doesn't matter. Now, tell me something else..."
PLAISANCE - "Wonderful! Did you talk to her?"
"Yes."
"Not really."
PLAISANCE - "Great! On a scale of one to ten, how compelled were you to buy books after talking with her?"
EMPATHY [Medium: Success] - Her opinion of her daughter depends on how well she lured you into the store.
"Ten. She's certainly very polite and helpful."
"Five. I felt some interest."
"One. Not impressed."
"I'm not going to grade a human being. I don't do that."
PLAISANCE - "Come now, it's not personal, it's about proper sales practices and market research." She crosses her arms. "I expect an answer."
"Ten. She's certainly very polite and helpful."
PLAISANCE - "My precious! Her dedication brings joy to my heart." She's immensely satisfied with the answer. "If you have children, I hope they turn out as great as my Annette."
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Anonymous asked: As a beginner in Classics I love your Classicist themed posts. I find your caption perfect posts a lot to think upon. I suppose it’s been more than a few years since you read Classics at Cambridge but my question is do you still bother to read any Classic texts and if so what are you currently reading?
I don’t know whether to be flattered or get depressed by your (sincere) remarks. Thank you so much for reminding me how old I must come across as my youngish Millennial bones are already starting to creak from all my sins of past sport injuries and physical exertions. I’m reminded of what J.R.R Tolkien wrote, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” I know the feeling (sigh).
But pay heed, dear follower, to what Menander said of old age, Τίμα το γήρας, ου γαρ έρχεται μόνον (respect old age, for it does not come alone). Presumably he means we all carry baggage. One hopes that will be wisdom which is often in the form of experience, suffering, and regret. So I’m not ready to trade in my high heels and hiking boots for a walking stick and granny glasses just yet.
To answer your question, yes, I still to read Classical literature and poetry in their original text alongside trustworthy translations. Every day in fact.
I learned Latin when I was around 8 or 9 years old and Greek came later - my father and grandfather are Classicists - and so it would be hard to shake it off even if I tried.
So why ‘bother’ to read Classics? There are several reasons. First, the Classics are the Swiss Army knife to unpick my understanding other European languages that I grew up with learning. Second, it increases my cultural literacy out of which you can form informed aesthetic judgements about any art form from art, music, and literature. Third, Classical history is our shared history which is so important to fathom one’s roots and traditions. Fourth, spending time with the Classics - poetry, myth, literature, history - inspires moral insight and virtue. Fifth, grappling with classical literature informs the mind by developing intellectual discipline, reason, and logic.
And finally, and perhaps one I find especially important, is that engaging with Classical literature, poetry, or history, is incredibly humbling; for the classical world first codified the great virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, loyalty, sacrifice, and courage. These are qualities that we all painfully fall short of in our every day lives and yet we still aspire to such heights.
I’m quite eclectic in my reading. I don’t really have a method other than what my mood happens to be. I have my trusty battered note book and pen and I sit my arse down to translate passages wherever I can carve out a place to think. It’s my answer to staving off premature dementia when I really get old because quite frankly I’m useless at Soduku. We spend so much time staring at screens and passively texting that we don’t allow ourselves to slow down and think that physically writing gives you that luxury of slow motion time and space. In writing things out you are taking the time to reflect on thoughts behind the written word.
I do make a point of reading Homer’s The Odyssey every year because it’s just one of my favourite stories of all time. Herodotus and Thucydides were authors I used to read almost every day when I was in the military and especially when I went out to war in Afghanistan. Not so much these days. Of the Greek poets, I still read Euripides for weighty stuff and Aristophanes for toilet humour. Aeschylus, Archilochus and Alcman, Sappho, Hesiod, and Mimnermus, Anacreon, Simonides, and others I read sporadically.
I read more Latin than Greek if I am honest. From Seneca, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, Apuleius, Virgil, Ovid, the younger Pliny to Augustine (yes, that Saint Augustine of Hippo). Again, there is no method. I pull out a copy from my book shelves and put it in my tote bag when I know I’m going on a plane trip for work reasons.
At the moment I am spending time with Horace. More precisely, his famous odes.
Of all the Greek and Latin poets, I feel spiritually comfortable with Horace. He praises a simple life of moderation in a much gentler tone than other Roman writers. Although Horace’s odes were written in imitation of Greek writers like Sappho, I like his take on friendship, love, alcohol, Roman politics and poetry itself. With the arguable exception of Virgil, there is no more celebrated Roman poet than Horace. His Odes set a fashion among English speakers that come to bear on poets to this day. His Ars Poetica, a rumination on the art of poetry in the form of a letter, is one of the seminal works of literary criticism. Ben Jonson, Pope, Auden, and Frost are but a few of the major poets of the English language who owe a debt to the Roman.
We owe to Horace the phrases, “carpe diem�� or “seize the day�� and the “golden mean” for his beloved moderation. Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, of Ancient Mariner fame, praised the odes in verse and Wilfred Owen’s great World War I poem, Dulce et Decorum est, is a response to Horace’s oft-quoted belief that it is “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country.
Unlike many poets, Horace lived a full life. And not always a happy one. Horace was born in Venusia, a small town in southern Italy, to a formerly enslaved mother. He was fortunate to have been the recipient of intense parental direction. His father spent a comparable fortune on his education, sending him to Rome to study. He later studied in Athens amidst the Stoics and Epicurean philosophers, immersing himself in Greek poetry. While led a life of scholarly idyll in Athens, a revolution came to Rome. Julius Caesar was murdered, and Horace fatefully lined up behind Brutus in the conflicts that would ensue. His learning enabled him to become a commander during the Battle of Philippi, but Horace saw his forces routed by those of Octavian and Mark Antony, another stop on the former’s road to becoming Emperor Augustus.
When he returned to Italy, Horace found that his family’s estate had been expropriated by Rome, and Horace was, according to his writings, left destitute. In 39 B.C., after Augustus granted amnesty, Horace became a secretary in the Roman treasury by buying the position of questor's scribe. In 38, Horace met and became the client of the artists' patron Maecenas, a close lieutenant to Augustus, who provided Horace with a villa in the Sabine Hills. From there he began to write his satires. Horace became the major lyric Latin poet of the era of the Augustus age. He is famed for his Odes as well as his caustic satires, and his book on writing, the Ars Poetica. His life and career were owed to Augustus, who was close to his patron, Maecenas. From this lofty, if tenuous, position, Horace became the voice of the new Roman Empire. When Horace died at age 59, he left his estate to Augustus and was buried near the tomb of his patron Maecenas.
Horace’s simple diction and exquisite arrangement give the odes an inevitable quality; the expression makes familiar thoughts new. While the language of the odes may be simple, their structure is complex. The odes can be seen as rhetorical arguments with a kind of logic that leads the reader to sometimes unexpected places. His odes speak of a love of the countryside that dedicates a farmer to his ancestral lands; exposes the ambition that drives one man to Olympic glory, another to political acclaim, and a third to wealth; the greed that compels the merchant to brave dangerous seas again and again rather than live modestly but safely; and even the tensions between the sexes that are at the root of the odes about relationships with women.
What I like then about Horace is his sense of moderation and he shows the gap between what we think we want and what we actually need. Horace has a preference for the small and simple over the grandiose. He’s all for independence and self-reliance.
If there is one thing I would nit pick Horace upon is his flippancy to the value of the religious and spiritual. The gods are often on his lips, but, in defiance of much contemporary feeling, he absolutely denied an afterlife - which as a Christian I would disagree with. So inevitably “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is an ever recurrent theme, though Horace insists on a Golden Mean of moderation - deploring excess and always refusing, deprecating, dissuading.
All in all he champions the quiet life, a prayer I think many men and women pray to the gods to grant them when they are caught in the open Aegean, and a dark cloud has blotted out the moon, and the sailors no longer have the bright stars to guide them. A quiet life is the prayer of Thrace when madness leads to war. A quiet life is the prayer of the Medes when fighting with painted quivers: a commodity, Grosphus, that cannot be bought by jewels or purple or gold? For no riches, no consul’s lictor, can move on the disorders of an unhappy mind and the anxieties that flutter around coffered ceilings.
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt (they change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)
Part of Horace’s persona - lack of political ambition, satisfaction with his life, gratitude for his land, and pride in his craft and the recognition it wins him - is an expression of an intricate web of awareness of place. Reading Horace will centre you and get you to focus on what is most important in life. In Horace’s discussion of what people in his society value, and where they place their energy and time, we can find something familiar. Horace brings his reader to the question - what do we value?
Much like many of our own societies, Rome was bustling with trade and commerce, ambition, and an area of vast, diverse civilisation. People there faced similar decisions as we do today, in what we pursue and why. As many of us debate our place and purpose in our world, our poet reassures us all. We have been coursing through Mondays for thousands of years. Horace beckons us: take a brief moment from the day’s busy hours. Stretch a little, close your eyes while facing the warm sun, and hear the birds and the quiet stream. The mind that is happy for the present should refuse to worry about what is further ahead; it should dilute bitter things with a mild smile.
I would encourage anyone to read these treasures in translations. For you though, as a budding Classicist, read the texts in Latin and Greek if you can. Wrestle with the word. The struggle is its own reward. Whether one reads from the original or from a worthy translation, the moral virtue (one hopes) is wisdom and enlightenment.
Pulvis et umbra sumus
(We are but dust and shadow.)
Thanks for your question.
#question#ask#classical#greek#latin#horace#poetry#literature#arts#cambridge#classics#personal#study#habits#reading#books#culture#personal growth
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title: think about it tomorrow
word count: 2629
summary: Even after that difficult day of work, Ruggie had one more task he needed to complete, one that he didn’t expect would end with him just coming home.
this fic post is a lil different from my usual ones but! i did a trade with @nicoliharu !! and heres my part of it uvu
Savanaclaw’s lounge has an eerie glow at night, blue irradiating from the pool in the center that people say looked uncanny when it was empty, like now. That, or visitors would find it pretty.
Ruggie himself didn’t care much. Usually, when he had work at the Lounge, he’d come back to that, and it was more familiar than anything. Without the other students around, it was more like the only thing welcoming him back “home”, so there’s a vague comfort there. He always gives it a bit of a stare before walking to his room.
Sometimes he sits there and thinks over the silence. Makes calculations in his mind about how much money he was sending back home, how much he needed for himself. Thinks about exam dates and those extravagant events Azul made him and the other employees suffer through. Leona’s errands, Crowley’s tasks, windows to be cleaned, letters to answer.
He doesn’t have time for that tonight. Ruggie’s heading straight back to his room, Agatha should be coming over soon, after all, he promised he’d help her out with Animal Languages.
Yeah, it seems sort of insane to accept requests like these when he was having such a busy week, he knows. It’s not like he doesn’t have the spine to decline them, or something, just… well. Agatha is Agatha. She’s not like anyone else in that school.
Agatha was the only girl, for one, and also, one of Ruggie’s close friends. A couple sparks had been rushing between them lately, which made him so much more excited than he should be, but he was grateful for the friendship itself. In his two years of being a NRC student, he never really found someone who had a presence that… healing. Agatha was understanding and kind, the sort of person that compels you to wind down just by being there.
(Really, how rare was someone like that in Night Raven College?)
So he had a crush he was comfortable with. Nothing wrong with that, right? And nothing wrong with wanting to see her after waiting all these damn tables either.
He opens the door to his room and wobbles inside with a sigh. But, man, he was exhausted. He hoped it wouldn’t show through too much when she got there. It wasn’t necessarily that late, just… he hadn’t caught a damn break today. He wonders if there’s time to rest his eyes for a bit before she gets there—
“Ruggie?” He perks up at the voice he hears outside. “Are you in there?”
And there she is! He feels inclined to smile. One very much needed spark of energy runs through him.
“Yeah, yeah, just a second!” He responds, first moving to turn on the lights, which he hadn’t done yet, then to open the door. Agatha greets him with one of her usual smiles. “You ready to work?”
“Ah, well.” She laughs, a bit awkwardly. “I’ll be doing my best. I hope it’s not too much of a bother or anything!”
Really, how could she ever be?
“Nah, not at all.” He says, allowing her inside before the door is closed. It makes a bit of a heavy noise when he shuts it. “If it’s Animal Languages, then I’m your guy! And, I always have time for you, shishishi.”
Agatha gives him a small chuckle. “You’re too good to me.”
“It’s just what you deserve, y’know!”
She sits on his bed while he’s picking up the papers he’d put together earlier on his desk. Drowsiness creeps in, but he knows how to push that aside well enough. He needed to do his best now. Just not let all that exhaustion show through so he could lend Agatha a hand! Then, then he could sleep…
Sleep sounds nice, doesn’t it? His brain tempts him, but he blinks multiple times, and hopes that good enough to stave off the feeling.
“So, what part did you have trouble with?” He asks, sitting next to Agatha, opening the textbook over his lap. The logical part of his brain wishes he had more than one chair in his room, so they could sit by the desk. The less logical part is just happy to be here.
“Mmh, it was with these...sentences Mr. Trein asked us to translate, I think? I couldn’t really get the difference between these two noises… I think it’s in chapter 7, hold on.”
She gets the book from Ruggie’s lap, bringing it closer to herself. He lets his eyes linger on her a little while she’s flipping through pages, shiny amber eyes narrowed at the words.
A silly smile appears on his face. Ruggie feels like a lucky guy, which he guesses it’s sort of odd, they’re not even dating or anything like that. And this was supposed to be him doing her a favor. Technically, he doesn’t gain anything from this, and yet…
Agatha’s hair is this nice red-like color that stands out while it flows over her shoulder. Ruggie doesn’t know the exact word for the color, maybe it was burgundy? Garnet? That doesn’t matter. The point is she’s just… beautiful. Eye-catching besides that pleasant aura that melted all his worries away. She’s there, so it’s like everything will be okay. Ruggie lets out a small laugh, in a way, this looks just like a dream—
“Ruggie.” Her voice calls for him, firmer than its usual airy tone. He blinks, a stronger haze settling over his mind. So he dozed off. Huh. “...are you okay? I think you just fell asleep for a bit.”
“I’m good!” Ruggie chirps almost immediately. Her brows furrow in worry. “Just dozed off for a bit. Uh.” He laughs awkwardly. “What were you trying to show me?”
Agatha stares intently, concerned expression intensifying on her face.
“Ruggie…” She begins again, head tilting a bit towards him. “I don’t think you should be studying right now. You should’ve told me you were tired.”
“Hey, I’m good, though!” He argues, but there’s no bite to it, really, he couldn’t add that in even if he tried. Agatha sighs, shaking her head. “We can keep going.”
“I’m not letting you study like this. Come on, you should get some rest.” She moves to close the textbook, but he grabs at it first, reflexes slowed down or not. “Ruggie.” She says, in a gently scolding tone.
“It’s fine, I told you.” He tries to argue again. It looks like she wouldn’t buy that at all, and, well… “Didn’t you need help? It won’t even take too long, I can just…”
“No. That’s final.” Agatha states, cheeks puffing slightly. “You’re so stubborn. Just rest a little, okay? We can study tomorrow.” She huffs, hand placed on the top of his head in a pat — That turns into something like light petting that sends a weird, fuzzy feeling across Ruggie. “Come on. You can lean on me if you wanna.”
Ruggie crosses his arms, but she looks at him all invitingly, with that warm expression on her face. And his resolve dwindles…
Ah. Ruggie isn’t really a strong man when it comes to things like that, is he?
“...what kinda leaning are we talking about?” He asks, a bit of a smile on his face. Well, maybe this wasn’t bad either.
Agatha chuckles. “You can lay on my lap or on my shoulder, what you’d like. As long as you take a little break, you stubborn hyena.”
Yeah, it’s not bad at all.
“Then I’m on it, shishi.” He can’t help but grin a little. “You said I could do it, so.”
He pushes the book off Agatha’s lap — Hey, it’s an opportunity, he’s not just gonna miss that — and moves to lean his head on her thighs, sighing when they touch. Agatha does a bit of a small, barely noticeable jump like she wasn’t expecting him to take that offer, but in just a second, her smile widens, still soft and warm. Ruggie smiles back at her.
“That’s the only way I can get you to rest, huh?” Agatha sighs, leaning back for a bit. “You’re such a workaholic.”
Ruggie doesn’t say much of anything. He begins to feel drowsy already, but… really, when he’s like this, how could he really sleep? He can feel his heartbeat quicken, the room filled with a silence that’s both comfortable and comforting.
Agatha’s hand makes its way into the mess that was his hair, Ruggie feels himself perk up — and then immediately begin to relax, feeling how the tips of her fingers begin to run along it, untangling knots and gently scratching against his scalp, then the back of his ears—
Ah. The tension in his body starts melting away, pressing his face against Agatha’s thigh some more. Damn it, that felt nice. If he had to die like that, he really doesn’t mind. He feels all fuzzy inside, the humming that begins to leave Agatha sounds faraway, even.
He sighs.
His thoughts get muddled… was he that much of a workaholic, he begins to wonder. It felt so natural to just fill every second of his day with those part-time jobs. He didn’t hate it at all, he’d come to every location with a smile, ready to tackle the day, but maybe he pushed himself a little too hard sometimes.
It’d be nice if he could come back to something like this everyday. Ruggie found his dorm room decently homey, but… with Agatha there, it’s a whole different story. Maybe she’s just spoiling him like this — He leans against her hand as she scratches the back of his ears once more, knowing they’ve gotten a bit twitchy — but whether he’d admit that out loud one day or not, he just really likes it. He feels floaty, fuzzy…
“Hey.” He half opens his eyes, Agatha’s gentle smile is the first thing he sees, warming his heart. Something straight out of a dream. “Y’know what, I really like you.”
Her posture straightens in shock.
“Eh?” She blinks, and only now, Ruggie notices what came out of his mouth.
“Uh. I mean.” Oh. Oops, he giggles awkwardly. That hadn’t been how he thought he’d tell her about it, but… gotta make the best out of what you have, huh? Whether that went well or not… “Is that weird? If you don’t feel the same we can just drop it. But I’m telling you the truth. You’re just… special. I feel really comfortable with you, and all.”
He feels his face warm up, and he’s still laying there — These are kind of embarrassing things to say, aren’t they? But it’s her, and it’s true — Agatha is undeniably flustered, maybe they shared the slight red tint to their faces now. Ah, it’s weird. He feels anxiety threaten to pull him under for the first time in a while—
“I… I do too. A lot. M-Maybe too much.” And she stutters, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear as she looks away in this rare sort of shyness. “S-So, it’s not weird at all!”
Ruggie’s heart skips a beat.
“Cool. Okay.” The words processing in his mind, repeating over and over like they hadn’t registered yet, echoing. His face felt impossibly hot, his self control running low. “...can I kiss you?”
Agatha blinks, still wide eyed, and a smile appears on her lips, she fiddles with her hair again, brushing it off her shoulder. “I… yeah.”
All of this, it’s so… Ruggie has a tough time wrapping his head around it all, but he’s not going to argue a reality like this at all. Sparkling with excitement, he gets up, sitting next to Agatha again, and they exchange a look for a moment as he smiles, foreheads touching.
Ruggie feels like he doesn’t even know how to begin, like she’s his very first kiss. Tentative hands cup Agatha’s cheeks, and in the peak of his enthusiasm, they just go for it, so close to being at the same time — And their lips meet.
He feels euphoric, almost every bit of exhaustion forgotten when he feels Agatha’s smile against his, small breathy laughs bubbling up and leaving them before the kiss deepens and Agatha pushes back against him too.
They’re not really thinking about it at all, and maybe that’s how Ruggie prefers it. Agatha is warm when she presses closer to him, her arms wrapping around him, and he continues to hold her face in his hands even as they pull away to breathe for a moment, seeing her smile.
“You’re so cute.” She says in between slightly harsher breaths. “Ruggie…”
And he thinks of the time he’s thought about something like this happening, none of his fantasies ever really went like this — There was always some sort of struggle, a larger pause after he tells Agatha about his feelings even when he thought of victorious scenarios. Even when he had her with him in the end.
He wonders when they kiss again, should anything have the right to feel so easy?
She tastes vaguely like lipstick, something cherry-like and similar to what he’d associate to the color of her hair, with a hint of sweetness. Her arms around him pull him closer with surprising strength, he feels her heartbeat on his when their chests touch.
And Ruggie’s not good at keeping his hands to himself— He notices he’d been hungry, wanting something like this for too long, and even though the world feels too dreamlike, blurry from exhaustion and still a bit of denial, he lets his hands wander. He touches her arm first, but it doesn’t linger there, going down her sides and ending up on her hips, wondering if he could let them wander further, maybe over her thighs—
“Ahaha, s-sorry, I’m just really happy.” They pull away, breathing heavily, and Agatha is giggling, her smile turning the dim room into the sun itself. Ruggie can’t help but share the expression. “I never thought… this really feels like a dream.”
“Yeah.” Ruggie agrees. “What do we… are we doing anything else, or?”
His face feels hotter upon saying the words. He sounds lame, but—
“I don’t know.” She says with a sigh, but it’s content. Their foreheads touch, bodies still too close to each other, and too happy to be where they are. “I’m just happy we’re here.”
“Mm, me too.”
There’s one more kiss, although a brief one. Agatha’s hand is on his hair, idly running fingers through strands, even after they part again.
“You still look so tired.” She points out, voice gentle. “Don’t you wanna call it a day?”
Ruggie has to sigh. Well…
“Maybe.” He admits, finally, even though he doesn’t want to be away from her at all now. “But I’m gonna miss you if you leave.” It’s a playful complaint, even though he means it. Agatha chuckles a bit.
“I can stay with you, then.” She says with a rare sort of decisiveness. “Someone’s gotta take care of you if you’re not gonna do it yourself.” She pouts, pulling him a bit closer.
His eyes threaten to flutter shut like this.
“If it’s you, then.” He murmurs, laughing quietly. “Guess it’s alright.”
Agatha gives him one more kiss, a small affectionate peck on his lips.
“Good. Let’s think about everything else tomorrow, okay?”
Then it goes by easily. He sighs, releasing tension with his exhale, and Agatha holds out her arms for him with an inviting smile.
They lay down, not really bothering to turn off the lights just yet. Ruggie makes himself at home there, back of his head on her chest, an arm pulling him closer while she continues to pet him, warm and dreamlike.
And they think about it tomorrow.
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First Line Meme Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line, then tag 10 of your favorite authors!
tagged by @lizardkingeliot. Thanks!!! <3
This is going to be fun!
1. The Production of Penny. SPOILERS for A Comet Pulled From Orbit.
For the first several weeks, it’s just impossible to meet her. Penny will feel bad about it later, but he can’t take in any new stimuli when his entire body, mind, soul is shivering in the exposed light, trying to adjust to a reality he’d given up on returning to. He holes himself up with his family in one of his favorite places, a small house in Alaska, of all places, that he’d only just acquired and made comfortable when he’d—when he’d gotten himself trapped somewhere else.
2. The Way a Fool Would Do
You never really know what you’re getting into, when you choose to take a soulmate. Before Quentin had bound himself to Eliot, he’d been forced to endure the normal barrage of questions from the Fillorian Soul Council, and then a separate barrage of questions from his cousin Julia, who had nitpicked his choice down to the marrow, pouring concern after concern into Quentin’s already terrified brain.
He’d been so frustrated with her at the time, but in retrospect he can’t blame her for her caution. The fact is, no matter how much you prepare, no matter how much you think you’ve thought it all through, binding another soul to your own is unlike anything else in the world. It is impossible to know how it will feel until it’s already too late to turn back.
3. The Genesis of Julia
She decides, while watching the 1984 Summer Olympics one lazy day, a magically cool glass of lemonade on the table beside her as she lounges back into their comfiest armchair, to master gymnastics. The decision is made more or less on a whim; this is how Julia decides how to spend a great deal of her infinite life minutes, truthfully. She’s organized and meticulous once she knows her goal, but when it comes to finding said goal, it’s all about what strikes her fancy.
4. The Construction of Kady
The dust took a couple of weeks to settle, after Kady’s abrupt departure from her old life and chaotic intrusion into her new one. She’d been in the middle of war with her own people when she’d died for the first time, and the others had found her desperately attempting to steal magic from a rival hedge group in order to survive, too anxious about her own life to properly mourn for her mother’s death, and certainly too caught up in her own frantic mind to trust any of these new people, much less believe them about their immortality, or her own.
5. The Origins of Alice
There was no way to prepare for something like this. There was simply nothing she could do, nothing she could write down, no refinements she could make, that would help her to be more ready for what the morning would bring.
Alice hated that very much, of course.
6. The Creation of Quentin
The object in question was beautifully rendered, detailed and precise. A burnished color, the cool weight of it reassuringly solid in Q’s hands as he examined it, turning it over and over in his hands. This one wasn’t even particularly old; it looked to be a sixteenth century model, and Q had seen older and more beautiful in his time.
7. The Making of Margo
When Margo first met Alice, she understood her immediately. That wasn’t to say that Alice was boring, or predictable, or that there was nothing Margo had to learn about her. It wasn’t that at all. It was more that in meeting Alice, Margo was able to take one look at her and think to herself: ah, now this I know what to do with.
8. The Explanation of Eliot
El was afraid of heights, but only a little.
He could fly, after all, and that should have made fear illogical. But if anything, his ability to subvert gravity was the very reason for his nerves: he’d never been able to trust himself with anything, much less his own life or the life of others. The few times his telekinetic powers had been called in as a means of escape or rescue, when he’d held an innocent stranger or beloved family member in his arms and floated with them down from the side of a mountain or building or cliff face… well, those were the things he had nightmares about, on the rare occasions when he could remember his dreams. It was that sensation of freefall, of knowing it was magic, something inexplicable, deep in his consciousness, in his soul, even, that was the only thing preventing sharp, painful, deadly impact. He knew himself well enough to know he should never be trusted with something so precious as the life of another.
9. A Comet Pulled From Orbit
Alice Quinn woke up.
This was an unexpected development, considering the events of mere moments ago. Specifically the agonizing thirty seconds she’d spent bleeding out on the carpet, wondering in an abstract sort of way how long it would be before someone thought to look for her and found her mangled corpse tucked into the corner of a Brakebills Library study room, surrounded by the shredded remains of several large magical tomes, and her carefully collated notes.
---
Pausing here for a moment after the first 9 - eight of them are all part of one series. The main story, A Comet Pulled From Orbit, is an Alice POV AU of The Old Guard. Prominent Queliot subplot, some burgeoning Kalice and other ships as well. Lots of found family, etc. The other stories, all the ones with the seven main characters' names in them, are meant to be a series of small snippets to fill out that universe, backwards and forwards. I'm noticing that I do a lot of setup, I don't often start in medias res with any of these, trying to set a tone and get the information started right away. Each of the chapters of the snippet stories could be their own thing, so it's a little weird to consider it the start of a bigger story!!
Okay, moving on to earlier stories.
10. is it too late (or could this love protect me)
This is a story about nothing and everything. It is a story between then and now. It is a story of people living their lives, living them, and living them, and continuing to live them, with only some pedestrian heartbreak and alcoholism and good old millennial economic angst to add some variety to the humdrum of continued existence.
This is a story about stupidity, and love. Stupid love.
(A/N - hmm I kinda hate this beginning now even though I'm SUPER proud of the story as a whole)
11. Maybe This Time
"Quentin Coldwater?" Eliot says, twisting the name up in his mouth like an insult.
Give him a break - it's a weird fucking name, for one thing. And besides, the off-putting demeanor is an intentional scare tactic.
12. Beyond the Veil
"Do you think the Lorians would want a seat at the table?" Fen asked doubtfully, looking over the charter in front of her.
"Well, they're going to want to review the language, at any rate," one of the advisers put in. "Especially the order of the names."
"But it's in alphabetical order!" Margo said. "Fillory comes before Loria - sorry, not sorry."
13. Running All This Time
Quentin was sweet. There were a lot of words that Eliot could think of to describe him, several of them a lot more besotted than he was comfortable with, but sweet was an apt descriptor, generally speaking.
He had the softest little smile, and wide brown eyes that crinkled up in the corners when he was happy. He had strong yet gentle hands, hands that were somehow mesmerizing as he flapped them around wildly during conversation, trying to paint pictures in the air to accompany his latest rant about whatever-the-fuck. His voice was calming, his circular logic compelling, enough so that Eliot found himself listening - really listening - whenever Quentin was talking to him, even if it was about the Plover books and what they suggested about this time period in Fillorian history, or the politics of trade when it came to buying labor from talking animals, or how he may have come up with a better tracking system to mark down the mosaic patterns they'd already tried. Dry, uninteresting stuff, really. Which is what Eliot told Quentin, with an eye-roll, to stop him from getting a big head.
14. To Feel the Same
Quentin finds Eliot sitting alone in the armory, surrounded by books.
Something tense and frantic inside of him unclenches, like it always does around this man. It’s actually a remarkable thing, because by all rights Eliot should make him more nervous, not less. Quentin is a nervous person, after all, and Eliot is so… Eliot . A High King in his blood. Quentin had meant that, when he said it, and had drank in the gratitude in Eliot’s eyes like a glass of pure, crisp water, essential and quenching.
15. Identity Theft
The first thing the man noticed as he came to consciousness was that his head was pounding. It felt like the worst hangover he'd ever had, times about a million, and for several seconds all he could do was lay there and gasp and wait for his eyes to adjust. He appeared to be in a semi-dark room of some sort. It was large, with a cavernous ceiling above him, and the air was drafty. Like a garage maybe, bigger even - a warehouse?
The second thing he noticed was that he wasn't alone in the room. There were shapes all around him, rustling and making confused, pained sounds. After a few moments of this, there was a whoosh of energy and an orb of light floated above his head, illuminating the space in a soft glow. Someone in the room had cast a simple light spell. He looked around and sat up slowly, trying not to jostle his still pounding head. His next observation was that pretty much everyone in the room with him was kind of stupidly attractive.
16. Promises
Quentin gets about thirty seconds alone in his bedroom in the cottage, before Eliot is bursting through the door without knocking. It's not that he wasn't expecting him to take it hard, but seriously - can he not give Quentin just a couple of minutes of peace?
"This isn't happening," Eliot says without preamble, slamming the door shut behind him. "I'm sorry, Q, but it's not."
"I honestly don't think it's your decision to make," Quentin says, running a tired hand over his face.
17. The Curse of the Broken Vase (aka The One Where They Get Married and Nothing Goes Wrong)
Quentin was pacing.
He was pacing, and he was tugging his hands through his hair, which he really shouldn't be doing because it had actually taken a hairdresser an annoying amount of time to brush it out and tie it back, and apparently it was perfect now, even though Quentin couldn't really see how it was different from his normal lazy bun, but whatever.
There would be people, Eliot included, who would be annoyed with him for messing up his hair.
18. Liquid Courage
Eliot was fidgeting. Which was unusual, and generally not a good sign. But it still wasn't much of a warning, Quentin had thought to himself later, given what was about to happen. Then again, Eliot had been acting strangely all week, a little distant and distracted, and Quentin had known his partner was working up to discuss something with him.
Quentin had been worried, of course, but in an abstract sort of way. He figured whatever it was, the two of them were more than equal to the challenge. Given everything they'd been through over the entire course of their relationship, he really couldn't imagine any piece of news that would be capable of obliterating their lives.
19. Reciprocal
The thing about Quentin Coldwater was that it was pretty much impossible not to love him. Honestly, it wasn't even Eliot's fault - how was he expected to spend every second of every day around such a beautiful, adorable, kind person without letting it get to him? And the sex. Well. That was fucking incendiary, which really wasn't helping his resolve in the love department.
20. Fragments
It was a perfectly normal morning in Fillory. Which, honestly, should have been Quentin's first warning that things were about to go very, very wrong. Fillory was many things, but normal was not one of them: Q had gotten used to being woken up by harried castle employees, alerting him to one catastrophe or another. The Serpent War had ended months ago, but the paperwork was still pouring in like it had never stopped. His official role in the government wasn't supposed to have anything to do with the war efforts, but it had been an all-hands-on-deck situation for the last year or so.
---
Oh my goodness, this took me back to almost my first story in this fandom! I have 22 Magicians fics posted, so that's almost all of them...
I think my favorite of all of these is Maybe This Time, just because I like starting off with such an iconic moment from canon. It's the kind of fic that I hope resonates with people differently upon a re-read, and I like the strong, instantly recognizable hook. You read that first line and you know where you are, but you have no real idea where the story is about to take you.
I've also had a lot of fun writing Julia in the Comet 'verse and I like her opening line to the first snippet I did for her!
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I'll tag @hmgfanfic, @ameliajessica, @hoko-onchi-writes, @freneticfloetry, @honeybabydichotomy, @allegria23, @spiders-hth-is-an-outlier, @rubickk7, @portraitofemmy, @propinquitous, and all others who want to!!
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We Fell in Love In December
Merry Christmas @nova-artino !!!! I was your gifter from the discord gift exchange :) I wrote a novissa one-shot for you a little over 2000 words. I hope you like it!!
Word Count: 2189
Pairing: Novissa (Nova Artino x Narcissa Cronin)
Nova could barely remember what Christmas was like. Sure, she had celebrated it with her family, but the Anarchists had encouraged her to banish those memories from her mind. Acknowledging them would only make her hurt worse.
“Hey, Nova!” Ingrid called to her hastily from the other train car.
“Yeah?” She responded. Getting her thoughts interrupted by Ingrid had become a normal occurrence. There was always more training to do, fewer memories to remember. More errands to run, less time to relax.
“Could you run down to the Cloven Cross Library to get me some bombshells?” Ingrid asked her.
Nova, fifteen and eager to help, immediately responded yes and grabbed her flimsy coat. She had outgrown being cold long ago. Now she skipped straight to numb. They had never had enough money to go buy a real coat anyway.
The streets of Gatlon had a new air about them. There were decorations, for Christmas she assumed, and everyone seemed happy. Why were they all out and around? Didn’t these people have to train? It was so easy for her to see why everyone was so incompetent. The Renegades only existed because people were too lazy to help themselves, and to be honest, the Renegades were a dictatorship. They made idiotic rules that they just expected everyone to follow. No one would ever even bother to help themselves because they had the Renegades. What would happen to the poor souls of Gatlon when the Renegades didn’t come? She knew there would be a day. It had happened to her, and she was sure it had happened to others.
If she were to compare the cheer from the Cloven Cross Library to the cheer of the streets of Gatlon, the competition would be non-existent. There was a huge wreath on the door, and the small pine trees that were in front of the Library had been decorated more than Nova thought the little trees could handle. The white Christmas lights were in just enough areas to really make the aesthetic, but they didn’t overdo it. The whole area just had a cozy feeling that living in the subway tunnels had always lacked. Frankly, it seemed even more inviting than the cathedral had been. Then again, maybe that wasn’t saying much.
The only thing that didn’t seem to be inviting was the large closed sign that hung over the antique door.
There was absolutely no way that she could go back to Ingrid without those bombshells, and there had to be other alternatives. If Leroy were here, he could easily concoct a serum that would break the lock, but she was by herself. Normally, she carried a bobby pin on hand, which was very helpful for picking locks, but she had forgotten one in her haste. Her only hope was that maybe The Librarian had left one of his backdoors open before leaving for Christmas. Though it was very unlikely, she went to check the front door too.
One of the things she had always admired about the Cloven Cross Library were the small windows that surrounded the door in the shape of an arch. From the inside, you could see the dangerous weather and know you were safe. From the outside, you could see friends reading, couples cuddling, and the fire roaring.
Today, as she peered through, only one figure was pleasant from her cozy fantasy. Narcissa Cronin, the librarian’s granddaughter. She was a sweet-looking girl who was probably a year older than Nova herself. Her speckled, gray eyes were perfectly framed by her flaming red hair that shone under the light of the fire. Her lips looked effortlessly soft unlike Nova’s which were always chapped.
Even though she had initially had plans to try the back doors, Nova suddenly felt compelled to talk to Narcissa. She was curled up reading a book with a mug in her hand and Nova didn’t think she had ever seen anyone look prettier. Slowly, Nova raised her hand to the door and knocked.
Narcissa looked up and started to shake her head no, but after a moment, Nova could see the realization in her eyes that Narcissa recognized her. She could see the small smile in Narcissa’s eye, the kind of thing that seemed like a dream and a perfect reality all at once. Or maybe she was just imagining it.
As Narcissa walked to the door, Nova felt her breath hitch and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Narcissa started to get closer and she tried to compose herself. She was here for bombshells, not to look at pretty girls.
“Hey, Nova,” Narcissa opened the door to the library and gestured for her to come inside.
“Ingrid needed a few bombshells,” Nova replied lamely, unable to fully comprehend everything happening around her.
“No-can-do,” Narcissa grinned, “Grandpa and I closed the library and the side-hustle yesterday.”
“Christmas?” Nova responded. Why would anyone close a shop for Christmas? To her, it was simply an overly-glorified day of the year and nothing else.
“Yeah, Christmas.”
Nova watched as a look of something near pity spread onto Narcissa’s face. At first, she was a little offended. She didn’t need anyone to pity her or have feelings for her in general. It was just the Anarchists vs. Renegades and nothing more. Then, she realized Narcissa cared, something she had never felt before either. Sure, the Anarchists cared for her, but not in a way like this. The look on Narcissa’s face was so purely genuine that it nearly made her heart melt.
Nearly.
“Well,” Narcissa spoke slowly and Nova turned her attention over, wanting to hear her voice, “I was going to do some fun Christmas-themed things before I meet up with Grandpa for Christmas Eve Dinner. Do you want to come?”
It sounded fun. Fun. It was something the Anarchists would never approve of, but for once, just once in her life, she wanted to do something fun. Something that would piss them off. Something that would show them they didn’t own her, and that she could do anything and everything she pleased.
“Sure,” she said firmly, though she could feel her face heating up. She had a feeling that this could be one of her best Christmases yet.
***
Narcissa had taken her to a grimy mall on the South Side of Gatlon. The neighborhoods around here were mostly abandoned, and she felt the Anarchists would fit right in.
The two of them had been in comfortable silence for a while when Narcissa spoke up. “So all I really came here for was a fluffy blanket, but if you want, we can go to some more stores. Do you have a favorite?”
Nova shook her head no. The only places she had ever really liked to go were hardware stores, and that was strictly for tools. She had never been allowed to buy real clothes of her own, mainly because the Anarchists had never had any real money. They had only ever had just enough to buy basic necessities like food or an occasional outfit. Things like fluffy blankets had always been out of the question, considering they could barely supply themselves with basic needs.
“Wait!” Narcissa blurted out, suddenly struck with a new idea, “Not to be rude, but this mall sucks. Let’s go to my favorite 24/7 diner and get funnel cakes with hot cocoa or maybe egg nog. I mean, if you’ve never had either before hot chocolate is definitely the way to go. It’s like warm chocolate with whipped cream, and you can get it with peppermint if you like that.” She sounded so excited, and it warmed Nova’s heart. For the first time in fifteen years, she felt good enough to let her guard down. Even with Mama, Papa, and Evie, things had never been that way. She had always fought for survival.
“That sounds really fun,” Nova felt herself blushing. Slowly but surely, her walls were crumpling and she knew the only reason for that was this girl, Narcissa Cronin.
***
Walking into the diner, Nova’s senses were flooded with all different sensations. By a normal person’s terms, it might have been considered crappy, fast food. But this was the first real restaurant she had ever gone to and suddenly, she was starving. She hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and she hadn’t intended to eat again until tomorrow. Narcissa walked over to a booth that was relatively far away from where they were standing, so Nova assumed it was a favorite of hers. She gestured for Nova to take a seat, so she slipped in, feeling the comfort and somehow homey feeling of the diner.
She had expected Narcissa to slide in on the other side of the booth, but surprisingly, she slid in right next to her. Instantly, their shoulders brushed and they were close. Very close. She had never been this close to anyone before, especially people she wasn’t related to. She could practically feel the heat radiating from Narcissa’s body, and she had the urge to move closer.
“Hey, Narcissa!” An excited waitress approached their table. In a way, the women reminded her of Ingrid, with eyes that could pierce her soul, but the energy was very different. She had an excited air about her, like she wanted everyone to be happy. To Nova, she looked like a huge Renegades supporter.
“What can I get for you two today? Our Christmas-related specials are on that side menu. Should I go ahead and mark you two down for some of our special hot cocoa? You look pretty chilly.”
She went to grab the small menu sitting near the wall of their tight booth, but Narcissa was too fast.
“We’ll have two cinnamon funnel cakes and two hot cocoas with extra whipped cream and add some chocolate drizzle on hers,” Narcissa gestured over to Nova. She nodded in return to Narcissa, seeing that she was doing all the talking. Plus, being around Narcissa had taken away most of her ability to think. All of her thoughts had been mushed, and she hadn’t even taken her normal precautions like counting possible exits or looking for security cameras.
“Oh wait!” Narcissa added before the waitress left, “Can we get it to go? I want to show Nova town square.” By the way she was grinning, Nova knew that she was in for a treat.
***
Boy, had she been right. Town square was sparkling. There was a huge Christmas tree, decorated with more types of ornaments than she could ever imagine. The hot cocoa in her hands warmed her whole body, practically making up for the flimsy coat. And having Narcissa near her was the icing on top of the cake. She felt giddy, something that she had never experienced. Narcissa Cronin was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
“So, what do you think?” Narcissa grinned, curious.
“This is definitely the prettiest I’ve ever seen it. I don’t really get to come out often, and when I do, it’s with the Anarchists. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. I mean, they’re the only family I have. But sometimes, I want to do things on my own. So thank you Narcissa. You’ve given me an experience I would have never gotten.”
It gave her a small joy to see Narcissa start to fluster. She looked like she was about to say something, but it ended up just coming out as a small “Thanks” and then her changing the topic.
“So, is there anything else you want to do before I have to leave? I don’t want to keep Grandpa waiting.”
Nova racked her mind. “No, I think I’m good.”
“Well,” Narcissa took a step closer to her, “There is one thing I want to do.”
Suddenly, her heart rate sped up, and her pulse started to flutter. She wasn’t completely oblivious. She knew Narcissa wanted to kiss her. The Anarchists would never approve, but at the same time that was exactly the reason she wanted to kiss her back.
“I think it’s the same thing I want to do,” She replied, her breath shaking, taking a step closer to Narcissa.
They were barely inches apart now. As she gazed into Narcissa’s gray eyes, her breath hitched, and whatever knowledge she had left was no longer functioning. All she wanted to do was kiss Narcissa Cronin, and never go back.
Narcissa breathed slowly. “Can I kiss you?” She asked quietly, her tone sending thousands of butterflies into Nova’s stomach.
She nodded, but didn’t give Narcissa time to respond before she kissed her. It was a soft, dreamy kiss that sent Nova breathless. Narcissa’s lips were so soft, and they tasted like the hot cocoa they had been drinking. She could briefly taste the cinnamon from their funnel cakes too, a scent that made her stomachs do flip-flops just thinking about it.
Finally, Narcissa pulled away. She put a firm grip on her hot cocoa and started to walk away. “Merry Christmas, Nova Artino,” She said, walking away, only to leave Nova exploding. This truly had been her best Christmas yet.
#renegades#merry christmas diana#ily!!#novissa#nova artino#narcissa cronin#my fic#renegades trilogy#shecduled post#discord gift exchange#super mega gay hell#supernova#pre-canon fic#adrian everhart#ruby tucker#oscar silva#danna bell
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Andy Weir on Writing a Buddy Cop Story… Set in Space
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Andy Weir is all about survival. His first novel, The Martian, centers upon the attempts of astronaut Mark Watney to survive long enough on the Red Planet for a rescue mission to reach him. His sophomore book, Artemis, is a fast-paced survival story of a different kind, set among various criminal factions on the Moon. His latest novel, Project Hail Mary, raises the stakes even higher— it’s about the survival of our entire species, and all life on Earth.
In Project Hail Mary, the Sun is getting dimmer, thanks to a mysterious substance known as Astrophage, a type of interstellar infection. Humanity is facing a ticking ecological time bomb; unless the secret of the Astrophage can be discovered and the planet-wide cooling process reversed, it’s goodnight for life as we know it. There’s just one long shot left for humankind: send a starship to make contact with whoever – or whatever – is behind it all.
Project Hail Mary is as much a mystery novel as it is an SF survival tale. The book opens with our protagonist, Ryland Grace, waking up in a medical bay with two corpses and no memory of how he got there. What follows is a constant peeling back of layer after layer of this mystery, until finally, the truth is revealed. It’s a deeply satisfying ride, made even more so for those readers who share Weir’s obvious passion for science. Surprisingly, at its heart, Project Hail Mary is also a buddy road trip story, which kicks into high gear when Grace connects with an alien partner he names Rocky.
After bonding over a shared love of Terry Pratchett, Andy and I talked about the influences behind Project Hail Mary, and what it took to bring the world of the Astrophage to life.
Den of Geek: Project Hail Mary evokes similar feelings to the Robert A. Heinlein juveniles, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama books. Were those influences for you?
Andy Weir: Oh, big time. I grew up reading my dad’s science fiction collection, Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, they’re my Holy Trinity. And yeah, that sense of optimism I feel has kind of vanished from sci-fi, and a lot of science fiction ends up being this bleak, dystopian misery-scape where a teenager doing weird stuff is the only thing that’ll save the day. I just don’t buy into that. I have a firm belief that the future is almost always better than the past. I mean, 2020 kind of sucked, we can all agree, but I would rather live through 2020 again than 1920.
Speaking of 2020, let’s talk about the Astrophage, which is basically Project Hail Mary’s nemesis. It’s a stellar virus, an infection transmitted from star to star. Did you plot the book during the Covid-19 pandemic, or was it just a fluke of timing? It seems like a very timely concept.
It does, but it’s pure coincidence. I actually finished the entire book before COVID-19 happened. This is the longest I’ve ever had a book done, but not yet published, because COVID messed with the print production pipelines. I actually finished the book in January of 2019. Astrophage was originally a technology called black matter, not a life form. It would absorb all electromagnetic radiation that hit it, and turn that energy into mass, in the form of more black matter. I thought, this is the perfect spacecraft fuel, because it mass converts. Then I thought, “Well, we have no way of creating that technology, I could not make that take place in the modern day… what if it wasn’t a technology? What if it was a life form?” Black matter takes energy and makes more black matter, but that’s kind of what life does, right? Humans take energy and make more humans out of it. That’s what we do. Cats take energy to make kittens.
It’s the ultimate double-edged sword. It has the power to wipe us out, but if we were smart enough to harness it, Astrophage could become humanity’s gateway to the stars.
That was my…kind of “shower epiphany.” I was thinking, “Oh, but we’d need to be really careful, because we wouldn’t want to let this shit get in our sun, because it would start breeding out of control. That’d be a disaster. We can’t have that.” Then I was like: “Wait a minute, disasters are where books come from. We can have that. We will have that!” Astrophage was… I can’t say handed to humanity on a silver platter, it was really more handed to humanity on a spiky, poisoned platter.
That’s how the Big Three – Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke – saw atomic power, wasn’t it?
Yeah, they did, and they’re not wrong. I still think that in the real world, our best bet for regular interplanetary travel is going to be ion propulsion, which requires a huge amount of energy, and so that’ll be reactors. This isn’t weird, way off in the middle of nowhere, made up science; this is real stuff. Humanity has put ion propulsion craft into space and used it, but if you scale that up big enough that you can have a passenger spacecraft, then you’re going to need to scale up the energy production. So, pretty much nuclear reactors are the only way to get that much energy out of such a small amount of weight.
The novel has a very non-traditional structure, essentially starting at two different time points, and unfolding from there in tandem. Was Project Hail Mary a difficult book to plot?
It wasn’t difficult to plot once I decided to use that structure, but it was a very difficult decision to go for that structure. I hate flashbacks. I always tell aspiring writers: “Don’t use flashbacks. Nobody likes them.” One of my main problems with flashbacks is, I’ll be really invested and interested in a story that’s going on, then suddenly we’re off somewhere else. We were over here doing neat stuff, now you’re over here doing boring stuff. This is a book, it’s entertainment, not a lesson. So, flashbacks often feel to me like you’re out playing with your friends and your mom tells you to come in and clean your room.
But I realized that this story, if told linearly, would be really weird. The whole scientific mystery which leads to the creation of the Hail Mary, and then the launch, is interesting, but it’s not a book… and so the flashbacks skip over the years. There’s this scene, and then the very next flashback you see will be two years later after that. The whole book would be really disjointed. From the second act on, it’s a completely different book. And so, I couldn’t think of any way to do this other than flashbacks. I’m like, “If I neat out the backstory bit by bit so that the stories kind of converge, and I’m constantly revealing new information in the flashbacks, then the flashbacks are compelling as well,” and just had the two stories come together at the end.
If this had been poorly executed, it would have been a very difficult read, but I felt no jarring at all due to the jumping backward and forward in time. I found myself looking forward to the next flashback, then getting back to the Rocky and Ryland show. I was also delighted to find there’s a lot of humor in there.
People don’t know it when they start the book, but it’s a buddy cop movie, basically. I don’t know if you watched those road movies from the ‘40s. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby will be on the road to something. There’s a bunch of movies that start with Road to…and then a location. It’s always the same principal plot, these two guys are trying to get somewhere, and all the funky, comedic things that happen along the way. It’s kind of like that.
So, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team behind The Lego Movie among many others, have been tapped to direct the Project Hail Mary Movie.
MGM bought the rights, and they bought them outright, not an option, which is neat, because it implies they’re much more serious about making the movie. Ryan Gosling is attached to play the lead, so that’s pretty cool.
Wonderful! Who’s your dream casting for Rocky, Grace’s alien partner?
I have some ideas for that, but I don’t want to give them away, because there’s been a lot of discussion on how do we portray the [alien] language situation on screen. In the book, after a while, I just start using italics to indicate what Rocky’s saying, and either Grace is looking it up on his computer, or later in the book has just learned Rocky’s language, learned how to understand what Rocky’s saying. We have an idea, and I think it’s a really solid idea. Ryan Gosling came up with it, and so I think that’s what we’re going to do. But films are so security conscious, I can’t really talk about it.
It was great talking with you, Andy, and I wish you the very best of luck with Project Hail Mary.
cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });
You too. Bye-bye.
Project Hail Mary hits the shelves on Tuesday, May 3rd.
The post Andy Weir on Writing a Buddy Cop Story… Set in Space appeared first on Den of Geek.
from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3gTzEik
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Roller Coaster
Read on AO3 Or in the post below:
Nights, flying down the 10, nearly 2 AM
Happiness begins
Days, lifted in a haze, we weren't just a phase
We weren't just pretend
Falling in love with Emma Swan was a lot like waking up to discover you were on a roller coaster of which you had no memory of buying a ticket for, much less boarding and buckling in. One minute he was asleep, dreaming of his father, and the next the car was moving and she was there. And as frightened as he probably should have been, as upsetting as the whole situation was, the only thought he could catch and hold onto was just how gorgeous she was.
So he sat up and introduced himself, and he thought if he listened carefully he could hear the soft click of his heart buckling into this ride for the long haul, anxiety pooling in the pit of his stomach because he had no clue what this ride was going to look like, but it was too late to get off now. Too late to admit that after decades of being alone, he was more than a little frightened of this ride.
But eventually, he had her smiling back, and agreeing to drinks, and to maybe this wasn’t going to be terrifying. Maybe he’d actually enjoy the ride. Maybe this would be the best decision he didn’t completely remember making.
“Now how ‘bout that drink?”
“It’s not like I had anything better to do today,” she answered with a shrug.
And then the ride started to move.
I remember low lows and high highs
We threw our hands up, palms out to the skies
Their first date was like slowly being pulled towards the heavens, both trying their best to forget about the drop that they knew was coming. Talking to her wasn’t like his normal conversations, he didn’t feel compelled to pour on the charm or live up to lies he had crafted about himself. There was a royal dignity about her that Neal hadn’t seen since he’d left that other world so long ago. Like a princess who had slipped out of the pages of a story book. Like a warrior, born to the wrong century. She was both comforting and compelling, like gripping a safety bar as you lean back and watch the world slowly disappear behind you.
They ended the night laying on the roof of the concession stand, the cold rain soaking through their winter clothes as they looked up to the stars and forgot completely that what goes up must always come down. Because laying there and holding her hand, Neal felt like he was never going to come back from this. This steep incline was never going to twist back down.
And so what if it did? Weeks would pass with Emma, months even, and slowly they both lost their fear of that drop. Because everything was new and exciting together, and so there wasn’t a thing in this world they couldn’t handle together. And Neal was right. There wasn’t a thing in *this* world that they couldn’t handle together.
“Do you believe in magic?”
“I take it you do.”
And with that one little question, Neal realized that the ride had stopped going up and was now hovering dangerously above a deadly drop.
It was fun when we were young and now we're older
Those days when we were broke in California
We were up-and-down and barely made it over
But I'd go back and ride that roller coaster
Neal had flown with shadows and fallen through swirling green portals, but nothing had ever made his stomach drop quite like August Booth. It was a gut-wrenching feeling, as if his heart was being pulled out of his chest by something far more powerful than gravity as too many new pieces of information whirled past him, sending him hurtling towards wrong conclusions. And he couldn’t slow this maddening descent down, he couldn’t even find the strength to scream.
He had known there would be challenges, true - what roller coaster doesn't have it's frights?-, but he hadn’t expected them to be this big. Call him a coward, but he hadn’t expected the drop to be one to his death, as if suddenly all of their plans were careening off the tracks and he just wanted off this ride. He wanted to save himself.
The call had already been made. Neal had moments to decide, before this terrible ride - that he hadn’t even bought a ticket for- came crashing to an end. The cops were on their way, one track ended in jail, the other in loneliness - which Neal knew better than most was a prison of its own - and he couldn’t divert Emma’s cart, but he had time to change his own.
“You’re doing her a favor,” August assured him.
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
And just like that it was over and nothing could possibly be worse than that first drop.
Faith led me to the clouds, reaching for the ground
His life was upside down
Except for in the months to come Neal would wish for that drop back. He would wish for the exhilarating thrill, replay it over and over again in his mind, because it was a hell of a lot better than what the rest of this ride had to offer. Because a roller coaster doesn’t just drop, it twists, and it turns, and it flips everything you have upside down. Which was where Neal was right now, so blind drunk that he was unaware which direction was up.
But after the fear of that first drop, he couldn’t care less. He wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. His hands were stretched out wide, reaching for anything to slow the blur of the world around him. Or was it to blur the painfully slow world around him? Had he actually gotten so used to the speed of this ride that nothing else would do?
And just when he’d had his fill of the nausea of alcohol and metaphorical roller coasters, when he thought he was going to be forever comfortable being jerked from one place to the next, he saw the sky again. He saw, what he thought, was the end of this hellish coaster.
“You can keep the scarf, really, I’ve got more.”
“And If I want to return it? Say, Friday night, around six?”
“Then I guess you can call me."
Neal breathed a sigh of relief, because this roller coaster was almost over.
Now everything has changed, we found better days
But I still hear the sound
I remember low lows and high highs
We threw our hands up, palms out to the skies
But as much as he wished she was the end of the ride, Tamara was just a different portion of the track. Because even though he filled his free time with her, Emma’s ghost never really left, now an uncomfortable third party to his new relationship. And sure, there were definitely high points in his relationship with Tamara, but there were low points, too.
And as much as Neal wanted to believe that this was a *new* ride, a new section of his life, he couldn’t help but be painfully reminded every now and then that while his time might belong to someone else now, his heart was still trapped on that damn roller coaster he’d boarded years ago.
On their first date he ordered her a hot chocolate and she had looked at him as if he was crazy, because of course she was a coffee drinker. He knew that. And on the second date she’d watched him pocket some candy at the movie theater concession stand and given him a long lecture about how immature and irresponsible that was. Emma would have understood his explanation - a nervous force of habit. And on the third date, well, he was more than a little rusty, but he’d learned quickly enough that she wasn’t Emma. Wasn’t Emma. Wasn’t Emma. Each little reminder another twist in the track. Each curve concealing new dips and dives for his heart to take, each one less terrifying than the first, but just as uncomfortable in other ways. But at least everything was slowing down a bit. And it always slowed down right before the end.
“UPS package for 407,” the strange voice crackled into the intercom by his front door.
“Does that trick really work on people?” he chuckled to himself as he lifted the window to the fire escape.
But as he rounded the corner, crashing into her like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, he realized he had another very big drop ahead of him.
It was fun when we were young and now we're older
Those days that are the worst, they seem to glow now
The ride always ends with one, last, fear-inducing drop, he reminded himself. There’s a camera to take your picture as you go crashing towards the earth. Crashing towards the end. And so Neal was determined to smile for that camera. He’d been on this roller coaster for ten years, and now he had the energy to lift his arms to the sky, shouting with joy, as his entire world tilted and then began careening downward. This ride had always been terrifying, but now, with her sparkling eyes only feet away from him, a son he was determined to befriend, and relationship with his father to rebuild, he could actually kind of enjoy the exhilarating horror of it all.
And as his heart hurtled back towards her, he watched the wind carry away things he shouldn’t have ever brought on this ride to begin with. He watched it carry away his resentment of his father like loose change falling out of his pocket, whisking thoughts of Tamara and their upcoming wedding right alongside it. And he wanted to care, but he was having too much fun.
So when they reached that last drop, the track disappearing into another swirling green abyss - he wasn’t afraid of this ride anymore. He had actually kind of enjoyed parts of it. The parts surrounded by her smile and filled with that unrestrained giggle that haunted his dreams. And yes, he couldn’t truly be sure that this didn’t all end in disaster, but it hadn’t killed him yet.
“Please don’t let go! I need you! I love you!”
“I love you too,” he assured her.
And then he raised his hands and smiled for the camera - for her - as he braced himself for one last drop.
It was fun when we were young and now we're older
Those days that are the worst, they seem to glow now
We were up-and-down and barely made it over
But I'd go back and ride that roller coaster
Everything was incredibly still for the first time in a decade. He wasn’t sure where he was, or why everything hurt so much, but he was startled by the stillness of the world around him. The peace as he opened his eyes and drew in a shaky breath. It was over, he was off the ride.
For a moment all he could do was sit in stunned silence, gathering his courage to take his first shaky step on solid ground, his knees weak as he came to terms with the idea of a world in which he wasn’t always moving toward Emma Swan. A world where he was free to find another ride - or better yet - go home to relative comfort and peace to never again think about the roller coaster of True Love that he'd just spent a decade trapped on. Of course… there was always that third option...
Here he was, finally free and forgiven, after a decade. No more ups and downs, no more upside down, no more twists and drops that left him reeling with emotion. He hadn’t planned to see it this far, but he had, and he could rest assured that Henry was with Emma and neither one needed him now.
“Look at his clothes, he’s lying. He’s from the same world Emma and Snow are from.”
“Emma Swan,” he repeated, letting the name envelope him. “I have to get back to her. I have to help her!”
Because falling in love with Emma Swan had been the best roller coaster Neal Cassidy had ever been on and he was damn determined to ride it again.
But I'd go back and ride that roller coaster. With you.
#sfweek2020#swanfire#neal cassidy#emma swan#ouat#Roller Coaster#Sleep is for people who prepared their swanfire stuff in advance#Sorry it's so short#This was supposed to be an actual songfic and I procrastinated#drabble
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Co w duszy gra Online Cda Zalukaj Chomikuj
Movie Co w duszy gra online proves the theory that all the studio's films take place in an interconnecteduniverse.I'll also show you how Soul explains the Toy Story movies, where the Incredibles get theirpowers, and the origins of the magical doorways in Monsters Inc and Brave.Plus I'll explain how the new film fits in with Inside Out and Coco.
Of course, there'll be some spoilers, so take care.Jon Negroni first introduced the idea of a single Pixar timeline, and it's in Soul'sThe Hall of Everything where we can find especially compelling evidence to confirm Negroni's theory.The hall is overflowing with specific objects and locations which often recur in Pixar'sfilms, from the iconic Pizza Planet truck to the blimp from Up, and even the weirdlyshaped rock, called Wille's Butte from the Cars movies.And that's a huge pointer that the films exist in the same universe.But Soul goes even further than this, because even though the film appears to be set roughlyin the present day, which I'm basing on the look and feel of New York City and the cellphoneJoe uses, the Hall of Everything even has objects fromthe future such as the Axiom from Wall-E, one of a fleet of giant starliners that wasn'tused until 2105 when Buy N Large arranged for the evacuation of Earth.This implies that The Hall of Everything may even contain blueprints or at least the inspirationfor events that are still to come in the future of the Pixar universe.
Co w duszy Gra CDA also demonstrates one of the most important concepts at the heart of Negroni's Pixar Theory,that humans are batteries.The idea is that human beings are a source of energy to sentient objects such as thetoys in Toy Story which is why they crave the love of their owners;otherwise, it's suggested that if the toys end up stored away they lose their life.And in Monsters Inc, we know that technology exists that can harvest energy from humanemotions such as fear or joy.And there are several moments in Soul that strongly support this idea of humans as anenergy source.When Joe is on the elevator that leads to the Great Beyond, he notices that as the soulsof the recently deceased float up into the big bright light, they fizzle and cracklelike an electrical charge.[electrical crackling sounds] As if to reinforce this idea that a soul isa form of energy, there's also an electrical crackle sound effect whenever we see Terrycounting souls on her abacus.[electrical crackling sounds] Joe also discovers in the Great Before thatbefore new souls can take their place on Earth, they not only have to acquire a set of personalities,but they also need what the movie calls a "spark" to complete that personality.Without this spark, theoretically a soul isn't allowed to go to Earth and live a human life.
Twenty-two does end up on Earth by accident, but the general rule is that a "spark" isneeded to complete the Earth Pass which a soul needs to live a life.The word "spark" can, of course, mean a number of things such as a burst of electricity oran intense feeling or emotion, which again points to this idea of human beings as a formof energy or batteries even.Another crucial element of Negroni's Pixar theory is the idea that Boo from MonstersInc travels back in time to become the Witch in Brave.I'll get to how Soul supports this idea shortly, but first let's quickly recap what the theorysays about time travel.Brave is set in 10th-century Scotland whereas, given the monsters' advanced technology, MonstersInc takes place in the future.The clearest evidence which suggests time travel is the wood carving of Sulley thatthe Witch has in her cottage.She's also obsessed with bears which could be her way of expressing the strong friendshipshe made with Sulley in Monsters Inc.On top of that, the Witch has carvings of the Pizza Planet truck which should be impossiblegiven motorised vehicles most definitely did not exist in medieval Scotlandand she has carved parodies of famous art by artists from the future like Michelangelo.
The door to the Witch's cottage is also magical and can transport her into an alternate interiorversion of her hut, and it can also make her disappear.This is because Boo learned how the technology of the portal doors at the Monsters Inc factoryworked, which is how she travelled through time and space.Crucially in Soul, we can see this same technology in the You Seminar.After souls are paired up with their mentor, Jerry conjures up a door and sends them throughit, instantly transporting them to another location.And when Jerry gives Joe his second chance to return to Earth, he passes from The GreatBeyond through a door and emerges on Earth through another door.Given The Great Before existed at the beginning of time, it suggests that the technology formagical portals in the Pixar Universe was originally born there.Soul also makes a sneaky possible reference to Boo's time-travel shenanigans in what initiallyappears to be a throwaway line by one of the Jerrys.When Terry turns up to complain that the count is out by one soul, Jerry replies:"I seriously doubt that.The count hasn't been off in centuries."This is a vital piece of information for Pixar theorists because it tells us an anomaly similarto Joe escaping the elevator that was taking him to the Great Beyond has happened previously,several hundred years ago in fact.To understand what may have happened all those centuries ago, let's look at what happenedwhen Joe's soul accidentally fell into the body of Mr Mittens."Why am I in a cat?""I don't know!""Meow."It seems that Mr Mittens' soul was sent off to The Great Beyond.So, what if Boo did a similar thing when she time-travelled to medieval Scotland?
Could she have landed in the body of a Scottish woman and displaced her soul sending it upto the Great Beyond?That would mean there'd be an extra soul in the afterlife without a corresponding deadbody on Earth, which could be the reason for the count being off as Jerry said.Interestingly, when Joe returns to his old body in Soul, Mr Mittens appears to regainhis original soul too as we see him reunite with his owner,so if my theory about Boo and the Witch's soul is correct, it makes me wonder whetherTerry did anything about the anomaly that occurred in the soul count hundreds of yearsago.By the way, it's worth pointing out that there's also a Brave easter egg in Soul during thevideo at the You Seminar when we see a soul find its spark after it successfully shootsan arrow into the centre of one of three targets, referencing Merida's demonstration of archeryskills when she fired arrows into three targets.And there are, of course, many more Pixar easter eggs in Soul including the Chinesetakeout box, A113, and the Luxo Ball, all of which I reveal in my full easter eggs video.Now, there are two Pixar movies, Inside Out and Coco, which on the surface seem to contradictSoul and maybe pose a problem for how smoothly it fits into the interconnected universe ofthe Pixar Theory.
The first issue is to do with personality.In The Great Before, we discover that every soul acquires a set of personalities beforethey go to Earth."This is where personalities come from?""Of course!Do you think people are just born with them?"However, in Inside Out, personalities are formed whenever a new core memory is made."Each Core Memory powers a different aspect of Riley's personality.The Islands of Personality are what make Riley...Riley!"While these ideas about personality may appear to be at odds with one another, they can beeasily reconciled if we think of a new born soul as having a baseline personality at birth,some of which adapts and changes as that person grows up and has different experiences.In fact, in Inside Out we see that Riley loses her personalities when she experiences a traumaticevent, however, these are later restored and new ones are also added as she grows up;so an individual's personality is clearly not something static or unchanging.Likewise, Soul also shows us how Twenty Two's personality changes as she experiences lifeon earth.Something else we need to reconcile is how Coco's Land of the Dead fits with Soul's depictionof The Great Beyond.
In Co w Duszy Gra online, the afterlife is a relatively simple place with an escalator that leads souls toa giant white light in the sky.This representation may be alluding to the idea that many people who report near-deathexperiences describe a tunnel with a bright light at the end that draws them towards it.Coco's spirit world, on the other hand, is complex and bursting with colours, with theMarigold Bridge forming a connection between the Land of the Living and the elaborate andcomplex Land of the Dead.Fear not though, because we can resolve these differences by turning to Pixar's officialThe Art of Soul book, which describes The Great Beyond as"a place beyond all that can be known […] represented by a brilliant white light ina vast space […] What lies beyond the light is all up to interpretation."As the book suggests, we can interpret what is beyond the bright light in our own way,and so we can see the Land of the Dead in Coco as a culturally-specific vision of whatthe afterlife is unique to people of Mexican heritage.This would also explain how Coco can have its own specific rules for its spirit world,such as allowing the dead to cross over to the Land of the Living one day each year.What's common to both Soul and Coco though is that the dead souls all retain the appearanceand age they had at the time of their death, whereas in the Great Before, all the soulslook more or less similar, likely because they haven't yet taken a human form yet.The sparks that a soul acquires may even explain where the Supers in The Incredibles got theirpowers.Could it be that the souls that ended up as superheroes were supercharged with extra powersby the spark they received in the Great Before?There is, after all, a statue of what looks like a caped hero on a plinth in the Hallof Everything.
Maybe that statue was responsible for sparking the unfortunate idea of caped superheroes."No capes!"And this is just a fun idea, but could the soul that's being interviewed here for theYou Seminar training video be the soul of Buddy Pine, aka Syndrome."I'm a manipulative megalomaniac, who's intensely opportunistic.""Oh ho!This one might be a handful, but that's Earth's problem."Perhaps Syndrome got his spark from that statue, because after all it was his cape that provedto be his ultimate undoing.And yes, Syndrome wasn't born with powers, but that statue might have inspired him toseek glory in whatever way he could.Or could that soul be Evelyn Deavor, the master manipulator and evil tech genius from thesecond Incredibles movie?The soul's possibly female-sounding voice might also suggest this, although we knowfrom Twenty Two that a soul can change their voice to sound like any type of person."I can sound like this if I wanted to.Or sound like this instead.I can even sound like you."If you like either of these ideas, leave a thumbs-up or comment below with which otherPixar character you think this troublemaking soul could be
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Apprentice April Asks #1 Azalea/Imalia
Here are my answers to my Apprentice April Asks #1. Thanks so very much to @leis-main-blog and @verysoftthings for sending me asks! I honestly wasn’t expecting it. ^^; I tend to write books about these two, so I made a separate post.
1. The Basics. What is your character's name? How old are they? How tall are they? Skin color? Eye color? Hair color? Gender identification?
Azalea Larinya Nevra. 30, female. 5'6"; medium skin tone; eyes blue with gold around the pupils; hair aqua to coral ombre; medium length
Imalia Vilyana Gabriev. 36, female. 5'10"; fair skin tone; eyes crimson; hair brown with burgundy ends; very long (art by @carowhitewolf)
2. Love Interest. Who does your character love? What attracted them to that particular LI?
Julian/Lucio (different universes).
Julian - she loved how kind he was, and she adored his bumbling. She was compelled to help him because his cause was right. He couldn't be guilty, he was too much of a good man. She really wanted to help him with his own inner demons as well because he didn't deserve to suffer, even at his own hand. That glorious chest didn't help either, lol.
Lucio - she thought he was overall adorable. Yeah, he was hot as hell, but it was his personality that got her heart thumping. He really was brave and skilled, and she had a feeling that not many others had appreciated it much. Yeah, he had done some horrendous things; but Azalea could see the actual changes happening in him and she knew that he had hope.
Asra. She had known Asra since she was 15 and he was 8. They had a good 20 year friendship and she knew him very well. She fell for him when that friendship veil lifted after the events of The Arcana story and she finally really noticed how beautiful he was. "He's smart, kind, talented, awesome...AND hot?! THE WHOLE PACKAGE?! I'm such an idiot..."
3. Familiar. Does your character have a familiar? How did they meet?
Corva, a white raven. She met Corva when Malak led her to an alley where Corva was lying on the ground with a broken wing. Azalea nursed Corva back to health, and Corva refused to ever leave. (image c. Mike Yip)
Balthazaar, a phoenix. Balthazaar was one of the phoenixes in the magical menagerie at the University of Prakra. He was ornery, and the handlers had a hard time with him. Imalia liked how stubborn he was and over time developed a rapport and closeness with him. The university allowed her to claim him as her familiar and take him home. (image c. Kiss Clip Art)
4. Hobbies. What kinds of things does your character like to do for fun?
Parquor. She loves running around, slipping up buildings, jumping over rooftops and sliding down poles. XD She's a very high-energy person and parquor keeps her healthy and mentally sharp. She also enjoys writing. She will write on just about anything that has her attention at the moment. Magical theory is one of her favorite subjects, but she does enjoy writing fiction.
Her hobby...is harassing bandits. She gets perverse joy out of robbing robbers blind. If she can find the original owners of things that were stolen...awesome. If not...hey, this is an ancient Drakrian fertility statue! I'm gonna put this on my shelf at home. Oh, and leaving off-color messages in ancient languages in ruins. "Here I sit all broken-hearted..."
5. Hidden talents. Is there something neat that your character can do? Tie a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue? Say any word backwards perfectly?
Azalea is kinda like Sherlock Holmes. She can look at a person and form their entire story in her mind. She never uses it against someone; she just uses it to be more friendly. But if you're annoying her and won't go away...she will scare you with what she has figured out about you.
Imalia secretly loves to sing and isn't terrible at it. She's one of those people who will sing in the bath, and if someone mentions it, she acts like it didn't happen.
6. Magical talents. Is there a specific type of magic that your character excels at? Any magic they aren't so great at? Or do they actually shy away from magic altogether?
Lightning. She's good at conducting the currents and utilizing its explosive capabilities. She also uses lightning as a personal shield while in battle. She is also really good at enchanting things; like her hair. She makes enchanted dreamcatchers that actually catch nightmares. Both Julian and Lucio appreciate this ability. (Lucio's dreamcatcher needs to be cleansed more often than Julian's)
Fire and Darkness. Imalia is in tune with fire and is extremely good at using it to its fullest potential; absolute destruction. As for the darkness...that will be explained in number 12.
7. Interaction. How does your character typically interact with people?
She is very polite, but not overly so. She tries to come off as someone you can actually have a conversation with. Sometimes if she's feeling nervous, she will go into overly-polite mode, but if the vibe starts to feel calmer, she will loosen up. She is very energetic and sometimes hyper with her friends.
She is ingratiating and very proper until you piss her off. Then you get things like "Why don't you get a horse, move up to the mountains, and don't bother anybody? You have the personality of a dead moth." (RIP Don Rickles) With friends, she's very laid back and frank with what she says.
8. Romance. What is something that your character and their LI love to do together? How do they show affection?
Azalea x Julian - They LOVE to read together. They have spent hours cuddled up together over a good book. Azalea shows Julian affection with gentle touches, kisses, and koala hugs. (she really loves how tall he is) She also makes sure he eats and gets plenty of rest. More than once, she has brought him dinner to his clinic while he was working late.
Azalea x Lucio - They love to spar. They are so different in fighting style that sparring really helps them improve their skills. Also, the prize at the end for the winner is quite nice. ^_~ Azalea shows Lucio affection by listening to him and holding him. She also likes to try to out kiss him. He reaches for her hand, she spins away and plants two on his cheek instead.
Imalia and Asra love to travel the Magical Realms together. They get into really long and in-depth conversations about the things they see and experiment with how their willpower affects the realm around them. Imalia shows affection by constant words of praise and sneaky touches and kisses. The more she can surprise him, the better. She also keeps a hefty supply of Lapsang Souchong tea at her estate for him and loves giving him little trinkets and things she has found on her travels.
9. Travel. Does your character like to travel outside of Vesuvia? How often? For how long? What kinds of things do they do away from home?
Yes. She loves to see more of the world and meet new people and see different cultures. She will travel maybe once every year or two. When traveling, she will typically stay away for 1-2 months. She loves adventure, but she does love her home more. Azalea loves to learn new types of magic or new methods of spellcasting from different cultures. She finds that certain techniques make her own magic stronger.
Definitely. She herself is originally from the northern hemisphere, so travel isn't something new to her. She gets wanderlust sometimes and has to get out into the world. She will be gone typically for six months when she decides to travel. She has been gone for three years before. She HAS to investigate old ruins wherever she goes. Who knows that treasures or knowledge lay inside? She must find out!
10. WTF. Has anything just...weird ever happened to your character? Something that made them stop and go "What just happened?!"
She was trying to brew a potion that would allow the drinker to become a mermaid for a short while. She ended up spilling it on a plant before it was done. The plant sprouted tiny muscular hairy legs and arms, stood up, walked to the window, shook its fist at her, and jumped out. Turns out she had forgotten a key ingredient in the early stages of brewing the potion. Mazelinka made fun of her for a solid week.
One time, she and a rival mage were about to have a battle. Right before they were to begin, this strange fellow wearing a sentient red cape fell from the sky and landed in between them. He promptly stood to his feet, apologized for the intrusion, and left. (Yes...I do mean Doctor Strange fell from the sky)
11. Crime. Has your character ever been arrested? If so, what did they do? Have they ever helped stop a crime?
She has never been arrested, however, she is guilty of petty larceny. It's not something she does often...just when some jerk needs to be taught a lesson. They always get their stuff back, but she will make sure they are thoroughly inconvenienced. She has stopped another thief before. The thief took the purse of an elderly individual who was trying to buy food. Azalea scaled up to the rooftops and cut the thief off, holding him down until the guards caught up and arrested him. She gave the money back to its owner.
Yep. She's been arrested plenty of times. Usually for assault and/or destruction of property. Hey, that jerk deserved to have his carriage set on fire. She has stopped several assassination attempts on her cousin, Queen Dreen Suval of Seiruun. She has also stopped dark plots at the Magical University in Prakra.
12. Secrets. What is a secret your character has? Are they in line for the throne in a far off land? Was there this one time at band camp...? Are they secretly involved in an assassin's guild?
Azalea secretly writes smut. She loves it. And her actual hair color is gray. The aqua-coral is an enchantment.
Imalia actually is in line for the throne of Seiruun; second in line, to be exact. But she HATES this. It's why she continues to live in Vesuvia rather than her home country. Imalia is also no longer entirely human. During an adventure that went terribly wrong, she summoned the Lord of Nightmares while inside the Magical Realms. (The Lord of Nightmares or "Lon" is an eldritch goddess) Lon then proceeded to implant herself inside Imalia. Lon is a being of pure darkness and nightmare, so Imalia has control over darkness when she taps into Lon's power. Through some creative wording, the contract between the two of them allows Imalia to use Lon's power and form when she needs to; however, Imalia is forever plagued by terrible nightmares that not even Azalea's dreamcatchers can stop. The dreamcatchers just catch on fire.
13. Overcompensation. Is there something that your character just HAS to do better than anyone else? Or are they just that dang good without trying? If they see someone else showing off, what is their kneejerk reaction?
She's actually quite humble. If she sees someone showing off, she really just concerns herself with their safety. "Please don't be careless and die, please!" But she IS gifted. Her magic is insanely strong, she just doesn't like to make a big deal out of it. She gets embarrassed.
She is the best in the room, and you'd better damn well know it. Unless she respects you. Then she will tone it down. But if she sees a showoff...she's got to mess with them. She's got to show them that they aren't all that and a bag of chips.
14. Fight Club. Is your character a good fighter? What kind of skills do they have?
She's pretty decent. Her attack magic is awesome, but her physical fighting mainly relies on how quick and squirmy she is. Her punches hurt, but they don't incapacitate.
She can fight pretty damn well. Her father made sure of it after most of her family was killed by assassins (it does sometimes really suck to be royalty). She is a heavy hitter and her intent is to end a fight with one strike. It doesn't always work, but hey...second, third, maybe fourth time is the charm. Or maybe you should just blow it the hell up.
15. The Arts. Is your character a creative type? What kinds of things can they create? Can they act? Street perform?
She is. Like mentioned earlier, she writes and makes dreamcatchers; she also gets into stage acting with Julian (when he's her LI). She's not a solo performer though. She has to be in a troupe or else she gets massive stage fright.
She can draw very well, almost photo-realistically. She mainly uses this skill for documentation when she's studying something. But every great once in a while she will draw a political cartoon making fun of some noble. Once she drew a penis on the face of one of Lucio's statues. He snapped back "I'd never put something that small in my mouth!" She retorted by drawing a full body penis on a different statue. It got misinterpreted by many townspeople as "Hey, look! Lucio is a dick!!"
16. Goofy. Is your character a clown? Do they like to make people laugh?
She does. She doesn't see herself as funny, but when she slips in something humorous into whatever she's talking about it usually takes whoever is listening by surprise. Spit your drink kind of humor.
YES. She has such a strange way of speaking sometimes that you can't help but snort at the things she says. Yes, it is entirely on purpose. She loves to crack jokes and has a self-deprecating sense of humor at times. She will also be hilariously over-confident as well.
17. Language. Is your character multilingual? How many languages do they speak? Do they have an accent? Is it sexy? Is it silly? Do they have the multilingual lisp?
No. She only speaks her native language.
Yes. Imalia speaks ten different languages. In her normal language, she doesn't have a multilingual lisp; but in about four of her other languages, she does. It drives her nuts, but she just can't seem to fix it.
18. Embarrassment. What is something really embarrassing that your character has done/said?
Azalea can't remember this, because it's part of the memories she lost. But Imalia remembers. One time she was going to meet one of the magisters of the Magical University of Prakra to see if she would be accepted. She spent weeks preparing how to introduce herself. On the day of, she mentioned how excited she was to meet Magister Asshole. Imalia blinked and said, "It's pronounced Ah-shole."
One time she said something quite rude about Lucio in front of Azalea (when Lucio is Azalea's LI). Azalea proceeded to tear her a new rectum, claiming that for someone so smart, she was incredibly closed-minded.
19. Memory. Has your character gotten any of their memory back? If so, what? Did it change them?
No. She insists that she doesn't want her memories back because she likes who she is now. She gets the important information from Asra and Imalia...her parents’ and aunt's names, what they were like, and how they died. That's all she feels that she needs.
*looks at me* "I'm exempt from this question. I'm your OC, not your MC." *walks out*
20. Family. Talk about your character's family. Who were they?
Her mother (Etoile) and father (Galen) were traveling merchants. Her mother was the one with magical talent. Her mother's sister (Sylvaine) owned the shop and taught Azalea most about magic. When Azalea was 13, her parents were robbed and killed by bandits just outside of Vesuvia. She lived with Sylvaine until she died of pneumonia when Azalea was 20.
Imalia's father was Vitalric Gabriev and her mother was Narsial Trevallan. When Imalia was 14, her father's family (the Sairuun royal family) were murdered by assassins sent by a rival country. Only Vitalric (and Narsial), Imalia, Vitalric's older brother Rhemun and his daughter Dreen survived. Rhemun and Dreen remained in Seiruun to run the place while Vitalric and his family moved to Vesuvia as a failsafe in case there were other assassination attempts. Vitalric started studying to become a doctor, while Narsial started grooming Imalia to wed into a noble family. Narsial was extremely abusive. Long story short, King Rhemun died of a hunting injury, and both of Imalia's parents died in the Red Plague.
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~My Incubus Lover~
So I had a silly little idea and @tanookiroxx agreed to lend me her new OC for this story! I have no excuse for this besides releasing incredible amounts of sexual frustration~ Enjoy!
~Shandi
My name is Akai Rogers. And I’m an outcast. A freak. Or so everyone says. All because I’m fascinated by the occult.
It’s nothing new to me. I’ve always been interested in witchcraft ever since I was a child. My parents never approved. They tried to hammer into my head that it was ‘against God’. Sorry..but I don't need some invisible man in the sky in my life. I only need my spirits. Needless to say I got away from them as soon as I was old enough. I don’t need my so-called family or friends. I need to be in a place where I can nurture my magical talents. So I start in the most obvious place: Salem, Massachusetts.
As soon as I arrive I feel energized. The entire place is teeming with energy! I feel so alive! This is hands down the best decision I've ever made~ When I finally settle into my new apartment I go out to explore. There are so many museums and shops I don't know where to start first. Actually..I think I do~ I come across a gigantic occult shop as I explore Essex street. Oh yes..that's the place for me~ As soon as I enter I feel as if I've truly come home. "You're searching for something..I can feel it." A voice says to me. I turn to see a woman wrapped in a green shawl with long red hair, much darker than my own. "Greetings..and welcome to OMEN. I am called Chikara. Come..let us explore your newfound magical awakening together!" Sounds good to me~ "I-I'm Akai..thank you~" I follow her into a room filled with various magical items. Candles, spell books, crystals, talismans, altar statues, incense. It's all so amazing I can't help but be drawn in. "So..it seems the spirits have been with you since you were young." Chikara says as she observes me. I look up from a display of crystals. "O-oh..yes. As a child I'd always wondered if I had some magical abilities. The occult has always interested me. I came here to discover if I can be a true Witch."
"Then you have come to the right place! Many Witches have started their journeys here. All that remains is discovering what path you are destined to take!"
As my excitement grows an unusual looking leather bound book catches my eye. Such strange markings. I have to see what it is. "What's this?" I ask, picking up the book and showing it to Chikara. She raises an eyebrow. "How interesting. It's a book on Demonology. I have never seen that before. Perhaps it was waiting for you to come and find it." Was it? I look down at the cover again. It feels..warm to the touch now. And there's a star etched into the leather that seems to be..glowing. I don't waste another moment. "I want to buy this."
"Take care with how you use that book." She warns. "If you truly wish to consort with demons you must be prepared for the consequences. Learn your craft first. Study the book thoroughly and completely. One wrong spell and you will be finished." I nod. "Y-yes I will. I promise! Can I come back? Study more with you?" She smiles. "Of course, Akai Rogers. My door is always open to you~" I return her smile and pay for the book, holding it tightly in my arms as I leave.
Wait.
I never told her my last name.
How did she know?
~*~
I spend months studying everything in the book, going to Chikara at least once a week for guidance. She's a great mentor, and I can feel my powers growing stronger. Now that I have my own altar, doing regular rituals and I am more closely connected with my spirits, I feel as if I am ready for spell casting. Maybe even a summoning. And it'll soon be the perfect night for it. All Hallows Eve~
On October 30th I return to the shop to buy what I need. As expected the place is packed to the brim with tourists. There's no way I can talk to Chikara now. She's much too busy. Maybe I can give her a call later. I buy my summoning items and quickly leave. Tourists are so annoying..
I spend the rest of the night preparing my altar and the proper summoning circle. On All Hallow's Eve night, everything is ready. I close all the curtains, light the candles and incense and sit in the middle of the circle with the book in my lap. I study the words closely one more time before closing my eyes to chant the spell. I can feel the energy swirling around me. Is the spell working? I can't be sure..and I can't open my eyes to look, not if I want everything to go right.
"I am here~"
I hear someone whisper. It is working! I open my eyes, finding myself surrounded by a deep purple mist.
"Not yet, my pretty one~" I hear the voice say. "I'm not finished seducing you~" I see a shadowy hand pass over my face and my entire world goes black.
~*~
When I wake up again I find that I’m definitely not in my bedroom anymore. I’m lying on a huge bed covered in purple satin, and the same thick purple mist is everywhere. Why is it so cold? I look down at my...bare...chest.. Holy Goddess I’m naked! As I grab one of the sheets to cover myself a man’s laughter echoes around me. I look around but I can’t see anything. “W-who’s there?!”
“Don’t you know~? I’m the one you wanted~”
My spell..the demon.. He’s taken me..
My eyes widen as I see him emerge from the mist. He’s...absolutely gorgeous~ A beautifully sculpted body. Dark purple skin..with the exception of his face, which is white with a black star over his right eye..and sinfully red lips. Long, elegantly curled horns protrude from his curly black hair. His thin, pointed tail sways along with his hips as he approaches me, and I see what he’s dressed in leaves very little to the imagination. My cheeks immediately heat up. There’s a really pleasant sensation growing between my legs too. Oh Goddess..he’s an Incubus!
“Do I please you~?” he asks, his voice deep and sultry. His glowing purple eyes look directly into mine as he waits for an answer. I have to catch my breath. My body feels so hot all of a sudden. My heart is racing. I can feel myself growing wet with arousal and I bite my lip. “Yes..yes you’re..perfect..” I finally manage to say. My mind can barely form words. I’m hypnotized by his eyes. “I am, aren’t I~?” he says, crawling onto the bed towards me. “Just the way you wanted me~” I’m no longer concerned with keeping my body covered. I let the sheet fall away, revealing my breasts to his hungry gaze. He licks his lips with his forked tongue. “An offering for me~? How generous you are~” He pulls the sheet off completely and drops it to the floor. As if compelled I lean back and open my legs. He smiles, revealing his fangs. “Mmmm...how I have missed the intoxicating scent of a woman~ Will you let me...taste your sweet nectar, my pretty one~?”
“Goddess, yes please..!” I moan and spread myself open for him. He purrs, stroking my thighs before grabbing them and burying his face between my legs. His tongue drives me crazy, circling my entrance again and again..so slow..so torturous..setting my nerves on fire!! Ohhhh..his tongue is inside me now..it feels incredible!! I feel his claws drag along my skin as his hands travel up my sides. He caresses my breasts. Traps my nipples tightly between his fingers. Strokes my throbbing clit with his tail. His tongue thrusts into me, building my pleasure to a fever pitch. My eyes roll back. I grab his horns. My head is spinning! Fuck...fuck he’s so good!! Goddess, I can’t take this!! “Ohhhhh FUCK!!!” I cry out. My climax is so strong it makes me arch off the bed, and he drinks in all in with the eagerness of a child. “Ahhh so delicious~ It has been centuries since I have tasted such purity~” I hear him say. “Are you a virgin, pretty one~?”
It’s true. I am. I had never found anyone I was even remotely interested in having an intimate relationship with, not that I ever tried. I was too consumed with my spellcraft. I look at him and nod. He looks absolutely delighted. “Will you sacrifice your innocence to me~? Do you accept the pleasure I offer you~?” After what I just experienced how can I possibly say no? I’d be insane! “Please..please take my body. I want you..need you!”
“Of course you do~ No woman has ever refused the StarChild~”
StarChild. What a beautiful name~
~*~
He strips off his miniscule clothing and lies on his back. Goddess..his cock is as perfect as he is. My mouth is watering. He smirks as he watches me. "Have a taste of me, pretty one..you'll love it~" I lick the pearly fluid oozing from the tip. I moan and shudder as pleasure courses through my veins. That felt wonderful~ I must have more~ He gently strokes my hair as I take him into my mouth. I have no idea what I'm doing..but I can't stop. He tastes like pure ecstasy~ When I hear him moan it makes me bolder. I start bobbing my head, taking in as much as I can handle. "Mmmm yes..you look sexy like that, pretty one~ You're doing so well~" Goddess, I love his praise~ I'm getting wet again. I'm taking in more..bobbing my head faster. Is he getting thicker? I feel his tail snake itself between my legs. Oh yes..yes..he's stroking me again! I moan and buck my hips for more friction. His heavy panting fills my ears. His cock throbs in my mouth. He's close now..so very close..and so am I! "Ahh..ahh..let's cum..let's cum together..pretty one..!!" Yeeees together!! He groans and thrusts into my mouth as he cums. Mmmm..I can feel it going down my throat!! My eyes roll back again as I climax along with him. "Swallow every drop like a good girl~" he purrs. His tail continues stroking me between my folds, making obscene slick noises. He's preparing me for more. Fuck yes I want more! He laughs, pulling me up to lie next to him. His tail never stops, making me moan and rut against him. "How insatiable you are, pretty one..with your hair like fire..your skin like the softest petals of roses..your nectar as sweet as honey..I could become addicted to you~"
"And I you~" I stroke his handsome face. Brush my lips against his. Run my fingers through the thick hair covering his chest. Never have I laid eyes upon a more perfect being~ "Then let us seal our pact of desire..with a kiss~" I don't even hesitate. In an instant our mouths are sealed together. A passionate kiss laden with the promise of future pleasures. We taste each other as our tongues dance together. It's most definitely addicting~ Looking into his glowing eyes, I feel it. The bond has been formed. "I'm ready, my StarChild..to give myself to you completely~"
~*~
He lies on his back again and pulls me onto him, my thighs straddling his hips. "I want to watch your face as you fuck yourself on my cock, pretty one~ It will be an experience you will never forget..I promise you~" I believe him~ Because of his tail I'm dripping wet. I've been wanting him inside me since I first laid eyes on him. But I've also never done this before. What if I do it wrong? What if I ruin everything? He reaches out and presses his thumb against my lips. I don't know what compels me but I take it into my mouth. "Relax, pretty one..I will guide you~ You have nothing to fear~" Yes. I should just let him take control. It's what I want anyway..and he knows it~ He takes me by the hips and helps me lift myself up. I take hold of his cock and guide it to my entrance, taking a deep breath as he lowers me. I gasp loudly. Ohhh Goddess..his cock is inside me..deeper...deeper! I feel something inside me give way. There's pain but only for a few moments. Then it completely melts into pleasure. Just like that, my innocence is gone. I belong to the StarChild now~
Bracing myself against his chest I move slowly. Up. Down. Up. Down. His eyes are transfixed on my face. Wanton moans escape from my lips, growing in volume as I move faster. He feels good..so fucking good..!! Without even realizing it I'm going even faster, thrusting myself down upon him in desperate need to have him deeper inside me. He grins, digging his claws into my hips as he thrusts his own to meet my frantic movements. "Ohhhhh oh yes!! Fuck yes!! Please don't stop...don't stoooop!!"
"Oh, I don't intend to, pretty one..ahhh..not until..you are filled with my seed~!!"
"Yes..yes!! Cum inside me..fill me up and make me yours!!"
"Your wish...is my command~!!"
With one last glorious thrust I feel his orgasm explode inside of me. Goddess..it's so hot..my own climax makes my entire body tremble as I throw my head back and cry out his name.
"OHHH STARCHILD~!!! YEEEES~!!!"
I'm weak now. I have nothing left. I collapse onto his chest and attempt to catch my breath. I hear him laugh. He embraces me and wraps his tail around my thigh. "Now Akai Rogers, my pretty one..you are mine, body and soul~ I will be your only lover..and you will bear my children." He reaches down and strokes my belly. "Oh yes..you will make fine, strong heirs for me..won't you~?"
I nod as I drift off to sleep.
Whatever the StarChild wants..he will have. I will make certain of it.
~END~
#Shandi's drabbles#Incubus!StarChild x OC#this is nooooot safe for woooork~#this is the kind of shit that comes from not being fucked in years lol#pretty sure my vagina has cobwebs#I'm still not good at this so apologies if it sucks
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So the story goes like this: I’m in London for the month, popping into every used bookstore I find, and while in one I spot Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages. Though baggage weight limits won’t let me buy it (I have already bought so many books) I did snap pics of the “Past Prologue,” “Cardassians,” and “The Wire” entires. And then transcribed them. Because I thought the other Garak stans might enjoy this info!
Worth the read imo 💜
Episode #3 “Past Prologue” Original Airdate: 1/11/93 Written by Katharyn Powers Directed by Winrich Kolbe Guest Starring: Jeffrey Nordling (Tahna), Andrew Robinson (Garak), Barbara March (Lursa), Vaughn Armstrong (Gul Dunar), Richard Ryder (Bajoran Deputy), Susan Bay (Admiral), Gwynyth Walsh (B’Etor)
“We didn’t want your typical Cardassian in there,” says director Winrich Kolbe of the creation of one of DS9’s break-out characters, the Cardassian spy Garak. “Obviously it would have been hard to put a real Cardassian soldier in a clothing store. Perhaps it would have been terrific, who knows, but what we felt we had to deal with was somebody abnormal—at least as far as the Cardassians were concerned. It was one of those things where I wasn’t quite sure whether Andy Robinson would be the right guy. I had a different idea as to what type of actor I wanted, but Andy Robinson was available and turned out to be terrific. What I wanted, which shows how far off I was, was Sydney Greenstreet. I have to admire an actor who has to come in at three in the morning and stay in that kind of makeup for the rest of the day and still be able to give a performance.”
Comments Michael Piller, “One of the things about ‘Past Prologue’ that bothered me was that Bashir’s performance was in a very broad range—and this was newness. I believe we have strange aliens, strange makeup, spaceships, explosions and wormholes and costumes that are crazy, so that the people within them have to be entirely credible. If those people get too big in their performances, then you go into opera, and it becomes space opera, foolish and unbelievable. Patrick Stewart really led the way with us in Next Generation, which is to underplay. When you think you’re going to go big, you come down, and it has much more power and credibility. You believe there’s a space station or a spaceship like Enterprise. The biggest problem with the early shows is that some of the performances were too big or too restrained. We had to find the even tone for the ensemble to work together. Our voices weren’t quite right, and the performances were uneven. The first episode hurt the character of Bashir because he was so broad in those scenes with Andy Robinson that he looked like the greenest recruit in the history of the Starfleet, and that hurt him for two or three episodes. If we were shooting it today, his performance would be much more credible, and he wouldn’t have the same reaction from the audience that he has now.”
Klingon renegades Lursa and B’Etor, of course, were introduced in the Next Generation two-parter “Redemption,” and were used as part of an attempt to tie Deep Space Nine into existing Trek continuity. The characters eventually perished in battle against the Enterprise in the feature film Star Trek: Generations.
“The creative synergy allows you incredible opportunities,” remarks Piller. “It’s interesting how we used them. Essentially, we had a story and, in the case of Lursa and B’Etor, we said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a real kind of Casablanca spy story and we need someone to really be doing double dealings and bringing money and doing gun exchanges; why don’t we use the Klingons—and use those characters that we love so much? It works out just fine to use those guys because then there’s a connection and an identification. There’s a backstory, there’s a history, and all of these things make for such a richer series.”
Says Ira Behr, “There’s no doubt that people like [TNG characters like] Lwaxana [Troi] and Q and Vash and a bunch of others. They have a certain life to them as characters and an energy that certainly helped The Next Generation and helps us too. The characters that don’t have to be Starfleet and don’t have those strings we have attached so often. A lot of times you have people performing those characters who take a lot of relish in doing them, so they’re fun to have come back.”
Piller doesn’t feel that in exploiting The Next Generation’s voluminous history Deep Space Nine has an unfair advantage, appealing to those already familiar with Trek lore. “You have to look at the shows themselves,” he insists. “There’s no question in my mind that conceptually, each of these shows would work because they’re about the new characters. In ‘Past Prologue,’ there’s a moral dilemma for Major Kira where she has to confront her loyalty to her past life and what her new life is going to be. It’s really about her. It’s illuminating our new characters. As I’ve always said, the guest stars are catalysts. There have been times when I have not been satisfied, more prior to my arrival, that the shows have been about the guest stars, but ultimately the shows that succeed are when the guest stars are serving as catalysts to illuminate our characters.”
Episode #25 “Cardassians” Original Airdate: 10/25/93 Teleplay by James Crocker Story by Gene Wolander and John Wright Directed by Cliff Bole Guest Starring: Rosalind Chao (Keiko O��Brien), Andrew Robinson (Garak), Robert Mandan (Kotan Pa’Dar), Terrence Evans (Proka), Vidal Peterson (Rugal), Dion Anderson (Zolan), Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat)
“I didn’t have a lot of faith in this show at first,” admits Ira Behr. “It was such an issue-oriented show that I thought we would oversimplify a complicated issue, but what got me into the show was when I realized this was not only a chance to bring back Garak but to do this whole weird little number with what’s going on between him and Dukat. To me, that nailed the character and I knew after that happened we were going to see a lot of Andy Robinson, who’s become quite popular on staff. What did not work for me was the kid and O’Brien. I thought that was very obvious stuff compared to the rest of the episode. Sometimes we have a tendency to overload the stories. Ultimately, who cared about this kid? It was weak compared to the rest of the episode.”
“As an actor, when I got the script, I didn’t realize Dukat was being set up to take the blame,” says Marc Alaimo, who portrays Gul Dukat. “But I played him as a man who was being set up. A man who was taking the dive because he had wanted to remove the children but his orders were to leave them. I never really understood that story. It seemed complicated to me, and I never quite understood how he got blamed for it.”
Episode #42 “The Wire” Original Airdate: 5/9/94 Written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe Directed by Kim Friedman Guest Starring: Andrew Robinson (Garak), Jimmie F. Skaggs (Glinn Boheeka), Ann Gillespie (Nurse Jabara), Paul Dooley (Enabran Tain)
“It just so happens some of the best shows are the least expensive, because we’re forced to be concise,” Ira Behr comments. “Our conceptual thinking of two guys in a room who are struggling for survival, or against each other, frequently makes for very good drama. This episode was an opportunity to show Bashir with a real strength that he hasn’t had before.
“[Story editor] Robert Wolfe talked passionately about doing this show, and we had always talked about the fact that Garak might have been George Smiley back in Cardassia and maybe we should explore that. Then I went to the movies and came back and said, ‘He’s Schindler.’ Why don’t we do Schindler and Smiley, and then Michale [Piller] said do all four stories, every one different. Robert came up with the idea that he tells this story about his best friend and it turns out to be him. Then you meet his mentor and best friend, who says, ‘I hope he dies, but tell him I miss him.’ That’s perfect; it’s all great stuff.”
Admittedly, “The Wire” could be perceived as an attempt to repeat the success of first season’s “Duet,” and the staff was aware of the similarities. “‘Duet’ was Kira’s crisis as much as the guy’s crisis, and this was much more Garak’s show,” offers Behr. “I thought that was a little dangerous, and we knew we were doing it, but let’s face it, the Cardassian monologue is great and Cardassians like to talk. They’re also great fun to write.”
Says David Livingston, “It’s a bottle show. It’s basically Andy Robinson in a room, but it’s very compelling because it’s one man intervening. Kurt Cobain needed Siddig. If he had had Sid he might have pulled through, because Sid knocks some sense into Andy’s head and says, ‘You’ve got to get off this stuff.’”
According to director Kim Friedman, “‘The Wire’ was kind of a challenge because most of the episode was two people in a room, Sid and Andy Robinson. It’s very hard to create pacing and energy for a show that is basically set in a room. But ultimately I was very pleased with the whole episode. I think my favorite moment was the implant withdrawal scene, which results in a fight between Bashir and Garak. It was just a very powerful moment.”
Paul Dooley, who played the menacing Enabran Tain, returned in DS9’s third season two-parter “Improbable Cause” and “The Die is Cast.” He is known for his role as Martin Tupper’s gay father in the HBO sitcom Dream On.
#DS9#star trek#garak#julian bashir#garashir#deep space nine#I have things to say about Piller's reading of Bashir#but that's for another post lol
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