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baelabong · 5 months ago

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ꜱᴇᴄʀᴇᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴠᴀʟʟᴇʏ

(ᴋᴀʀɪɴᴀ x ꜰᴇᴍ!ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ)

plot: karina as Rose and y/n as Lily. Karina can’t handle the thought of losing y/n, takes matters into her own hands, not very maturely …..

Pairing: toxic! Creditor! Karina x idiot! duchess!Fem!reader

Note/warnings: kissing, swearing, also this wasnt requested but again, i am working on requests because i love everything being requested so far. Karina isnt as much of an asshole as rose in the actual webtoon 🫣 but that’s because i believe lily can fix rose 😟😟 (i lie)

The sun dips below the horizon, casting long shadows across the mansion's garden. You’re sitting on the stone bench, Aeri beside you, the two of you huddled close as you whisper and laugh softly. Your hands are busy weaving a daisy chain, your fingers brushing occasionally, sending little sparks of warmth through your veins. Aeri’s presence is calming, a stark contrast to the whirlwind of emotions you often feel around Karina.

From the balcony above, Karina watches you, her expression darkening with every shared smile between you and Aeri. Her lip twitching in annoyance. There’s something raw and feral in her gaze, a storm brewing in her chest. She grips the railing so tightly her knuckles turn white, her breath coming out in slow, measured huffs as she tries to keep her temper in check. But the sight of Aeri’s hand resting on your thigh, her lips so close to your ear, breaks something inside Karina.

Karina’s thoughts are a chaotic mess as she leaves the balcony, her steps heavy as she makes her way down the stairs. Each step feels like it’s amplifying the burning rage in her chest, the jealousy searing through her like a wildfire. The image of Aeri’s hand on your thigh, her lips brushing against your ear, fuels her anger, twisting her thoughts into darker territory.

By the time she reaches the garden, the gravel crunching under her feet, the sound alerts you and Aeri. You both look up, your laughter dying down as you notice the storm brewing in Karina’s eyes. The shift in the atmosphere is palpable, the lightheartedness you felt moments ago vanishing into thin air.

“Karina,” you start, a soft smile playing on your lips, an attempt to ease the tension. But that smile quickly fades when you see the fury etched across her face, the way her eyes seem to pierce right through you.

“Leave,” Karina’s voice is sharp, cutting through the quiet of the evening like a blade. Her gaze is locked on Aeri, who flinches at the venom in her tone. “Now.”

Aeri hesitates, her eyes flicking between you and Karina, uncertainty evident in her expression. “Karina, I—”

“I said leave!” Karina’s voice rises, the anger she’s been holding back finally spilling over. Her fists clench at her sides, the tension in her body clear. Aeri’s eyes widen in surprise, and you can see the hurt flash across her face, but she doesn’t dare to argue further.

Aeri stands, her movements slow, as if she’s afraid to provoke Karina any more than she already has. She turns to you, her expression softening. “I’ll talk to you later, Y/N,” she says quietly, offering you a small, apologetic smile.

You nod, trying to reassure her, but your attention is mostly on Karina, who hasn’t taken her eyes off Aeri. As Aeri walks away, her footsteps fading into the distance, the silence that follows is thick, almost suffocating.

You finally look at Karina, whose chest is rising and falling with the effort to control her breathing. The fury in her eyes hasn’t subsided, but there’s something else there too—something raw and desperate.

“What the hell was that, Karina?” you ask, your voice shaking slightly, though you try to keep it steady. “You didn’t have to be so harsh.”

“Didn’t I?” Karina snaps, taking a step closer to you. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to watch her touch you like that? To see you laugh with her like... like I don’t even exist?”

That’s not even true! “” you insist, your own frustration bubbling to the surface. “You’re reading too much into this, Karina. Aeri is a friend, nothing more.”

Karina starts walking back towards the estate, heavy breathes and clearly stomping as she walks.

When you’re alone, Karina turns her gaze to you, her eyes wild and dark. “Do you enjoy making me jealous, Y/N? Do you like to see me suffer?”

You blink, taken aback by the accusation. “What are you talking about, Karina? Aeri’s just a friend—”

“Just a friend?” Karina cuts you off, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “You think I’m blind? The way she looks at you, the way you laugh with her, it’s more than friendship, and you know it.”

You stand up, your own anger rising to match Karina’s. “You’re being ridiculous. I’m allowed to have friends, Karina.”

Karina steps closer, her voice low and dangerous. “Not when they touch you like that. Not when they look at you like they own you. You’re mine, Y/N. Mine.”

Your heart pounds in your chest, a chaotic blend of fear, frustration, and a strange thrill at Karina’s possessiveness. “I’m not your possession, Karina. You can’t just control me like this—”

“Can’t I?” Karina’s voice drops to a dangerous whisper as her hand shoots out, gripping your wrist with a force that makes you wince. Her eyes darken, her pupils dilated with a mix of anger and something more primal. “You belong to me, Y/N. I’ve given you everything, and I won’t let someone like Aeri take you away from me.”

The intensity of her words sends a shiver down your spine, but you refuse to back down. “This isn’t love, Karina. This is obsession,” you say, your voice trembling but steady.

For a moment, her gaze wavers, and you see a flicker of vulnerability beneath the fury. “I love you,” she whispers, the desperation in her voice almost breaking your resolve. “I just... I can’t lose you. The thought of you with someone else... it drives me insane.”

Seeing the cracks in her tough exterior, you decide to take control. You pull her closer, dragging her towards the nearest chair with a force that surprises even you. Before she can protest, you push her down onto it, and in one swift motion, straddle her lap.

Her breath hitches as you move her hair away from her face, your fingers gentle as they trace her cheek. “Would I ever do this to Aeri?” you ask softly, your voice a low murmur against her skin.

Before she can respond, you begin kissing her face, your lips brushing against her forehead, her cheeks, her nose—anywhere but her lips. Each kiss is soft, deliberate, meant to convey the depth of your feelings for her. You can feel her body relax beneath you, the tension in her shoulders melting away as she leans into your touch.

“Y/N...” Karina’s voice is barely audible, a shaky breath escaping her as you press your lips to the sensitive spot just below her ear. Her hands find your waist, gripping you tightly, as if she’s afraid you’ll disappear if she lets go.

You trail kisses down her jawline, taking your time, letting her feel every moment. When you reach her neck, you suck gently on the skin, earning a quiet, breathy whimper from her. The sound sends a thrill through you, spurring you to kiss her harder, your teeth grazing the soft skin of her neck.

“Does this feel like I belong to anyone else?” you whisper against her throat, your voice teasing but laced with sincerity.

Karina’s grip on you tightens, her nails digging into your sides. “No,” she breathes out, her voice trembling with need. “No, you’re mine... only mine.”

You pull back slightly to look into her eyes, your hands cupping her face. “Exactly,” you say, your tone firm but loving. “I’m yours, Karina. You don’t need to be afraid of losing me. But you have to trust me.”

She looks up at you, her eyes glossy and vulnerable, and you lean down, capturing her lips in a deep, heated kiss. Karina responds immediately, her hands sliding up your back and pulling you closer, as if trying to merge your bodies together. The kiss is desperate, a little rough around the edges, her teeth grazing your bottom lip, tugging lightly before she soothes the sting with her tongue.

You let out a quiet moan, your body arching into hers, and she takes that as an invitation to explore further. Her hands slide under your shirt, fingers tracing the curves of your waist, her touch both possessive and gentle. The sensation makes you shiver, and Karina takes advantage of your distraction, deepening the kiss until you’re both breathless.

When you pull away to catch your breath, Karina’s lips follow yours, pressing soft, needy kisses along your jawline. “You’re everything to me, Y/N,” she murmurs between kisses, her voice rough with emotion. “I can’t... I won’t lose you.”

You press your forehead against hers, your breaths mingling as you cradle her face in your hands. “I’m not going anywhere,” you whisper, your lips brushing against hers with each word. “I’m right here, Karina.”

Karina’s eyes flutter shut, a shaky whimper escaping her as you begin to kiss down her neck again, your lips and teeth working together to leave a trail of possessive marks. Her body trembles beneath you, her hands clutching at your shirt as if it’s the only thing keeping her grounded.

“I love you,” she breathes out, her voice barely above a whisper, but the words are laced with so much intensity that it makes your heart ache.

“I love you too,” you reply, your voice soft but filled with conviction. You kiss her lips again, slower this time, savoring the taste of her, the way she melts into your touch, her body surrendering to you completely.

Karina’s hands slide back up to your waist, pulling you even closer, until there’s no space left between you. The kiss turns languid, a slow exploration of each other’s mouths, as if you’re both trying to memorize every detail, every sensation.

As the kiss deepens, a soft rustling sound reaches Karina’s ears. She freezes momentarily, her gaze shifting toward the source of the noise. Her heart pounds when she sees Aeri standing at the edge of the garden, her eyes wide with shock and hurt. Karina's lips curl into a subtle, satisfied smile.

Unaware of Aeri’s presence, you continue to kiss Karina, lost in the moment. Karina, however, sees Aeri clearly and feels a surge of possessiveness and triumph.

The kiss becomes more urgent and assertive, each touch and movement calculated to reaffirm her hold over you. Karina’s eyes, though half-closed in the intensity of the kiss, occasionally flicker back to where Aeri stands, her satisfaction growing with each second.

Without breaking the kiss, Karina turns her focus back to you, her grip on your waist tightening. The sight of Aeri's distress fuels something dark and possessive within her. She deepens the kiss, her lips moving with a fervent intensity as if to stake her claim.

You're lost in the kiss, oblivious to Aeri's presence, but Karina is acutely aware.

She revels in the knowledge that Aeri has seen her in this intimate moment with you. The kiss becomes more urgent, her movements deliberate, each touch meant to assert her dominance and ensure that Aeri understands her place.

"Does this feel like I'm letting you go?" she murmurs, her breath warm against your skin.

When Aeri finally turns and walks away, the sound of her footsteps fading into the distance, Karina pulls back slightly but maintains a smug smile. Her eyes meet yours, and you see a mixture of possessive satisfaction and triumph.

Eventually, you pull back slightly, your breath mingling with Karina’s. “I need to freshen up,” you murmur, giving her a tender kiss on the cheek before heading toward the mansion.

Karina watches you with a possessive gaze as you make your way through the grand hallway and into the bathroom. She then turns back toward the garden, her mind still buzzing with the intensity of the moment.

As Karina walks toward the bathroom, she unexpectedly bumps into Aeri, who has been waiting in the shadows. Aeri’s eyes are red, her face a mask of hurt and confusion. Karina’s smile widens, a dark satisfaction glinting in her eyes.

“Did you enjoy our little show?” Karina’s voice is low and taunting, laced with a sinister edge. She steps closer to Aeri, her gaze piercing.

Aeri flinches at the words, struggling to maintain her composure. “I... I just needed to clear my head,” she stammers, her voice barely above a whisper.

Karina’s smile remains fixed as she leans in slightly. “Well, now you know your place,” she says softly, her tone almost a purr of satisfaction. “I suggest you stay out of our way.”

Without waiting for a response, Karina brushes past Aeri and heads toward the bathroom, her demeanor radiating a mixture of triumph and possessiveness. The night’s events have left an unspoken tension hanging heavily in the air, with Karina clearly asserting her dominance over the situation.

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intrepid-fictioneer-7 · 2 years ago

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How to read the Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Light Novels

I was recently reminded that there is a lot of people who simply don’t know that they can read the Case Files light novels, and that there are people who do know but have no idea where to find them. This is especially a problem when these people have only watched the anime and want to know where they can find more of the story. Since it kind of requires you to go through some hoops (not a whole lot but still), I decided to take a page out of @humbertozero‘s excellent Fate/strange Fake resource post and make one for my other favorite Type-Moon Fate spinoff, the dossiers of El-Melon.

Read the First Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.1 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Second Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.2 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Third Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.3 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Fourth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.4 (PDF) (EPUB1) (EPUB2)

Read the Fifth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.5 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Sixth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.6 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Seventh Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.7 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Eighth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.8 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Ninth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.9 (PDF) (EPUB)

Read the Tenth Volume: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Vol.10 (PDF) (EPUB)

Important note!

It should be noted first that I am just the compiler here. I am neither the translator nor am I the files’ creator. So all credits go to...

Credits

Credits and thanks to TwilightsCall on the Beast Lair forums (from which the majority of the other creditors originally posted their contributions) for translating the first 4 volumes and some of volume 5, thus getting the ball rolling. Further thanks to azwhoisverybored for translating the rest of the series from volume 6 onwards, and thanks to Kneenaw for starting the translation for the rest of volume 5. Thanks to Dotelias for making EPUBs for volumes 1-3, thanks to cereal_ for making EPUBs of volume 4, thanks to u/confusedkuratowski on Reddit for making EPUB of volume 6, and thanks to ProtoformX for making PDFs and EPUBs for volumes 5 to 10 as well as for Adventures volume 1 and 2!

And big thanks to Makoto Sanda for writing Case Files in the first place!

Further explanations

Anime

The anime adaptation of Case Files, with the mouthful of a title that is Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note, is particular to use as an entry-point in the series, because it only partially adapts the series. See, the author, Makoto Sanda, said in interview that the two first arcs/cases in the series didn’t quite work as scripts for anime episodes, so the anime only adapted the third case/arc, Rail Zeppelin, which is more action oriented than the more mystery focused first arcs. But because they still needed to explain stuff like Gray, Reines, El-Melloi’s students, etc., many of whom are relevant characters to the arc, the first half/six episodes of the anime is about introducing them.

So to the question “where do I start reading after the anime?”, the answer is unironically to restart at volume 1. And then you may skip volumes 4-5 since they are the Rail Zeppelin arc and there are not much differences besides some characters not being present during that arc. This is why I think you can watch the anime first if that’s more your speed (I have my problems and criticisms of the anime but that’s irrelevant to this post).

And you can’t start with the anime and start reading with volume 6, the first 3 volumes have characters and plot points that come back for the final arc, so you’re gonna be incredibly lost if you think to consume the series this way.

Weirdly enough, despite being original episodes, the anime originals are most likely canon in some ways. Episode 0, the original OVA, is an expansion of an anecdote Gray mentions in the first volume’s prologue, and Episode 1 takes place during Waver’s travels before the story starts and is an actual story, one of the 3 incidents Sanda has in mind for Waver’s journey before he returned to London. Episodes 2 to 6 take place during the one month period between volume 3 and volume 4, and finally the special OVA take place on Christmas also in between arcs.

Manga

The manga’s translation used to be on hiatus for a long time, but it has fortunately been picked up by the team doing the UBW and HF mangas. As of the time of writing (14/10/24), it has been translated up to the Rail Zeppelin arc, meaning if LNs aren’t your thing, you can experience the first two arcs that weren’t adapted in the anime in manga form. It has really gorgeous art so definitely check it out.

The Adventures of El-Melloi II

The sequel series currently ongoing, started a year after the first Case Files ended in 2019. You might know it as “the (other) series where Rin shows up grown up and also a pirate” and, as of recent volumes, “that one series where Shirou comes back spending the entire time half-naked”. @call-me-noa has been compiling pretty thorough chapter-by-chapter summaries of the volumes by @kaibutsushidousha if you don’t mind being spoiled. Or you can be patient and wait for azwhoisverybored to finish translating them on Beast Lair in this thread.

At the time of writing (14/10/24), the first and second volume of Adventures have been completed and compiled into PDF and EPUB forms:

First Volume: The Man Who Devoured God (PDF)(EPUB)

Second Volume: The Demon of the Wandering Sea I (PDF)(EPUB)

Lord El-Melloi II Case Files material

This is absolutely not required reading in any shape or form, those lore books are usually of interest only to dumb nerds like me lol. A timeline of the Clock Tower? An explanation of its politics? Yes please. But it also has insights into the characters by the author that aren’t in the books proper, as well as behind-the-scenes explanations for some decisions (for example, why it’s Gray with the American spelling instead of Grey with the British spelling). Only the glossary/encyclopedia is translated, but give it a look...after you read the series, because it assumes you did and has some big spoilers.

Drama CD

What’s that? You heard something about a Buzzfeed quizz about the most handsome Clock Tower teachers and how it’s somehow a plot point? Look no further than one of my only posts that did numbers. Read the summary, it’s hilarious.

#lord el-melloi II case files #Lord El Melloi II Case Files #Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files #fate series #TYPE-MOON #nasuverse #lord el melloi ll #Lord El-Melloi II #Gray (Fate)#reines el-melloi archisorte #reines el melloi archisorte #flat escardos #svin glascheit #would you believe what I spent the most time on was finding a free collage making site allowing this grid layout for 10 pics?#never again #but it made me realize how neat the symmetry of the covers for books of a same arc are

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memories-of-ancients · 1 year ago

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Wooden Money in Olde England,

The use of tally sticks as an accounting tool goes back to ancient antiquity and the dawn of civilization. In an age when the vast majority of people were illiterate, the simplest way represent a certain number of goods was to simply cut markings into a stick, a piece of bamboo, bone, or other similar item. Such systems were common all over the world including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. If you have, say 12 goats, you could go to the market, find an interested buyer, hold up the stick with 12 notches cut into it and say, “I have this many goats, want to make a deal?”

By the Middle Ages in Europe, Asia, and The Middle East, tally sticks were used as a record of debts, almost like a wooden credit card. An agreement to an IOU was made with the amount notched out on both sides of a stick. The stick was then split in half lengthwise, with one half held by the creditor, and the other half held by the debtor. Believe it or not this system of recording and settling debts continued well into modern times. In 1804 the use of the split tally was acknowledge as legal proof of debt in the Napoleonic Code. The split tally continued in use in Switzerland into the 20th century. When the Bank of England was founded in 1694 as a public corporation, the bank issued tally sticks to it’s investors as proof of their investments. Since the investments were recorded on stocks of wood, they became known as “stocks” and since then the use of the term “stock” for a investment in ownership of a public company has continued to this very day.

In 1100 King Henry I of England began issuing tally sticks as a form of money due to a lack of coinage in the kingdom and Europe in general at the time. The denomination of the stick would be etched onto both sides of the stick. The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer, written in the 13th century, notes the different denominations as thus,

“The manner of cutting is as follows. At the top of the tally a cut is made, the thickness of the palm of the hand, to represent a thousand pounds; then a hundred pounds by a cut the breadth of a thumb; twenty pounds, the breadth of the little finger; a single pound, the width of a swollen barleycorn; a shilling rather narrower; then a penny is marked by a single cut without removing any wood.”

Like other split tallies, the stick was split lengthwise, with one half being circulated among the populace as money, and the other half being stored at the local exchequer’s office (treasurer). If one believed they were being cheated with a counterfeit stick, one only had to make a visit to the local exchequer and match his half of the stick with the half held by the treasurer.

The use of the split tally for money and the recording of debts ended by act of the British Parliament in 1826. In 1834 Parliament ordered the burning of thousands of ancient tally sticks representing centuries worth of wooden money and debt records to be burned. During their destruction, the chimney of the stove caught fire, resulting in a blaze that destroyed most of the Palace of Westminster.

#history #money #economics #middle ages #medieval history #medieval life #investing

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affableramen · 3 months ago

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Assorted creditor Pantalone x afab!debtor reader headcanons. Episode one

((highly requested))

tags: tsundere!pantalone ; condescending, slightly vulgar villain ; he is a meanie ; toxic relationship ; early stage of relationship ; manipulative Lone ; slight degradation+humiliation ; choking ; slap dynamics (you slap him) ; degrading names (“bitch”) ; pet names (“kitten”) ; sexual themes ; criminal themes ; pantalone has chronic illnesses

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT Madman’s note: I like mean guys and judging by what we know about Pantalone so far (Arlecchino’s voice-line, Lazzo teaser, Wriothesley’s weapon, Pantalone’s artefact) he fits this category perfectly. I see the pattern of a rude boy here. Charming on the outside but once he opens his mouth it’s disgusting (hahaha.) He probably likes mocking and lecturing others, that’s for sure vibing in the Lazzo. He also talks a lot (thanks Cholde). As for the toxic assorted au, Ik half of you don’t like reading gentle n sweet Pantalone, but when I see this man I just can’t imagine him being cruel to his lover who accepted him when the Gods did not. I really think he is very soft inside (with a person he trusts). He’s all about equality and fairness so probably he treats people the way they treat him, and if ur nice to him, well Panty acts with equal respect to you back. That’s for the personality part. Speaking of other aspects, at least you guys get a happy ending. Coz I hate bad endings. Don’t wanna fuck up huge efforts. The angst and struggle was worth it. Come get your man guys. He’s like the mean classmate who bullies you but is secretly in love with you. As for the gentleman part, I wish I could write something more than just him protecting the lady, coz I believe Pantalone to be a big deal of a gentleman who has his standards even though what he does for a living is very questionable. I’m afraid it will be too much information for this post already. I must also mention that he might say a lot of disturbing and condescending things in the beginning. Oh, and to avoid any misconception--i don’t like writing innocent readers. My reader is fierce, chronically exhausted and crazy.

⟣

“You will be my prize. A perfect fit for a powerful man like me. You have no friends, your parents are far away, the only person to care for you is your grandmother who was, for sure, foolish enough to take a loan from Northland Bank. You are helpless in front of me, and I enjoy seeing that smug smirk disappear from your face once you realise you’re completely at my mercy. All alone, with your life depending on me. And I will, by any means, show you mercy if you are worthy enough.”

Said Pantalone as your résumé was forcefully slapped down on his desk. Your past jobs, experiences and skills — all in front of him, in his long fingers which are sliding through the pages as if it were an action book.

Your grandmother, indeed, was the only dearest person you had and, unfortunately, in order to save your life (and future) she took the risk of becoming a debtor to the old devilish banker who was by any means an extremely questionable person.

You had a rough path of changing jobs, trying to find the most fitting and well-paid one, however ending up in only worse conditions. A few years passed like this, the workload traumatised you so much that you couldn’t believe two years had passed since you started doing work for a living. Your grandmother was too prideful to retire, but you both knew her money alone could not sustain your happiness.

And thus, you ended up under Pantalone’s sharp gaze. Now, standing up in front of him with an unfazed expression, knowing too well this man just adores chewing on others’ suffering.

“Fuck you and your long ass monologues”, you think but your face remains cold.

The tapping of his fingers suddenly stops. You feel your heart sink, and it makes you wanna vomit.

“What was that? The look on your face just a moment ago”, Pantalone takes his glasses off and looks at you sharply. You can feel that heavy presence with your skin alone. The violet charm of his eyes suffocating you. His whole presence does nothing but choke you.

“Beg your pardon?” You narrow eyes and ask him as politely as possible.

“Were you thinking something a bit ago, dear? Or should I say, were you doubting my professionalism?”

“Shit, he is reading my mind. I have to think about something stupid.”

“You’re so untamed and so… wild, I’d say”, he says as he rises from his desk and approaches closer to you. “But alas, I can’t discount your value after one mere impression, can I? That would be too unconscionable of me as a businessman.”

You see him lean to your ear, his body bending cause of how tall he is, and you feel nauseous once he opens his mouth again.

“Your résumé is trash, but I’m not a monster everyone thinks I am. I will let you work under me because of how persuasive your grandmother has been. Though, I’ll be watching you, kitten. Perhaps I’ll even put you under my strict supervision—"

A sharp slap lands on his cheek. That is the moment Pantalone should realise that your pride cannot be underestimated. With his face thrown to the side, he pats his cheek, holding his fingers on the reddened skin.

“…at the lowest position”, he finishes the sentence. “Heh, the audacity of yours.”

Pantalone grabs your throat, your is suddenly pulled closer. While being choked heartlessly you turn your eyes to him and hold them for a few long deep moments.

“I’m not afraid of you”, the words come out of your mouth weakly. “Just let me work for you. I won’t be plotting anything. Not interested, to be exact.” He keeps suffocating you, you almost roll your eyes at the back of your head before the banker finally releases you. You slowly fall onto your knees. “Haah… hha…”

“I’d never be mean to a lady. But a particular someone just doesn’t know any manners.”

He signs the papers quickly, squeezes a used draft in a ball and throws it into the trash bin. The signature he leaves on your zero-hour contract is so lazily made as if the man wanted to deal with you as soon as possible.

“Don’t disappoint me. You wouldn’t like to see me when I’m angry.”

“Thank God”, you sigh in relief, despite being choked a few seconds ago.

His movements, his body are so quick and flexible, you do not notice how the eyeglasses return to his face.

“You have a zero hours contract here, but I’ll personally make sure you work not less than six days a week.”

“Just so you know, I won’t kill for you. That goes against my principles.”

Pantalone raises his eyebrows, giving you a bored look.

“I wouldn’t let you have a privelege like that anyway. I have enough henchmen of my own to stain hands with unneccessary violence.”

When the conversation ends, you go to the bathroom and throw out. This man gives goosebumps, and he is not easy at all.

To your biggest surprise, as a leader Pantalone turns out capable enough. Just seeing him intricately managing his resources and employees makes you admire him at some point. No matter how unattractive his personality, for sure, was, none could not deny the fact that he is a skilful individual. He possess finesse and determination. Though speaking of his other traits, you cannot ignore the fact how suave he is. Women touch him with or without his consent all the time. And you’d agree: the man is attractive. Affable demeanour in public, though quite closed in private. “Closed” is an understatement. He is, in fact, incredibly emotionally unavailable.

His ill-favoured personality, hidden under that affable demeanour and polished looks, however, could not prevent you from falling. For him. And you are gradually finding yourself more and more addicted to him. Brushing off these ideas as soon as possible, of course. Occasional touch of your fingers, frequent looks he’d give you. You cannot remember the exact moment when Pantalone started showing signs, but you remember well that his glances in your first meaning were anything but interest. As you are a “special” debtor with a large sum to owe, Pantalone almost cages you in his main office buildings. To your knowledge, there were a few of them, but out of all people the fate of working with him has fallen onto your shoulder.

There was one day when he scared you.

“You… killed someone?” You ask, holding your hand to your chest as you walk into his office to bring some papers. But they are dropped down the moment you see the so-called crime scene. The heavy metallic scent of blood blocks your breathing and you dream of disappearing from this room, however it is too late.

“Just taught a disagreeable debtor a valuable lesson”, Pantalone walks out of the shadows, lighting the cigarette right in his own office.

Your eyes widen at the sight of the blood on his face once he makes himself visible.

“What are you doing here? Ah, the job. I almost forgot.”

A panic attack crashes you sooner than Pantalone inquiries.

“Why the sour face? Just put the papers here and you’re dismissed.”

You look down at the body next, and even if!(fat chance) that person is alive, you cannot pull yourself back into the calm state.

“Are you deaf? Put your stuff on my desk,” the banker commands, wiping the blood off his cheek.

Your vision goes blurry when you see his stained with crimson skin and you feel like fainting.

“I don’t… exactly like… seeing blood, yes.” You turn away but lose your consciousness the moment after.

When you wake up you find yourself lying in the leather couch, a blanket dropped sloppily over your body. Pantalone is sitting at his desk per usual, working on his papers when he sees you slowly come to senses.

“Alive? Good. Now go back to your duties.”

You rise from the couch slowly, pulling the blanket down and slightly wobbly proceed to the door.

“Y/N.” Pantalone stops you with his voice.

“What now…” you think. But your expression softens one you hear what he tells you:

“There is a bottle of water I left for you on the desk. Take it. I’m not exactly eager reviving you after another fainting because your careless ass is dehydrated”, he stops writing with his left hand and says again, this time harsher: “And never enter my office announced again.”

“Thank you”, you take the bottle of water the Harbinger offers you. It has a distinct spicy scent from cologne lingering on it. “Your couch reeks of tobacco, by the way.”

One time, when you save him.

Pantalone storms into the office visibly injured and infuriated. You can see his secretary come up to him, presenting some sort of intel while her hand slips under his sleeve trying to pull his gloves out. You see it all through the small doorway.

“Lord Harbinger, you must have had a tough mission, let me release this stress of yours…”

The other employee of his, a male, presses a wet sponge against his expressionless face. Pantalone, seemingly weak and tired doesn’t respond immediately to the secretary boldly roaming her lustful hands over him but a while after his consciousness makes itself known. He grabs the recently presented papers and slaps the woman’s hand with them.

“Sir—”

“Have you two no shame? I need privacy. For once, just leave me alone!” He shouts, uncharacteristically to him. Both the secretary and the lowly subordinate rush out of the room under his strict command.

When the shift ends you can see everyone leave the office, however there has been not a single move from Pantalone’s office since he shut his door. You look on the clock, it’s already 9:15 p.m. Why is he not going home? You decide to spy on Pantalone. Soon, as everyone has left the office empty, you raise from your working desk and go to check on your CEO.

“Pantalone.”

You knock, but the response is none.

“Pantalone, coming in.”

You push the door slowly. Even his spicy cologne mixes up with the metallic scent of blood. You walk in the office and feel your heart sink at the sight: the banker is lying on the floor, as if he had fallen from his desk, there are lots of tablets scattered around the floor, and a bottle of wine, shattered, the salty smell filling your nostrils. The ashtray on his desk is full and messy. Everything looks chaotic and Pantalone himself is, for sure, out of character.

He is unconscious as he is lying on the floor. You rush to him, gently placing your hand on his shoulder and start shaking him.

“PANTALONE!!”

He doesn’t wake up and you have to resort to drastic measures. You slap him. At that, he finally comes to the senses.

“This is the second time you have slapped me. Are you not afraid of the punishment I might force upon you?” he asks, groggily putting his body into a sitting position.

“Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”

“I’m perfectly fine handling some scratch.”

“Just a scratch? Then, what are the tablets for? I thought they were painkillers.”

You see as Pantalone examines his own mess, and his expression is calm yet a hint of exhaustion can be spotted.

“Clever”, he says. “I was beaten up, and my muscles obviously hurt.”

“And the wine?”

“To relax.”

“I see.”

Pantalone eyes you once again, his face extremely pale and tired. “Are you done? You can go home.” He turns away from you, you don’t know what he’s doing but you hear a drawer being pulled and Pantalone let out a short sound similar to groaning. His knuckles turn white as he grips the edge of the desk. You see a used needle roll across the very same desk…

“You’re… you’re diabetic?”

“An astitute observation” (silently). “Didn’t I tell you to go home?”

You analyse him from the top to bottom and deem this person likely not being able to get home himself. You open your eyes to offer taxi, but realise that he has a personal chauffeur. “Right, rich people…”

“That’s all? You won’t even give me a lecture for spotting you in such a vulne-” Pantalone’s gaze becomes so evil that you rethink over the choice of your wording. “In such a predicament. I mean, shouldn’t your mighty self cut my tongue in order to prevent me from gossiping about your health concerns?”

“You’ve been reading far too many detective stories. I’m not so…” he sighs, realising that given the circumstances of his long list of crimes even as a polished businessman he is a perfect match to Meropide. So Pantalone cuts his wording as well. “Forget about it.”

“You sure will be alright?”

“Worry of yourself, it’s getting quite dark and seems like rain and thunder.”

Wow. That’s a gentleman indeed! He won’t even offer you a lift? You roll your eyes.

“I’ll get home just fine. And also, you reek of alcohol. Can’t have the employees think poorly of you.”

You don’t even know if you are happy with your doing or not, because if you didn’t wake him, he’d probably be lying there on the floor until the very morning.

As you’ve cleaned your desk and taken your coat on, ready to leave, you see that the raining outside has become even more aggresive.

You walk outside and slip on the first level of stairs. “Great.” Before you could dial the number of the taxi, you hear the voice behind you stopping you.

“Don’t need to spend money. You’re coming with my chauffeur.”

“No thanks, I am quite fine being al-ready indebted to you.”

“That won’t need repayment. You saved my life. If I were not woken up in time, and didn’t inject insulin, I would most certainly end up in a coma not long after.”

“Especially considering that you drank wine”, you think.

“If you insist. Look like today I’m but a slave of the weather conditions.”

Pantalone hums to your response and leads you to the sleek black car. He throws the door open for you and gets onto the back seat with you. Once he’s settled and you wait to be dropped off your place you notice the holes on his gloves, revealing already dry blood stained cuts. You are only able to see them properly now, due to your close proximity.

“May I ask who attacked you?”

“It happens quite often so no one is really surprised by now”, he clears throat. “An assassination attempt. But I’m faster” he gives you a warning look, by which you conclude that the killer is no longer alive.

“I see.”

As you’re dropped off safely to your place, you sneak into your bedroom before your grandma has questions. As you lie in bed under a fuzzy blanket you cannot brush his scent, the mix of spicy cologne with blood, off your mind. The sight of him almost helpless, injecting that insulin like he was on a thin ice, stays carved into your mind as well.

⟢

#those are some really sharp thorns you’ve grown around you Pantalone #tsundere pantalone #pantalone x reader #pantalone x you #genshin impact x you #genshin smut #anime smut #anime x reader #creditor pantalone episodes #pantalone smut

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methed-up-marxist · 6 months ago

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"No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the debtors; before it the creditors of the shop. And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!

Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from them that this property had to be saved – for the house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman. Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June." -Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

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dionewrites · 2 years ago

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𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐑 𝐎𝐅 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐄𝐃. ˚₊ HEADCANONS // ft. Mammon 1k words · GN!Reader · SFW · Feel-good & Fluff ♛ Masterlist | Request Guidelines

⚠ Content Warning: Mention of his demon form, debts and creditors, Mammon being jealous, and reader being insecure, insulted, stressed, and unhappy. ✎ Note: I finally finished it! It took me four days because my assignments these past few days wore me out. Leviathan’s next to my list~ ♡

Mammon never thought he’d have a special someone back then, more so to be swept off his feet by a human. However, after meeting and spending time with you, you constantly occupy his mind at every moment of the day, adamantly dwell in his heart, and eventually become a part of him.

He adores you just the way you are. He’s already impressed by you and who you are and undoubtedly captivated by your charms when you’re yourself; hence you don’t have to change anything about yourself to prove, please, or win his approval. You don’t always have to be the best version of yourself with him because he accepts and embraces all parts of you. It’s okay not to be strong all the time. It’s okay not to do well and stumble a little bit.

Even by just existing, you’re already enough and the best in his eyes—and whoever dares to speak otherwise and insult you will drive him to turn into his demon form and goes into a serious and protective mode. He has quite a long history of being criticized and belittled harshly; therefore, he certainly doesn’t want you to go through that as well, especially since you never deserve to be treated that way. This demon rarely transforms into his form and loses his temper, but trust me; he doesn’t and will never hold himself back when it comes to matters concerning you.

He wants to be always there for you through good and especially during bad times, just like you do whenever he feels he has no one to lean on. Although he thinks and feels he couldn’t accomplish anything that utterly helps you or your situation, he still wants to do his utmost and be there for and with you no matter what, despite his belief that he may not be necessary or you might be able to manage it on your own. He silently hopes for his presence or the ambiance he creates by being there to comfort, give you peace and assurance, and be your safe place.

On top of that, he knows he’s not good with words, so most of the time, he expresses his concern and affection for you through little actions, such as carrying out your assigned house chores or errands before you can even do them, cooking or buying your favorite foods to make sure you eat, leaving presents for you that reminds him of you or something he thinks you’d like, taking you to spontaneous trips or late night drives around the Devildom with only the two of you, and simply laying your head on his shoulders or chest while he plays with your hands and fingers.

To make you laugh or entertain, he once begged involved his crow familiars in creating a special and memorable performance for you. He got that idea after watching the moonfish scene in Finding Nemo and thought it’ll bring a smile to your face.

Even though he’ll not verbally admit it, he works hard to be the best one for you. He’s cognizant of his shortcomings, especially with his financial troubles, and being with him as his partner means you’re also inevitably involved in his mess. All the “love letters” his older brother received and settled back then now fall and entrust to your hands and shoulders (though Lucifer still helps occasionally if necessary). All the witches or other species he has serious business with might come to you instead of him. Thus, he spares no effort to control his sin and avoids getting into grave trouble that might implicate and burden you.

Nothing goes unnoticed by him to anything about you. He’s extra-observant and secretly takes notes of what attracts your attention. Spectacles? He wears it the next day. Blue? He’ll wear blue and buys gifts for you only in that color. Flowers? Expect him to give you a bouquet; if he’s short of money, you’ll receive them as origami (which looks ugly clumsy, but give him an A+ for the thought and effort). Whenever he sees you, he always fixes himself to look more presentable and attractive before you notice him. Everything revolves around keeping you interested and impressed by him; hence, he wants to look good in your eyes.

Although he’s terrible at keeping his surprises for you a secret, he never forgets and misses your birthdays and anniversaries. This demon has those special days on his mind months before the actual date and is excited to celebrate it with you.

He calls you “babe” verbally but “baby” in his mind. Every time he slips the tongue, he’ll blush really hard because he feels awkward and embarrassed that you’ll think of it as a cringe. After all, you’re a grown person, but he really can’t stop himself from addressing you like that, especially when he’s over the moon.

Whenever he’s full of the joys of spring, he loves hugging and spinning you around or taking you in his arms, lifting you up, and twirling you around while giggling and pecking on your cheeks, nose, and forehead. Once he realizes what he just did, he flushes but still proceeds to shower you words of love and appreciation.

When he’s jealous, he becomes quiet and grumpy. He’ll instantly grab your attention back to him with a long face, and if you still don’t stop or pay no heed to him, he’ll put his arms around your shoulder while scowling at the one/s he’s jealous of, or he’ll just take you away and kiss you somewhere until you’re out of breath.

His love languages are gift-giving and quality time. He’s constantly reminded of everything about you, so he can’t resist buying something when you’re not with him to make you happy and satisfied. Seeing you smile makes him feel warm and giddy. He also loves being with you all the time and receiving your whole and undivided attention because, for him, as long as you’re with him or it involves you, it’s all worthwhile.

Dating Mammon means being someone’s everything. Despite being in the grip of greed toward money, he values and loves you more than anything and anyone in three worlds. After all, you’re the only one who sees the best in him when others only always see the worst. That being so, just say a word, and he’s more than willing to give you everything and more.

#♛ | writings #♛ | in mind's eye #obey me #omswd #obey me shall we date #obey me nightbringer #obey me nb #obey me fluff #om! shall we date #obey me mc #om mammon #obey me mammon #mammon x mc #obey me headcanons #obey me mammon x reader #obey me x reader #obey me mammon headcanons

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foreficfandom · 11 months ago

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POV: You Are Actually MUCH More Powerful Than Alastor (ch. 3 - "Taking Notes")

(Alastor x Reader, g/n, queerplatonic/sex and romance favorable, fan theories, God!Reader) (AO3)

As far as the wider population of hell was concerned, Alastor disappeared after the Extermination with his tail between his legs. Vox made sure his viewers didn’t forget it, showing the footage of Alastor’s prone body no less than eight times over the course of four days. By the time the hotel was newly renovated, the Radio Demon being back in hiding was old news.

Hell’s populace was cynical and jaded. They took the news in stride, aware that as far as anyone knew, Alastor was right around the corner, seconds away from a new murderous streak. But danger was always right around the corner. Distinctions between dangers mattered less if the outcomes were always a guarantee.

Alastor didn’t plan on laying low for long. The angelic energy still festering in his chest prompted great pain whenever he used his dark magic. It took several days for it to completely dissipate, and it left scars that occasionally twinged with phantom jolts. Akin to nerve damage after burns.

He didn’t let you see the wound in full. You had offered to speed up its healing, but he would rather defenestrate himself than show you his bare chest. However, he was quickly allowing himself more casual dress within your private presence, a remainder of typical ‘30’s societal norms. If a gentleman made a friend, he could remove his hat, gloves, and jacket. If it was a close friend or family, he could be shirtless if needed, when out of the public eye.

Like when you and he made plans to further plot in his room, and you had arrived to Alastor in his pants, shoes, a belt, and a white sleeveless undershirt - what would be called a tank top. He was using a flat iron, freshly heated from his fireplace, carefully pulling and pushing it upon a dampened shirt spread tightly across an ironing board. You could now appreciate his limber, bare arms and collarbone, which were lightly haired with a gradient coat, colored more darkly further towards his hands. He had only the slightest muscle bulk, mostly in his forearms, and only due to a deficit of body fat to cushion it.

“Couldn’t you just magic your wardrobe clean and pressed?” You teased, closing the door.

“Of course I could, my dear. But nothing beats a job done by your own hand!”

Cleverly spoken. After all, Alastor’s magic weren’t extensions of his own will, but of his jailers. You approached the opposite side of the ironing board, the slight steam of sizzling water reminiscent of a little sauna.

“So, Alastor. I’m sure you’ve agonized over every fine detail of your deal. You should know that there’s limited chance your creditor would see any more advantages to take.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Alastor said, continuing his ironing, “so I’m going to take this opportunity to play kitten. Let’s pretend that plonk Adam managed to lodge a real stinker into me, and despite my best efforts, it’s hindered my abilities pathetically! I couldn’t shatter a stemware if I tried!”

He placed his hand on his chest as if a fainting damsel, the hot iron held aloft. You noticed with amusement that his elk-down has replaced his armpit hair, leaving it smooth like a child’s.

“And so Alastor would take drastic measures to be powerful once more? Anybody lucky enough to know you would certainly expect the Radio Demon’d be desperate to get his arsenal back.”

“Precisely! I will swallow my pride and put on a great show. Soon enough, it’ll get their attention.”

You took a second to ponder. “Beings like them believe their indentured souls are largely grateful for their gifts, and not chomping at the bit to reverse it all. They’re arrogant like that. After all, you certainly owe a lot to their influence.”

Alastor looked like he was about to refute your words with his bitter resentment, but considered a second further and went back to his chores.

“Well, I suppose they haven’t been all cruel. As a mortal man, I knew I was protected by forces unseen. I believe I am still being protected.”

“In more ways than one. Do you have any clue how many illnesses you dodged while eating your victims? They even debated on whether to let the listeria permanently damage your large intestinal tract. They settled on just the temporary infection.”

“What’s listeria?”

“A bacterial parasite. Causes loose stool, vomiting, and fever, and can resolve itself after a couple of weeks. First discovered in the late 1920’s, but wouldn’t be in everyone’s medical books until World War II. You got it from the back-alley surgeon.”

“Is that what that was? I was throwing back Ostrex for days. I swear I had never been more ill.” Alastor shifted his shirt so that he could iron the left sleeve. The fabric sizzled anew. “Well, aside from when I watched Way Down East to see what the fuss was about. That wretched Porter Strong gives me strong retches, all right!” He cackled alongside a canned studio laugh track.

“How shall we advertise your weak state? You wouldn’t want to roam Hell’s streets like you used to.”

“That’s where I’m hoping you can come in. You, with your millennia of experience.” He gave you a sly eye, smiling as ever but you could see the pointed daggers.

You crossed your arms with an exhale. “Actually, I do have some ideas. Simply put, we fake a new competitor of yours, and let them run far more rampant than you’d normally allow.”

You knew men like Alastor. If he could allow it, the spotlight would never leave him.

Stimulating the opposite would be a tell-tale sign that the Radio Demon was indisposed.

Alastor narrowed his eyes, as if reading your mind. “And who would this new competitor be?”

“Me, of course. Like you’d trust anybody else to be in on it.”

Every Overlord was once an unassuming sinner soul. It would be an on-going process, but with careful pretense you could convincingly step into the shoes of Overlord.

Your avenue would have to be something that threatened Alastor’s specific audience, not just another jumpstart with a seat at the table. Dread Vox would be a good comparison. You’d just take a leaf from his book and aim for the media masses.

And as a content creator, you wouldn’t have to bother with physical territory, which decreased the risk of encountering physical confrontations. You didn’t want to play-act some street scuffle with an Alastor forcing himself to feign weakness. He probably couldn’t bring himself to play act meek in-person. It would be hard enough to have him remain out of the public eye - or rather, public ears.

“The longer I go uncontested by you, the more suspicious it’ll seem. Before long, your creditor will get the hint.”

Alastor gave a “Hmm” of consideration, finishing up his ironing. His smile was small, but unpained.

After a minute of silence, spent watching Alastor hang his laundry in careful sets and whisk away the ironing set with a snap of his fingers, he turned to you, lips curled ever upwards.

“Very well. We will cultivate the rise of a new Overlord. Together.”

—

The next day was a slow, but relaxing affair for the hotel. After finishing your administration duties, you enjoyed catching up with Niffty on gossip, before lounging in the parlor with Angel Dust, who had been carefully pampering himself since morning. He was fresh out of his perfumed bath, fur conditioned and silky, and asked for your help in applying a fresh manicure. An endeavor made harder considering that he had eight hands.

The television screen popped and sizzled as Alastor entered from the hall, apparently deciding to pay the two of you a visit.

“Aww damn it, Kelsey was just about to reveal her deep, dark secret,” Angel Dust whined. The television’s audio finally stabilized and revealed the cast utterly distraught over whatever the step-daughter had confessed to. “Could you maybe cool your anti-TV thing if you’re gonna crash my soap time?”

“Why, it’s hardly something I can control.” Alastor threw his hands and eyes upwards in disregard.

“You know, back in Alastor’s day, entire families sat to listen to the radio just like we do with television,” you smiled demurely at the two of them.

“Yeah, well, ‘back in his day,’” Angel mocked your tone, “they also brewed poisonous moonshine in toilets, ate banged-up cans of brown windsor soup every other day, and probably had more cases of TB than kids to die from it. I died in nineteen-fucking-forty, I know the low-down. Hell, I think nonna remembered the actual Civil War.”

Unlike Alastor, Angel Dust was a sinner who found little trouble adjusting to modern technology. Many of the sinner souls who died young embraced things like internet and electric cars, whether they died during the 20th century, or the 17th.

Cultures of the living found their way downstairs with little delay. Nobody was sure why, but some suspected it was because all technological progress can be considered sinful. You knew it was because earth and hell - and heaven, and purgatory, and all sapient souls - existed as one simultaneously. If Segways existed both physically and within mortal awareness, then so shall it be in hell. Certainly, Segways would not escape the mortal consciousness without great effort.

“Well, back in your day, housewives could only earn money in Tupperware pyramid schemes, children didn’t learn about evolution in school, and everyone was obsessed with Spam,” you teased.

You had told everyone you died mere years ago. True, there was a tangible generational gap between you, Angel Dust, and Alastor, all of you could feel it, but in your case it was much more … complicated.

Angel took your needling in stride. “Eh, at least we had toothpaste. I heard that Great Depression suckers only bothered with charcoal dust, like, once a week.”

At that, you smirked at Alastor, who you’ve teased about his unfortunately-yellow maw more than once. It would have been normal for his time, and the fact that he’d only ever had to pull two would actually be considered impressive.

But you were a being that greatly valued hygiene. Something to do with your heightened senses picking up on every stray molecule that builds on the body, but you privately joked that it was because ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’.

“Now, now, my dainty friend,” An approaching Alastor made a point to mimic Angel’s delicately elevated fingers, reminiscent of a wilting flower, “the future may look greener on the other side, but sometimes, olden days were the golden days. Why heck, one could claim that not much has progressed at all! Look out the window there, and tell me you don’t see the same rampant crime and barbarity, no matter the perpetrators from my century, or not! In fact,” Angel pulled a face as Alastor entered one of his long-winded rambles, always intending to (and unfortunately usually succeeding) in dominating the room, “I declare that mankind’s one constant has been its depravity. Always the same distasteful impulses.”

“And mankind’s moralities are never constant?” you offered.

“Oh please,” Angel said simultaneously as Alastor’s “Goodness, no!”

“Back when I was a kid, people thought left-handedness wasn’t Jesus-fearing. People sure don’t think so, now,” Angel continued.

“And whatever’s casting humans to hell evolves just as its victims do. When’s the last time you saw some pitiful gilly drop down here solely for premarital relations? ‘Twas the case just some fifty years ago.”

Angel snorted. “Yeah, if abstinence awarded you points, I’m waaaay off the mark. And, well, it don’t seem like it for certain, but for all I know, it’s still in heaven’s rulebook.”

“Hah, if only that was the case,” you threw a none-too-subtle look towards Alastor, who returned with a slow, absolutely withering glare.

Of course, Angel Dust noticed. “Whoa, Alastor man, you died a virgin? But you were probably, like, forty.”

“Oh hardly,” Alastor sardonically hissed through his teeth. You didn’t point out that he died a mere two years from the mark, not something you’d call ‘hardly’.

“Well, hey, if your abstinence wasn’t enough to get you upstairs, then that’d be free reign to let wild down here, wouldn’t it?” Angel Dust smiled. “You probably had lotsa old-timey fans when you first arrived. Wouldn’t be a shock if you have lotsa admirers today, too. Pick up a dame from the speakeasy for a nightcap over at your place? Or let some knockout daddy plow you in the bathroom?”

A vein popped in Alastor’s temple. You ducked over Angel’s half-painted hand to hide a grin. If it were anyone else, you would have felt sympathy for the teasing. But, in your opinion, any little blow to Alastor’s inflated ego was always warranted whenever one managed to get their hands on them.

“Can’t say I’ve ever bothered with any of … that , I’m afraid.”

Angel Dust looked incredulously at Alastor. “Never? Even in hell? Never done the vertical tango? The hankity-spankity?”

“Not every man is as covetous as you, my fellow.” Alastor leaned on his cane with both hands, his posture as rim-rod stiff as a telephone pole. You watched his torment in amusement.

“Huh. Goes to show you never know what’s goin’ on underneath it all,” Angel Dust nonchalantly concluded with a thump back onto the cushions. He returned to his bottle of varnish.

“I expect you to be prompt for supper this time!” Alastor exited the foyer but called over his shoulder. “I won’t be taking a still-wet manicure as an excuse again!”

He didn’t pause in his application. “Yeah, sheesh. Like what’s he gonna do? Send me to bed without food?”

You finished applying on Angel’s third hand, and moved to the fourth. “You want to make the rules, then you’ll have to be in charge of the cooking for once.”

“Not gonna happen! Don’t think I’ve stepped in front of a stove since I was a kid. Well, aside from the prop ones in a movie or two. Frilly apron and everything. Why’s he always the chef, anyways? Not like Charlie’s ever made a Thanksgiving turkey for us.”

“Ask him, not me.” Alastor didn’t make meals every day, so if the hotel’s residents didn’t expect a meal from him, then you were all due to fend for yourselves that evening. Most, like Vaggie and Husk, visited the cheap eateries in the neighborhood. Some defaulted to leftovers, or frozen pre-packaged meals (Niffty was especially fond of those). You and Charlie didn’t have to eat every day, though you kept up the facade of mortality. For the longest time, you were the only one brave enough to eat the leftovers from Alastor’s midnight stress-cooking.

“You know, I could see Charlie trying to cook for us, her poor suffering lambs.” Angel was finishing up the delicate white strips on each nail tip, done in one or two practiced strokes. You intentionally numbed your proficiency and took much longer to draw a passable line. “But she’s a princess, so maybe she has no idea how to cook anything. Probably for the best she hasn’t tried, then.”

A moment of silence, then Angel piped up once more. “Speaking o’ Charlie, she apparently got some hot letter in the mail this morning, and’s rushed out the door. Haven’t seen her since.”

“Oh? Have any idea why?”

“No idea. I was at the bar with a hair of the dog, and heard Charlie make a big fuss before rushin’ out. Took the letter with her. Sounded important, but couldn’t tell if it was a happy important, or a nasty important.”

You gave a ‘hmm’. “And what about the king? Have you seen him around?”

“Nope. Guy’s been gone since yesterday evening, but that’s nothing unusual these past days, is it? You ask me, something’s brewin’ with the bigwigs up top. The royals, I mean.”

The Goetia Royalty. A long-winded line of hell-borne beings, some of them older than hell itself. For the most part, they kept out of the public eye, intent on living their privileged life with as little interruptions as possible.

“I hope that Charlie doesn’t get handed more trouble,” you said. “She’s busy enough as it is.”

Angel just shrugged. “Hey, she wanted to start this whole redemption project to begin with. She can deal with it.” You knew he meant it as a compliment. “I mean, I don’t envy her pressure. More and more shit’s been pilin’ on her shoulders these months. And she’s not gonna be unloading any of the responsibilities if she can help it, that wouldn’t match up with her vision, would it? Princess Of Hell, finally doin’ something productive for a change. Prob’ for the best, since lightening her load’ll probably do in the spine of whatever sucker volunteers. All pressure’s heavy at the best of times.”

You sighed in sympathy. “Tell me about it. You never expect to be the cause of a black hole.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Did you get any hints where Charlie went off to?”

“No. If she’s not back until supper, Alastor’ll probably throw a fit. He loves her fawning whenever she sits down to his cooking.”

You made a mental note to text Vaggie if Charlie doesn’t make it back before sundown. Whatever trouble was brewing, it would likely affect your and Alastor’s plans. You couldn’t risk too many interlacing threads getting tangled.

—

“You could always start a ‘podcast’ series. I detest them less than most modern medias. I may even give yours a listen!”

“Podcasts may be a successful culture, but I fear it wouldn’t be aggressive enough,” you said to Alastor, both of you sat across one of the small tables dotting the hotel study, an open notebook and pen in front of you. “It’s gotta be something people obsess over. Something that earns a lot of money and eats up a lot of time. Something unrepentantly mainstream.”

“Oh, with your charisma, I’m sure you could be a trailblazer in making any media a mainstream mainstay,” Alastor alliterated. He took a sip from his mug of lightly-brewed coffee, more akin to a tea, to avoid over-exciting himself this late in the afternoon.

You sighed tired, crossing out ‘popstar’ and ‘idol musical group’. Too short-lived to make a successful Overlord career out of it. Alastor’s flattery had a ring of truth, you could theoretically manipulate any field you’d end up in, but you didn’t want to make this any harder than it needed to be.

He had finished up the last touches on his pulled pork recipe before leaving it to stew in the kitchen, and tracked you down out of curiosity. It was just the two of you in the study for now, but you kept one eye open in case someone else decided to pay a visit.

You hovered your pen over ‘celebrity surgeon’, just about to ask if Alastor could turn down the volume of the big band he was blaring obnoxiously, before you sensed two pairs of footsteps approach. The two of you turned to Husk and Vaggie strolling in.

“Oh joy, you’re here,” Husk groused sarcastically. It had not gone unnoticed that Alastor had spent the last few days wandering around the hotel more often than he usually did, rather than couching himself in the secluded corners.

“Now, is that any way to greet your friends?” With a crank, Alastor snapped his head to an unnatural 30°. Vaggie, who had grown a modicum more tolerant of the guy, didn’t take the opportunity to needle him, and proceeded to guide Husk to a specific bookshelf in the far corner. She traced her finger along the spines, then pulled out a small hardcover and held it out for Husk.

“Here. From Kuomintang To Kraft Mac: A Brief Timeline Of Events From 1950 - 1970 ”, Vaggie said, handing the book over. “We’re missing the next volume, but Charlie can order it.”

“It’s fine. Thanks.” Husk opened and browsed the first few pages. You could see Leviathan's symbol printed on the opening cover. One of the official hell-produced encyclopedias that detailed living events for the sake of its sinner residents.

Alastor didn’t hesitate to milk the opportunity. “Why, Husker, my good man! Are you feeling a scholarly bent? I wasn’t aware you knew which end to open a book from!”

“We were talking about hot sauces,” Vaggie allowed herself a small grin at Husk’ dramatic eyeroll. “I know you like using the tabasco pepper-based ones, but Husk was just telling me that he missed the sweeter, pulpy pastes from his time spent across the sea. I said that the world has slowly come around to spices from all over the world.”

“Back in my day, you were lucky to find a dusty bottle of Trappey’s at the mart. I’m surprised America embraced hot spice at all,” Husk added. He spared a glance at the rest of the encyclopedia collection, which boasted a recollection from prehistoric civilization to the rise of the internet. Some of the volumes were depressingly wrinkled and worn, and more than one was absent.

Alastor didn’t respond, instead rested his chin on the back of his hands, smiling peacefully at the space over Husk’s shoulder. You knew he was thinking of his mortal days, too, when most people made their own bottled sauces from a summer pepper harvest, acidifying mashed jalapeño and cayenne in vinegar and salt, sealing the repurposed cola bottle with cork and wax. It wasn’t until the ‘50’s when hot pepper sauces started appearing in most American recipe books, and it would take a further 30 years before international cuisines reached proper globalization.

It was nice to see Vaggie and Husk getting along. And perhaps the both of them were learning to tolerate Alastor a bit more.

Still, both of them eyed Alastor with a distasteful eye, which didn’t phase him in the slightest. Husk, in particular, would rather he spend as little time around the man as possible. Before Alastor forced him to work for the hotel, Husk almost never had contact with the man. You were sure he missed those days dearly.

The same sentiment wasn’t quite shared by Alastor, who didn’t hold Husk in high regard, but enjoyed his company well enough. And he’ll put up with Vaggie’s ire to a surprisingly high degree.

“Vaggie, do you know where Charlie is? I heard she left this morning, and it’s almost dinnertime,” you asked.

Vaggie’s expression turned slightly pensive, and she averted her eyes. “She’s … meeting with old friends. It’s complicated.”

“Royalty issues?” Husk asked.

“Sorta like that. She should be back soon,” Vaggie assured, but you didn’t miss the subtle glance she threw towards her phone, sitting in her skirt pocket.

“What kind of friends keep a busy woman for so long? It must be important ,” Alastor said, emphasizing the last word with an oily grin. Vaggie shot him a warning glance. She had far from forgotten the deal he had convinced Charlie to make.

“Like I said, it’s a royalty issue. Those types of friends aren’t ones you can risk losing. Aren’t you an Overlord? You should relate to the whole, ‘high-society’ sort of thing.”

“Oh, Vaggie dear,” Alastor flapped a hand dismissively, “I haven’t bothered with the ins-and-outs of hell’s Overlord dog-eat-dog kerfuffle in years! You see new faces come and go like the wind. I may enjoy the company of a select few that share a spot at the table, but not for power. For their conversation! For their fun! For keeping up with me on the dance floor, hah!”

“Like Overlord Rosie?” You asked, and he affirmed, “Precisely!”

“You know,” Husk was still scanning over the encyclopedia, speaking to the air as if on an aside, “I heard from a certain little spider that you’re still as lady-less as freshly fallen snow.”

Vaggie raised an eyebrow as Alastor’s smile turned downwards. “And your point?”

“Just sayin’. You got all your lady friends, what’s stopping you?” Husk met Alastor’s unamused glare with a little smirk.

“Well, it just so happens that my friends tend to be women. They bring the best out in me!”

It didn’t take a genius to understand Alastor’s personal preferences in friends. The lively and prevaricative Niffty, the gregarious and wayward Mimzy, the cordial and extroverted Rosie. This was in comparison to those that annoy him; the prickly Vaggie. The invasive Angel Dust. Charlie, herself, must have drawn Alastor’s affections by virtue of simply being jovial. He loved to see smiles and loved to hear them sing.

Not being a man would also score a couple points in the ‘friends’ column. And speak of the devil, Alastor piped up; “And men? Brutes, much of them, graceless.”

Vaggie pointed out that he was a man, which apparently was the expected set-up for his prepared joke, “I need no reminder! After all, I find myself shouldering the burden of being proper gentlemanly to compensate for those who aren’t! Ah, the days when men at least did things like start a conversation with a proper greeting, and ended with a proper ‘goodbye’. I do miss when evocation was a schooling curriculum. Husk! Recite!” He pointed his cane at Husk, who gave a long suffering groan.

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Exactly! Did your teacher ever have you recite The Lady of Shallot , or at least See Spot Run ? Come, old fellow, give me hope that the art of spoken word hasn’t been completely lost.”

To your surprise, Husk rose to the bait with, “Tôi đéo quan tâm.”

It was a clever blow. Alastor was skilled, but he knew no second language fluently. His Louisiana Creole was dreadful. His pride taken a blow, Alastor’s grin twitched, but he pulled himself back together with a twirl of his cane.

“Ah, like a dock sailor. Impressively worldly. But as brutish as an ox.”

The chatter went on, but you focused on your notes. Alastor was exaggerating, plenty of modern people knew public speaking, especially the entertainers. Any television figure worth their salt made sure their audience could follow along not just with clarity, but with enjoyment. News anchors, game show hosts, social media vloggers, podcast narrators, video game streamers -

Streamers . Scheduled broadcasts of live commentary. Responding to the audience in real time. Recorded in a set location. Commonly arranged by genre content. Earning thousands of dollars every year. Even sponsorships were comparably as invasive as a bugle for Edgeworth Cigarettes from during the golden age of radio.

You wrote with vigor. Streaming would require an expensive set-up if you wanted to cultivate the proper attention. Studio lights, audio recording, multiple high-definition cameras and mounts, a backdrop, not to mention the software.

Your spacious hotel quarters would do, once you got proper acoustic foam wall panels. And luckily, Alastor’s presence in the hotel made for a very powerful modem, to his annoyance. The internet speed here is wild.

Would you focus on video games? Viral challenges? Conspiracy theories and social drama? Offer adult content? The most successful streamers usually have one main focus, although the more famous one got, the more they could branch without risking alienating their audience.

And once you establish your place within the internet world, you’d start to ask for more and more money from your adoring fans. Some wouldn’t be able to pay. So you’d offer a deal , instead. Plenty of people have committed to worse for the sake of their idols.

To become one of the top Overlords, you’d have to total a soul count in the five-hundreds, at the very least. Owning actual real estate would also help -shareholding a business or two, or maybe you’d develop a brand from the bottom up.

To grow from niche interest to mainstream name, you’ll make and distribute products. You’ll cultivate entertaining drama with other media personalities with the intent of going viral. You’d be on friendly terms with Alastor’s enemies, and make vague threats towards his friends.

Alastor turned from the others to see what you were so excited about. He couldn’t quite read your handwriting upside down, but he could tell that you had hit a revelation.

“Ah, but poor Charlie! I hope her ‘friends’ at least have the good manners to serve dinner, because she certainly won’t be arriving on time for ours! Come now, my good people, to the dining room! Husk, bring out the Austrian Riesling, it’ll pair nicely with the pork.”

“Why are we drinking good wine with barbecue?” you heard him grumble as Alastor managed to usher him and Vaggie out. You finished your notes with a flourish, stuffed your notebook away, and jogged after them.

#alastor #alastor the radio demon #hazbin alastor #hazbin hotel #alastor x reader #hazbin hotel headcanon #alastor headcanons

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literaryvein-reblogs · 3 months ago

Text

George Orwell: A Writer

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-grown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it.

He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank.

There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book.

He has lost this address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.

He is a man of 35, but looks 50.

He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost.

If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.

At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs.

The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income-tax demand printed in red.

Needless to say this person is a writer.

He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer.

Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that they “ought to go well together”.

They arrived four days ago, but for 48 hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel.

Normally He Doesn't Want to Write It

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews – 1,000 words is a bare minimum – to the few that seem to matter.

Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it.

Normally he doesn’t want to write it, and the week-in, week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in a dressing grown whom I described at the beginning of this article.

However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.

Excerpts from the essay, "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" published in the Tribune, 3 May 1946

More: George Orwell

#carl spitzweg #george orwell #literature #writing reference #dark academia #spilled ink #writeblr #writing inspiration #light academia #writers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #writing prompt #poetry #writing resources

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ryuichirou · 4 months ago

Note

This is an out there question but out of the cast of twst which characters can you picture becoming serial murderers? If so, what type (i.e lust killer, power/control etc…) and how would the murders be (planned, clinical, ritualistic, etc.)

Sorry for the screwed up question and feel free to not answer if it makes you uncomfortable. I just have an interest in criminology so I’m weird that way :/

Anon! It took so long for me to finally write this post, but I’ve been excited about your prompt ever since you sent it lol Screwed up questions are always a joy to come up with answers to with this cast, so I hope I managed to write something that was worth waiting for.

I’ll also note that we do have a hc list about twst boys murdering for the first time, and while I won’t reference this post here too much, some of the ideas for this post feel like a continuation/result of the unfortunate circumstances some of the characters found themselves in that first post. I also feel like some of these boys don’t fit the role very much, but I’ll mention it when I write about them!

That being said, let’s profile these assholes~

Riddle – pretty easy one: he’d be someone who sentences people to death for disobeying the law, so technically his Unique Magic thing but more aggressive. There are actually a bunch of options for him; it could literally be him abusing Off With Your Head, or he could end up being a judge or a prosecutor who has a reputation of sentencing people to death a lot… Of course, he would feel like it’s justified, and sometimes it would really be justified by an actual law, but I would still technically call him a serial murderer for that lol But if he isn’t in any way related to law or authority and ends up being a doctor, he could still abuse his power there and kill off those who he considers to be criminals. To be completely honest though, I don’t think Riddle is super likely to end up like this, but if he does it once, he might struggle with guilt and double down on this kind of just punishment super hard.

Ace – I don’t think he would do end up being a serial killer unless his circumstances force him to. I see him as someone who could get in huge trouble when he gets older, like shady stuff with creditors for example, but he still wouldn’t want to take someone else’s life. Still, if it’s either you or the guy who came to steal your kidneys to sell them, you’ll end up cutting the guy’s throat with a knife given a chance, and then escape. What would make Ace a serial murderer is that he would have to kill off a bunch of guys to be completely “free”. So I guess he’s fighting for his own freedom by actually reaping the fruits of his own mistakes.

Deuce – he would either kill someone on accident and then either run forever or turn himself to the police (hence not becoming a serial killer) or actually in a weird twist of fate become someone who is a vigilante of sorts. Deuce might actually end up thinking that this is his only way to pay for his missteps as a young delinquent. Of course, Deuce doesn’t really want to kill, and at first he would spare everyone, believing that they would learn their lesson, but after that time he’ll think that he has no other choice. He could do it with delinquent gangs, or, if he works for the police, he’d do it with actual criminals. But he would still have some principles – he would only kill those who ended someone else’s life, or at least did something very horrible.

Trey – there he is, our first “killing to protect someone” guy! The worst version of Trey would probably go very far trying to protect Riddle from those who try to overthrow him, or even give him any kind of critique. He knows that this is wrong, but this is the choice he made: the first murder would be very justified in his head, very forced and necessary, but after that point he’d just go further and further down the rabbit hole. He would be very careful about it though, and no one would suspect him for a very long time. He wouldn’t poison anyone with food, that’s too obvious, but he would definitely use his scientific knowledge.

Cater – there was one guy who moved a lot and changed a lot of schools and was unhappy with his family life that ended up trying to blow up a school to feel anything because we live in a society (yes JD from Heathers), so my go-to is to think that there is this worm in Cater’s head that sometimes tells him to do something horrible, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that he would blow up NRC lol You know, maybe it’s more of an American Psycho situation. No one would ever think that I am the one doing it even though I am not even hiding it very well, so I continue doing it. Or something? To be honest, I’m 50/50 on that one.

Leona – he doesn’t have any big ideas and he definitely isn’t forced to do it, and knowing Leona’s luck, he probably wouldn’t be able to pull off an American Psycho situation either. Even if Falena covers up his crimes, it wouldn’t really help Leona gain anything, so it doesn’t make much sense… I think if Leona starts killing people off left and right, he would mostly do it out of boredom and frustration.

Ruggie – he would work as someone who cares for elderly, but only the rich ones, and then would poison them little by little over a long period of time by adjusting their dosage of medicine. He would pick grandpas and grandmas who have turbulent relationship with their kids, and then somehow frame the kids for the death, getting a bunch of money from the deal. This is just one thing Ruggie could do for money though; of course he prefers to work within the system and work hard And smart, but he is also perfectly aware that the system is rotten and someone is going to take advantage of that. And that someone might as well be him~

Jack – another vigilante, but if Deuce hunts down criminals, Jack would hunt down those who work within the system and are the reason it’s rotting. So corrupt policemen, rich assholes, even very powerful people: those who are making things worse for others in Jack’s own mind (he has his own idea of justice…) are his targets. He also really wants to be calm, clean and collected about it, but I also see him as someone whose emotions would take over, and he wouldn’t stop even after the guy is already dead.

Azul – either power or pettiness, or ideally both – Azul loves to multitask, after all. Killing some guy that disrespected him and getting his business and wealth as a bonus? Perfect scenario for Azul. He wouldn’t mind trample on others for his own gain, and his tactics are pretty predatory, so at some point it might start involving ending someone else’s life, but one thing to note is that Azul rarely does anything by himself. He is very creative with the ways he wants his enemies to go (the tweels love his sick ideas), but he would rather order others to kill than dirty his own hands.

Jade and Floyd – a rare occasion when I write about them together, but they are almost the same when it comes to this topic: they mostly do it for funsies. That includes coming up with new ways to end someone else’s life (this is why Azul’s ideas are the best), playing with new toys (Jade has a big collection of weaponry, Floyd loves using whatever lies around), or even just killing time. But these days they try to pace themselves because otherwise this whole thing becomes terribly dull and boring, so their go-to is to either wait for a very good occasion, or for Azul to give them a new mission.

Kalim – wait a minute, this guy isn’t a serial killer, he’s a cereal killer! 🥰 Sorry, I had to make this joke once. In all seriousness, I don’t see Kalim becoming a serial killer, buuut if we’re bending canon to force a sunshine boy to do horrible stuff, he would either do it in a situation similar to Ace’s (got kidnapped, was forced to shoot everyone), and absolutely hate it because he really wants bad people to become better and is very forgiving… or he would get so deeply disappointed in bad people not becoming better that his brain would completely melt and he would start going “… it can’t be helped, can it?”. But once again, one really has to bend canon and put Kalim through a lot for this to happen.

Jamil – a vigilante whose only mission is to protect himself lol I can see a scenario in which Jamil starts killing off influential people out of spite. He could never kill Kalim or anyone from the Asim family, but he has no relation to other families or wealthy colleagues of Kalim’s father, and he hates their greedy grease faces so much that killing them is actually a huge stress relief. But also, his killing off Kalim’s potential assassins and other mercenaries who try to attack him would also count as serial murdering…

Vil – I think he would start out as an impulsive killer who let his emotion and stress take over. And it doesn’t even have to be with Neige, he might “accidentally” (i.e. he didn’t think the punch was that hard) kill off someone rando who was harassing him, and then after that point he’ll start doing it from time to time. Of course, he would suffer from guilt, but overtime he’ll try to dull this emotion with more killings. He believes that he only kills those who are doing bad things with young actors in the industry, but he did kill a couple of nasty and obnoxious guys who were pretty much his stalkers. The difference is just that he poisons the first ones and tries to make it as clean as possible, and he gets very emotional with the second ones.

Rook – this guy is all over the place, and yet in his head he has this whole thing figured out. He honours people that he kills, he takes the flower from a young and blooming tree to make sure that its beauty lives forever between the pages of his diary… Rook Hunt has a lot of weird ideas, and I can see him as all kinds of serial killer: he could create installations with people’s dead bodies, he could consume people for food and use their hair and skin for craft, he could literally put a body in a glass case and freeze it or taxidermy it, he could punish those who, unfortunately, only steal from other’s beauty and thus aren’t beautiful at all… I guess Rook Hunt is an amalgamation of every criminal from Hannibal TV series lol

Epel – pretty similar to Ace, I think. He definitely needs to be put in a horrible situation in which he doesn’t have much of a choice but to kill. But also I think after some point he would start feeling so helpless and weak that he would become more aggressive, and maybe even start taking it out on people who are completely unrelated to his troubles, just to make himself feel at least a little bit powerful. He is pretty good at cutting and is pretty fast, also good at hiding, but he is also sloppy, so he’ll get caught pretty soon. The world will be charmed by the image of a pretty boy doing horrible things… and then they’ll give him a stupid nickname and he’ll get mad lol This is your true punishment, Epel.

Idia – I don’t think he would be capable of becoming a serial murderer, not only because of his psyche, but also because of the logistics – it’s easy to do a lot of things to ruin someone else’s life while sitting in front of your pc in your dusty dark room, but it’s not easy to murder someone like that. I mean, he could hire an assassin on darkweb… or maybe he could create a virus that explodes phones and computers. Never mind, where there is a will, there is a way lol But in terms of will, I think Idia would only do something like that if he feels like he has no other choice, i.e. if he (or Ortho) is getting severely bullied. He does joke about killing off everyone who mischaracterises his favourite anime girl though lol

Ortho – a little yandere. We’ve seen him being willing to murder a bunch of people for Idia’s sake multiple times now, and it was just him being silly lol While he learns more empathy and starts to value others more overtime, his number one priority is still Idia, and he would easily be willing to anything to protect him… or simply out of jealousy!

Lilia – he already had his share of serial murders, our local mister war criminal lol And given how much time he had to reflex on his past and on the life and death in general, I don’t think he would go for it right now. But he isn’t a saint and it’s not like he would avoid murder at all cost, so I can see him easily killing off a bunch of people while trying to protect Malleus or Silver or, in case of Malleus, to take revenge for dishonouring or even just disrespecting him.

Silver – he wouldn’t! He is a good boy that values life too much. I think he is one person in NRC who is aware of his ability to kill (he has to protect Malleus, after all), but would do anything to avoid it at all cost.

Sebek – while generally he isn’t super bloodthirsty (surprisingly), he would get bloodthirsty real quick if Malleus himself or his honour is in danger, or if Sebek feels like it is. Yeah, pretty similar to Lilia, but Sebek is much more hot-headed, much less mature and much messier in general. It’s possible for Sebek to become a version of himself that kills people off for Malleus’ sake even without Malleus asking him to. Malleus could not even be aware of that person existence, and Sebek would think that he has this duty to “clean”. He is a fanatic, and while he is super loyal and obedient, he is also very entitled and acts according to ideas in his head (including fae superiority). Similarly to Riddle though, he would partially do it to dull the feeling of “oh no I did something horrible”, but a lot of it would genuinely be his desire to serve Malleus in the best way possible and to eliminate everyone who doesn’t share his adoration of him.

Malleus – pettiness. I don’t think Malleus would do something like that out of any major reason or great idea, the only thing that someone powerful like him really needs is pettiness. He also isn’t just some guy that hangs out in his basement sharpening knives; the scale of his actions would be massive. The worst version of Malleus murders people for fun, out of spite, to command others’ attention, completely on a whim, fully embracing his god complex and somehow being a spoiled brat at the same time. He might come up with some Great Idea of course, he might even start thinking about fae being superior do other beings, but all of that would just be pretty words to cover the fact that he is very petty and deeply unhappy. This Malleus combined with previously described Sebek would be a very dangerous combo…

#replies #headcanons

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors

Private equity is quite a racket. PE managers pile up other peoples’ money — pension funds, plutes, other pools of money — and then “invest” it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee — 2% — of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.

On top of this, private equity bosses get to use the carried interest tax loophole, a scam that lets them treat this ordinary income as a capital gain, so they can pay half the taxes that a working stiff would pay on a regular salary. If you don’t know much about carried interest, you might think it has to do with “interest” on a loan or a deposit, but it’s way weirder. “Carried interest” is a tax regime designed for 16th century sea captains and their “interest” in the cargo they “carried”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them — and the company’s creditors. The mafia have a name for this. They call it a “bust out”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Private equity destroyed Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and many more companies beloved of Main Street, bled dry for Wall Street:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

And they’re coming for more. PE funds are “rolling up” thousands of Boomer-owned business as their owners retire. There’s a good chance that every funeral home, pet groomer and urgent care clinic within an hour’s drive of you is owned by a single PE firm. There’s 2.9m more Boomer-owned businesses going up for sale in the coming years, with 32m employees, and PE is set to buy ’em all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE funds get their money from “institutional investors.” It shouldn’t surprise you to learn they treat their investors no better than their creditors, nor the customers, employees or suppliers of the businesses they buy.

Pension funds, in particular, are the perennial suckers at the poker table. My parent’s pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Fund, are every grifter’s favorite patsy, losing $90m to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scam:

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/

Pension funds are neck-deep in private equity, paying steep fees for shitty returns. Imagine knowing that the reason you can’t afford your apartment anymore is your pension fund gambled with the private equity firm that bought your building and jacked up the rent — and still lost money:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/

But there’s no depth too low for PE looters to sink to. They’ve found an exciting new way to steal from their investors, a scam called a “continuation fund.” Writing in his latest newsletter, the great Matt Levine breaks it down:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Here’s the deal: say you’re a PE guy who’s raised a $1b fund. That entitles you to a 2% annual “carry” on the fund: $20,000,000/year. But you’ve managed to buy and asset strip so many productive businesses that it’s now worth $5b. Your carry doesn’t go up fivefold. You could sell the company and collect your 20% commission — $800m — but you stop collecting that annual carry.

But what if you do both? Here’s how: you create a “continuation fund” — a fund that buys your old fund’s portfolio. Now you’ve got $5b under management and your carry quintuples, to $100m/year. Levine dryly notes that the FT calls this “a controversial type of transaction”:

https://www.ft.com/content/11549c33-b97d-468b-8990-e6fd64294f85

These deals “look like a pyramid scheme” — one fund flips its assets to another fund, with the same manager running both funds. It’s a way to make the pie bigger, but to decrease the share (in both real and proportional terms) going to the pension funds and other institutional investors who backed the fund.

A PE boss is supposed to be a fiduciary, with a legal requirement to do what’s best for their investors. But when the same PE manager is the buyer and the seller, and when the sale takes place without inviting any outside bidders, how can they possibly resolve their conflict of interest?

They can’t: 42% of continuation fund deals involve a sale at a value lower than the one that the PE fund told their investors the assets were worth. Now, this may sound weird — if a PE boss wants to set a high initial value for their fund in order to maximize their carry, why would they sell its assets to the new fund at a discount?

Here’s Levine’s theory: if you’re a PE guy going back to your investors for money to put in a new fund, you’re more likely to succeed if you can show that their getting a bargain. So you raise $1b, build it up to $5b, and then tell your investors they can buy the new fund for only $3b. Sure, they can get out — and lose big. Or they can take the deal, get the new fund at a 40% discount — and the PE boss gets $60m/year for the next ten years, instead of the $20m they were getting before the continuation fund deal.

PE is devouring the productive economy and making the world’s richest people even richer. The one bright light? The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division just published new merger guidelines that would make the PE acquire/debt-load/asset-strip model illegal:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

The bad news is that some sneaky fuck just slipped a 20% FTC budget cut — $50m/year — into the new appropriations bill:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1681830706488438785

They’re scared, and they’re fighting dirty.

I’m at San Diego Comic-Con!

Today (Jul 20) 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause — Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Tomorrow (Jul 21):

1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

[Image ID: An old Punch editorial cartoon depicting a bank-robber sticking up a group of businesspeople and workers. He wears a bandanna emblazoned with dollar-signs and a top-hat.]

#pluralistic #buyout groups #continuation fraud #pe #pyramid schemes #the sucker at the table #pension plans #continuation funds #matt levine #fiduciaries #finance #private equity #mark to market #ripoffs

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galaxygolfergirl · 8 months ago

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Watcher's Expenses

I didn't major in accounting: I took three classes and it grinded my brain to a fine powder. However, after graduating with a business admin degree, being a former eager fan of their videos, and from a cursory glance over their socials, there's a lot to consider in their spending behavior that really could start racking up costs. Some of these things we've already noticed, but there are other things I'd like to highlight, and I'll try to break it down into the different categories of accounting expenses (if I get something wrong, let me know. I was more concentrated in marketing 🤷‍♀️). I'm not going to hypothesize numbers either, as that would take out more time than I'm willing to afford-- you can assume how much everything costs. Anyways, here's my attempt at being a layman forensic accountant:

Note: All of this is assuming they're operating above board and not engaging in any illegal practices such as money laundering, tax evasion, not paying rent, etc.

Operating Expenses

Payroll: 25+ staff salaries and insurance

Overhead Expenses

CEO/founder salaries

Office space leasing or rent (In L.A, one of the most expensive cities in the US)

Utilities (water, electricity, heating, sanitation, etc.)

Insurance

Advertising Costs

Telephone & Internet service

Cloud Storage or mainframe

Office equipment (furniture, computers, printers, etc.)

Office supplies (paper, pens, printer ink, etc.)

Marketing costs (Social media marketing on Instagram, Youtube, SEO for search engines, Twitter, etc. Designing merchandise and posters, art, etc. )

Human Resources (not sure how equipped they are)

Accounting fees

Property taxes

Legal fees

Licensing fees

Website maintenance (For Watchertv.com, Watcherstuff.com, & Watcherentertainment.com)

Expenses regarding merchandising (whoever they contract or outsource for that)

Inventory costs

Potentially maintenance of company vehicles

Subsequent gas mileage for road trips

Depreciation (pertains to tangible assets like buildings and equipment)

Amortization (intangible assets such as patents and trademarks)

Overhead Travel and Entertainment Costs (I think one of the biggest culprits, evident in their videos and posts)

The travel expenses (flights, train trips, rental cars, etc. For main team and scouts)

Hotel expenses for 7-8 people at least, or potentially more

Breakfasts, lunches and dinners with the crew (whether that's fully on their dime or not, I don't know; Ryan stated they like to cover that for the most part)

Recreational activities (vacation destinations, amusement parks, sporting activities etc.)

The location fees

Extraneous Overhead costs (not sure exactly where these fall under, but another culprit, evident in videos and posts)

Paying for guest appearances

Expensive filming & recording equipment (Cameras, sound equipment, editing software subscriptions, etc.)

The overelaborate sets for Ghost files, Mystery Files, Puppet History, Podcasts etc. (Set dressing: Vintage memorabilia, antiquated tech, vintage furniture, props, etc.)

Kitchen & Cooking supplies/equipment

Office food supply; expensive food and drink purchases for videos

Novelty items or miscellaneous purchases (ex. Ghost hunting equipment, outfits, toys, etc.)

Non-Operating Expenses

These are those expenses that cannot be linked back to operating revenue. One of the most common examples of non-operating expenses is interest expense. This is because while interest is the cost of borrowing money from a creditor or a bank, they are not generating any operating income. This makes interest payments a part of non-operating expenses.

Financial Expenses

Potential loan payments, borrowing from creditors or lenders, bank loans, etc.

Variable Expenses

Hiring a large amount of freelancers, overtime expenditure, commissions, etc.

PR consultations (Not sure if they had this before the scandal)

Extraordinary Expenses

Expenses incurred outside your company’s regular business activities and during a large one-time event or transactions. For example, selling land, disposal of a significant asset, laying off of your employees, unexpected machine repairing or replacement, etc.

Accrued Expenses

When your business has incurred an expense but not yet paid for it.

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

(If there's anything else I'm missing, please feel free to add or correct things)

To a novice or a young entrepreneur, this can be very intimidating if you don't have the education or the support to manage it properly. I know it intimidates the hell out of me and I'm still having to fill in the gaps (again, if I've mislabeled or gotten anything wrong here, please let me know). For the artistic or creative entrepreneur, it can be even harder to reconcile the extent of your creative passions with your ability to operate and scale your business at a sustainable rate. That can lead to irresponsible, selfish, and impulsive decisions that could irreparably harm your brand, which is a whole other beast of its own.

My guess at this point is that their overhead and operation expenses are woefully mismanaged; they've made way too many extraneous purchases, and that they had too much confidence in their audience of formerly 2.93 million to make up for the expenses they failed to cover.

It almost seems as if their internal logic was, "If we make more money, we can keep living the expensive lifestyle that we want and make whatever we want without anyone telling us we can't, and we want to do it NOW, sooner rather than later because we don't want wait and compromise our vision." But as you can see, the reality of fulfilling those ambitions is already compromised by the responsibility of running a business.

And I wrote this in another post here, but I'll state it again: Running a business means you need to be educated on how a business can successfully and efficiently operate. Accounting, marketing, social media marketing, public relations, production, etc; these resources and internet of things is available and at your disposal. If they had invested more time in educating themselves on those aspects and not made this decision based on artistic passion (and/or greed), they would have not gotten the response they got.

Being a graphic designer, I know the creative/passionate side of things but I also got a degree/got educated in business because I wanted to understand how to start a company and run it successfully. If they’re having trouble handling the responsibility of doing that, managing production costs, managing overhead expenses, and especially with compensating their 25+ employees, then they should hire professionals that are sympathetic to their creative interests, but have the education and experience to reign in bad decisions like these.

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TedTalk. What a shitshow this has been.

#watcher #watcher entertainment #ryan bergara #shane madej #steven lim #watcher tv #watchergate #accounting

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whencyclopedia · 6 months ago

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Shays' Rebellion

Shays' Rebellion (1786-87) was an armed insurrection by rural farmers in western and central Massachusetts, sparked by the state government's unpopular response to a debt crisis. The insurrection reached its climax when the rebels, referred to by some scholars as 'Shaysites', unsuccessfully assaulted a federal arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, ultimately leading to the rebellion's dissolution.

The rebellion erupted amidst an economic crisis and was largely the result of a feud between New England rural farmers and the coastal mercantile elite; when the farmers proved unable to pay debts owed to New English retailers and merchants, their creditors took harsh legal action, often resulting in the farmers losing their property or being thrown into debtors' jail. The farmers believed these judicial actions to be unjust and, in autumn 1786, surrounded courthouses in several Massachusetts towns to halt court proceedings. When the Massachusetts government responded by implementing a severe Riot Act and raising a private army, the protestors turned violent. Under the leadership of American Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays (the namesake of the rebellion) and others, the rebels surrounded Springfield Armory, with the intention of using the weapons within to launch an assault on Boston.

The Shaysites, however, were repulsed when they assaulted the armory on 25 January 1787. The rebels were then mopped up by the private army under General Benjamin Lincoln and the insurrection fizzled out shortly thereafter. Shays' Rebellion highlighted the inefficiency of the United States central government which, under the Articles of Confederation, had been powerless to send federal troops or otherwise intercede to stop the insurrection. The rebellion led many Americans to realize that a stronger central government was necessary, and it influenced the drafting and ratification of the US Constitution.

Debt Crisis

As noted by historian David P. Szatmary, the New England of the 18th century was a society in which aspects of 'rural tradition' and 'commercial expansion' coexisted and gradually came into conflict with one another (1). The vast majority of New Englanders existed within the former category as yeomen farmers or agricultural laborers, who lived in rural communities and often owned the land on which they worked. These farmers enjoyed a subsistence lifestyle, living off their own produce. Whenever they needed something from the market – shoes, for instance, or medicine – they would usually pay with surplus crops rather than in hard currency, which was scarce. If it had been a rough harvest season and the farmers did not have any surplus crops, retailers would often extend to them a line of credit, trusting the farmers to pay them back the next harvest season.

Simultaneously, a growing commercial economy was thriving in the coastal towns of Massachusetts and in the Connecticut River Valley, which relied on trade conducted by merchants. This mercantile class dominated politics in New England and was, therefore, a powerful interest group; indeed, it was partially the grievances of these merchants that had set the New England colonies on the path toward the American Revolution. These merchants had built their fortunes off trade with business contacts in Great Britain and the West Indies, exporting commodities such as timber and rum in exchange for various goods which would then be sold to the shopkeepers in New England's various market towns for resale. Like the yeomen farmers, the merchants did not have much hard currency on hand and were used to conducting business through lines of credit extended to them by their overseas business partners.

At the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, the New England merchants were eager to resume trade with their prewar business contacts in Britain and France. There was, however, a problem; the United States was experiencing a postwar economic depression and lacked a reliable national currency, making British merchants wary of extending new lines of credit to their New English counterparts. British merchants insisted that any future business dealings must be conducted entirely in hard currency and that all past debts must be immediately paid before commerce could resume. The New English merchants were taken aback by these demands but had no choice but to comply, since Britain was one of their only feasible overseas markets.

The merchants of New England did not have the hard currency that their overseas contacts were demanding; in 1786, for instance, Boston merchants collectively owed £80,000 in debt but had less than £25,000 in hard currency between them. To collect the coinage needed to reopen trade, the merchants decided to call in the debts owed to them by the storeowners of New England's rural market towns. But, of course, the storeowners were as cash-poor as the merchants and were forced to demand that their own customers, mostly yeomen farmers, pay up as well. The burden of the credit crisis, therefore, fell squarely on the shoulders of the farmers, who were at the bottom of this debt hierarchy and could not pass the buck downward. When the farmers tried to pay their debts with surplus crops, they were dismayed to learn that only hard currency would be accepted. This came at a time when the New England state governments were already levying high taxes to pay off their own war debts, imposing an extra financial strain on the rural population.

#History #Shays'Rebellion #AmericanRevolution #DanielShays

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bradshawsbaby · 2 years ago

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Si Vis Amari Ama

I. Twin Flames

SERIES MASTERLIST

Pairings: Rooster (Roman Name: Gallus) x Female Reader (Roman Name: Sabina), featuring Hangman (Roman Name: Carnifex) x Phoenix

Summary: A girl whose freedom was stolen to pay her father’s debts. A gladiator enslaved for the entertainment of Rome. A love they never thought possible.

Author’s Note: I hope you guys are excited for Gallus and Sabina’s story! I know that I’m very excited to tell it. Please think of this chapter as a Prologue of sorts, where you’ll get a little glimpse into the histories of our hero and heroine.

Word Count: 2k

Warnings: Slavery in the ancient world, parental death, references to physical abuse, allusions to atrocities committed during a Roman raid, angst.

You could never escape your debts.

There wasn’t much that you remembered about your father, but you could recall those words falling from his lips, clear as a bell. He’d said them so often when you were a little girl that they were permanently ingrained in your brain, rather like the brand that now marred the skin of your left shoulder.

He was right. You couldn’t escape your debts. Even in death, they came to haunt those you left behind, the weight of them falling on shoulders not strong enough to bear the burden.

If only your father had heeded his own advice.

But you were only a child then. At six years old, what could you know of the expenses your father was piling up, the creditors he owed, the tax collectors he evaded?

Perhaps he knew all along. Perhaps he knew he would never escape those debts, never outrun them. And so perhaps Fortuna, the only god he had ever had any use for, had smiled upon him when she sent the fever that robbed him of his life breath.

But why did she have to take Mater, too?

At six years old, you knew nothing. Nothing but pain and loss.

If only you had known that that was just the beginning.

What could you have known of the debts your father owed? Death may have allowed him to escape them, but it didn’t afford you the same luxury.

Rome had been your home your entire life, but when you needed her the most, she turned her back on you, just as your father had done. Just, as it seemed, Fortuna had. The most powerful empire in the world had no pity in her heart for poor orphans, especially not orphans who had inherited a lifetime’s worth of debt, orphans whose fathers’ foolishness had robbed the empire’s coffers.

It was a strange thing, being swept up and sold off, like you were of no more worth than the tapestries and vases that went with you off to market.

Everything was to be sold, you’d overheard the men saying, those frightening men with their faces that looked like the marble you’d seen in the Temple of Jupiter and their eyes as cold as the frigid waters of the Tiber in the dead of winter. If they fetched a good enough price for your childhood home and everything that lay within it, it might just settle your father’s accounts, so they said.

You could never escape your debts.

Or, in this case, you could never escape the debts of others.

Maybe you should have known that moment would come, the moment when your freedom was swallowed up forever. Maybe the signs had been there all along, as the augurs in the temples were so wont to remind people.

Had your parents known all along that this would be your fate when they bestowed your name upon you at birth? Sabina, a name derived from the Sabine women, the very women who had been robbed of their freedom when they were unwillingly carried off by the brutal hands of Rome.

You had never been one for portents and signs, but perhaps this one had been staring you in the face all along.

From Sabina, the freeborn Roman to Sabina, the slave.

How quickly the hands of fate could turn.

Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and months to years, until freedom itself seemed only to be a distant memory, like the sound of your mother’s voice and the joy of the games you’d played as a small child.

Your childhood and your freedom had been stolen, stolen to satisfy the debts of the man who was supposed to protect and defend you. And yet, you couldn’t find it in yourself to let the bitterness and resentment build. You’d seen the way it festered in others, the way it gnawed at their bones until nothing remained but a hollow shell. You couldn’t allow that to happen.

Because then what was left of you would be stolen, too, and you really would be nothing.

So long as that tiny flicker of peace remained, then a part of you remained as well, and nobody, not even Rome herself, could take that away from you.

Through every indignity, through every punishment and beating and degradation, you clung to that tiny piece of your heart that you stubbornly refused to let be stained by the world. Through every change of hands, when your body was treated like a commodity to be bought and sold, your very humanity ignored and denied, you retreated to that small place inside, that place where you were still you and always would be.

At night, when you dreamed, it wasn’t of the horrors of your circumstances or the brutality of your days. When you dreamed, it was always of the same pair of arms that held you close and kept you safe. They were strong arms. Scarred arms. Arms that had carried the weight of burdens too heavy to bear, just as you had. You didn’t know who they belonged to—you could never see his face—but you trusted him more than anyone you had ever known. And though you woke each morning alone and cold, you knew with a surety borne only of a deep-seated need that his warmth would find you again when you closed your eyes.

No matter where you went, no matter what household you were sold to, your strong-armed protector followed you in your dreams. And so you weren’t afraid when, after the death of the dominus you’d served for many years, you were sold off to the household of Atticus Cornelius Juventus. For though he was well known to be a lanista, a dealer in the most brutal of gladiators, you felt a strange sense of certainty that you would be safe there.

Your father had taught that you could never escape your debts.

You had learned that you could never escape the fetters of slavery.

But maybe, just maybe, there was still a part of you, no matter how small, that could be free.

Honor and pride were all a man had.

His father had been a great warrior. Honor and pride were the two things he had lived by, the things that had fueled him.

He didn’t really remember his father.

His mother had told him about him when he was small, but he didn’t really remember her either.

He could recall her in flashes—the feel of her arms as she rocked him to sleep, the sound of her voice as she hummed a tune he could no longer remember the words of, the look of pain that flickered in her eyes when she spoke of his father.

But every time he tried to cling to those memories, to solidify her face in his mind’s eye and tattoo it on his heart, they disappeared like the morning mist, taking all the fleeting echoes of home with them.

Home.

Britannia had been home once, but was it any longer?

It was the land his father had died for, the land he’d been cut down defending.

It was the land where his mother had given him life, nurturing him and raising him to be a man of honor and pride, as his father had been.

But he hadn’t been a man, not then.

He hadn’t been a man when the Romans came and raided his village. He hadn’t been a man when they burned the only home he’d ever known, not caring that his mother was still inside. He hadn’t been a man when they raped and pillaged, destroying everything he’d ever held dear in their mad thirst for power and control.

He hadn’t been a man when they rounded him up with the other few survivors and carted him off to the slave markets of Rome, the foul center of their even fouler empire.

He hadn’t been a man then, but he became one.

And as he grew under the watchful eyes of Rome, so did his bitterness. As his body grew stronger, so did his hatred for the people who had made him a slave to their savage empire.

The Romans liked to claim that his people were the savages, yet he had never seen a people as thirsty for blood as the citizens of this hellish kingdom. His father had only ever fought out of devotion to his family and his homeland. These people fought for the pure joy of bloodlust.

He hated them.

He hated them and he hated everything they represented.

But most of all, he hated himself for not being able to break free of them. He hated himself for having to submit to their fetters and chains.

One day, he told himself, he would break free. And so he worked hard every day, not for the benefit of Rome, but for the benefit of himself. He built up his muscles and his stamina, he built up his endurance and his strength. He built himself up so that no one would ever be able to hurt him and get away with it.

But perhaps that had been his mistake.

He built himself up so much that it began to attract talk—and attention.

It started out harmlessly enough. His dominus—how he hated that word—would set up street brawls with drunkards and other slaves and collect bets on the outcome of the fights. He might not have been proud to admit it, but it served as an outlet for the rage he’d been bottling up inside since he was a small boy. Each man he fought was the man who had run his father through with a Roman sword, or the soldier who had laughed as his mother screamed in agony while the flames engulfed her. With each swing of his massive fists, he avenged his parents and his people.

But as the fights became more popular, more people began to take notice. And he was too brash and impulsive, too young and stupid, to realize just how dangerous that was.

He would never forget the day that Atticus Cornelius Juventus came to watch him fight, the rich man’s dark, beady eyes never blinking as he watched him destroy his opponents, beating them to within an inch of their lives. At the end of the bout, when he was bloodied and panting and soaked with sweat, the man even smiled, one corner of his cunning mouth quirking up into a satisfied grin.

“I’ll take him, Linus,” he had said, throwing a hefty bag of clinking coins in the direction of his smirking dominus.

His former dominus.

From that day forward, he became the property of Atticus Cornelius Juventus and he knew that he would never taste freedom again.

He had built himself up so that they could never destroy him, and he ended up destroying himself.

From street brawls with drunkards, to armed combat in local arenas, to the public spectacles of the Colosseum, the years passed and his fame grew. “The Barbarian from Britannia” was what they loved to call him. He was their champion, their hero, their undefeated victor. They loved him, worshiped him, adored the ground he walked on.

He hated them.

He hated their cheers, he hated the way they fawned over him, he hated the way they had forced their sword into his hand, the same sword that had slaughtered his father and his people.

He no longer cared whether he lived or died. In fact, he rather wished that death would finally come to claim him one of these days.

What did he have to live for?

It certainly wasn’t the hope of freedom. He no longer hoped for that. He no longer hoped for anything. His life was not his own, and it never had been.

There were moments when he was by himself late at night, brief and fleeting moments when he felt himself reaching out for something—or someone. It was a desperate ache, a longing deep inside his chest for something he didn’t quite understand.

It didn’t matter. He would root that longing out of his heart, just as he had rooted out every other feeling beyond bitterness and hatred.

Honor and pride were all a man had, and his had been trampled into the dust.

He would never return to his homeland.

He would never escape the blood and sand of the Colosseum.

He would never again be free.

#bradley rooster bradshaw #rooster x reader #x reader #x female reader #top gun #top gun: maverick #miles teller #hannix #hangman x phoenix #Ancient Rome AU #si vis amari ama ⚔️

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