#do I want to keep this?

[shamera]

NaNo day 26

Originally in my head, there's one more scene before part 1 ends, but this might be the best place to end it?

I'll write it anyway and then see, but this might be the place to end today's bit! Gotta go back and change a few things too, especially since I was struggling on translating most things to English but honestly I have finally given up with how fdb addresses his aunt. He calls her 小姨 in the series, and while I normally just translate that as small aunt (at least I did in previous stories), I never had him CALL her that before, because that just sounds weird in translation. So I might have to go back and change all the 'small aunt' into 'xiao-yi' in this story instead just because just sounds better.

(Also, people just don't address family members as like 'big uncle' or something in English, because they include a name there. But in Mandarin that just sounds like you're not actually related to them, because you can call all your parents' friends aunts and uncles, too.)

Also in my head, it was 黑暗 for what I translated to "the Black", which. Uh. Well, the translation worked in my head as I was writing, but I'm a terrible terrible translator.

“No, tell me now.” Fang Duobing said, hand tightening to a bruising grip around Li Lianhua’s wrist. “Tell me what actually happened. Tell me the truth.”

“Tell you what, that you just fell right into some psychedelic core of a dungeon boss?” Li Lianhua bluffed, deceptively nonchalant. “Whatever you saw, we don’t have time to unpack all of that. This dungeon is going to start falling apart in moments, and—”

Fang Duobing refused to let go. “No one’s destroyed an active dungeon in ten years. How would you know that?”

Fang Duobing thought, maybe, maybe it would be easier if Li Lianhua just said it outright. If Li Lianhua would stop trying to yank out of his grip, as if he was really weak Li Lianhua again rather than someone Fang Duobing had just seen take down a dungeon boss. 

He felt strange, like the darkness really was clinging to him, like he was hovering just right above his body, like his actions made sense to him and were guided by his thoughts but there was a barrier between what he was thinking and feeling, and what he was actually doing. 

He felt untethered by the recent realisations. 

“Fang Duobing,” and here Li Lianhua’s tone grew harsher as Fang Duobing continued to cling to him. “Why must you insist on this? Isn’t it enough to survive the dungeon? What if I say I’ll explain it all to you later?”

“You’d just run away,” Fang Duobing already knew this. “You’d run away until you could come up with a suitable lie for yourself, and then you won’t say even if I already know that you’re lying. Li Lianhua. I’ve been your friend for two years now, haven’t I? I have always considered you my friend even though I was never sure what you thought. And I’ve told you—”

Drunken rambling under starry skies about his dreams of being a Hunter, of living up to Li Xiangyi’s legacy, of breaking free from familial expectations to forge his own path. Of his aspirations. 

“—I told you everything about myself.” Fang Duobing finished lamely, the force of his anger deflating into a disappointment that cored him. He was starting to get feeling in his limbs again, and his legs were tingling. His grip felt stiff, like he was using one hand to hold onto Li Lianhua, and his other to hold something else. 

Wait. He was holding onto something else. 

Li Lianhua was quiet in the darkness for a moment, and then a cold hand patted the grip Fang Duobing had on him. 

“Later,” Li Lianhua amended. “I’ll explain later. You always manage to find me. How could I run away?”

What had Fang Duobing expected? Li Lianhua was reluctant to part with the truth at the best of times, never mind when he was forced into a situation where he had to say something real. It was likely the best he was going to get from the man.  With that, his grip started to loosen, only to tense as the smell of acrid smog permeated his senses. Immediately following the smell was the rumbling of the ground underneath them, different from the fight before as this was a more even spread, like the world itself was starting to shake itself apart, evenly and building with each second. 

“Time to go.” Li Lianhua said briskly, and hauled Fang Duobing up to his feet unceremoniously. The younger man stumbled for half a second before resting his weight on protesting legs, unable to see the ground or where they might be going. “Hold on, then. This is going to feel— strange.”

Then Li Lianhua was pulling him along, grabbing onto his wrist in return as the two of them raced along the unstable ground, soon joined by the sounds of thousands of skittering feet, yet their path was unimpeded. Fang Duobing didn’t know where they were going, didn’t know how Li Lianhua knew where to go in the darkness.

“Which way?” Fang Duobing called out in a panic as they ran. 

“Any!” Li Lianhua called back. “The edge of the dungeon is closing in, and we just have to pass it—”

And there it was— the faint purple glow associated with gates, except it was appearing in front of them endlessly, like a light to cross through. Within the glow, he could now see the shapes of endless monsters, none of them paying the two of them any attention as they crashed against the purple gate, climbing atop each other and flooding the ground, but unable to pass through. 

Apprehension slowed him as they approached, even with the shaking underneath growing worse and crashing sounds coming from behind them. Li Lianhua continued to pull at him, displaying uncharacteristic strength as they ran, and then soon they came upon the gate and they were going to be okay and then afterward Fang Duobing was going to tie Li Lianhua to a pole and refuse to let him go until he got answers—

It was like hitting a solid wall. 

Perhaps not a solid wall, as Fang Duobing nearly bounced back from the impact, as the feeling had been evenly spread rather than hitting at a single point of impact. He nearly let go of Li Lianhua, who didn’t have the same problem, but the man didn’t let go of his wrist. 

Li Lianhua stopped at Fang Duobing’s sound of pain and the jerk backward, the purple light now bright enough to see each other clearly. “What—?”

Within a moment, his stunned expression changed toward something strange. 

“Put that down, drop it right now.” Li Lianhua ordered, and reached to yank at Fang Duobing’s other hand. “You can’t— bring things from the Black, how did you even—?”

In his hand, the one curled into a death group, was a ball the size of his palm, like a black pearl shimmering against the purple light. Fang Duobing hadn’t even noticed— or rather, he had, yet the knowledge managed to escape his attention somehow. 

“What?” He asked, mind blank as he stared down at the ball in his hand. His fingers were caught in a death grip, like it wasn’t his own hand at all. For a moment, he shook his wrist, but still couldn’t let go of it. “I… I can’t?”

Li Lianhua was prying at his fingers, backlit by the purple light, the creatures of the dungeon swarming around them in panic, each of them hitting the same wall that Fang Duobing had. 

The gate seemed to be pushing them back, skidding them across the unstable ground, drawing to a smaller and smaller point as they attached to detach the ball from Fang Duobing. In the distance, he could see the extent of the gate, of it encroaching from the opposite side, from all sides. It really was drawing in like it would crush everything within the dungeon. 

“Let go,” Li Lianhua told him, a heavy panic in his tone. His fingers were pale even in the purple light, pulling at Fang Duobing’s. Fang Duobing was trying, he really was, but it was an involuntary reaction, like reacting to getting shocked, like electric currents running along his nerves now that he knew where to look in order to feel it. 

“I’m trying!” Fang Duobing protested, and both wrestled with his hand as they were pushed back by the gate, and the shove of monster bodies began to press in against them. He shook at his own hand in a panic, trying to help Li Lianhua in prying his fingers open. 

They got one finger, and then another, and the carapaces of the creatures around them were pressing in tight, stuck in the nonspace between the dungeon and the magic of the gate until it felt hard to breathe. 

Around them, the dungeon was starting to disappear, the bits of stone illuminated  falling into nothing at all, and even the monsters starting to disappear into nothingness. 

“Got it!” Li Lianhua called, and then he was holding onto the orb with both hands, looking up in victory. “Now we go—”

He dropped the orb just as they were swallowed by the purple light. 

— 

He Xiaofeng was yelling at the representatives from Wansheng Sect when Hunters started pouring out of the gate in a flurry, her arm in a sling as the medic next to her attempted to gently dissuade her from aggravating her injuries to no avail. 

“What do you mean the dungeon is collapsing?” She shouted, her good hand around the collar of the representative’s throat. He was a good head taller than her with a tired slant to his eyes and chin-length hair wearing a button up with Hunter accessories. He must have introduced himself at some point, but she didn’t care for his name unless she needed Tianji Hall to start legal shit against him. “Dungeons don’t collapse!”

Not unless the dungeon boss was defeated, and that wasn’t something anyone attempted in the past decade. Not to mention the difficulty of it, and the fact that she doubted Wansheng Sect could manage it at all.

Wansheng Sect was a shit sect, in her opinion, but they were apparently high ranked and the ones who came first at the call of a newly formed dungeon with people caught up in it, and the members apparently already rescued the rest of her employees. To them, it was He Xiaofeng and her group who had been unlucky as the rescue operations were well underway even when they had been waiting and running, yet when she dragged Bei Yun to them, yelling at the top of her lungs that her nephew was still in there, that she was fit to go back in if she had to in order to rescue him and Physician Li despite her injuries, so long as they provided backup to obtain more crystal shards— 

They refused to let her back in! She was a qualified Hunter, even if she never trained for search and rescue in dungeons before. 

“Do you know who I am?” She asked, voice low and dangerous as she dragged the man down to her level to brush her nose against his, glaring him down. The wailing of sirens around them and the overwhelming scent of ozone from the gate was only infuriating her more, feeling like a sensory overload to go with stupid men who would dismiss her. “Do you know who my nephew is? If you think your Wansheng Sect can withstand the wrath of Tianji Hall—”

Technically, Tianji Hall was a tech company intermediary between Hunter sects and the government, but they had authority the same way Baichuan Court was given authority to police Hunters. 

“Ma’am, please,” the medic next to her said, voice pained. “We’re already short staffed and don’t need more injuries to see to right now.”

She refused to let up on her grip, even as the man started choking in her grasp, hands coming up to claw at her in vain. 

“Send people through,” she demanded. “Send people through or let me through, or so help me—”

The gate was getting smaller and smaller, had been for the past minute or so, and her panic grew inversely. What would she tell her sister, her brother-in-law— 

“Xiao-yi!”

She released the man immediately, paying no mind as he tumbled to the ground and instead turning on her heel toward her nephew’s voice. 

“Xiaobao!” She gasped out, already pushing past both Bei Yun and the medic to jog toward the figures that appeared out of the gate. He was covered, absolutely slathered, in a black substance that looked like it was slowly wisping away in the air, evaporating into nothingness to reveal bruises and dried blood and torn clothes. 

Li Lianhua was similarly drenched, hair out of his usual neat bun to cover his face and drape over Xiaobao’s shoulder, his form limp carried across Fang Duobing’s back. 

“Xiao-yi,” he gasped out again, just as she reached him to grab onto his shoulders, too worried to know what to do or what to say first. “Help.”

And then his legs gave out underneath him, just as the team of medics converged on them.

[tearlessrain]

I mean honestly I don’t hate Harris. or Biden, who has actually done a lot of good in the last four years especially considering the mess he had to clean up. but whatever gets the “my imaginary moral high ground is more important than peoples’ lives” fucks to vote.

[dovesick]

endless night

[catmask]

SNAPDEX REPORT: WEEK 1

actually, i guess nows as good a time as any. heres all my pokemon warmups from the past 9 days! i wonder how long i can keep going

[zillychu]

everyone sh. shutd up im cooking smthn

[laughingcatwrites]

As a reminder that good exists out there, a coworker recently confessed to me that he found out his child is questioning their identity (kid's gender redacted for this post). The kid is keeping it from him, so he can't say anything to them or show that he knows, but he's doing his best to get mentally prepared and educated so that he'll be ready whenever his kid does feel comfortable enough come to him.

For context, this guy is a big, bulky middle aged dude who loves sports and typical outdoor "manly" activities. As his coworker and friend, I know he's a kind and sweet teddy bear of a person, but his kid probably views him as a stern, authoritarian figure, the way most teenagers view their parents. His family lives in a conservative area, so I'm sure between that, their dad's looks and interests, and the fact that their dad is a Figure of Authority, the kid is worried that they won't be accepted.

But you know what? When he found out about his kid, the first thing he did was reach out to his closest queer friend and ask for resources for parents of questioning children. His biggest fears are that his kid will be bullied or discriminated against and won't feel comfortable enough to be themself. His second action was to find himself a mentor in another parent who went the same situation (kid coming out in a conservative town). The other person is preparing him for some of the struggles his kid may face and the fights he may need to take on as a parent to make sure his kid is safe and treated well.

Something I want to emphasize for people focused on language as the primary method of allyship is that when we spoke, he used some outdated terms and thoughts about gender and sexuality. That does not make him bad. These were the terms and thinking used about questioning teenagers when he was growing up and he never needed to learn more current ones. But now that he does have that need, he's throwing himself in head first because that's his kid and he's darn well going to make sure that his kid feels welcomed and has a safe place to be themselves even if they never come out to him.

[lemongogo]

life of regret

[crabussy]

mane 6 with realistic horse coat colours!!!

info under cut, please ask to repost!!

twilight: dark bay

pinkie: strawberry roan

fluttershy: palomino tobiano

rarity: buttermilk/silver buckskin

applejack: palomino

rainbow dash: blue roan

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Ah, Stan, not on the good rug!! Your fleas are jumpin' off and holin' up in there!!!

Guys, be real, he would have fleas he was a stray for ten years 🗣️

I just wanted to draw Stan stratchin' like a dog, you guys understand 🙏

Previous!!

Next!!

First!!

[vaxxman]

"Do you miss the time when you used to do no harm?"

Old habits.

Merc behaviour is based on a nice little comment @up-in-flames-writing left on one of my comics :)

Rambling and more silly drawings below.

Loosely based on the Solemn Vow's public blurb:

Art lovers will cherish the bust of Hippocrates, commemorating a time when the Medic still thought doing no harm was a good idea.

I am absolutely convinced that Medic carries dextrose drops with him. German pharmacies throw these after you when you buy anything at all. I went to check if this one specific brand I know of had been around since the 60s and 70s and yes, it was.

Small acts of kindness I can see Medic doing is giving everyone one of these if they are tired. I'm talking about Engineer mostly.

Or they snack on them when solving practical problems together, like during the teleporter bread tumor incident.

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[nat-20s]

Every time that the stakes are now So So So high in Doctor Who I'm like. Congratulations to Fourteen for well and truly fucking off. His ass is NOT dealing with death gods his ass is trying to get rid of the spider mites on the basil

[chloesimaginationthings]

I know Vanessa regret saying this in the FNAF movie,,

[wispscribbles]

I love your ghost design. I wanna squeeze him :⁠^⁠)

If no hug then why hug-shaped???

[eyes-of-nine]

pls assume i'm thinking about this moment 24/7 all week every week

[hinamie]

parenthood was not on my 2024 bingo card but clearly life is full of surprises