#but with a kernel of the human experience worked in

[linka-from-captain-planet]

going through the assortment of crackship scenarios in my head and had to circle back on young Manip Florrick and the kind of misadventures she would have gotten into (bc this woman is incapable of not getting herself into Situations), and can only assume (statistically) she was targeted by Cazador's spawn at least once. But recently turned Dalyria would see a lot of her former self in the ambitious, intelligent younger elf and, clinging to the frayed shreds of her humanity, would perhaps let her go (also Florrick wouldn't leave her post to go to a Secondary Location)

[jeanbie]

FANTASIZE ★ masterlist.

pairing: jake x reader

warnings: explicit sexual content, fem!human!reader, semi-public sex, piv sex, dirty talk, size kink, manhandling, breeding kink, cumming inside, glowy cum | wc: 16k | ♬

note: i've been promoted to: avatar writer. my first time writing for it (def not my last!) lemme know what u think ;-) also his smirk in the header....GET INSIDE ME

★ ⏤ fantasize | all the time (if you were mine)

⏤ It's official - Jake is sick and tired of Norm giving him shit. While he can't claim to know as much about Pandora as Norm does, there's still a few things Jake can afford to do to piss him off even more for the fun of it, and it just so happens that Norm's sister works as a scientist in the lab - which to Jake spells perfect revenge in its simplest form.

It’s official — Jake has had enough of Norm’s bitching and whining.

For the last two months, Jake has endured a lot, more than he ever asked for or wanted; whether it was Neytiri on his ass about becoming an Omatikaya and never missing a single beat of training for it, Grace nagging him about video logs, or even Norm giving him so much shit over every single thing he didn’t spend three years learning in simulations and classrooms — he’s sat and listened to all of it without complaint. 

Jake has never once fought back, never once raised his own grievances about how tedious and time-consuming everything actually is on one man’s shoulders, and yet it all keeps coming.

The worst thing is that he can understand all of it to an extent. There’s a necessary need for attentiveness when learning the ways of the Omatikaya, and the longer it takes, the worse his chances get with the rest of the clan. The video logs? They’re not that important, Jake thinks, but it keeps Grace off his back for the small kernel of time he actually spends in the real world and not inside of his avatar. 

But with Norm, Jake can’t seem to understand what is actually bothering him enough to be so goddamn bitter about every little thing.

Of course, he’ll never fit into Tom’s shoes, not in the way everybody expects him to. He didn’t spend three years of his life learning how to control an avatar or how to function on Pandora — every day is quite literally a learning experience, a practical education that neither a lab nor a stuck up prick like Norm can teach. 

And, while he’s on the subject, Jake actually thought Norm would be a decent ally, at least until he almost died and got saved — with reluctance — by the daughter of the Olo’eyktan and somehow ended up being thrust into learning their way of life. 

Nobody seems to remember the giant part of the story concerning how he almost got devoured by an oversized dog in the process.

Instead, Norm wants to bitch about how Jake knows nothing, and treats him like a genuine idiot. Jake might be a few years short of being educated on the Na’vi, but he’s not stupid. He can still do stuff, stuff that Norm can’t; but reasoning with the man is like trying to convince the Na’vi that the Sky People are actually friends and not foes, and it’s pretty obvious that that’s never going to happen.

When Norm begins his daily ritual of berating Jake on his lack-of knowledge regarding the Hallelujah Mountains that surround their shitty little containment, Jake’s willing to sit through it and take it like a champion. 

Norm starts weaving his conspiracies to the cluster of scientists about how Jake is a terrible candidate for joining the Omatikaya clan and that all he cares about is sucking up to the Chief’s daughter — not true, by the way, for Neytiri can only stomach being near Jake because she has to and on rare occasions, he can do something absurdly dumb to make her laugh — and Jake begins to mentally tap out of the debate, rolling his eyes to the side and sighing as he watches you duck your head through a low archway with a bowl of slop in your hands.

Jake watches you for around three seconds before the lightbulb flickers alight above his head.

And then he grins.

It’s hard to believe that you and Norm are related — Jake can’t find any similarities between the two of you. You’re incredibly compassionate and communicative, never letting Jake suffer in his silent struggle of stupidity, and not to mention you’re incredibly beautiful; whereas Norm is just… Norm. A bitter, angry, red-faced man who does a piss poor job at hiding his insatiable jealousy of how wasting your life in a classroom or behind a book actually means very little in the grand scheme of achieving your goals. 

Example A: Jake of the Jarhead clan, ex-military, future Omatikaya. Cross-reference to Norm: sad loser. Jake signs his name on the mental essay he’s compiling as Norm drones on about culture and ignorance and narrows his gaze on you as you close in on the group.

Jake’s actually always liked you. You’re a no nonsense kind of woman who loves science and the Na’vi, and, unlike your brother, you actually treat him like an equal. Even now, as you slip next to him and lean back against the low metal work-surface, you meet Jake’s gaze with an eye-roll and smile, and his grin only widens from it.

Oh, how he loves that you like him. Although you spend so much time engrossed in your work and documenting on paper whatever Jake recites from his daily activities within the clan, Jake happens to know that you like him, and in hindsight, it’s never been a secret. For the first time, Jake lets himself consider the possibility of that being just another reason for Norm to suddenly despise him, but the idea warms his stomach rather than churns it.

“I can totally see Jake ruining all of our chances at building bridges by just burning them all together,” Norm huffs, folding his arms and wrangling a dirty glare in his direction. Jake welcomes it with the same smile that’s been blooming over his face for the past two minutes, which worsens Norm’s mood. 

“I don’t see you building any bridges, either,” you say to Norm. “Jake’s been more valuable to this program than you have as of late.”

Norm bristles. “One of us has actually been doing research while the other is trying to seduce an Olo’eyktan’s daughter—”

“Jake’s doing field research, Norm,” Grace says, her eyes still glued to her microscope. “And he knows better than to seduce anybody when we haven’t properly studied the relations between Na’vi and avatars yet. And there are bigger issues at stake right now.”

“I can get results on that if you want me to,” Jake offers.

“No, Jake.”

Jake shrugs. While Norm continues his tirade against Jake’s rather noble endeavours with the Omatikaya, he turns his gaze back towards you and lets his mental clogs turn.

At this point, Jake thinks that even if you agreed with some of Norm’s points, it wouldn’t make any difference. There is absolutely nothing he can do to please Norm, and so maybe he should just stop trying. Then again… There’s something hideously funny in how worked up Norm gets when somebody jumps to his defence, particularly you.

And considering most of Norm’s insecurities come from seeds he planted all by himself without any concrete evidence to support most of the points, Jake knows that anything he does from here on out will drive Norm into a slow burning insanity.

“Is it because I’m in a wheelchair?” Jake asks suddenly.

Norm huffs. “Of course not. It’s because you don’t take any of this seriously. Everything is a game to you. All of us here have spent years building up to this assignment while you read a manual and called it a day.”

“What? I’m serious. I’m one of the best avatar drivers here,” Jake says smugly. Grace finally looks over with an irate look — something tells him he wasn’t supposed to tell everyone that she had told him that. 

Norm’s face turns a whole new shade of pink. 

“I’m also a quick learner. The Omatikaya are trusting me more and more each day, so while I go out there and find out valuable field research for this program—” Jake looks at you with a deliberately sweet look and you laugh quietly, “—you can stay here and look at plants and mud and cells.”

“You probably don’t even know what a cell is.”

“Sure I do. Where they lock up all the bad guys.”

Norm opens his mouth to say something more, probably missing the joke like he does every time, but this time Grace swirls in her chair and sighs loudly, looking between the two of them like they were children.

“Alright, ladies, you’ve measured your dicks at equal length. You’re both doing good work around here, so Norm, why don’t you just let Jake go back to doing his work with the Omatikaya and you can just get some rest. Jesus, you’re both making everyone miserable, it’s affecting my work ethic…”

“Yeah, sweet dreams, Norm,” Jake calls, and Norm gives him a filthy scowl before snatching his things up off the desk, holding them secretively to his chest as he stomps towards the back room lined with their bunks. 

Jake feels the dark and evil energy follow him out the room and then he finally looks around the lab in disbelief. 

“Jake, go, you’ll be late, don’t keep Neytiri waiting,” Grace reminds him, switching off the bulb to the microscope and stretching her arms as Trudy claps her hands and silently announces her retirement to the bunks after Norm. “Don’t forget to make a log when you get back. Don’t let him forget, will you, Spellman?”

Grace looks at you with a look that suggests no room for negotiation. It was an order. She collects her things, claps Jake on the shoulder and grabs a cigarette from the net by the archway and takes it with her towards her separated bedroom. 

When the door to her little cubicle rattles shut, Jake shakes his head with a quiet laugh and rolls himself forward, giving you room to assemble your own work station where he had just been.

“Staying up late tonight?” he asks you, taking a swig of water before pushing one of the buttons to the link unit, waiting as it whirs to life.

You settle your stuff down and walk towards him. “Yep. I actually do have some work on cells to finish up.”

Jake’s lips quirk. “Not your usual ballpark, is it?”

“No, but there’s not really a surplus of Na’vi around here to communicate with,” you say in reply, rummaging with the unit to help Jake into the gel pack mattress. Usually he dismisses the help, but when it’s you helping him get comfy, then he’ll stomach his pride and accept your kindness. He’s surprisingly light, as normal, and you frown. 

“Don’t forget about the real world, Jake, you gotta take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry, I got this,” he assures you. “You need anything while I’m out?”

Another thing that will shave a few years off Norm’s life — Jake bringing you things, extraordinary and otherwise unattainable when stranded in the mountains things for you to study and report. You hum thoughtfully at the offer, pushing his head down softly when he wriggles restlessly, a little to eager to get to whatever he’s doing in the forest tonight.

“If you happen to cross paths with a tsawksyul, a simple cutting would be appreciated,” you tell him, opting for something a little more simple than normal, considering Jake’s busy these days training. “If you don’t forget while you’re busy seducing daughters, of course.”

Jake’s grin returns, if not out of genuine amusement then just to see you smile in return and do the little head-tilt thing that Jake’s discovered he adores.

“Not my thing. More into scientists,” he tells you, watching in the final moments before you shut him in the pod at how you shake your head and turn yourself away from him.

There was no rejection. No refusal. Just a smile.

A smile that sets his plan into motion.

No wonder Norm is always in a terrible mood. You find that his notes on the cells found in the mossy undergrowth of the forest is as chaotic as it can possibly be, which has left you using Grace’s Bible on Pandora botany as a guide and squinting to find the connections between his barely legible notes.

It’s basic knowledge that when cells die and a genetic material begins to unfold, a charge of energy is released; this concept has been the fundamental structural point to Norm’s notes on the moss and how each step at night causes a ricochet of expanding light, but there has to be something more than everybody is missing. Even in Grace’s book, there’s not enough information regarding how it works; if it’s connected to Eywa, if it is a response to another organism, whether it breathes and lives as its own entity.

Alongside Norm’s notes, you very sparingly begin to make an analysis of the communicative features of Pandora plant life, and begin jotting a vocabulary to use in a later research assignment, when a sudden knock against the glass above your head makes you jump quite literally up and out of your seat.

The Hallelujah Mountains are so isolated from the rest of the human population on Pandora and used rarely by the Na’vi during the night, but you distinctly make out Jake’s looming form standing outside with a smile on his face and relax. His skin is a bioluminescent explosion of colour, and for a moment you’re struck dumb staring at him until he waves his hand as if beckoning you outside.

You throw a cautious look over your shoulder, but the lab is silent and still. With that in mind, you reach for one of the exo-packs and shrug on your cardigan hanging on the back of the chair you were just on and hesitantly begin to make your way outside.

Very sparingly have you been outside of Site 26 to explore, and never once on your own. Grace has drilled into you the strict importance of respecting the laboratory rules and curfew, and if you’re going to wander outside after hours in the name of research, then please, wake her up too. 

But you won’t be alone out there, not when Jake is waiting for you outside.

Jake drops to a squat in anticipation when the airlock doors to the lab force open with a wheezy breath, and he sees you cautiously step out and secure a button on your cardigan in place. The gesture almost makes him croon. He rarely sees you at night since he’s learned the value of getting rest in between his adventures in his avatar, but now he can’t believe what he’s been missing out on seeing past his bedtime.

You look tired, your hair out of place and messy, but he recognises your attempt to look more alert when you step towards him with a slight bounce.

“Hey, tìyawn,” he calls to you, as you stare up at him even whilst drawing near. Thanks to the crouch, you’re about eye-to-eye, and he watches your expression widen with wonder as you map out the illustrations of light across his nose and cheeks, before sweeping to his forehead, then his neck, and then his bare chest.

“Hey, yourself,” you laugh, finding his eyes again as they glow in the low light. The Pandora skies are littered with stars and balls of unimaginable white light, but even the surrounding forest gathering around the lab to protect it from the harsh dropping winds of the mountains are pulsing with purple light, every single shrub and leaf and plant glowing with life.

Jake stares at you for a moment before producing a gift from behind his leg. You take it from him with a wide and gasping smile.

“No way!”

“Way,” Jake says, watching you handle the flower with so much care that one might assume it would break with your touch. With the way Jake was swinging it around on his way up here, he’s actually shocked that it’s still in one piece, but something in the way you respond to everything Jake does or brings tells him that even if he’d brought a portion of it, you’d be just as pleased.

“Thanks,” you say, turning slightly as you tell him you’re going to put the tsawksyul in the lab for safe-keeping. But Jake reaches his arm out to trap you from leaving, cocking his head to the side with a soft smirk when you round back on him curiously.

“It’s not gonna die if you leave it out here, it’s a flower,” Jake tells you, jerking his head in another direction. “Wanna look around with me?”

You pause, and he can tell you’re genuinely conflicted. Grace said not to leave the vicinity under any circumstances out of respect for the Na’vi and the lab rules. But she also said not to go outside without her, and here you are.

“Grace will be mad if she finds out I’m gone,” you tell him slowly.

“Probably.”

“And Norm.”

Jake feels a rush of something at the mere mention of your brother, and his tail swishes against the rocks behind him. 

Jake leans closer to you. “Well, him I don’t care about.”

Mindful of the plant in your hand, you gently push Jake’s chest back until he rolls on his heels, unable to fight the smile on your own face.

“…Where will we be going? I can’t go far just in case Grace wakes up and comes looking for me.”

Jake tilts his head up to the sky and to the top of the mountain peak that houses the lab. From his own experience scouting up there, Jake knows there’s a small incubation of trees that offers a compelling view of the entire mountain range, as well as offering a minor collection of plants he thinks you’ll die over once you see.

But that just wouldn’t be as evil as what he originally had planned. He then rolls his head towards the small section of trees that border the back of the lab, close to where the bunks are, and he then looks back at you with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

“We’ll stay close,” Jake promises. 

You hesitate once again and guiltily look at the lab. It’s not like it’s going anywhere…

“Alright,” you sigh, looking back at Jake and watching his smile widen as if he’s just obtained a great victory. There’s no room in your stomach for suspicion to grow — it’s overrun with butterflies when Jake points his head in the direction of the snug tree line and holds out his finger for you. 

You stifle a laugh and reach to hold it, setting the tsawksyul on the ground tucked under the same window he just scared you from and join him on the slow walk to wherever he means to take you.

Being with Jake has always felt easy, but being with Jake’s avatar is practically uncharted territory. It’s a struggle to remember that it is actually the same man you like so badly back in the lab, the same guy who deliberately rams your ankles with his wheelchair just to watch the way you catch yourself as you fall, the same guy who you think uses you as a factor to piss off your brother but in a way that you find strangely attractive. 

Now, he’s an almost ten foot Na’vi leading you in the whimsical dark towards a cluster of trees, and you don’t know how to begin separating the feelings you have for Jake from the feeling of nerves you feel around his alter ego.

You can barely make out Jake’s face all the way above your head, not until he feels your stare and looks down at you beside him. There’s a similarity in his human expressions with his Na’vi ones, which is fortunate considering there was a time where you thought the avatar looked more like Tom than it did Jake. Now that they’re one in the same, and now that Jake is in front of you in his avatar form and the feelings you have for him are still lingering, you’re beginning to accept the likeness between the two of them. 

“What did you do today?” you ask him, referring to his ritualistic training with Neytiri.

Jake hums thoughtfully. “Nothing compared to Norm, I’m sure.”

At that, you laugh. “I’m seriously asking, Jake.”

“Alright… Neytiri has me reading the signals of the forest whenever we go hunting,” he explains sparingly, seeming not in the mood to talk training now that you’ve reached the lay of forest near the back of the lab. He surveys the setting and the space between the lab and the fringe of leaves and bushes and nods, as if satisfied but then pulls you deeper into the thrush of leaves.

“She says everything’s connected,” he continues. “She also says I’m a terrible shooter.”

“You’re missing your shots?” you tease. Jake turns back to you with a grin that you honestly walked into when you asked.

“Not all of ‘em.”

After the short walk, Jake is finally satisfied with the burrow of bushes and rocks that outline the small selection of forest behind the lab, and he looks up to once again gauge the distance and is pleased when the lab doesn’t look too far away. Jake hears you rustle and sit on one of the low rocks with your knees to your chest, and then drops to his usual squat in front of you, arms rested on his knees, gently fiddling with his fingers.

“How’re your cells?” he asks, but you’re so busy gazing at the forest around you and the stars above your heads that he fears you’re not even listening. Jake instead settles for watching you.

He knows he’s in over in his head when even his avatar likes you. Jake’s had nowhere near as much experience navigating his way around how to use this body than the other drivers, let alone time to understand the signals his body sends him or the feelings different things have to him, but he can tell the difference between being you friendly and not, even when he’s not totally familiar with how it all works. And on top of that, there are so many random variables to being Na’vi to get his head around that he never even thought of until Neytiri or Grace filled him in on what the hell was going on with his body at certain times of the month.

He’s stupid sometimes, true, but not totally naive. Jake recognises the tug in his chest as he looks at you — he feels the same thing when he’s in his human body. He’s no expert on Na’vi, never claimed to be, but he feels there must be something instinctive in the way he feels for you and the way his avatar senses it. And with Norm’s fresh-faced hatred in full flush whenever Jake makes that fact known, he’s not at all surprised that those feelings have suddenly become so full frontal now that he’s had enough of Norm’s bullshit.

“It’s amazing out here,” you say, to Jake but also to the wind as you completely crane your head up to look through the cracks in the branches and leaves. “Don’t you ever wish Earth had looked like this?”

“I haven’t really thought about Earth since I left,” he confesses, shuffling closer to you while you’re occupied with mapping out the stars in the sky.

“Not once?” You look down at him. If you’re taken aback by the sudden closeness between you, you hide it well. 

Jake shrugs. “Nothing I need is there.”

Fair enough. You stare at him for a moment and think about that before agreeing. 

“Me too.”

The branches above your heads sway in a gentle breeze and Jake watches you hug your cardigan around yourself before asking, “So, why’re we here? Did you wanna show me something?”

“What, the stars not enough for you?” Jake looks up to the sky.

You laugh quietly. “I’ll never get enough of them, actually. Beats the lab ceiling by a long shot. Looking at the stars through the window’s not the same… I wish I didn’t have to use this mask—” You throw him a playfully exasperated look, “—I wish I had an avatar.”

“Why don’t you?” Jake’s never asked, never thought to ask. But you’re the only scientist in his close collective of scientist ‘friends’ who doesn’t actually drive an avatar, and is instead limited to just studying everyone else's.

“It was never really my thing,” you explain, settling comfortably atop the rock and throwing the glances to the sky away to focus on him. Like the lab, they’re not going anywhere, and the ones tattooing Jake’s skin are far more interesting. “Okay, that’s a lie. I think the avatars are fascinating, just like the Na’vi, but sometimes you take what you’re given when you’re given it. Norm has always had to be better than I am, always one step ahead. Plus, our inheritance only stretched as far as to cover the contract costs of one avatar driver.” You laugh, “And Norm’s older.”

“Damn, so we just got stuck with Norm,” Jake comments, only to make you laugh again, which thankfully works. “I’d have a better time out here if it were you and not him.”

“He’s actually very insecure about that,” you tell him, watching his amusement grow without knowing the exact reasons for why. “He always goes on about how your avatar is much more built. I guess Tom was just more athletic and the avatar reflects it, I don’t think Norm’s used so much as an elliptical since high school… Anyway, he’s very vocal on how unfair the avatar program is in that regard.”

“You agree with him?”

Jake’s fingers ghost across your ankle.

“One: he’s my brother, and I’m not going to answer that question honestly. And two: let’s not forget who the avatar is modelled off. Tom was very handsome.”

“Growing up, I was always the pretty twin.”

You hum. “I couldn’t tell.”

Jake’s never ever considered the fact of you knowing his brother well before he died. He’s never had to think about it before, not until now, but he pushes the thought away and falls back into the thoughts of what he came here to do in the first place.

“You don’t think I’m handsome?”

He watches your grin widen. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

Jake creeps forward slightly, and this time you notice, moving your toes back further towards your bum on the rock while Jake continues his close creeping. 

“I think you’re a very pretty woman,” Jake murmurs. “Beautiful, even.”

“Norm’s not here to get mad at you for saying that,” you remind him.

“‘m not saying it for Norm to hear.”

You feel Jake’s hand sliding to wrap around your ankle and you shudder when he smooths his way up to your calf. You’ve never interacted with any Na’vi like this before, never felt their skin pushing against your own. With a glance down at his hand, you frown and work your way back up to his face, his eyes lit up in the dark.

“It’s not fair that you’re using your avatar against me right now,” you mutter, making him laugh through his nose and bring his body closer to the round edge of the rock. He considers it progress when you remain rooted in place once his hands run up the length of your legs to your waist.

You watch his nostrils flare slightly as he observes you, which only makes you feel more nervous and trapped here.

“All I’m doing is talking,” says Jake.

You scoff at him. “Does all your talking involve hands on the waist, Sully?”

He shrugs. “Only with really pretty people.”

Jake’s ears prick when you sigh and look back up at the stars. He doesn’t move his hands, but he senses your body tensing beneath his touch, smells the change in your body as he speaks. He’d love that part of being Na’vi a lot more if he knew what those changes meant exactly, and he can’t figure it out even as he stares at you intently.

His thumbs smooth from left to right, feeling the nub of your ribcage with every stroke over your tank top and tries to level his face into one of absolute neutrality when you look back down at him. 

“What are you doing, Jake?”

Not what he was expecting you to say, if he’s being honest.

“Nothing,” he says.

“You’re being weird,” you reply, narrowing your eyes suspiciously. It has the opposite effect, and you watch him struggle not to smile. His hairline raises when his brows do, and you fight the urge to roll your eyes when you figure him out, “Did you actually bring me out here just to flirt with me?”

He does nothing except look at you, as if the answer is painfully obvious and you’re stupid for not realising it sooner.

You sigh loudly. “Jake, I’m sorry that you didn’t get the memo like everybody else, but you didn’t need to lure me out the lab in your avatar if you wanted to get my attention.”

His thumb continues to move and his eyes drop slightly.

“I wouldn’t say I lured you out here,” Jake replies. You watch his eyes zero back in on yours and you fight your body against the urge to wrap up and hide from him. 

“You can’t be that stupid, I refuse to believe it,” you laugh disbelievingly, which makes him raise his brows questioningly. Even with a layer of plastic obstructing your face from his, Jake can’t get over how pretty you look. “You have to know that I like you even when you’re not a big blue alien.”

Jake’s grin widens, his fangs glinting in the moonlight. “I know. You’re really bad at hiding it.”

“Okay,” you say, feeling under your cardigan for his hands and attempting to wrestle them away, but he doesn’t budge. You laugh again, as if the whole thing is genuinely funny for you, “then you can always make your thoughts about that known when I see you in the lab. In person.”

“I’m not doing anything I wouldn’t in there if I had the chance,” Jake tells you, moving his hands but only to sandwich them between your tank and your skin. The feeling of his palms flat against your stomach makes you jump slightly and reach for his wrist. 

“Please. I see you every single day.”

“Yeah, and your brother, and Grace, and Trudy,” Jake points out. “I can’t get a second alone with you. What would you have me do, make a move with your brother breathing down my neck about it?”

“You could just be upfront. Save me from looking like an idiot.”

“Come on, baby, let’s be real.”

The smile he has on his face is unmoving, and you search every corner of it to find signs of his sincerity falling and find nothing. But something feels wrong.

You’ve spent close to two months in the long shadow drawn by everything else in Jake’s life, and considering Jake’s newfound role of future Omatikaya warrior, you feel that the time he spends in your company has become less and less. So now that Jake has decided to pick up on whatever signals you were sending him and respond to them, you assume it’s all in the name of good fun to piss off Norm.

Feeling Jake’s hands creeping up your body in the middle of the Hallelujah Mountains and with no older brother here to glare at either of you, you’re rethinking everything you thought you had figured out.

“I don’t get it,” you say finally. 

Jake just laughs quietly. “You thought I just rammed my wheelchair into your feet for fun?”

“You mean to tell me that was your way of showing interest?” you ask unconvincingly.

“…Nah. I liked watching you fall, though,” he grins. Jake picks himself up from his squat and looms over you like a shadow, watching you fall back onto your forearms as you stare up at him. He sets one knee between your legs and leans down slightly, breathing in deeply in a way that has you thinking he’s actually sniffing the air around you. 

“Honey, I’m all kinds of obsessed with you.”

You blink. “You certainly gave nothing away.”

“I bring you shit all the time.”

“I’m a scientist, I didn’t know you did that because you liked me. I thought it was just because I wanted better samples than Norm.”

“I mean, that definitely helped motivate me to find everything.”

“You never even told me you liked me.”

“Well, I’m telling you now.”

“Okay, well, tell me tomorrow when you’re awake and not all…big,” you frown. 

Jake chuckles. “You don’t like me now, or something?”

“I definitely never said that. I just want to hear human Jake Sully tell me how he feels without using his avatar to try and win me over.” 

Jake’s tail swishes behind him. “You prefer the dummy in the wheelchair?”

“I like your wheelchair,” you tell him quietly, running your hand up his arm as he pins you flat against the boulder with a hand on your stomach. 

“I don’t,” he murmurs. “I like being like this. I like being bigger than you. I like smelling how much you like me.”

All of a sudden, your legs swing shut around him and you look at him in disbelief.

“Freak.”

All he does is smile. 

“Come on, Jake, I actually don’t have time for this,” you say around a groan, trying to move against him but failing miserably. An exasperated smile falls on your face. “Really? What are you even trying to achieve? You’re seducing me with your avatar?”

His ears twitch and he angles his head to the side. “Yes?”

“Why am I getting the impression that all of this has something to do with Norm somehow?” you sigh in reply, but Jake notices the way you fall relaxed underneath him, and he has the feeling you’re in no real hurry to get anywhere else tonight. 

“Well, it might have something to do with it,” Jake confesses, his voice lower than it was before as he draws his nose close to you and takes a deep inhale. The feeling of his braid flicking down from his back and brushing against your thighs makes you shudder, not to mention the feeling of his snout against your collarbones. “Really, I just want to spend some time with my girl while I got the chance to.”

Whatever you want to say or have planned to say dies away when you feel Jake’s lips wander and press against your sternum. 

Sighing, you shift your hands to his arms that have you pinned down and carefully squeeze. “Good luck with that, Sully.”

He runs his tongue flat against your skin and hears you exhale through your nose, a noise of satisfaction muffled by your closed mouth, and all at once, Jake’s decision is final.

He is going to fuck Norm’s sister. 

And he’s going to rub salt on Norm’s wounds by doing it in the way that will piss him off the most.

Jake kisses his way down the length of your body, his hands moving around your figure like a sculptor until his hands find their way to your thighs. Though oversized and covering most of them, Jake’s hands circle around the width of your thighs and he strokes his thumbs across the inside skin of them, all while laughter bubbles in your chest.

All of this is just so absurd. If someone had told you this morning that Jake so much as liked you back, it would have taken some convincing, but if they had gone as far as to suggest he’s be attempting to seduce you in his avatar in a little chunk of forest behind the lab you pretty much live in, you would have laughed at the delusion of the thought. But now, there’s no denying the very tangible view of Jake’s Na’vi hands pressing down on your thighs, his eyes staring up over the slope of your body as you pick your head up to look down at him.

“This is crazy,” you gasp.

Jake’s teeth reveal themselves against the stretch of skin he was just pressing kisses onto, his smile widening as he speaks. “You don’t want to, baby?”

You weigh your options. It’s either leave and go back to the lab and hope that Jake follows through on his apparent feelings for you in the morning… Or you can relax and enjoy.

“Jake…” You pause for a moment. You want to enjoy it, and you feel the pool of desire deepen inside of you and know it’s a sensation Jake can most likely smell. 

He’s still your Jake, still the same guy you dote over when he remembers he has a life outside of being Na’vi. The only difference now is that he’s blue, and mobile, and double your size in every definition of the word. And suspiciously attractive, but you don’t know for certain if you think that because it’s Jake or because it’s actually true as a fact. But you just can’t help but wonder if Jake’s climaxing feud with Norm is the only reason he’s pinning you to a boulder in the forest and kissing your stomach. 

“You’re not just doing this to piss off Norm, are you?” you ask, feeling serious all of a sudden. The only way you know Jake notices is from the way his ears flatten against his head and his eyes grow round with concern. 

In the light, his tail flicks from side to side in the way you recognise most Na’vi do when they’re nervous, and you fight the urge to look away from him when he stays quiet for a second, thinking of what to say in a loud silence.

Of course he’s doing this because he knows it will piss Norm off if and when he finds out. As soon as Norm catches a stinking whiff of Jake on your body when he’s in his own avatar surveying the mountains, there will be nowhere for Jake to run or roll off to and avoid Norm’s volcanic rage. But he knows as well that this is a long time coming — that he’s been chasing circles around your feet for the fun of it, and now the chance has come for him to bring what he’s buried to the surface and shape it into something more.

Jake very carefully thinks of what to say. “Knowing that if I fuck you right now it will piss off your insanely annoying brother makes me want to do it more. But if the only reason I was fucking you was to piss him off, then I’d be doing it in front of him.”

Your brows raise. 

“Okay, that came out wrong,” Jake says quickly. “My point is… I go crazy thinking about you. And everything I think about doing to you can be made possible when I’m, as you said, all big.”

“But… Norm—”

Jake groans, all smiles. “Oh my god, can we please stop bringing up your brother for a sec? It’s a huge turn off.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any sexier, either,” you point out, “but I’m just thinking—”

“Don’t think,” Jake tells you. “This is the one time you don’t have to think about anything at all except for how you’d like me to take care of you.”

Jake returns his face to your stomach as you blink furiously, a flustered feeling creeping up over your body at the bluntness of his words. If you thought he was playing around, you’re officially convinced when his hands tighten around your thighs and he spreads them apart, pinning them down against the boulder he’s made your bed for the night. You inhale a deep breath when Jake’s thumbs dip underneath your shorts, bunched around your inner thighs.

“I suppose it would be like killing two birds with one stone…”

Jake laughs against your skin. “Jesus Christ, Spellman, quit talking so much. Who knew you were such a yapper?”

“Am not,” you protest.

You shudder when he plants another kiss on your abdomen, pings the fabric of your shorts back against your skin with a sharp sting and he grunts with a nod.

“Okay,” Jake agrees, his ears high and tail swishing playfully. “Now take off your cardigan.”

Still watching Jake on your forearms as he hooks his fingers around the waistline of your shorts in an effort to pull them down, you wrangle a sigh of protest and lift your lower body up for him, all whilst reaching for the buttons on the front of your cardigan. 

You breathe heavily as you mumble, “Do you really need to take off all my clothes, Sully?”

“One of us is halfway there, honey, and it’s not you,” replies Jake. His golden eyes watch with intent as he pulls the shorts down the expanse of your legs with your underwear in tow. As you shudder with the breeze fanning between your legs, Jake takes a big inhale and stares.

He barely moves an inch once the shorts and panties are in a bunch around your feet, but you busy yourself by sweeping a look at Jake’s own attire, or striking lack of. Between his legs hangs his tewng, a simple and sparsely intricate item of clothing that leaves little to imagination when it comes to what is growing between his thighs. 

It’s standard attire for the Omatikaya, but you’ve never seen it up close, and never on Jake himself. It hits you then that he’s still in his entire hunting gear, as if he finished up with Neytiri and brought himself here right away.

Jake’s thighs clench as he finally moves, readjusting his footing in his dropped squat; to him, this position has become as natural as breathing, but you stare at his thighs bulging and wonder how he’s not in agony from it alone.

Jake looks up at you after his allocated time spent analysing the spot growing wet between your legs and you gulp, feeling almost nervous. 

“Well, you’re gonna be an Omatikaya soon. One of the consequences is wearing your little g-string everywhere.”

His head leans to the side as his amusement grows. “It’s called a tewng, genius.”

That makes you laugh, and say in a melodic and sweet tone, “I know.”

But Jake bites back with the same sweet tone as you and says, “Then shut up,” and you comply. It’s the least you can do for him when he smooths his big hands back between your legs and up close to your cunt.

Pressing a kiss to the inside of your knee, Jake inches his hands further, relishing in a deep breath as he returns to staring at the spot just inches from his fingers. From his perspective, you are hideously tiny; given the obvious lack of research on Na’vi and human sexual relations, Jake isn’t totally sure you’ll be able to withstand what he wants to give you.

Worth a try, though.

Jake’s chest rises and falls as he stares in wonder at your pussy, the scent divinely pronounced, and he runs one of his fingers between your folds and up, collecting the juices on his finger as he rounds your clit in a rather observational manner. 

You bristle, your legs instinctively trying to close — all the good it does, as Jake pushes them back open. His eyes flicker back up to yours, as if assessing his next steps, before he lowers his mouth to your cunt and without doing you the kind service of looking away, stares at you as he spreads his tongue flat between your folds.

His actions earn him a strangled moan of pleasure, and his ears twitch in satisfaction. The feeling of his tongue against you is strangely addicting, rough and soft at the same time, warm and wet and enough for your hips to lift. 

“Jake…” You gasp, feeling your eyes close, half with the pleasure of it all and also sheer embarrassment. 

Like a predator watching its prey, Jake never looks away from your face and the way it twists, your jaw hanging open as he licks your cunt. With the size of his head alone, his tongue virtually covers every corner of your pussy with no difficulty, leaving you with no untouched itch, no ignored stretch of wet skin. 

You can’t even bear to look down at him again, and you toss your gaze up to the stars as they twinkle above, blinking, conspirators to your escapade. Biting down on your lip to stop yourself from moaning too loud, your hips slowly roll up and down as Jake sucks around your clit, his big hands working overtime to keep you from wriggling away entirely off the rock and to the ground.

“Oh, god…”

Between your legs is a flurry of warmth, a tingling feeling rippling down to your toes. After five dry years, it comes as no real shock that even someone’s tongue could be ripping this kind of response from you. 

“You good?” Jake murmurs.

“Mmh. Hot,” you rasp. It doesn’t help that there’s an exo-pack warming your face with every deep breath you take. Jake moves his mouth from your cunt momentarily as if trying to hear you, watching with curious eyes when you bite back another noise which stirs as he slides his finger towards your entrance. 

“This mask is really ruining my vibe right now,” you groan, your voice so throaty and strangled that Jake has to fight a smirk. He fails miserably.

“Take it off and hold your breath,” Jake replies; a laugh rumbles from his chest when you lift your head to scowl at him.

“It would frighten people if they knew how much of a genius you were.”

Jake hums, his eyes glistening as he cocks his head, “I’m incredibly humble.” Then he wastes no more time talking and sinks his finger into you.

He sinks in with plenty of ease, your wetness guiding his finger all the way in to the knuckle and you choke back a strangled sound; one of Jake’s fingers feels like two of your own, the stretch unfamiliar but not unwelcome after your dry spell of five cryo-stolen years. 

Jake grins widely and inches his tongue back between your legs, swiping it over your clit and forcing the moans out from hiding in your throat.

You turn your head to the side, sparing a glance at the distant laboratory. You can only hope you’re not loud enough to startle your sleeping colleagues and brother.

“Eyes down here, Spellman,” Jake mumbles, his voice vibrating across your pussy and pulling your eyes back towards him. Tears spring to your eyes as he looks up at you, working his fingers in and out of you slowly while matching his licks to the tempo.

His tongue is slightly rough and textured, each lick leaving you feeling almost ticklish. A rush of warmth pulls from your cunt up to your neck, and your thighs tremble around his head with a flushed squeeze, but Jake doesn’t seem to mind; he pulls your one leg further apart with his other hand and slips in a second finger, the stretch of your hole making your back arch with a half pained, half pleasured moan.

“Jake!” you gasp, your hips bucking up against his mouth, his fangs brushing across you. He has the nerve to laugh all of a sudden, pulling his mouth away after pressing a sloppy kiss to your clit. “Jesus, fuck, Jake—”

“Goddamn, you are a yapper,” Jake comments, and you glare at the almost human look of pure smugness on his face, his chin coated with saliva and juice. 

“Fuck you,” you huff, feeling the absence of his tongue immensely, despite his continuously moving fingers. Jake’s fingers are thicker than they looked from afar — it feels like you’re full already, but you’re not willing to confess that to him. He already looks far too proud with what he’s doing.

You suppose, now that you’re thinking about it, Jake’s had years to become familiar with a pussy; he seems to be back between your legs with a certain hunger for you, the taste of your juices sweeter than he initially expected. 

His fingers are coated in juice, slipping into you with no resistance and curling his fingers up to make your hips lift once more. He almost wants to make a comment to fluster you, to tell you how insanely good it feels for your cunt to be quivering around his fingers, welcoming him up there as if you’d prepared for them beforehand. Jake parts his fingers inside of you, stretching you out, his mouth comfortably attached to you.

His ears twitch when you let out a wobbly cry — actually, he’s not sure if you’re crying for real or not. His eyes follow your hand as it creeps down to the hood of your pussy, just above his nose, and he pulls his mouth away for a split second.

“No, no, go back,” you pant, and like a dog given a command, Jake pulls his soggy fingers out of your cunt and pushes his head back between your thighs, satisfied by your own pleasured sounds when he does.

Jake hooks his arm across your lower stomach, effectively pinning you to the sloping boulder while he uses his other hand to keep your legs wide apart. You forget all about modesty and self-control and open them as wide as you can for him to help, your hand stroking the top of Jake’s hair as he burrows his way back between the wet spot he was devouring. 

You suck in a tight and high-pitched breath when Jake’s tongue shifts from left to right over your clit, the feeling of his tongue strange and almost like a vibration. Your hips lift from the boulder again and shift up and down — Jake’s barely even trying, barely broken a sweat, but when he glances up at you he’s both amused and surprised by how twisted in pleasure you look. All he can see is the underneath of your jaw tilted to the sky, and one of your hands curling up around your tit under your tank top.

Jake guides his arm from trapping your abdomen up to push the bottom of your tank up above your wrist. There’s no way he’ll let you gatekeep the sight of your tits when he’s the one making you touch yourself in the first place. His eyes are wide with excitement when you fist the fabric of your tank and yank it up above your boobs, the curve of them bouncing with the quick movement of your hand. 

Jake groans into you, his tail curling up high. Jake’s tasted a lot of pussy in his life, but he doesn’t know what exactly you’ve done to taste so good to him. He momentarily convinces himself that it feels different because he’s in a whole other body — it must just be because he’s big and strange and he’s been fucking you in his mind for a while now that you somehow feel ten times better than anyone else he’s ever been with. 

The pool of warm juice between your legs leaves you incredibly soft and squishy, like a tìhawnuwll that he has to remind himself he can’t just sink his teeth into.

It could be because you’re Norm’s sister. Could be because you usually appear so big when he’s resorted to sitting down all day, but now you’re helplessly tiny underneath him, trapped by his arms and head. Or it could just be because he’s an idiot who quashes his feelings rather than gives in to them.

He blinks. Your hips are so high off the boulder that Jake has to bring his arm back down to hold you in place. The less you squirm, the more drawn out he can make it, but he’s acutely aware of the tremor in your legs, the impatient rutting against his lips, the painful hardness under his tewng.

“Sweet,” he grumbles. The word leaves you flustered, and the heat brewing like a bomb against his open mouth begins to rise through your body again. You forget to be quiet as you let out a high-pitched moan, feeling your toes curl in your boots and you desperately finger at your nipple, rolling and tugging on the hardened nub of flesh as Jake pins you tighter against the boulder. He laves his tongue down your cunt towards your entrance, the warm tip of it pushing to the tightened hole that Jake wants more than anything to squeeze himself inside.

“Mf — Jake, come on,” you whimper.

One of his thin brows raises. “You seduced yet?”

“Fuck off. Yes.”

You feel the rumble of his laughter against your pussy. Jake presses a kiss against it and then moves his mouth to the soft skin of your inner thigh. 

“I never let a woman go without making her cum,” Jake says, his voice muffled against your leg. He feels you quiver beneath him, and his grin widens. “You wanna at least cum first, right?”

“Please, Jake—”

A startled cry of pain rips from your throat when Jake gently sinks his teeth into your leg — Jake knows his own strength and pulls back before he can draw blood, glancing at the red outline of his teeth imprinted into your leg, a ridged ring of saliva in his wake. Your head is lifted entirely to gape at him, and he looks at you with a coy expression.

“Did you just bite me?”

He smirks. “Accident. Sorry.”

“Yeah right.” Your legs shift slightly around him, but Jake can smell the twisting agony of pleasure leaking out of you — he’s never been more thankful for his Na’vi body and its strange sense of smell than he is now, to be able to pick up on the need you try to hide from him, a scent he actually understands. Normally he can admire your determination, but right now, he’s more concerned with finding out how to break down your walls and unravel you the way he knows you’ve been wanting him to for the last two months.

He smooches the bite one more time, his ears pricking when you whimper out a sort of desperately small sound and say, “Come on, Jake. You got me out here, don’t torture me about it.”

“Me eating your pussy not enough for you?” he asks smugly. He knows it would be more than enough — call him conceited, but he’s sort of an expert on it by now.

You don’t say much, nothing worth noting, at least. Jake’s ears are tall as he lifts his head slightly, but his thumb continues to rub up and down your slit, carefully smoothing over your swollen clit almost sympathetically.

“Please,” you beg in such a small and desperate voice that Jake smiles at the sound. You see his eyes flutter, half-lidded, as he cocks his head to the side until his temple is against your knee. 

“Hm? You just wanna say please and get it over and done with?” Jake mutters. “You can’t take any more of my fingers?”

“Don’t be a prick,” you whimper. “You want it, too.”

You feel that unkind heat simmer over you again, but not for the reason you expect. Jake blinks at you lazily, like an unimpressed cat, and then you watch as his eyes curve into crescent moons, the slint of gold virtually glowing in the Pandoran night. Then, the fucker smiles again, looking so smug that you feel embarrassed somehow, caught under his gaze.

“Yeah, I do,” agrees Jake. “I’ve been wanting you a long time.”

“Then, come on,” you urge. Something excited claws at you, and you feel your heartbeat race when he lifts himself slightly. “Come on, big guy. You got me out here, you win.”

He swells with pride, pleased by what is leaving your mouth in a flustered flurry. 

“You think you can take me all by yourself?” he asks, his hands coming to rest on your knees as he turns his gaze back to the clenching hole between your legs. Jake looks almost thoughtful as he stares at you, as if analysing. “You could only just take two fingers.”

For such an intelligent woman, Jake finds himself amazed when you look anxious about that statement. What, do you really think he’ll just give up and go? Jake doesn’t care if it takes all night to get himself up your snatch, because no matter what, he’ll get himself in there.

He sniggers when your mouth flounders like a little fish, your tank sliding with the angle of your body back down over your tits, but then he tuts and reaches back to pull it up. In fact, he decides it’s better off, and he uses one finger to pull the whole thing up to your chin, and lets you suffer in an anxious string of actions — you tug the tank up over your head, eyes wide, lip pouting. 

“Wanna try?” Jake asks, if not to speed along the increasing agony of his hard cock tenting under his tewng then just to put you out of your misery. “Or should I go back for seconds?”

“Jake…” Your chest rises and falls as you gape at him. He went through all the trouble to get you here, and although you never expected to look at Jake’s avatar and feel a throb between your legs, you can’t even look at him without feeling overcome with the terrible, pressing desire to squeeze whatever weapon he has under his loincloth into your cunt. Jake watches your eyes look down at the darkness between his legs, to the pretty band of string tied around his middle, and then looks back at you with a sickeningly sweet expression.

“Aw, honey. You want me to fuck you?”

It takes an incredible amount of effort not to scowl at him. Jake is lucky he looks so attractive with your arousal around his lips, otherwise you’d be up off the boulder and marching back to the labs for being so unbelievably full of himself. 

But even though he’s double your size and consumed by a cocky smugness from being able bodied and towering over you, you can’t think of enough reasons to warrant your leave. The only things on your mind are how much it’ll hurt to get him inside you, and how good it’ll feel once he is.

“That’s why you brought me here, after all, isn’t it?” you murmur, your lips curved slightly when he bows his body over you, his hands flat against the boulder on either side of your waist. “You’ve been thinking of me, right? Oeyä sayrìp tsamsiyu — you must have thought about this every time you went and found me a flower, right?”

Jake’s smile turns wolfish. “Yap, yap, yap.”

You all but whine underneath him. It is so unbecoming of you to be so desperate for something that you resort to writhing like a brat, but with Jake just straddling over you without doing anything, you feel the eager feeling of want coiling in your lower stomach. Your hole clenches around the air, as if trying to feel for Jake’s fingers again, and you lift your hips up off the boulder as if to entice him.

He barely even looks down at you, which only infuriates you more. 

For a moment, you wonder if the only reason he lured you out here was to satiate a desire of his own; maybe he just wanted to prove that he still had what it took to make a woman beg for him — though he needn’t have tried so hard, considering you’d have writhed and whined for him just as much, if not more, had he just made it known that he knew about and returned your feelings sooner.

But having you touch him in an impossible silence in the shared bunks pales in comparison to now, to having you look so small and soft and inviting; for you to beg for him, to let yourself be ravaged by him in all of his strength. Why would he prefer to have you while he feels useless when he can make the most of the strong, brawny and big body his brother passed down to him?

Jake breathes deeply through his nose and chews on the inner skin under his lips. You watch in the dark as his tail coils, his ears flat, until he lowers his body down like he’s doing a press up and pushes his nose against your sternum. 

“You smell so pretty, baby girl,” Jake mutters, pressing a kiss against the skin sloping between your tits. Biting your lip does little to suppress the moan that spills out when Jake cups one of his hands around your breast, and you hold the back of his hand as he gently squeezes. 

The hanging cloth of his tewng brushes past your pussy and you jolt in surprise, just in time for Jake to bring his mouth down over your other boob. The sheer size of Jake dwarfs every feature of yours, but something about your tiny size only excites him more. 

With his lips wrapped around your tit, you try your hardest to muffle another moan at the feeling of his tongue toying around your nipple, desperately trying to find something to focus on that isn’t the absurdly good feeling of Jake’s mouth or the tewng brushing past your pussy every time Jake rocks his hips backwards and forwards.

You clench your hand over his, feeling your legs squirm around him as his sharp teeth scrape against the squishy curve of your breast. Fear should rip through you when you feel his teeth tighten around the top of your tit, but it doesn’t; instead, a rush of warm excitement burns you from the inside out when Jake’s cheeks hollow, sucking a purple blot into your skin.

“Hey—” you say cautiously, but the damage is already done. It’s as if Jake’s determined to make you the same shade as him; the mark he leaves is blooming and bright, and he looks all too proud of himself when he looks up in acknowledgement of your voice. His tail thrashes excitedly. 

“Leaving that so everyone can see what you were doing when they wake up,” Jake explains, licking a strip from the swelling bruise to your neck for good measure. “My dirty scientist.”

That is if you ever make it back to the lab in one piece. 

Feeling the pleasure spreading across your body, you’re half contemplating staying here on this rock forever, hoping that Norm or Grace never come back here looking for samples only to find your corpse. You’re overcome with a conflicting contrast of emotions — you suddenly feel so exposed, so unraveled, half guilty for encouraging Jake to shove his big blue fingers up your crotch, and even guiltier about the fact that you want more from him.

“Enough. Come on,” you huff, and Jake dips his attention back to the rutting of your hips, the glossy shine of your arousal. “While I’m wet.”

“You really think I’m gonna let you dry up before I can get inside you?” Jake asks, as if the idea is beneath you both. “Have some confidence in me, Spellman.”

“I do. Full confidence. So, come on, gimme.”

Jake grins; he leans his weight up on one knee and in the light, you can just about see the protruding point of his tewng and feel your desire pooling. It’s only when Jake undoes the string around his waist and frees what hides beneath that you start to feel your body tense unexpectedly; it is beyond you how Jake has managed to keep the spear he calls his cock hidden for so long, and even more unthinkable as to how it will fit inside of you. 

You stare at it with wide eyes. Meanwhile, Jake holds the base of it with his hand and assesses the space between your legs again. When he guides the tip to your folds and strokes himself up and down, you feel your heartbeat quicken and your legs turn like jelly.

“You like it?” he asks, ever so sweetly, as if it’s a new gift brought back for you to enjoy. In a way, it is a gift, something for you to sample. Jake’s body seems to vibrate with nothing short of delight at the speechless state his dick has left you in — and he hasn’t even put it in yet.

“Big, right?” he continues to ask, a smirk on his face.

All you can say is, “how do you walk around with that thing?”

He barks out a laugh, his head tilted to the stars as his smirk widens. Jake then pushes the tip against you again with his thumb, choking down his amused sniggers as he drags himself up and down your cunt, and more than anything, he wishes he could see your face better in the moonlight. Luckily, Jake’s spent hours staring at you in his wheelchair to be able to piece together the smudges of your features he can see in the reflection of light hanging over the front of your mask. And what he can’t see, he’ll hear, and what he’s not satisfied with not seeing he’ll seek from you again later.

“It’ll be a tight fit,” Jake thinks out loud, prodding the tip of his cock against your entrance and looking up at you once you whimper, “but I know you can take it.”

“I dunno… Looks kind of big—”

“You can fit it in,” he tells you confidently.

But now you’ve seen it, you’re slightly nervous. “What if I can’t—?”

“You were just begging me for it,” Jake says pointedly. “While I’m wet, you said.” Then, he leans forward so that the wide slope of his nose is pushed against the front of your mask. “I don’t care if it takes all night trying. I’ll help you fit it all in, okay?”

You breathe in sharply, feeling your hips grinding up against him. Jake tries to find sympathy for you; he supposes that if he were you and some ten foot Na’vi was trying to burrow his cock between his legs, he’d be apprehensive too. 

“Just…” you rasp, watching him desperately, and he waits kindly, though his tip is on the verge of being swallowed by your cunt. Your legs tremble when he smiles at you, one hand on his cock, the other flat against the boulder. “Just go slow, okay?”

The way he looks at you is as if you’ve just said something stupidly endearing. “Sure thing, Spellman.”

Jake does his best to keep up his presented facade of coolness, but you feel so warm and wet, his arm begins to shake as he supports his weight on the boulder, grunting when he aligns his cockhead with your hole and very slightly pushes in. Even though he only just had his fingers up there, he can feel your pussy resisting, and it’s only the tip. 

Your mouth hangs open with a pained whine, the stretch uncomfortable but in spite of it, you arch your back as if trying to feel more of him inside of you.

“Easy,” he chuckles, very slowly pushing more of himself into your pussy. The noises from your mouth grow louder, and something proud purrs in his chest. His tongue pushes against the inside of his lower lip as he smirks, teeth showing, as he makes an almost amused groan. You’re insanely tight, and unbelievably squishy and wet — and hey, it’s been five years for him, too.

“Yeah,” Jake groans, pushing his hips further and pulling out, each stroke gentle and tentative. He wants more than anything to go rough, to make you mewl and cry and curl up against him, but the tearful look on your face makes him reconsider. Each time he sinks in a little bit deeper, softening the resistance of your walls as they make room for him. 

It takes an incredible amount of self restraint to stop himself from shoving all of it in at once; you’re so tight, the tightest pussy he’s ever felt closing around his cock, and easily the best. Jake closes his eyes for a second, honing in on the squeezing clench around his cock and the unnerving, uncharacteristic silence leaving your gaping mouth. 

“Talk to me, Spellman,” Jake groans, inching deeper inside. His ears perk again when you cry as he sinks in deeper. “Say something.”

“You told me I talked too much,” you manage out, admirably trying your hardest to remain quiet despite the pushing twelve inches of Na’vi cock up your cunt. Jake’s barely even inside of you; more of his dick is out than it is stuffed inside. 

“I love hearing you talk,” replies Jake, even though he had just poked fun at your ability to talk someone’s ear off. Had he known it would swear you into silence now, he’d have never said anything. What Jake wants now most of all is to hear your voice again, hear your pleasure, your instructions, your pleas. 

Hearing you slip out a high pitched moan when he pushes more of his cock inside of you feels like a reward almost. 

“Could listen to you yap away all damn day,” he murmurs quietly, his eyes finding yours behind the glaze of the exo-pack. “I know you’ve always got something to say, so why’re you so quiet all of a sudden?” Jake’s grin brightens when you manage to suck in more of his length, “Talk to me, baby, tell me what you want, hm?”

“Just… Put it in,” you whimper, and his eyes widen excitedly. 

“You said to go slow.”

“I know what I said, but I need more.” Your eyes are so blown open he’d laugh if it didn’t look so goddamn sexy. “Please, Jake.”

“You sure?” he croons. 

“Mm. Please — come on, please—!”

Jake snaps his hips forward so quickly that more than half of dick disappears inside of you, and the primal noise that leaves your mouth takes Jake completely by surprise. 

“Fucking shit, mama,” Jake groans, his voice rasped as he bows his chest over yours, dropping to his forearm on the boulder as he adjusts to the warmth enveloping him. “Holy shit.”

You swallow a deep breath, your hands gripping tightly to Jake’s shoulders which forces his eyes to your face. He can make out the distinct shimmer of tears under your eyes, and he brushes his fingers across the side of your neck, tapping you to bring your eyes open and searching for him in the dark. 

“You with me?” he asks, chuckling slightly. “You good?”

“Oh my god,” you squeal, cunt clenching. “Wait—”

“Breathe,” Jake says quietly, pressing a kiss to the swollen bruise he sucked into your skin earlier. “You can do it, pretty girl.”

“Keep moving, it hurts when you just stay still.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he mutters, his hips falling back into a slow rhythm to keep you adjusted to his twitching cock. It’s almost disturbing how easily you’re taking him now he’s forced more of his length inside, how wet and responsive you seem to be as he sinks deeper into you.

At first, Jake goes slow, familiarising himself with every noise you give him, every twitch and shift in your body, every clench around him. You feel the smooth ridges of his cock kissing your insides, the sensation unfamiliar and strange but so fucking good. He snakes one hand under your back when you lift up off the boulder; his large palm is flat against the arch of your spine, his fingers curled around your hip. 

You look like a toy underneath him, something he could easily just hold with one hand and fuck himself up into.

His hips snap again, faster than he intended, and more of his dick disappears inside of you. You could easily take all of him if he took his time getting you to that point, but the warmth wrapping around him like a glove is so sinful that he can’t think of anything less appealing than going slow. He sucks in a deep breath through his teeth and squeezes your waist with his hand; one desperate little cry from your mouth later, and Jake forgives himself for having waited so long to get you in this position, to fuck you stupid. 

It’s been so long since Jake’s been able to fuck a woman like this, and for his first time since his accident to be with you, of all people — well, Jake could think of no greater victory, no better reward for all the shit he’s endured so far. 

He stares down at the gap between your legs, watching as his dick vanishes and reappears with every rock of his hips. You’re taking it so well, like a champion. Pride blooms in his chest — he’d expect nothing less from his woman.

Pulling your hips down slightly to meet him as he thrusts up, Jake shoulders the control and moans in a low tone, pushing until he feels your body seize underneath him. Then, he pulls back, falls back in, and gets himself comfortable.

The stretch no longer burns the way it did, but you feel as though you can barely breathe as Jake ruts his hips up. He’s so big in every definition of the word. He doesn’t seem to notice nor care about the deep indent of your fingernails in his shoulder; he seems entirely devoted to gaining momentum, creating his own pace with his ears flat against his bowed head.

“God… Jake,” you moan, feeling the slight point of the boulder against your shoulder blades and his hand squeezing your middle as you finally speak, after what feels like eons of silence to Jake.

He latches his gaze to the rise and fall of your breasts as he fucks you, his breathing heavy. “Oh, you like that?”

Ever so slightly, he hastens his pacing, eliciting a tearful sob from your mouth. “Mmf—”

“Is it everything you hoped for?”

His stomach churns when you laugh, albeit with a strangled kind of tone, and clench around his cock again.

“You’re so full of yourself.”

“So’re you,” he points out, lifting his chest slightly to glance down at your stomach. It should be criminal how turned on he feels by the sight of his own dick outlined in your lower tummy — it should be criminal how insanely good it feels knowing he’s fucking a part of you nobody else has before. You’ve lost all self control as you decide to let yourself be noisy, which Jake is all too pleased to hear.

Peering down at your hips, you marvel at the sight of Jake’s frightening length pushing up against your stomach. It looks just as weird as it feels. Jake hisses and runs a hand across the spot his dick is hitting.

“Feel that?” he asks. He knows you do. It’s a stupidly dumb question, but you whine at it all the same. “I told you it would fit. Look at you, taking it all, no problem.”

“Mhm. Feels good; so, so, so good, Jake…” Your body feels limp and tingly, and you let your head fall back so your gaze is pointed up at the sky. Even as you blink dazed up at them, they have the striking appearance of Jake’s skin, the dark blue wash of sky with littered balls of bright white light. The image of him is printed on your mind, and no matter where you look to avoid his gaze, you find him again.

Jake shifts. Keeping his dick sliding in and out of you with more of an upbeat rhythm than before, he bows his chest back over yours and brings his ears close to your ear.

“A perfect fit for my perfect girl,” he mutters. He becomes so reliant on his one hand on the boulder when he uses the other to hold your leg up around his waist, bringing forth an entirely new burn from the stretch of it. His breath is warm on your ear, making you shudder. “How long you been waiting for me, baby?”

You scoff disbelievingly, trying to think of something to say despite your mind being both full and empty at the same time. All you can think about is the building pressure in your tummy.

“Long,” you offer, snaking a hand up his neck to the back of his head. 

Jake licks his tongue across the arch of skin connecting your neck to your collar. “Thinking of me with your fingers up your cunt at night, huh?” His hand squeezes around your middle when you begin to shift with his thrusts further up the boulder. Even with your loud cries in his ear, Jake can hear the squelching wetness around his cock, the tightening spasms around his length bringing him closer to giving in to the dull ache in his own stomach. “Bet you wheelchair Jake Sully couldn’t make you feel like this. Next time you get off to the thought of him, I want you to think of what we’re doing right now, about who’s got you feeling this way.”

“How…how do you even know about that?” you gasp, half pleasured by his thrusting and half horrified by the revelation that Jake might have been privy to the fact you masturbated with him in mind when everyone went to bed at night.

Actually, he didn’t know. But he sniggers smugly that his teasing jeer turned out to be true. 

Jake presses a kiss to your collar and peppers a line of them up until he is thwarted by the mask covering your face. Peering down at your face hidden behind it, Jake gives you a sad pout and says, “I wanna go fast.”

“I…” you start, his hips already moving and you feel the heat simmering below again. Anymore from him, and you’ll be finished, cumming all over him. “I don’t think… I’ll — I’m gonna—”

“Then let’s get it done,” he says with as much finality and refine as he can muster before he picks himself back up, finding the energy he had before to pin you down against the boulder. You keep your leg wrapped around his waist as he sets one hand down over your tummy, the other on your shoulder, and then the real fun begins for him.

Jake isn’t ignorant to the twisting ache inside of him — like you, he knows he probably doesn’t have that much longer until he’s completely tuckered out and ready to fill you up. What can he say? It’s been a long time, and he doesn’t have the same kind of stamina as he used to. You’re tightening up around him in anticipation; it’s like being gripped in a vice. 

He pulls his hips back and then pistons himself back in with so much speed that you almost fly up off the boulder in surprise. Too fast, he thinks, so he gets accustomed to a regular fast pace and sticks to it loyally. In return, he’s rewarded with a litany of pretty sounds, your hands curling around his arms, desperately trying to hold on. 

“Yeah, oh yeah,” Jake groans, feeling your cunt fluttering around him as he fucks in and out, slipping in and out of your wetness as if he owns it. The hand that’s pressing your shoulder slips to your throat, and while he doesn’t squeeze, you claw your fingers around his and feel his grip tighten ever so slightly. 

“Fuck!” you squeal, clamping your eyes closed suddenly. “Shit—Jake, baby—”

He moans at that, really moans. A ringing rises in volume in his ears as his thrusts grow more rapid, relentlessly smacking his hips up until he slides all of his dick inside of you. 

God, you’re fucking perfect — he can’t name many women, if any at all, who could take a dick this size with as much ease as you are now. But the increasing pressure in your tummy is so overwhelming that you’re not even too aware of the size of what’s getting comfortable inside of you. All you know and understand is that in the next three seconds, you’ll be seeing white.

Jake’s name falls like a mantra from your lips, and he looks at you in surprise to see that you’ve very bravely opened your eyes to stare at him, although the tears lining your waterline and smeared down your cheeks make your stare look ten times more attractive to him. He almost wishes he hadn’t looked — his hips stagger slightly and he growls, the noise earning him another whiney moan from the undone woman beneath him, the woman he’s committed to filling with his cum and making his.

“I—!” You say nothing — you don’t even have to. Jake feels your cunt strangling his length like a goddamn fist, and by the buffering look of pure ecstasy on your face, he’s fairly certain all of those things mean you’re about to cum.

“Yeah, mama, cum for me,” Jake coaxes. “Lemme feel you.”

The warmth around him clenches, and all of a sudden, your body seizes with a jolt, your back arched so high off the boulder that it leaves him hitting entirely new angles inside of you, pushing your orgasm to a new level. 

For you, it feels like you’ve been blown up. Your entire body is consumed by a blazing heat, your legs going immediately limp as you cum around him. Jake’s eyes instantly shift to your quivering hips, to your cunt still swallowing him up, the white dribbles of cum leaking down the length of his cock. He watches the small cluster of glowing freckles decorating his dick disappear behind a rolling drop of your cum and his jaw goes slack.

“My girl,” he crows, his head bowing as he eagerly fucks into you a few more times, muttering the same thing as he does: “Oh, my girl, my pretty girl—”

The hand around your throat rips itself away only to squeeze into your hips, as though Jake intends to leave fingerprints there once he’s done. He grips you tightly and with a monumental and low, throaty moan, he snaps his hips one final time and feels a tug in his tummy.

You probably feel him cum before he does. Jake seems caught up in his thrusts while you register the unmissable burst of warmth inside of you, ropes of cum spilling out as if his sole intention were to breed you, stuff you full of his seed. 

In actual fact, Jake just wanted to fuck you silly, fill you with boat loads of cum, and bask in the evil satisfaction of watching Norm smell Jake all over you, claiming you as his. 

“Mm—fuck, Jake!” you rasp, squeezing your little hands around his wrists. The feeling is enough to bring him up to the surface he was drowning under, the ringing in his ears dulling as he catches his breath and opens his eyes, staring down at the embarrassingly wet mixture of cum and juice between your legs. 

He stays inside of you for a moment, his dick still hard and even more pronounced up your cunt than it was before, and it’s as if his eyes are unfocused in absolute awe as he observes the sight of you stretched open, locking him in place greedily. 

It sinks in that you managed to fit all of him in, that he just used his avatar to fuck you in the forest behind the lab. You. Norm’s sister. The object of his desire. The woman of his literal dreams.

Jake lets out a loud and heavy breath, a sigh of relief, and rubs his palms up and down your stomach gently. Despite having had him fucking you just seconds before, you feel a heat flush over your face when he looks up at your face, sweaty and tear-stained under the exo-pack, and he grins wolfishly.

“You’re incredible,” he laughs, which makes the act of looking at him feel ten times more rewarding. Your body warms with the praise: all you’ve wanted was for Jake to like you back, and now, to be full of his cum and knowing he thinks you’re incredible… You laugh with him. 

A few disbelieving laughs later, and Jake finally moves his hands under your thighs and slowly pulls himself out of you. The bump of each ridge along his length knocks past you, and Jake stifles a howl of laughter at the whiney, high-pitched moan you make as his cock pulls out of you with a slick, wet pop. He cranes his head slightly to watch his cum pool out of you and you pick yourself up on your forearms, looking for his dick between his legs to have a final peek, a good look at him covered in your cum and his…

Your eyes widen. “Your cum glows.”

Jake raises his eyebrows. “What? Scientist of Pandora didn’t know Na’vi cum glowed?”

“I haven’t exactly had a selection of Na’vi men or women to tell me that it did!” you reason, your eyes still marvelling curiously at the shiny soft blue stain over the hanging fruit between his legs. 

He hums, poking a finger against your folds and smirking when you flinch. “Hm. Put that in your research notes. Wanna take samples?”

“Fuck off,” you laugh, keeping your legs wide as you struggle to sit upright. The discomfort between your legs is suddenly making itself known, and already the cum around your pussy and thighs is drying, sticky and thick. “Jesus, Sully. Look at me.”

“I know,” grins Jake, his eyes soaking up the image of you. “You’re fucking sexy.”

You roll your eyes with a twisting smile. While Jake seems incredibly fascinated with the marks he has either left accidentally or on purpose over your body, you groan and roll your shoulders. Frankly, you wish Jake had just thrown you down on the grass and fucked you there — in hindsight, the boulder had been a bad idea and you know it will come to haunt you in the morning.

Lazily, and yet with a rush of shame and exhilaration, you glance back at the lab, sitting in the curve of moonlight and caged by bioluminescent flowers and shrubs, each glowing vibrant spectrums of cyan and purple and lime. 

“You’re the luckiest woman alive if nobody heard you yapping,” Jake says playfully, rising upright to stretch the agonised muscles of his legs. “You’re so noisy, honey.”

“I apologise for not thinking too much about the volume of my voice,” you drawl sarcastically, your eyes still glued to the glazed thick glass windows looking into the back of the lab. Anxiously, you glance at him, “Was I that loud?”

He gives you a tight, sympathetic smile. You frown.

“You weren’t quiet yourself, you know,” you grumble, feeling the pinch in your back ease slightly.

“Yep.” And he seems smug about that fact, for reasons beyond you, although you wager a guess as to why he seems proud all of a sudden.

As you shuffle awkwardly off the boulder, you wince as you lean for your shorts and panties, dropping a little look at the sliding dollop of cum slipping out of you. 

“You gotta keep it in there,” Jake says. 

“Jake, as soon as I stand up and walk around, it’s all gonna come pouring out anyway.”

His lip curls with disappointment as he watches his cum drip out of you onto the edge of the boulder, splatting on the wisps of grass around your ankles. It’s a good thing he’s full of copious reserves of cum to give back to you another time.

“Can’t wait for Norm to get a whiff of me,” Jake tells you, and you fight the urge to sigh and roll your eyes, because of course — of course that had been a motive for the gallon of glowing blue sperm Jake just squoze into you. “The look on his face when he figures out I’ve been breedin’ his little sister—”

“I have never been more thankful of the fact that Na’vi and humans can’t reproduce together. Hand on my heart, I mean that.”

You slide your shorts and panties back up your legs and reach for your thrown tank top. The inconspicuous smudges of green from the boulder across the back of it fill you with a puny drop of dread — you’ll just pray really hard to both God and Eywa that nobody pays it any mind. 

That and the bulbous bruise on your tit, the bite on your leg, the finger indents on your hips.

“I was doing that thing you were doing. Killing two birds with one stone,” Jake says as he searches the ground for his tewng. “Fucking you ‘cause I wanted to and fucking you because I know wanting you is gonna piss off your annoying big brother.”

You had said that, hadn’t you? And even though the entire scheme of Jake wanting to scorn your brother so badly that he has to use you as a human fuck-toy seems ludicrous, you can’t deny the very minuscule jolt of thrill it gives you. It would be fun to piss Norm off a little bit. He has been a total arse lately.

“Norm’s all you think about,” you tease. “You sure you don’t like him instead?”

“Shut up.”

Jake hands you your cardigan with an amused smile, his tail whipping to and fro happily. 

“Your coat, ma’am.”

“Love how you only have one thing to slip back into,” you point out as you take the cardigan from him, and he reaches for the tewng and chuckles. “You could’ve just lifted it up.”

“Could’ve, would’ve, didn’t,” he replies.

There’s an uncharacteristic silence between you both as you climb back into your clothes, and while Jake fiddles with his tewng with his tongue between his lips, you look back at the lab and sigh. 

Somewhere in that lab is the man you’ve been thinking of for two months — Jake in his human form, lying in a link unit as he takes control through another body. You wonder what he might think when he wakes up: will he come searching for you in the dark? Come kiss you, tell you how he feels?

Jake creeps up to you with an alarming light foot, and the feeling of his hand on top of your head makes you look up suddenly. 

“What’s on your mind?” he asks. 

“You,” you sigh, looking back at the lab. “Are you going to follow through with tonight when you’re back as yourself, or is this an avatar Jake exclusive?”

“Come on. You still want that loser in there?” Jake feels his heart tug — he doesn’t know if to feel offended that you’re still thinking of someone else, or flattered because that someone else is technically him, the real him, the version of him that Jake hates the most.

“You’re so mean to him,” you grumble. Then pause, and add, “To you. That’s literally still you in there. If anything, doesn’t that make me look a little bit obsessed?” Jake gently pushes your head as you fall into a slow walk in the direction of the remote lab. “Wow. Actually, I just realised that’s true.”

“Finding out that you liked me was the only reason I started spending more than five minutes at a time in the lab,” Jake tells you. 

“Who told you?”

You both accept a short silence as you stride past the wall that most of the bunks are built against, and you feel an anxious knot forming in your stomach when the clearing at the front of the lab expands into view. 

“I meant it when I said you were horrible at hiding your crush on me,” Jake reminds you. 

Right. 

The tsawksyul Jake found you is thankfully still where you left it, and you slip out of Jake’s touch to fetch it from under the window, but when you turn to him, his eyes are pulled back across the miles of suspended mountains.

“You have somewhere else to be?” you call.

His top lip curls into a half pout as he says, “Not now. But tomorrow I’ve got to do some hunting. If I make a clean kill, I start my iknimaya.”

“Impressive,” you comment, twirling the tsawksyul between your fingers. “You… Will you be gone long?”

Jake hesitates for a moment. Is he reading into it, or are you looking a little bit more crestfallen now you know he’ll be gone for a little while longer?

“Why, you wanna go again?” he asks with a laugh.

“Respectfully, I think my vagina is broken and I need to lie down,” you quip, making him laugh even more. “I was just…curious. If you’re gone too long, I’ll be asleep before you get back.”

Jake creeps towards you and drops to a painful crouch. He’s definitely going to feel the cry and protest in his legs in the morning from being haunched for so long. Still, he frames your face with his hands and takes a long look at your face.

“I’ll roll past your bed extra quietly,” he promises. 

You snort and push yourself away from him. “Safe travels, big guy. I’ll see you in the morning?”

Peering up at him, you breathe in the sight of him one last time as he nods once and rises to stand. The long shadow drawn by his lithe figure falls over you.

“Affirmative,” he states. You look up at him for a second and smile. Did it take having his cock in your stomach for you to realise how pretty he is like this, or have you known all along?

“Go,” you tell him, nodding towards the edge of the cliff before turning to the door. Over your shoulder, Jake scoffs a laugh and turns on his heels, his eyes scanning the mountain range as he approaches the edge. 

The bravery you had before died long ago and you quickly twist the air-lock to the door and force it open, your heart in your throat. You don’t look back at him, even when he looks back at you with an endearing smile on his face.

The lab is deathly silent when you slide back inside. You were half expecting someone to stir at the sound of the door sealing shut, but if anyone’s awake, they make no effort to show it. Tip-toeing to the small bathroom, you very hurriedly go about your business and wipe away the eternal flood of cum from between your legs. With the amount Jake just put inside you, you’re fairly confident that even a human with an average sense of smell could sniff him all over you.

The long stalk back to your bunk is made silently and carefully. Norm is fast asleep on the top bunk he unhappily shares with Jake, the aforementioned’s bunk empty and cold, the link unit whirring quietly. Just the sight and sound of it makes you unnaturally nervous, and you turn to speed towards your bottom bunk and peer at Trudy. She’s out like a light. 

The thin blanket is pulled to your chin once you settle in the sheets, and you refuse to accept that it’s cowardice you feel when the sound of the link unit slowly begins to fade and Jake hauls himself out with a pained groan. You remain very still as he fumbles for his chair, though you fight the urge to get up, help him and while you’re at it, kiss him until he can’t breathe.

You hope your acting has improved since your terrible attempts of hiding your crush and try to make it look as though you’re asleep, but the distinct sound of rolling wheels makes its way towards where you sleep; you steady your breaths so it looks like you’re out of it, and perhaps Jake will fall for it this time. 

Your stomach tightens when the wheels stop next to your bed, and you’re uncomfortably aware of the set of eyes staring at you curled up and facing the wall.

Jake’s hand brushes the back of your head gently, and you’re not sure if that means you’ve been caught, but then you feel Jake’s fingers brush a section of hair away from your neck and nearly sigh at the feeling of his mouth pressing a kiss to the nape of your neck. It is so sweet, so fond and gentle, and annoyingly quick. He pulls away and the sound of wheels roll towards his own bunk.

Every sound he makes feels like it’s right in your ear. 

You almost wish you’d rolled over and took his face into your hands. But Jake’s smooch against your nape feels like a stolen secret, something shared between only you two, something special. 

No matter, you think as you wriggle to get comfortable. He’ll be there in the morning. And it’ll be the man you’ve wanted the entire time who wants you back who receives all your stirring desires.

[nopanamaman]

How do mutants in the Facility live?

Patreon Loredump. August 2023

One of the most frequent types of questions I get are about life in the Facility. So it seems like a good topic to start my loredumping series with! 

Apologies in advance for all the photo examples, I hope they work fine for getting the vibes across.

Overview

The facility dome is visible in the distance.

The facility in general – or, as it’s officially known, the Zh. I. Alferov National Institute of Anomalous Research – is a large structure located on the border of the Zone. Its most notable feature is the massive dome surrounded by an outside wall.

The wall. In real life, the famous building of НИЦЭВТ.

The latter is a building in itself, containing offices, lecture halls, resting and dining quarters for researchers, as well as minor labs. All entrances are supervised, though not totally closed off to the public. Excursions, official meetings, TV reports – all of those happen within the wall.

But you will not find any mutants here. As you may have already guessed, all the major laboratories, anomalous artefacts, and, of course, mutants are housed in the dome. The entrances to the dome are monitored and equipped with anomaly scanners, allowing only authorised personnel and mutants to travel between its sectors.

Mutants cannot traverse the facility unsupervised.

What is the mutant classification system?

Depending on their anomalous characteristics, cooperability and method of containment, mutants are sorted into types and numbered groups. Individual mutant numbers usually look like XT000-000.

Let’s use Dmitry as an example.

Dima’s serial number is DT001-319.

The type constitutes the first part of the mutant’s number. Dima’s mutation is Directional Type, hence the letters DT at the start (for the record, KT stands for Kernel Type).

Next we have the 00X number. Mutants are assigned a 001, 002, 003 or 004 class depending on the potency and containability of their mutation – kinda like SCPs, yeah. Dima has a very powerful mutation he has good control over, plus he is sound of mind, making him suitable for 001 containment.

The last three digits are the overall number of the mutant within their type. So if Dima’s are 319, the facility has had 318 directional-type mutants on record prior to his arrival. This does not mean they were as powerful or had the same level of control over their telekinesis, just that they possessed a similar mutation to some extent.

How do different mutant classes live?

001

001 quarters example. Not too different from a hospital or sanatorium

Subjects ranked as 001 are extremely powerful, have good control over their powers and are, most importantly, docile. Since their mutations are very potent and difficult to forcefully contain, the go-to approach is making them not want to leave.

001s spend most (if not all) of their conscious lives surrounded by doctors. The latter foster a particular mindset in their subjects, where the world outside is presented as a place that is unanimously hostile to mutants. This is done by means of propaganda, reminders about their family’s supposed mistreatment and, in case a mutant has some favourable recollections of their childhood, gaslighting. Additionally, subjects are never left alone with each other.

001s get very luxurious treatment by facility's standards, with much bigger, more comfortable rooms than other mutant types. They're even allowed to have gaming consoles, TVs with VHS and video players, and their own bookshelves. Each mutant has their own separate room, which is kept under constant camera surveillance with the toilet being the only blind spot.

Special folders are issued to 001s before experiments with lower-ranked mutants.

Experiments held on 001s are relatively humane so as not to discourage them from staying at the facility. They do undergo daily checkups mostly designed to monitor their mental state. 001s are also active participants in experimentation on lower-ranked mutants, who they are taught and encouraged to treat as lesser beings.

001s are a high-risk investment, so their numbers are far smaller than those of 002 and 003-class mutants. Additionally, because of the potential danger they present, the institute is quick to dispose of 001 subjects by either termination or reclassification to 004. Though, if a 001 manages to stay cooperative long-term, they can become a very valuable asset for the facility.

002 and 003

002 and 003 quarters example. Though, they’re typically not as well-kept

002 and 003 mutant classes can be grouped together, since their treatment is largely the same. Both of these types’ mutations are easy to forcibly contain. The difference is their danger levels. 003s require close monitoring to not be harmful to others, while 002s are borderline harmless. Both types are characterised by general cooperability.

002s live in wards for 2 to 4 people, while 003s are more commonly placed in single-person wards to prevent accidents. A standard room includes a bed, a desk and a small bathroom (multiple beds and two desks in bigger wards).

KT got to take a dinosaur plushie to her room for good behaviour.

Mutants are allowed to borrow books from the library, as well as get drawing and writing materials. If they behave well, they can get a toy or even be lent a handheld console for a few days. 

002s and 003s have breakfasts, lunches and dinners together, and can spend some time in the playroom with other mutants (that’s also where they can play computer games and watch TV) – all under very strict surveillance, of course.

In some ways, their treatment is much less cruel than that of the elite 001 subjects.

KT before the DT experiment.

Though, not when it comes to experiments. 002s and 003s are very common, and are thus treated as disposable material in a scientific sense. The people holding experiments on them are a lot less concerned with minimising the subject’s pain or discomfort. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for mutants of these classes to sustain serious injuries or die as a result of experimentation.

That said, 002s have the highest likelihood of getting released from the facility, given they meet the conditions for it (more on that below).

004

004 quarters example. Basically a prison bunker

004 is a special category reserved for powerful mutants that refuse or physically cannot cooperate. This number can also be issued as a temporary or permanent punishment to misbehaving mutants. The 004 quarters are located underground and have the highest level of security, acting as a sort of bunker for the most dangerous subjects the facility has.

004 rooms are even more barebones than those of 002 and 003s. They have no access to entertainment (unless it is somehow required to contain their mutation) and cannot leave their room under any circumstances. They are more weapons than test subjects.

Do mutants receive education?

All mutants from class 003 and above receive basic education, learning to read, write and count. They additionally get curated history and sociology lessons. Some mutants, namely 001s, attend mandatory classes in certain disciplines to better apply their mutation. For example, Dmitry studied anatomy to know the precise positioning of internal organs.

Mutants are also free to study whatever sciences interest them in their free time by asking for educational materials at the library. Needless to say, most kids aren’t too interested in that, and are very uneducated compared to their outside peers.

Is there censorship in the facility?

All the media mutants are exposed to at the facility is strictly controlled.

6 y.o. Dima and his politically correct PSP.

The only movies, cartoons, comics, books and games allowed are those that either don't feature the Zone or mutants at all, those that show the discrimination mutants face outside, or those that are very obvious anti-mutant propaganda.

In essence, there are no positive depictions of human-to-mutant interaction, aside from ones between mutants and noble scientists. And, of course, nothing that goes against the general government ideology.

Can mutants be released from the facility?

It is generally assumed that mutants that go into the dome do not come out.

While they are largely dehumanised, the facility is still publicly presented as a sort of scientific sanatorium and hospice for those that cannot safely exist in society. Releasing mutants that know the truth behind the institute’s experiments into the wild is simply of no benefit to the government. So the majority are terminated once their scientific potential is exhausted or if they become too expensive to contain. As a result, few mutants live to adulthood.

Though, there are exceptions to the rule. Occasionally, mutants deemed non-hazardous can be released back into society. This is applicable to mutants that have not experienced significant mistreatment from the facility, lack the ability to talk about their experiences and optimally have been brainwashed by an appropriate 001 subject.

Have other mutants before DT and KT ever escaped?

The funny thing is, escapes aren’t a particularly rare occurrence.

Dmitry and Katya’s escape in KT’s Official Guide to Coolness.

Despite getting a lot of funding, the facility itself is very disorganised. Most of the money is blatantly pocketed by the higher-ups, so a lot of its structures and equipment are subpar – this includes its outdated safety systems. To top it all off, the security staff isn’t especially well-paid, so their diligence is highly questionable.

With all that piling up, there are around 3 cases of low-level escapes every year. Because of tight budgets and plenty of work to do as is, these escapes are generally brushed under the rug. The institute still keeps tabs on the escapees in case they happen to show up on the radar, but it rarely organises active searches or alerts the public for that matter.

DT and KT’s escape stood out because it was anything but low-level, and pretty bombastic at that. But even that didn’t warrant a public announcement for fear of panic and reputational damage. So if you’re an 003 mutant looking for an opportunity to sneak out… Hell, man, just go for it.

Wrap-up

That’s about all I can say about mutants’ life in the research centre, scratch some small factoids here and there. I tried to answer the most common questions regarding the topic, so I hope your curiosity was satisfied!

[alan-in-the-outernet]

I'm following up the merging drabble bc the idea didn't leave my brain

Noogai, after doing it's computer brain speed-read of Alan's memories, is slowly comprehending that Alan had been right. He wasn't a missing piece. He'd been a regular human.

Absorbing Alan had also given Noogai insight on how he worked. Including the dormant power Alan didn't even realize he had.

Noogai delves into its own mindscape, searching. It had known from the start that Alan wasn't fully absorbed. A small kernel remained, remaining separate from the rest. Noogai had assumed this was the culmination of Alan's life. It was the sum of all of his experiences, his living, the very core of his self. Noogai had assumed that, in time, the weird little boundaries between this remaining spark and the rest of its own Self would fade, and they would be unified properly.

As it investigates the spark, Noogai is dismayed to realize. It had been wrong.

The dormant spark of Alan Becker slumbers in its hold, drifting gently as Noogai handles him with utmost care. It had Severely miscalculated. It had stolen and *consumed* a human, taken him from his life and family and forced him into merging.

Noogai felt... regret.

(It hadn't absorbed his soul and personality, but it had immersed itself in his memories, to understand the human and stick worlds from a mortals point if view. Alan's memories and experiences were beginning to influence Noogai, making it less... unwavering, in its convictions. Making it question what it once saw as immutable fact)

Luckily for them both, Noogai had been so careful. When it merged with Alan, it had taken him apart so meticulously. Bit by bit, studying every piece, every cell, lear ing how it all fit together. Learning how humans worked.

In the moment, it had been trying to understand how its "missing piece" had become human, and it had wanted to make the merging as seamless and painless as possible.

Now, with such detailed knowledge on how the human body, how Alan specifically, was designed, it was able to begin its new goal. Put Alan back together.

Right what it had wronged.

Noogai takes that newly acquired data, and its vast, versatile power, and it sets about rebuilding Alan's body. It weaves memories back into the physical form, and it carefully retrieves the slumbering spark, his Soul, and sets it into the recreated vessel.

It still has copies of his memories. And despite all its careful crafting, the body is not the same.

Things will never be the same.

But that doesn't mean all is lost.

Laying on the floor, drawing his first breaths in his new body, Alan wakes up.

*HAPPY ARM GESTURES*

Hngh THIS IS SO COOL.. the slow realization.. the dread.. the realizing it is WRONG.. slow meticulously having taken him apart.. now putting him back together..

Changed forever.. but alive..

Hngh I LOVE THIS..

[madamlaydebug]

“Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.”

~Fritz Williams

“Phoenix rising from the ashes.” This phrase popped into my head recently, and I wasn’t sure why until I did the research. As the story goes, the phoenix is a mythical bird with fiery plumage that lives up to 100 years. Near the end of its life, it settles in to its nest of twigs which then burns ferociously, reducing bird and nest to ashes. And from those ashes, a fledgling phoenix rises – renewed and reborn.

And now I get it. This is the story of my life in the past few months – especially the part about burning ferociously. Life presented me with some challenging circumstances that left me just hanging on. And now, sanity has returned. I look out with fresh eyes. The fog has lifted, and the dark clouds have moved on.

My experience is not unique – it happens to all of us at some point, it’s a part of the human journey. But this was my time, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned along the way.

Resistance is natural

When life threw me a curve, I longed for the turmoil to be over with. I wanted to pick myself up and move on. I tried hard to create a plan, to know what I didn’t know, to gain control. I was so busy trying to make things happen that I overlooked what was actually happening.

I ignored my feelings and resisted the present moment. Yes, me, the one who writes aboutwelcoming all of our experience with a loving, open heart. I was doing everything but.

Finally, I realized my approach wasn’t working. I stopped trying. I let myself be frustrated and impatient. I admitted that there was so much I didn’t know, and I let go of figuring it all out. Life was messy, so I suspended my fruitless attempts to clean it up.

And this was the beginning of the fire, as there was space for feelings and reactions to surface.

Things happen in their own time

When I look back I see that I had very little control over what happened. The seasons of my experience had to run their course – severe winter storms, cold and darkness, then the seeds hidden from view beginning to sprout (very exciting!). The best I could do was ride the waves, which I did with varying degrees of success.

Forgetting and remembering joy

When darkness descends, joy is blotted out, buried, seemingly non-existent. Everything weighed like a heavy burden, all my activities felt like obligations. When I realized that I had forgotten joy, I created a “want-to-do” list. Every time I found myself wandering around in a fog, my job was to pull out the list and do something enjoyable or productive. I organized closets andtook walks, finally starting to see the beauty around me.

And I focused on others – being a good friend, showing up for someone in need.

My self-care didn’t suffer. My diet stayed healthy, and I kept up with yoga. But some people going through hard times can benefit from paying special attention to the basics of daily living – good diet, exercise, limited alcohol.

Staying close to the bone

Things started to shift when I made the commitment to find direction in my moment-to moment experience. The big picture was way too nebulous, but I realized that in each moment there was a kernel of truth, a clarity, a “yes” that showed me my next step.

I recognized that this guidance had been there all along, but I was too caught up in trying to find solutions to see it. When I let go of paying so much attention to the stories running through my mind, of trying to control, of avoiding strong feelings, much to my surprise, I found the groundedness I was looking for – the truth in every moment.

Support was essential

At the beginning, I was going it alone, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Eventually, I reached out, allowing the vulnerability of asking for support. It came in so many beautiful, unexpected ways, but I had to let people know I needed it. And a few sessions with a therapist offered some very useful insights.

The clouds do part

“This too shall pass” were empty words to me. I looked into the future, and all I could see was confusion. My negative mind had taken over, and I couldn’t see my way out.

But the clouds do part in their own time. The human spirit is resilient and wants to find its way home to wholeness. I see this over and over in my work. I facilitate a bereavement group at a retirement community for people who have lost their spouses after sometimes 50+ years of marriage. You can just tell when someone walks through the door that they will announce they no longer need the group. They are renewed; they have gone into the darkness and found their way through.

One day I realized that I was happy, and soon after, I saw that I was thriving. I had been through the fire and emerged whole and clear, with doors opening in so many wonderful ways. The sad and frustrated stories in my mind had fallen away, and the emotions that had captured me softened. I can breathe freely again.

Eventually opening to the lessons

When people said I would look back and appreciate this time, all I could do was groan. When I was in the thick of it, it seemed like it would never end. And now, with the sun shining and flowers blooming, I can reflect on what I have learned.

Let things happen.Give up trying to control.Don’t pretend you know what you don’t know.Stay close to what you know is true in the moment.Feeling bad isn’t wrong – it’s just how things are sometimes.Take good care of yourself.Engage with others.Reach out for support.When the time is right, feel the emotions.Get perspective – learn what not to do next time.

[zodiactalks]

Top 6 LIARS of the Zodiac

Let's face it, we all lie every now and then.

Whether it's little white lies meant to keep the peace or huge lies that can destroy a friendship or relationship, lying is just part of the human experience.

After all, we all want to be seen in the best light possible, and sometimes lying is the easiest way to get there.

This isn't to say that lying is good or moral, but rather that it's something we all do now and then.

However, some Zodiac signs do it a lot more often than others.

While some Zodiac signs are so blunt, they find it almost impossible to lie, others practically lie by default and need to make a conscious effort to not do it.

Some lie to present themselves in the best light possible, others lie to avoid drama, and some lie because they just can't make up their mind about things.

Regardless of the reason, the following 6 zodiac signs are huge liars:

#1. Gemini

Geminis are known for being sincere and open, which often means that most people don't peg them as liars and, to be fair, they're not.

What they are is tremendously unreliable, to the point where believing they'll do what they say they'll do is setting yourself up for disappointment.

They often don't mean to lie or to fool you. It's just that their indecision and habit of changing their mind will make them look like it, even if they meant what they said at the time.

Yes, it's much better to take people at their word, but in the case of Geminis, you do it at your own risk.

If you want to minimize any misunderstandings, make sure to double and triple check with them whenever they promise something, as committing to the same thing over and over again can help keep their indecisiveness to a minimum.

#2. Cancer

Because of their warm and charitable personality, most people are inclined to naturally believe anything that a Cancer says, which is a huge mistake.

Though they rarely outright lie about things, Cancers have a way of exaggerating things to the point they barely resemble facts, which can lead to some pretty serious misunderstandings.

For the most part, though, Cancers' lies aren't particularly harmful and are just a product of their overactive imagination.

There is an exception to this rule, though, and one that you should keep in mind. If a Cancer finds themselves in a stressful situation, they're very likely to lie in hopes of getting out of it.

Does it work? Not really. They're just postponing the inevitable.

#3. Leo

Leos love being the center of attention and they're not afraid of lying to get there.

As they see it, if people are too dazzled by their brilliance to catch their lies and exaggerations, does it even matter if what they're saying isn't technically true?

While Leos prefer to back their lies with a kernel of truth, this isn't always a requirement, and if Leo genuinely believes they can fool others, they'll lie about the most outrageous things.

Will someone catch them on their lies? Almost certainly, but Leos tend to be so charismatic that most people will be willing to let their lies slide.

#4. Libra

We usually associate lying with drama, as that's what happens when you're caught in a lie, but for Libra, lying is their golden ticket to a drama-free life.

Libra's day-to-day life is peppered with little white lies meant to make life easier for them and everyone around them.

They'll compliment your outfit even if they hate it; they'll say they're not annoyed when they're ready to explode; they'll pretend they know where they're going when they have no idea.

The list goes on and on.

When a Libra lies, they're not trying to be manipulative. They're just trying to get by, while upsetting as few people as possible.

#5. Capricorn

Capricorns are pragmatic liars who see lies as tools whenever convenient.

They're usually not the kind of people who will lie for the joy of it, but they're also not the kind of people who'll think twice about lying if they can get something they desire.

When you think about it, this isn't really surprising. Capricorns are known for being ruthless in the pursuit of what they desire, so something as honesty and "the truth" won't stand in their way for long.

#6. Pisces

Though they're known for being friendly and warmhearted, Pisces are dedicated liars practiced at telling tales where they always come out looking good.

They may or may not be interested in being the center of attention, like Leo, but they're certainly invested in coming off as sympathetic and "the good one" in any story they tell.

This means that, while they usually won't lie about what happened, they'll paint a picture where everyone else is on the wrong but them.

Though some may claim that it's hard to tell when Pisces is lying, it's actually pretty easy.

Just assume they're omitting a lot of details about their own actions whenever they're sharing a story.

[softlighter]

Dear Unsent Letters Writer

Hello! Lovely to not-meet you! Thank you for signing up, and thank you for writing a work for me, I am truly so excited already to just be participating, and the prospect of receiving a work has me absolutely giddy! Now, let's get down to business, shall we?

Likes: I love Happy Endings and Not Totally Angsty Endings, basically, I need a kernel of hope in there at the end and not a complete tragedy. Bitter and sweet combined, y'know? I really do need a kernel of hope and to just not be completely devastated come the end, basically, not a distressing ending, please. Additionally, I love complex characterization, not one-note, and I love feeling characters as human. The human experience is so rich! I love fairy tales and mythological allusions, so if you go the AU route with that, I would be very down for that! Same thing for Shakespeare, I’m a huge Shakespeare nerd, and any allusions or inspirations for that would be more than welcome! I do love smut, and I write it myself, but I absolutely do not expect it. If you find yourself inspired, though, I will be delighted! I’m not against dead dove themes, but again, not a fan of completely distressing endings. Finally, if a general overarching theme I just love is hope.

For me absolutely Do Not Wants, I think they’re self-explanatory, and include scat, watersports, suicide, self harm, unprompted crossovers, character bashing, addiction/substance use, homophobia/transphobia, use of the first person outside of epistolary itself.

Request #1: Ancient Scribe & Modern Scholar (Original Work) Books and Articles, Journals and Diaries I think what's drawing me to this prompt is the openness. Is the ancient scribe a hero? Have they been forgotten by society? Is the modern scholar researching their work in desperation or out of pure curiosity? I will admit, part of my interest in this prompt is because of the potential romantic spin one could take on this, on two people interested in the same topic years apart, but that is absolutely optional, and I would love to read about admiring someone and learning about the person behind their work, too. What does their research/work say, and then maybe what does their journal say? What do they think versus how do they feel? I would love if this was fantasy, and I would be most appreciative if this was between two women, but I'm really leaving this up to you. Some ideas to throw at you if you're stuck: - the ancient inventor of a cure for an ailment the modern scholar suffered from and who is now reading the journals and works their hero who they owe their life to - two priests/priestesses devoted to the same god(dess) centuries apart - someone researching how to cure a broken heart/grief and someone in the midst of that pain - someone who discovered a prophecy and recorded it, and then the scholar realizes they are the subject of the prophecy Really, go wild! I'm excited to see what you come up with.

Request #2: Sally Jackson/Poseidon (Percy Jackson and the Olympians [TV]) Books and Articles, Journals and Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio or Video Message Transcripts Whew, where to begin! I love a love story, through and through, and I would be most appreciate of any angle that really emphasizes the enduring aspect of their love, even if it's not a traditionally happy ending where they end up together. There's an idea I have where the epistolary aspect is a book/article going through Poseidon's lovers and how Sally is or isn't like those lovers, and there's absolutely potential to bring Medusa in here if that's your vibe, but not necessary! Honestly, I also love the idea of either of them writing and keeping literal unsent letters to each other, about each other, about Percy, about their lives. Why or why not each letter is or isn't sent could be interesting, too, what is "worth" it and what isn't. Selfishness v. selflessness, etc. I just adore Sally Jackson, and I think she deserves the world. If you wrote 1k about Poseidon adoring her, I'd be thrilled.

Request #3: Alicent Hightower/Rhaenyra Targaryean (House of the Dragon) Books and Articles, Journals and Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio or Video Message Transcripts I love messy sapphics, and I am here for all passion and fury and desperation and, at the end of it all, this quiet, enduring, stubborn love for each other. Maybe it's what gets them through, maybe it's what damns them, but the love they have for each other, even as it evolves. Are the letters sent, are they not? What is said and what isn't said between them, what is heard? I am also here for some tongue in cheek irony, i.e. "historians say they were very good friends" passages for the epistolary aspect and then them being very ;) good ;) friends ;) soft and romantic, smutty, or otherwise! If you want to do an AU where they're queens together and this is still what the historians report, I would cackle with utter delight! So no need to go super angsty with this, I'm also here for the soft letters they wrote as maidens to the scathing confessions they wrote as mothers and everything in between, so long as the love they hold for the other endures, even if they don't want it to. Maybe especially if they don't want it to.

Request #4: Crown Princess/Her Arranged Marriage Bride (F/F) (Original Work) Letters I am here for the PINING. I am here for sensual tension, I am here for sexual tension, I am here for tentative and longing pens flowing over parchment and love, above all else. How did this match come to be? How do they both feel about it? Is either party less-than-willing? What's making them both go along with it? I would really love and appreciate a happy, sweet fic for this, so write as much fluffy sapphic love to your heart's content! Also, if you want to make one of the women a she/they baddied and/or a they/them baddie, I am SO Here for it, but you're not obligated to!

Again, thank you for all your hard work in advance, and I look forward to reading your creation!

[nequittezpaswrites]

I would love to know more about how you came about developing Diana as an OC. Was it plot first, then character development? Or did Diana help the plot develop?

I’m just so curious!— I often have a hard time getting into OC-centric fics because I sometimes can’t connect with the OC, but I find myself very intrigued by Diana. She’s the type of character I’d obsess over making moodboards and Pinterest boards for. 😂

This is a fun question! I hope you’ll forgive the lengthy response.

What came first was the talent, actually.

Inter Vivos began life as an Aro x OC fic, and I wanted to create a character with a talent which would draw him in, in particular. The idea of a talent for influencing people sprang to mind immediately. Originally, I thought about making Diana a vampire to begin with--but the problem is that any vampire with sense who had that kind of talent would probably do their best to stay well away from the Volturi.

So, the OC had to start out human. She also had to be in a position where she would be noticed by Aro and the Volturi, without being eaten. So she had to stumble on the secret, but there had to be a compelling reason why she couldn’t just be killed or turned right away.

With these constraints, investigating a loved one’s mysterious death in Volterra came to mind immediately as the opening for the story, and it demanded a certain sort of character: someone suspicious enough to worry immediately; someone proactive and clever enough to track her loved one down; someone brave enough to walk into almost certain danger in order to save her loved one; and someone cunning enough to put together fail-safes that would, if not guarantee her safety, at least guarantee serious repercussions if anything were to happen to her.

Diana’s character unfurled from there. The story was initially going to be pretty straightforward--Diana striking the bargain for time, then doing her best to hate Aro as she slowly gets to know him, failing, and ultimately romance ensues. The hybrid pregnancy plot did not exist at all.

Diana’s character shaped the plot very significantly from there. For one thing, she’s a little too similar to Aro to make for good romance, at least in my opinion. They’re both cunning and curious and share a lot of the same values. That made it hard to come up with good conflict beyond “you ate my sister.”

(Aro, for his part, is inherently difficult to write a romance with, because when you’ve seen every thought everyone’s ever had immediately upon meeting them, it’s easy to make judgments about who you like and who you don’t like. I don’t subscribe to love at first sight, but for Aro it does seem likely that he would experience love at first touch. And while I could have written a story where Aro fell in love immediately and had to slowly woo an extremely reluctant Diana, that isn’t the sort of romance I’m interested in writing. Also, CarnivorousMuffin and Vinelle’s meta and fics have convinced me that Aro is mostly gay for Carlisle, and I’m now incapable of shipping him with anyone else.)

With the pairing that inspired the story originally in tatters, I scrambled for candidates to salvage this as a romance. Writing the Volturi is difficult because, aside from Aro, the rest of them have very, very few lines.

I narrowed down the candidates to Marcus and Demetri. Once the hybrid pregnancy plot was involved (which was a natural extension of the political situation), Demetri was out. We get very little from him in canon, but he does come across as very polite and dutiful, and thus not inclined to hit on a woman who is basically royalty and thus above his station. That left Marcus, who already had an edge because while he only says like two sentences in canon, he has a solid backstory from which his character can be extrapolated. And that extrapolated character is different enough from Diana for me to work with.

TL;DR: The kernel of a plot gave me Diana’s character, which then imploded the planned plot and forced me to rewrite the whole thing.

[anonanimal]

the night house was ok i guess. spoilers if u care. i love rebecca but besides her. the premise was more fun than the execution. she had a near-death experience years ago and it wants her back final-destination-style so her husband starts serial killing doppelgangers of her to placate it in a copy of their house he built on the opposite side of the lake to confuse it. and he's doing this based on info from occult books he got at a bookshop. that's an incredible premise. a lot of the haunting stuff was kind of lame. and i'm not sure makes sense. the ending was kind of lame. she basically gets no time to think about and further explore the "my husband was a serial killer. to help me, sure. but still." the unraveling of the mystery was the best stuff. some scenes of beth interacting with other people were great character moments. the indents on her skin as Not Owen touches her were cool. the movie wasn't brave enough to have her fuck a ghost but whatever. not like everyone's favorite orgasm euphemism "la petite mort" wasn't right there the whole time for this movie to play with. i mean it tried a little when she touches the air where Not Owen might be and she swoons into the boat. there's scenes like these where the movie tries out a love continuing after death thing but has to throw it out because it's not actually her dead husband, and that's another thing she barely gets to think about before the end. think it suffered from a lack of details of the occult shit he got up to, details of why the house was built the way it was. suffers from the interior design of the house being kind of boring. if death is Nothing then how come it does things and talks to her and has like. a will. fun movie with some problems and a kernel of stupidity at its heart. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

wait i just realized what "death" meant when it was telling her villain-monologue-style that it never left her and then jumped to her husband + why she mentions she had a history of depression. r u telling me death trying to get her to kill herself manifested as said history of depression and it started trying to get her husband to kill her instead when she was too strong-willed or whatever. god that's kind of stupid i'm revising my star rating. ⭐⭐⭐ i need to watch something that's stupid on PURPOSE immediately

also owen was the dumbest character ever written how the hell did he think killing himself would get death to back off when he'd already made multuple sacrifices in exchange for her life that didn't work. guess you could argue it's unclear owen knew what exactly was compelling him to kill her and he thought killing himself would be the end of the danger she was in. BUT his note says "you were right, there is nothing." which either means Death gave him the villain speech too oorrrr... actually that's all i can think it means.

see if death's personification here and death wanting beth is a metaphor for her depression and grief...there's no analogue for making literal human sacrifices here. owen literally killed people. death as a character in this movie is like half a metaphor. if the death entity is analogous to her depression then owen keeping it at bay by being her loving husband should be analogous to him doing....something nice??

TLDR:

death: "i need u bad baby plz take me back 🤗"

rebecca hall: "i liked u better when i thought u were my dead husband 😒"

me: "can we talk more about serial murder and mazes for trapping and confusing entities"

[rebrandedstoryline]

Rebranded - 2 - A Moment of Reprieve

Sun and Moon take a moment to enjoy a new experience before continuing on their journey.

Word Count: 1,199

The day had been spent in silence. Neither animatronic was willing to speak. Neither was really willing to move.

While the sun made its way through the sky, humans made their way along the nearby street.

With the rising light came the ability to study their surroundings. This warehouse, old and worn as it appeared to be, was still very much in use. Evidence of heavy machinery marked the dirt. Footprints were easy enough to spot.

Every passing vehicle was treated as a potential risk of discovery. They dared not move for fear of somehow drawing attention to themselves.

The workers sent by Fazbear Entertainment may very well have realized their escape by now. If not, then they inevitably would. Nine foot tall animatronics do not simply vanish. They moved - and they had indeed moved far under the cover of night. Just not far enough to feel secure in their temporary shelter.

They knew not what time it was when the humans first began to arrive at the warehouse. All that they knew was that the sun had risen rather high in the sky.

The two could do nothing but remain still and hidden, though they studied what these humans did. This place appeared to behave as some sort of temporary storage. For what, the bots did not know.

Large wooden crates full of white bags were unloaded from massive vehicles. Thankfully the people appeared to be disinterested in assuring the security of the building. The crates were simply unloaded and then left wherever they had been placed.

None ever drew close enough to the hidden animatronics to risk discovering them. Few had even bothered to gaze in their general direction. Once their work was done the people left. They took with them their heavy vehicles, but left behind the crates.

The rogue animatronics remained perfectly still and silent until the activity on the road slowed to a trickle. By then the signs of dusk had already begun to show. However, they would not be leaving the security of the warehouse until after the sun had completely vanished from the sky.

They tentatively became active once it became clear that the people were unlikely to return. At which point curiosity overtook them. The contents of the crates became a subject of interest at that point. Specifically the contents of the white bags that were held within.

The bolder of the two was the one to take the initiative. Either out of genuine curiosity, or in order to prevent their twin from being put at risk should whatever lay within the bags prove dangerous.

Metallic claws were raked along the outside of a random bag in order to spill its contents. Thousands of kernels of some unknown grain spilled from the wounds inflicted upon the fabric.

This further piqued the interest of the animatronics. Trash could fuel them just fine, but they did prefer food. Grain made for an excellent fuel. Plenty of fuels used to power machines were the direct result of processing grain. This damaged bag was claimed for that very purpose. To be converted directly into essential power that would keep their animatronic bodies functioning.

Grain was shoveled into their mouths by the handful. Nearly the whole bag was consumed in pursuit of energy. The remaining contents of the bag were scattered. Once their fuel converters had been completely filled. Once their bodies had been assured a long enough charge to allow them to spend the following days travelling.

The warehouse had been made into the home of countless rodents and birds. The grain was quickly and readily sought out.

First by the birds.

Then by the rats.

These animals showed no fear in the presence of the animatronics. Quite the opposite. The birds proved to be just as curious of the machines and the machines were of them.

The more docile of the animatronics extended a long arm to offer these curious birds a place to land. What could be described as a sense of childlike infatuation overtook them as a number of these surprisingly trusting birds proceeded to land on their extended limb.

“Pigeons~?” The curious AI inquired, peering towards their twin as if in search of confirmation. Or perhaps to make sure that their twin was able to share in the excitement of the moment. Neither of them had ever been able to draw so close to a bird before.

In the rare event that a member of the animal kingdom might succeed in breaking into the Pizza Plex, it had always been removed before any of the animatronics could become too distracted by it.

The other animatronic drew closer, curiously rotating their circular head to the side as they studied the tiny avians that had settled upon their twin’s arm.

“Doves, I think.” The other replied, tentatively extending a hand as if to touch one of the birds. The birds, however, responded by fluttering off. A disheartening interaction, for sure. Though there was at least an understanding that, for the birds, the presence of food had become more enticing than their interest in the animatronics.

“They’re so pretty, Moony~” The original replied, contently watching as the avians went about their business. They gobbled up the kernels of grain that had been scattered upon the dusty floor.

Despite the tension of the hours prior, a sort of childlike joy had seemingly overtaken them. A comforting change for sure. After having been terrified for so long, it was nice to have this moment of reprieve.

“Yes, Sun... Very pretty~ I especially like that one there, with the black face.” Moon responded in turn, carefully motioning towards their favorite bird. His movements seemed purposefully slow, as if he feared that he may accidentally frighten the feathery animals.

Sun’s response was to hum excitedly as they carefully crouched down to have a closer look at the birds pecking at the floor.

Following this, there came a few moments of content silence between them. The only sound being that of the animals scurrying around in search of the scattered grain. The birds pecked and scratched while the rodents chomped and chewed. To think that something so mundane, even annoying in the eyes of people, brought these runaway animatronics such a sense of comfort.

For them this was a new experience. Something pleasant to observe. New information worth taking in. The one downside of the moment was the fact that it inevitably had to come to an untimely conclusion.

The sun settled down beyond the limits of the horizon. As the sky grew dark once more, the time to resume their journey set upon them. The birds had to be left behind. The warehouse had provided for them during their short time within it, but now they needed to put more distance between themselves and that forsaken Pizza Plex.

The remains of the empty grain bag were quickly consumed by Moon to eliminate the evidence of their presence and the crate was re-secured. The birds and the rats were left behind to enjoy the scattered grain.

The animatronics pressed on, moving further from the city. Further from the prison that had nearly become the cause of their second demise.

[choccy-zefirka]

Well then. I had to take a plane ride with some obnoxiously talkative neighbors that would have prevented me from taking a nap, so instead I decided to put on headphones and watch a movie. The in-flight entertainment catalog was not very varied, so I ended up settling on the live action Aladdin, which I have been blissfully avoiding all these years. And yeah, that sure was a movie.

I'd say that I enjoyed it less than both the Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, particularly the latter, which I actually had genuine fun with, albeit most probably because I watched it with a friend and we were so carried away by pointing at the screen and riffing off each other that it might have created an illusion of a grand old time, softening the flaws of the film. Anyway.

There were a number of things that I kind of liked about live action Aladdin. They almost, just barely, brought the experience to the brink of being fun.

I remember all the Blue Will Smith memes back in the day, but he actually was one of the least meh parts of the movie for me? His performance was charming, when he was being himself rather than emulating Robin Williams. And I really appreciated the idea of this version of Genie turning into a human once he was freed from the lamp. Aside from that, I was rather interested in some of the new additions/character expansions (and I actually laughed out loud at the "I am going to get some bread... To go with all the jams" bit, it aligns perfectly with my sense of humor), but then they sort of... slipped away.

I wanna draw a parallel with the visuals here: in some parts of the movie, like the cave of wonders and the landscapes in A Whole New World, the backdrop was rather muddled. Both in terms of a diluted colour scheme and in terms of overcluttered details that do not pop the same way as the more simplistic yet bold and expressive animated scenes.

The plot buildup feels the same: there were moments that made me mentally go "Ooh, nice", like the backstory of Jasmine's mom, or the hints that Jafar and Aladdin are foils of each other, with similar backgrounds as thieves, or the attempt to make the captain of the guard more three-dimensional than "Grr gotta chase Aladdin with a sword"; but then they were not explored in-depth.

And I get that, I am beset by blorbo concepts that come to me as kernels of potentially intriguing plot and then simmer into nothingness all the time. But I am a small gremlin with a mundane day job, not a big-name creator at a multi-billion business meant to entertain people across the globe.

My biggest disappointment, though, aside from the almost complete loss of Iago's personality (which is also why I felt it made little sense for Jafar to pull Iago into the lamp at the end, as this is now less of a sidekick that you want to take down with you, but a random borb that talks sometimes), was the fact that I fully expected the himbo Fantasy North European Prince to show up when Jafar tossed Aladdin into the middle of the snowy nowhere.

I wanted it to be his kingdom, and for him to come riding in on a sleigh or something, and be like "Hey man, I see you got the princess over me, no hard feelings, let me give you a hand". The story paid way too much attention to him during the first act, turning the original asshole suitor from the animated movie into a dumbass but well-meaning jock that got bitten by Rajah not because he was being a douche to Jasmine but because he could not resist petting the Danger Kitty, which. Valid.

Justice for Himbo Prince.

Oh, and I guess the nostalgia bait of the songs worked on me to some extent, and I am now having flashbacks to my own retelling of Aladdin that I toyed with but obviously shelved because I did not want to come off as culturally insensitive. Overall, not the worst alternative to failing to nap.

[pastelwitchling]

Seasons of the Storm by Elle Cosimano

⭐⭐.75

Oh my GOD, I EARNED this rant, do you understand me? I've EARNED it.

I don't know what's more devastating. The fact that I felt the need to finish this because I've DNFed so many books lately and desperately need to make it out of this reading slump, or the fact that the worst part about this book was all the wasted potential. In fact, that's the best way to really describe it. Reading this is the equivalent of watching the live-action Last Airbender movie; you start off excited with the concept because it promises epic adventures and elements at one's fingertips and rich characters; you see the kernels of good ideas, but none of it is ever used. The entire book rushes from one point to another, leaving every moment rushed and unimportant.

I was thrown off when Jack's own death scene in the first chapter started and finished within maybe two paragraphs, but I let it go. And then we got the same thing for the entirety of the rest of the book. It's all just getting from here to there with no time to take in ANYTHING.

The "Seasons" (I'll get to that in a minute) can't touch each other or they'll supposedly die. But no worries, because a few chapters later, they figure it's okay to touch each other, so that's not a problem anymore. Jack includes a bunch complicated science talk on how they can escape the Observatory, this place we've barely seen and have no feelings about, leaves a few maps for Fleur behind, and suddenly she can completely understand his idea. They talk a lot about how this and that is going to be a big deal and hard to manage, then manage it in less than a page, and move on. All the Seasons coming at them at once? They escape in, once again, about a page, and move on. Important character dies? We get maybe four lines dedicated to it, and move on.

The descriptions were just plain not well done. For however short the fight scenes were, they felt even shorter because I didn't understand half of what was going on. People would suddenly fall out of car windows in confusing ways that I had to read and reread to make sense of, people would "tense up" a LINE after they were just chatting and laughing like they sensed danger, but we as the reader never really get to experience that, and they talked a lot about these people controlling the seasons, but it never made any sense how they managed it. They never showed ANYBODY so much as lining the trees with frost, or making leaves change color, or making flowers grow. It seemed more like these people were being affected by the change in nature rather than them affecting any change themselves. So there goes the magic and whimsy.

Which brings me to the second biggest issue I had with this book. It was trying so hard to be Rise of the Guardians, Percy Jackson, and The Raven Cycle without ANY of the heart. I remember Jack Frost and his staff, I remember the abandoned amusement park in The Lightning Thief, I remember 300 Fox Way. Why? Because the authors took the time to explore the characters, their powers, and these places. All the campers at Camp Half-Blood had such presence. When the Athena cabin or ANY worked together, you knew you were going to see something amazing happen because you knew they weren't human. The characters in this book, however, felt like nothing BUT human. The fact that they were seasons felt more like an aside.

I expected whimsy and magic and epic battles using the elements, and instead I got a college setting with a bunch of science talk that left gaping plot holes in the story! Explain to me this; if Chronos, Gaia, and ALL of them are supposed to just be "vessels," what's their purpose? We never SEE any of them actually creating anything, never see them use their powers to change the weather. It changes based on their moods! If anything, having vessels for the seasons seems more like a liability! But oh, it has to fit the weird science logic that this book insists on having.

That's another issue; how convenient everything is, and how often everything happens off the page. They need money to escape; oh no worries, all the Seasons are unreasonably rich. (Why are Seasons saving up money? And how do they manage to save up money? For the three months they're out in the world, don't they have work to do controlling the weather? I'm assuming, since we never actually see it?)

Too much telling and not showing. We keep getting told about how close the eight of them are, but it's like they want us to forget that almost all the four Seasons (outside of Amber) forced and guilted their Handlers into giving up immortality to join them. Choose immortality or choose death at Chronos's hands because I want to escape where I will forever be immortal anyway. When Fleur had the actual NERVE to say that Marie had the choice to go where she wanted AFTER they had knocked her unconscious and forced her along with them? Oh but it's okay, it's okay, because every so often, we'll get a reminder of how guilty the Seasons feel about what they did to their Handlers, which makes it all okay. What a load.

So much was needlessly difficult for drama when it really could've been resolved so easily. Like the fact that Fleur starts an earthquake all by herself even though they have an army of other Seasons with them, another Spring included, and yet SHE had to be the one to start the earthquake by herself? Why? And why did Lyon have to be so damn cryptic about everything? With Chiron in Percy Jackson, you understand why he has to be careful with his wording; the gods are always watching, the Fates are always watching, one of the gods resides with them in the camp, and they have rules about anyone knowing too much about their future, especially a demigod hero. With this, Lyon just felt like a cheap knockoff of Chiron, keeping things vague so that Jack could a few pages later piece things together, even though Lyon could've just directly told him how to fight back. It made no sense.

What bothers me the most is what this could've been. This felt like the last book in a series, expecting to get the same amount of emotion and attachment we form to characters that we've had the chance to know for several books. Instead, this one skips to the end. I don't even know WHY they had to be so-called "embodiments of seasons" if they don't act that way. I love how much Jack loves Fleur, I love Amber and Julio, I love Fleur's strength, and I love the Handlers, too. (They deserved so much better.) But instead of leaning into the magical aspect that this book kind of promises, it crams in way too much and rushes through it all. I have a lot more problems with this book, but I'll end it here. I'm tired. After getting through it, however, after acknowledging what we could've had, the only thing I really have left to say is... man, what a waste.

[madamlaydebug]

“Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.”

~Fritz Williams

“Phoenix rising from the ashes.” This phrase popped into my head recently, and I wasn’t sure why until I did the research. As the story goes, the phoenix is a mythical bird with fiery plumage that lives up to 100 years. Near the end of its life, it settles in to its nest of twigs which then burns ferociously, reducing bird and nest to ashes. And from those ashes, a fledgling phoenix rises – renewed and reborn.

And now I get it. This is the story of my life in the past few months – especially the part about burning ferociously. Life presented me with some challenging circumstances that left me just hanging on. And now, sanity has returned. I look out with fresh eyes. The fog has lifted, and the dark clouds have moved on.

My experience is not unique – it happens to all of us at some point, it’s a part of the human journey. But this was my time, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned along the way.

Resistance is natural

When life threw me a curve, I longed for the turmoil to be over with. I wanted to pick myself up and move on. I tried hard to create a plan, to know what I didn’t know, to gain control. I was so busy trying to make things happen that I overlooked what was actually happening.

I ignored my feelings and resisted the present moment. Yes, me, the one who writes aboutwelcoming all of our experience with a loving, open heart. I was doing everything but.

Finally, I realized my approach wasn’t working. I stopped trying. I let myself be frustrated and impatient. I admitted that there was so much I didn’t know, and I let go of figuring it all out. Life was messy, so I suspended my fruitless attempts to clean it up.

And this was the beginning of the fire, as there was space for feelings and reactions to surface.

Things happen in their own time

When I look back I see that I had very little control over what happened. The seasons of my experience had to run their course – severe winter storms, cold and darkness, then the seeds hidden from view beginning to sprout (very exciting!). The best I could do was ride the waves, which I did with varying degrees of success.

Forgetting and remembering joy

When darkness descends, joy is blotted out, buried, seemingly non-existent. Everything weighed like a heavy burden, all my activities felt like obligations. When I realized that I had forgotten joy, I created a “want-to-do” list. Every time I found myself wandering around in a fog, my job was to pull out the list and do something enjoyable or productive. I organized closets andtook walks, finally starting to see the beauty around me.

And I focused on others – being a good friend, showing up for someone in need.

My self-care didn’t suffer. My diet stayed healthy, and I kept up with yoga. But some people going through hard times can benefit from paying special attention to the basics of daily living – good diet, exercise, limited alcohol.

Staying close to the bone

Things started to shift when I made the commitment to find direction in my moment-to moment experience. The big picture was way too nebulous, but I realized that in each moment there was a kernel of truth, a clarity, a “yes” that showed me my next step.

I recognized that this guidance had been there all along, but I was too caught up in trying to find solutions to see it. When I let go of paying so much attention to the stories running through my mind, of trying to control, of avoiding strong feelings, much to my surprise, I found the groundedness I was looking for – the truth in every moment.

Support was essential

At the beginning, I was going it alone, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Eventually, I reached out, allowing the vulnerability of asking for support. It came in so many beautiful, unexpected ways, but I had to let people know I needed it. And a few sessions with a therapist offered some very useful insights.

The clouds do part

“This too shall pass” were empty words to me. I looked into the future, and all I could see was confusion. My negative mind had taken over, and I couldn’t see my way out.

But the clouds do part in their own time. The human spirit is resilient and wants to find its way home to wholeness. I see this over and over in my work. I facilitate a bereavement group at a retirement community for people who have lost their spouses after sometimes 50+ years of marriage. You can just tell when someone walks through the door that they will announce they no longer need the group. They are renewed; they have gone into the darkness and found their way through.

One day I realized that I was happy, and soon after, I saw that I was thriving. I had been through the fire and emerged whole and clear, with doors opening in so many wonderful ways. The sad and frustrated stories in my mind had fallen away, and the emotions that had captured me softened. I can breathe freely again.

Eventually opening to the lessons

When people said I would look back and appreciate this time, all I could do was groan. When I was in the thick of it, it seemed like it would never end. And now, with the sun shining and flowers blooming, I can reflect on what I have learned.

Let things happen.Give up trying to control.Don’t pretend you know what you don’t know.Stay close to what you know is true in the moment.Feeling bad isn’t wrong – it’s just how things are sometimes.Take good care of yourself.Engage with others.Reach out for support.When the time is right, feel the emotions.Get perspective – learn what not to do next time.

[aismallard]

In university I took an anthropology class and one of our assignments was to make stone tools.

Yes, really.

And even though the professor introduced the basics to us (kinds of rocks that are flakey and sharp, how to choose a rock to chip it against, etc.), it was legitimately challenging. I realized how much Dunning-Kruger ignorance I had about this ancient, foundational technology. There is so much complexity I could easily imagine ancient experts on it producing superior stone tools and weapons with generations of experience.

Remember, we walk on the shoulders of giants. We are constantly exposed to innumerable lifetimes of human expertise condensed into things that we take for granted.

I remember some estimate that the Linux kernel, just the kernel, had something like 27,000 man *years* of work put into it. And that might be running invisibly in some machine somewhere you didn't even know had a computer inside.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”

[burningfeathersx]

6, 7, 9 !!!

6 ] How do you deal with betrayal or conflict in your relationships?

"I don't take outright betrayal. And talking."

Lucifer has only experienced betrayal from Stan (Satan) and Eli (God). He never forgave Eli and he's still working through things about Stan. He's developed some bad coping mechanisms such as self-harm that is meant to 'cleanse' himself in hopes he'll be worthy (a hold over behavior from his stages of grief when he Fell), repressing his vulnerable emotions which causes other self-destructive behavior, and imbibing in substances. He's got a strong abandonment fear and when he is 'abandoned', he tends to spiral even if it's mostly internalized and implosion. Eats at him worse than anything when he thinks he's been betrayed or discarded in his affections. Eventually it all coalesces into intense embitterment and hatred. If left to fester.

Rook has given him a lot of his current emotional intelligence skills and the Big One? Talking it out. He, admittedly, loses his temper even in his best attempts. Or 'talks' in a way that is not, erm, peaceful. But if there is a conflict, he TRIES to talk first and throw his weight around second. Sometimes it leads to big old blow out arguments, but in his experience--something always get solved if enough words get spewed out. Don't mistake his communication methods and wishes to 'talk it through' for healthy. He's said some mean shit and had some mean shit said to him. He's not perfect and no one else is, but it's better than his native propensity to bottle it up and make it worse.

Mind you, he only does this with people he's in a relationship with. He has far less patience for everyone else, usually.

7 ] What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals?

"Self-sacrifice is non-issue."

He had very little to lose back-when. And he didn't consider humans, demons, angels, or otherwise to be worth much in the scheme of things. He's always been protective in a sideways way when it came to his fallen and non-fallen 'siblings'. However, he was still willing to dash one on rocks to get where he was going if the ends justified, logically, the means.

He's less like that now.

Most of his 'sacrifices' now are limited to himself and his personhood. He's learned he can endure much of anything and keep a key kernel of himself intact. No one has managed to damage that tiny spark of Willpower and Self. Even when the rest of him might burn, rot, or crumble.

However, he's still a 'ends justify the means'. If it's down to the wire and it's either lose an asset like a demon or lose an asset like one of his children? The answer is simple. He'll kill five people to save many more, etc. Though very emotional under the five million onion layers, he operates by hard logic most of the time. Ignoring that emotional part of himself. This does not make him superior at morals.

9 ] What's your favorite way to relax or unwind?

"Relax? Unwind? Never heard of her."

He is a tightly wound spring even on his best of days. However, he has been known to downshift through substances, intimacy, time with loved ones, and just making himself sit in his favorite recliner and not-listen to the TV.

He doesn't really have hobbies. Though he will share activities with someone he cares about. Like playing a video game or watching a movie so long as it's with a loved one.

He's otherwise a master class brooder and workaholic. Either thinking too much while in a dim lit room or nose deep in his paperwork like it'll keep those thoughts away.

[riftresearcher]

Entry #2: The Local "Ghost-Train"

During my research into the local legends and mysterious occurrences, I came across an intriguing story from a Mr. Jacob Reynolds, a RETIRED engineer with years of experience working the railways. Jacob's tale has got to be one of the most fascinating and chilling accounts I've encountered, and it has become known as "The Mysterious Cargo." Or "Local Ghost-Train" According to Mr Reynolds, the event took place on a quiet, moonlit night when he saw something utterly inexplicable.

Jacob vividly remembers that night, even though it happened many years ago. He was out for a late-night stroll along the tracks when he saw an old freight train approaching. The sight of the train was peculiar in itself since no such train was scheduled to pass through at that hour. As it approached, Jake noticed that the train moved silently, an eerie contrast to the usual clattering and rumbling of a freight train.

What struck Jacob the most was the cargo being transported. The freight cars were filled with crates and barrels, but these were not ordinary cargo. Instead, they appeared ghostly and transparent, shimmering under the moonlight. The ghostly cargo seemed to fade in and out of existence as the train rolled by. Jacob watched in awe as the train continued its journey, eventually disappearing around a bend in the tracks.

Despite the surreal nature of what he had witnessed, Jacob felt compelled to report the incident. He contacted the railway authorities and recounted his experience, but his report was met with skepticism. A thorough investigation was conducted, but no evidence of the train or its ghostly cargo was ever found. The tracks showed no signs of recent use, and there were no records of any unscheduled trains.

As I delved deeper into the story, I sought to uncover any logical explanations for Jacob's experience. One possibility is that Jacob may have witnessed a residual haunting. Residual hauntings are believed to be imprints of past events that replay themselves, often without any interaction with the present world. Perhaps the phantom train Jake saw was a spectral replay of a long-forgotten freight train, eternally bound to its route.

Another theory is that Jacob experienced a TIME-SLIP, a phenomenon where individuals briefly glimpse a scene from another time. This would explain the anachronistic appearance of the train and its ghostly cargo. Time slips are rare and poorly understood, but they offer a fascinating explanation for Jake's encounter.

I also considered the possibility of an optical illusion or a trick of the light. Moonlit nights can create strange visual effects, and the human mind is capable of interpreting these effects in unusual ways. However, Jacob's detailed account and the specificity of the ghostly cargo make this explanation less convincing.

Local folklore adds another layer to the mystery. There are tales of a freight train that vanished under mysterious circumstances many decades ago, rumored to have been carrying a valuable but cursed cargo. Could Jacob have seen the spectral remnants of this ill-fated train? The idea is tantalizing and lends a supernatural air to the story.

I do believe him however, I lived in this town my entire life after all.

Jacob's encounter with the mysterious cargo has become a well-known tale in the community, passed down through generations. It serves as a reminder of the unexplained and the eerie possibilities that lie just beyond our understanding. While some dismiss the story as mere legend, others believe there is a kernel of truth to Jacob's account.

As a researcher, I remain open to all possibilities. The story of the mysterious cargo - OR - Local Ghost-Train challenges our perception of reality and invites us to consider the unknown. Whether it was a residual haunting, a time slip, an optical illusion, or something else entirely, Mr. Jacob Reynolds experience is a testament to the enduring power of the UNEXPLAINED.

ONE THING IS CERTAIN: the tale of the mysterious, local ghost-train has left an indelible mark on those who hear it. It sparks curiosity and a sense of wonder, encouraging us to look beyond the mundane and question the nature of our world. As I continue my research, I hope to uncover more stories like Jacob's, each adding a piece to the puzzle of the mysterious and the supernatural.

In conclusion, Jacob Reynolds' encounter remains one of the most enigmatic stories I've come across. It defies easy explanation and invites a myriad of interpretations. Whether you believe in the supernatural or seek logical explanations, the story of the mysterious cargo is a fascinating glimpse into the unknown.

And who knows... You've probably heard the train too.

(Have any strange or weird questions that want to be answered/solved? Send them my way! I would love to see what I can find!!)