#ever wanted to learn what a vivisection is

[brekitten]

The Therapist

There's a new therapist at school.

Normally this wouldn't really bother Peter at all, since he's never gone to see a shrink in his life and doesn't ever plan on it, but there's something... off about this woman.

She seems unassuming enough at first glance. Red hair, green eyes, bright red lipstick. But there is something in her eyes, something that Peter can only describe as a predator looking at its next prey, when she looks around the school at all of the teenagers milling about. Heck, even the way she walks makes her seem as if she is a predator stalking her prey.

It could always be some kind of power move, Peter reasons. He's met people like that before, who try to intimidate everyone around them into thinking that they are superior, that they are the apex predator and anyone who dares to cross them would pay for it dearly.

But his Spidey Sense went crazy around her.

He tries to brush it off as paranoia. He'd pulled an all-nighter last night in the lab with Tony because neither of them had been able to sleep, and he hadn't been sleeping well even before that. (Funny, how it had all started the night after he first bumped into the new therapist in the halls.) So his Spidey Sense is probably out of wack because he's tired. Simple as that.

But it seems like everyone in the school is depressed. Even Ned, who can't even muster up the energy and enthusiasm to talk about Legos or Star Wars or even the weather. It worries Peter.

Because it all started when that therapist came to the school.

He can't ignore it forever, he knows that. There is only so long his Spidey Sense can tell him that she is danger danger danger before he finally listens. He has to do something to help everyone.

So he researches.

And he falls into the rabbit hole of ghosts and ectoplasm and secret government organizations and the little, unassuming town of Amity Park, Illinois.

He doesn't sleep that night.

When he comes to school the next morning, Dr. Penelope Spectra looks him dead in the eyes, and smiles.

[animal-123-crazy]

Okay listen when one of the biggest plot pieces revolves around nuclear burger sauce…. Yeah its silly

But yknow the entire Freakshow arc still unsettles me a bit. ALSO SPECTRA??? Im pretty sure my innate fear of psychologists stems from THAT. Spectra freaked me out man

[deadsetobsessions]

“Tim. Timmy. Ancients, kid, what are you doing?!”

Danny Phantom smacked away the instinctual terror of seeing an eight year old dangling out of a third story window.

��I gotta go take pictures of Batman and Robin! They’re out tonight!”

Danny thought that his barely healed vivisection wound might bust open from the sheer stress.

“Setting aside how you even know the patrol schedule of honest to god vigilantes, why’d you choose the window? The house is literally empty, just walk out the front door, for Ancient’s sake.”

Tim paused, a motion Danny was overwhelmingly thankful for, and blinked sheepishly.

“Um… for the aesthetic?”

Danny allowed the silence to settle between them before dropping his head into his waiting hands. Tim panicked.

“You- you can’t stop me!”

And yeah, Danny really can’t. In the months he’s been mooching off of the Drakes (not that they’ll notice), Danny’s learned that Tim Drake is nothing but relentless in the pursuit of whatever he sets his mind on. Whether thet might be putting hot chocolate in his cereal (which Danny doesn’t actually mind) or, apparently, stalking a pair of vigilantes.

He wanted to hack into the library cameras? Danny had to hover just to make sure the kid didn’t get caught after arguing for an hour about it.

He walked out of that argument with a loss, yes, but he also let Tim know that Danny cared about him. Danny also walked out of that argument with a new hatred for Janet and Jack Drake and his mind (just as diabolical as Tim’s) whirring with plans to haunt them.

Tim is never ever introducing his new little brother to Tucker. Ever.

“Okay. I don’t want to see you take unnecessary risks, but I’m also aware that I can’t really stop you. So. I’ll go with you.”

Maybe this is like… Tim’s obsession? When he put it that way, Danny lost the fight to prevent this tiny kid from what clearly is the only joy in his poor life.

“But…!” Tim’s eyes darted to Danny’s chest, the vivisection scars still fresh in his mind.

“They’re healed.” Danny pulled his dumbass little brother off the window sill, core settling as Tim follows willingly. “I’ll make us invisible and fly with you behind Batman and Robin so you can get even better shots. You can’t make any noise, though. That camera got a shutter sound, right?”

“Yeah!” Tim’s face brightened and Danny melted. He shoved a bottle of the (incredibly stinky but helpful in a pinch) ecto contaminated tap water into a backpack, along with some snacks and a blanket for when Tim gets cold. Danny’ll be fine, he’s got a Space Core. The cold his kind of his thing.

“Cool. We’ll stay out of earshot. If things starts to get too dicey, we’re heading home, okay?”

“Okay!” The look Tim shot him is full of trust and adoration and it makes Danny’s human heart squeeze painfully. “C’mon! I don’t want to be late!”

“We need to talk about your stalking tendencies later,” Danny said fondly.

“I’m not stalking them! I’m observing them!”

“Uh-huh,” Danny drawled, picking Tim up and making them intangible and invisible. “They’re not a bird observatory and also, even the birds in the observatory knows they’re being watched. Batman and Robin clearly doesn’t.”

Danny felt more than saw Tim’s pout.

He laughs as they fly just below the Gotham-brand of toxic smog. He waves to the City’s Spirit as Tim cranes his head around to catch sight of Batman and Robin.

“There!”

Danny obliged. With Danny’s flight, Tim got much better- much closer- photos than he would have originally.

Danny hung back as the pair of vigilantes swooped down to take care of a mugging.

“Wanna mess with them?” He grinned down at his little brother, canines glinting.

Tim looked up at him, admiration and mischievousness in his gaze. “Yes.”

Gotham parted her clouds in response to their glee.

——

Dick Grayson, AKA Robin, finally understood why criminals are so creeped out by him.

Other than the whole flippy child kicking grown people’s asses and winning thing, obviously (that, and Batman loomed menacingly behind him everytime a criminal even looked at Robin wrong).

Batman had picked up on it first, but the for entirety of their patrol, they kept hearing eerie little giggles and laughter. Haunting them. Never distracting. But persistent. And so creepy. He got goosebumps.

“B, I wanna go home.”

“Hm.” That’s a resounding yes if Dick’s ever heard one.

Maybe Alfred can chase away the giggles and chuckles.

Robin shudders and follows the Bat home.

——

Danny lowered the temperature as he held Tim up near Batman’s cowl so his brother could giggle menacingly. He knew for a fact that any recording device would get completely cram led by the sheer output of ambient ectoplasm he’s emitting. Plus, it freaked Robin out and raised the hairs on the back of the vigilantes’ heads. He tones it down when he noticed Tim rubbing his hands together.

He let out a quiet laugh, enjoying the flight with his brother in his arm and the light of the stars (thanks, Gotham) at his back.

——

Danny: oh, this kid’s got an Obsession, gotta let him do it safely, he’s a liminal from all that tap water

Danny: *forgets Tim isn’t a ghost nor is he from Amity and is therefore extremely breakable*

——

Danny and Tim: doing crime is a good bonding activity

Batman and Robin, who wants to say no it isn’t but they’re literally a pair of illegal vigilantes:

——

Dick as Robin: *cackles*

Tim, learning habits from stalking them: *giggles*

Gotham Criminals: *fear*

[subbyp]

I have this idea for an AU wherein Sanji’s physical Germa modifications kick in during his time starving on the rock, and when he’s like 14 Judge finds out and decides to take him back by force, because if the physical modifications took then surely the mental ones will too and if not there’s always psychological conditioning like what he did to Reiju, right? So Germa rocks up to the Baratie, burns it to the waterline, slaughters the crew (almost) to a man, and drags Sanji back. they don’t realize that Zeff survives, and they probably wouldn’t care if they did. (more fool them)

the mental modifications never kick in, but Sanji learns to act like they do, developing this false persona as a vicious shallow hedonist. he also leans hardcore on his growing resemblance to Sora to get Judge to indulge his whims (no, there’s nothing actually sexual about it, but it is deeply uncomfortable and it’s supposed to be). this is because he’s waiting for a very specific kind of opportunity…..

five years later, the Straw Hat Pirates are in Loguetown, getting ready to scale Reverse Mountain when Luffy fucks up the storefront of a shabby little seafood shack off the main square where Roger was once executed and is enlisted into chore boy duty. he gets to talking about dreams and piracy and sailing with the owner.

“do you have any dreams?” he says, failing to mop the floor.

“I used to have a few,” says the owner.

“not anymore?” says Luffy.

“none of your business,” says the owner.

“you should be my cook!” says Luffy.

“not a chance in hell,” says the owner.

then the shit goes down that leads to Luffy being put up on the block and almost executed. when the Straw Hats flee to the Merry they find the owner standing there waiting for them with a book under his arm.

he explains that he can’t be their cook—he’s too old and too broken, he’s had enough of the Grand Line, and besides staying in Loguetown is the best shot he has at achieving his dream (“I knew you had a dream!” yells Luffy. everyone ignores this), but he’s got a cookbook and nutrition guide he’s been working on and the Straw Hats can have the first draft so they don’t totally die of scurvy and shit if they swear to do him one favor—to, if they ever, out there on the sea, meet a nineteen-year-old kid called Sanji, tell him that Red-Leg Zeff is alive.

“yeah! of course!” says Luffy. “if you tell me what your dream is.”

“to see him walk free,” says Zeff.

—

Zeff’s cookbook keeps the Straw Hats properly nourished. but they barely make it to Sabaody in canon, and here they have one less combatant, so Kuma decides to split the team at Thriller Bark, and instead of sending Zoro to Kuraigana, he sends his unconscious just-bore-Luffy’s-pain ass right onto the Germa 66 flagship.

Judge wants to vivisect Zoro to figure out how a regular human non-DF-user could be so freakshow strong and then turn his head in for the bounty, but Sanji recognizes him as one of the Straw Hats (and thus, one of the liberators of Alabasta) and improvs on the spot that he wants him as a swordsmanship coach (“after all, sir, you want me to improve my swordsmanship”) and, he heavily implies, bed-warmer. thus Zoro wakes up in a Germa 66 infirmary, wounds bandaged, swords gone, and explosive collar on his neck, as the third-born Prince of Germa demands to be allowed to see his new toy alone. (“yes, I’ll be careful with him. I don’t want to break him when I’ve just got him!”)

zoro, having deduced what sanji is alluding to, is about ready to kill him with his bare hands on the spot, but as soon as they’re alone in the room together sanji starts immediately and profusely apologizing for being such a creep. he says he’s not into men (“especially not unwilling ones”) but it was the only way he could think of to get them even occasional privacy, and btw he is probably going to have to claim that he’s doing some unsavory stuff or else Judge might possibly have Zoro killed, but he’ll never lay a hand on Zoro without his consent besides what is strictly necessary to fake it around the Vinsmokes—

at this point Zoro starts to wonder what the hell he’s going on about. Sanji explains the whole thing and says that he’s planning on somehow getting Zoro back to the Straw Hats as soon as he can, and in the meantime he’ll make sure Zoro gets food and medical care and that nobody sells off his swords or anything, but he needs Zoro to do something for him in return:

“I’m going to feed you every bit of knowledge I have about Germa 66, and when you leave here, you need to give that information to someone who can destroy us until not even memories remain.”

[inhurtandincomfort]

Forsaken

"Go ahead, leave. See what happens. There is no place for you out there; you'll be begging me to take you back."

Warlock: Oathbreaker. Deceiver. Monster. A person who has forged a pact with a daemon thus betraying their Gods, their kin, and even themselves. Those who bear the brand have forsaken the world, and so too shall they be forsaken in turn.

Eldwin Wisht is one such person. The Black Syndicate may be cruel, but they are also the only thing keeping him safe in a world that sees him as a traitor. A tool. A subject. A weapon.

But when he is tasked to infiltrate a rival organisation on a search for the one thing that might prevent an inter-realm war, he is faced with a choice that could change the fate of the world.

THIS IS A WHUMP BLOG. HEED THE WARNINGS.

(main story is still a WIP. Everything is subject to change. However there are plenty of oneshots for you to enjoy!)

(cast)

ONESHOTS

You're a Monster - When you're trying to build a killer, you need to desensitise them first. Or, how easy is it to kill someone begging for their life?

Trapped - A little vivisection to brighten your day

Mithridatism Was a Stupid Idea - Aka poison is fun

The Black Syndicate Survival Guide - Eldwin's notes on the (un)official rules of the Black Syndicate

Oh Sure, Take My Aether, I Didn't Need It Anyway - The first Aether extraction process.

Blindfolded - Blindfolded and left to fend for himself. Aka Clyde is a dick, what's new?

Sweet Aconite - Eldwin gets a cat!

A Soul Condemned, a Fate Be Changed - When Eldwin made a pact with Vor'gol

His Greatest Gift - When Clyde bought Eldwin

Echoes Of The Past: A Study In Jowan - Jowan is captured by a rival team and suffers for it. Oh, and represses everything.

Clawing At Own Throat - a BTHB prompt filled in which Eldwin suffers again :)

BONUS CONTENT

Character Relationships | Height Comparisons | Rooms

|More rooms! | Playlist (YT ver) | All Forsaken Asks

| What my OCs would do for Valentine's Day |Scar Story Tag Game

|What does the daemon brand look like? |Badly Explained Magic System tag

Eldwin asks

What's something Eldwin likes about himself/does he want pets /AUS for this character

What emotion does Eldwin feel the most/what's something he dislikes about himself/How does he sleep at night

Has Eldwin ever left his home country/how's his sense of direction/his most embarrassing moment

What is Eldwin's biggest regret/What would he say to his childhood self/What's something others are surprised to learn about him

What would Eldwin prefer; to die at the hands of the syndicate, of his demon pact, or one his victims seeking revenge?

What would Eldwin do if one day his powers disappeared? Would he still be useful enough to bother keeping around?

Does Eldwin think he deserves everything that happened?

Does he have fears and is he open about it/what is the most stupid or dangerous thing he has ever done?

How does his social personality differ from when he's alone/What is one of his fondest and most treasured memories/How would they spend a lazy day with nothing specific to do?

What does it take to make him laugh + what does his laugh sound like/at a party where would you find him/unexpected skill or knowledge people are surprised he has and are surprised he DOESN'T have

What do I have in common with Eldwin? How are we different? Would we get along?

Does Eldwin like receiving gifts? Giving gifts? Ideal gift?/How would other characters describe him/how would he describe himself?

Eldwin's opinion on lying, stealing and killing/How does he show that he cares about someone? How does he express his dislike for someone?

Other character asks (they'll get their own section if they get a lot)

How did Jowan do in school/what's something he dislikes about himself/Do they collect anything

Day or Night for Eldwin, Jowan and Mordwen?

OC Ask Tag for Jowan and Eldwin - Do they have a favourite person/What's something they'd change about themselves/How do they feel about their name?

How physically/emotionally affectionate is Jowan/What are small things that make him happy/does he have nightmares and what are they about

Are Eldwin and Jowan associated with a certain colour? What do they wear the most?/Weapon of choice and why/Favourite food? Are they picky? Dietary restrictions?

Are Ancassius and Destrian associated with a certain colour?

Does Jowan sleep well at night?

Describe their voices plus can they sing? For everyone!

How do Eldwin and Jowan typically dress? Do they favour aesthetics or practicality?

TAGLIST (let me know if you want to be added or removed!)

@floral-comet-whump @cepheusgalaxy @violets-whumperflies @watermelons-dont-grow-on-trees @whump-till-ya-jump

All graphics by @saradika-graphics

[bardic-tales]

Day 14 | Day 16

31 days of FF 7 Headcanons: Day 15 - Shinra Indoctrination or Rebellion

In the vast expanse of Shinra’s dominion, power isn’t just wielded. It’s extracted, commodified, and weaponized. And for those caught in its gears, survival often becomes its own form of resistance. Bianca Moore was never a cog in that system. She was never sworn in, never recruited, and never compliant. But that didn’t spare her. Dragged beneath the surface of the world she once knew, she was ripped from the mythos of her celestial bloodline and thrust into the clinical nightmare of Shinra’s experiments.

This isn’t a story of indoctrination. It’s the story of a girl reforged in a crucible of pain, rage, and defiance. It’s about what happens when the system doesn’t simply fail you. It devours you like some kind of gnashing beast, and you crawl out of its belly with wings made of scars and wrath. Bianca didn’t rebel. She evolved. And the result is something Shinra never accounted for: a force not bent on justice or retribution or even world domination due to rage like Sephiroth, but on absolute unmaking of Existence. This article explores this side of her.

Possible Trigger Warnings: Abduction, body horror, captivity, disassociation, experimentation, loss of bodily autonomy, medical torture, PTSD, psychological abuse, torture, vivisection, violence (implied), war trauma.

Bianca Moore was never indoctrinated by Shinra in the traditional sense: no badge, no loyalty oath, or no illusions of benevolence. But she was captured. Experimented on. Broken open and rearranged at the molecular level like a science project under Diana Ravenscroft and Hojo’s scalpel. In that hell beneath Shinra Manor, she wasn’t seen as a person. She was data. Proof of a hypothesis. Something to dissect, modify, and tame. Her celestial and demonic heritage, once sacred, was reduced to variables and aberrations. Shinra didn’t need to brainwash her. They tried to erase her, and when she survived that, rebellion wasn’t a choice. It was instinct: a force of reckoning for what they did to her, Sephiroth, and all of the other experiments.

What Shinra did to her shaped more than her scars. It rewrote her identity. She no longer trusted the idea of order, of hierarchy, and of institutions claiming to protect while devouring from within. She learned firsthand that the monsters weren’t in cages. They rarely were. They were wearing lab coats. Her rebellion wasn’t loud at first. It was quiet and methodical. The refusal to die. The choice to become something terrifying enough that no one could ever chain her again: a being shaped by Sephiroth in a dreamscape. She didn’t need to shout her rage at Shinra. Her very existence became her protest.

Still, her path wasn’t one of mere vengeance. It was evolution. Even now, she doesn’t fight Shinra because she wants them to suffer (though part of her does). She fights them because they represent everything that tried to contain her: their obsession with control, their fear of power they don’t understand, and their belief in systems over souls. They saw her as an anomaly to correct and to harvest. A thing to stop degradation. A vessel to create more Sephiroths to only have those babies still borned.

Now? She sees herself as a force to unmake the very foundation they stand on. Not just to destroy Shinra, but to destroy what made Shinra possible.

This history also created tension in her bond with Sephiroth. Though their suffering at Shinra’s hands mirrors one another, he once belonged to them. She never did. Where he was raised by the machine (humanity), she was hunted by it. Sometimes, in the silence between battles, she wonders if he ever truly shed their grip. If somewhere deep inside, the ghost of their indoctrination still haunts him. But it’s also that contrast that makes them whole. Two souls shattered by the same system, coming together not to rebuild, but to become something beyond it.

So no. Bianca Moore was never a Turk, never a SOLDIER, never indoctrinated. But she was invaded. Used. Torn apart. And that is why her rebellion isn’t a war. It’s a metamorphosis. She doesn’t fight to tear Shinra down because it wronged her and her lover. She fights because as long as it exists, nothing truly free can. She’s not interested in flipping the power structure. She’s interested in ending it. Entirely.

@themaradwrites @shepardstales @megandaisy9 @watermeezer

@prehistoric-creatures @creativechaosqueen @chickensarentcheap

@inkandimpressions @arrthurpendragon

[imekitty]

I've been reading your Dis- series around the clock this week (genuinely, I've been staying up every night because I was so engrossed!), and juuust caught up on Disillusioned.

I really like the way you don't shy away from exploring a darker or more realistic (imho) side of a lot of the characters. Especially Danny's parents-they feel way more fleshed out than the standard cartoon couple, thanks to the way you portray their relationship and all of the worries/messiness within it.

And while I do like when authors write Maddie as purely scientifically motivated through and through, I found it really interesting that you've been exploring a more sinister part of her that, honestly, would make a lot of sense to exist in a vivisection story like this. I don't feel like I've ever really seen her character handled this way. It's really interesting.

Thanks for writing! It's been fun to read <3

Thank you! I'm so thrilled to get a message like this! :D

I remember when I was a teenager that I wasn't very good at writing adults, but now as an adult myself, I love being able to flesh out adult characters and make them so much more complicated and human than what we see in cartoons aimed at kids.

While I was writing Disparaged, I read a "Maddie experiments on Phantom" fic and I don't remember much about it except that Danny observes that Maddie is cold and clinical with him, detached, nothing at all like his mother who is warm and loving and nurturing. And that intrigued me because I thought, well, what if she were more warm and nurturing even during experiments? What if she were intimate with him during these experiments instead of detached? What if the woman who tortured Phantom really was the same woman who loved Danny? Would that add to the trauma, the torture? That inability to separate the scientist from his mother?

And then it evolved from there, Maddie being very affectionate with Phantom during experiments, feeling straight up arousal during their time together because her work really does turn her on, achieving the results she wants is better than any orgasm. And seeing someone as powerful as Phantom submitting to her will, also better than sex.

I also saw a comic here on Tumblr where Maddie and Jack had successfully captured Phantom and locked him up in a cell and Maddie was conflicted because he was acting so much like a child, like Danny would, and the author commented that they didn't believe Maddie could actually experiment on Phantom because her motherly side would kick in, she'd have too much sympathy. And I thought but what if Maddie sees Phantom acting like a child as just a trick? What if she learned to ignore ghosts trying to act like humans? What if she saw these ghosts trying to play on her motherly sympathies and chose to continue with the torture anyway? Because she is just that convinced that ghosts only imitate human emotion and can't genuinely experience it?

I think fics that portray Maddie as being cold and clinical and other fics that have her showing sympathy to Phantom and hesitating when conducting experiments on him are completely valid and awesome. I just really enjoy writing Maddie as sadistic and obsessed lol.

[ghostinthegallery]

Re-reading Twice Dead King, the character I was most struck by on a second viewing was Mentep. Now there’s a tragic figure. Simultaneously a mentor, an ally, an antagonist, someone so terribly understandable who I want to smack upside the head for being a lying liar who lies.

Ultimately, Mentep is a penitent. He has committed terrible acts (that we only get scant details of) and he wants to redeem himself. Thanks to his tampering with his own memories, he doesn't fully know what he is repenting for, which puts him in a bind. However, he knows that he played a role in creating the flayer curse/longing sickness, so he goes to a planet where a high concentration of them have gathered and works on his cure. He's respected, he's able to do his work with only occasional interruptions from the local angsty youth. Things are good-ish (until the armada shows up.)

Mentep and Oltyx have a weird relationship. Despite being his normal asshole-teenager self, Oltyx does respect Mentep more than most. Trusts Mentep enough to let the guy perform experimental brain surgery on him. Twice. And Mentep is able to be much more candid with Oltyx in return. He's one of the few consistently calling Oltyx out for his bullshit. On the surface, it is a standard mentor relationship, but what got me on a second reading is that there is hardly a single conversation Mentep has with Oltyx where he isn’t lying to and/or manipulating him.

It starts early with Yenekh. Mentep knows Yenekh has been suffering from the curse, he hasn’t told Oltyx, and when he finally has to tell him, he conveniently does so right before distracting everyone with the “oh btw, we’re all gonna die to a giant human armada” news. This is done with the best of intentions. Mentep wants to protect Yenekh (and Oltyx, in his way), so he delivers the news this way to get the bad news out of the way and then both of them on the same side. But it is the start of a pattern.

Which we get again when Mentep fails to mention a that Antikef is a flayer den ruled by a “We have Illuminor Szeras at home” Vizier, and boy does that end badly for Oltyx (see the last 60% of Ruin). Naturally, Mentep has a good explanation:

But it is another lie, one that costs Oltyx dearly (put a pin in this, I am coming back to it.)

There's some little fibs and ommissions along the way as they go to Carnotite, but it all builds up to The Big Lie. The one that sends Oltyx spiraling and gets Mentep killed. Because you know what really helps with paranoia? Finding out your mentor and your best friend have been hiding a secret blood pit in your basement! Again, it makes sense why Mentep is lying about this! He has every reason to believe Oltyx would have rejected the flayed ones he and Yenekh were sheltering (he in fact does exactly this), and Mentep's entire goal is to cure the curse to atone for his role in its creation. However...

I think Oltyx is correct to call Mentep out here (Oltyx is wrong about most things, but not this). Somewhere a long the way he became a means to an end for Mentep. Mentep was focused on The Curse and not the person in front of him who was cursed. He used Oltyx's friendship with Yenekh, his need to save his kingdom, his trust, his fears, all in service of admirable goals, but he was using Oltyx. Is it any wonder this is where it ended?

The lies were Mentep's undoing from the start. Remember the lie about Antikef? The one that led to all the events of Ruin? Yes, Oltyx and Djoseras did talk and avoid a civil war, but Oltyx also went through hell. He saw his home turned into an abbattoir, his father reduced to barely more than an animal. Oltyx was literally vivisected and almost consumed by his own dysphoria. And then committed regicide after leaving his brother behind to die. Antikef is where Oltyx truly learned that compassion was weakness and saw how horrific the flayer curse could become. So how was he ever going to accept the flayed ones as Mentep wanted him to? Oltyx experienced the comically perfect combination of traumas to ensure that would never happen, thanks in part to Mentep's manipulations.

I cannot stress enough that Mentep's individual lies all made sense at the time. May have even been the best option, at the time. But the consequences piled up, and even as he is dying he still refuses to give Oltyx even a scrap of the truth. That is the core of his tragedy for me. Well, that and this:

He bases all of his manipulations on his understanding of people's psyche's, which are usually accurate, but it also traps them. It gives them no room to grow or surprise him or for outside factors to come in and intervene. Contrast this with Zultanekh, who is upfront to a fault. He gives Oltyx advice and resources, but what Oltyx does with those things is up to him. Even when he is screwing up royally, he's allowed to make those mistakes. Mentep causes ones of Oltyx's darkest hours (the secret blood pit), while Zultanekh lifts him out of another (the Blood Angel's attack). In the end, Zultanekh is the one who sees Oltyx's true growth and witnesses the birth of his kingdom. A birth that comes not from curing the curse but embracing it.

There was never a sickness to be fixed, which means Mentep never would have achieved his redemption because he was focused on the wrong things. Which does make his death and rebirth as Xott a bit of a reflection of Oltyx. He was too burdened in his first life, but in his second he (or at least a version of him) was able to witness the people he hurt reaching a place of peace.

[uncreative-cryptid]

VIVISECTION pt. II

❝ is - is this thing on ? oh , sentinel .. forgive us , for we have sinned .. if you can hear this , please , run . ❞

[ you're feeling uneasy ]

[ you start to feel like you're being watched .. a lot. ]

[ you wander the different islands, crossing the rivers between them, feeling like your reflection looks a little ... different. ]

Stop to look at the water?

[ yes ] [ no ]

Very well.

[ you look into the waters for a while more, discerning your blurry image from the debris and wildlife within the waves. your brows furrow, you can't really see yourself clearly, but when you start to move, you swear your reflection lags behind you. ]

"Log 754 .. Subject: 00V9."

A voice crackles through the damaged recording device,

"Subject 00V9 has had some .. interesting developments since the start of this program ..

Starting with the physical appearance, Subject 00V9 has developed three sets of wings. The wings span to be nearly three times his height, and seem to be fully functional. Sensation tests have shown some sensitivity, closer to the skin or when feathers are moved.

Over time, these wings have developed a full sense of functionality, including the ability to shed and regrow, creating pin feathers and blood feathers, shedding the pins' wax-textured shell, and bleeding when the blood feathers are broken prematurely.

Starting with his eyes, they seem to have accumulated a lot of the .. exposure, so to speak, to Spectro and other attributes, now containing a double tone to their irises.

After several experiments and testing with various TD frequencies —"

[ There is an ear-piercing screech, cutting the recording short for a moment. ]

"— shown exceptional resonance with the Unknown Entity we've obtained.

Although he is resistant now, I am certain in due time, he will come to see the gift we have bestowed upon him."

[ You stand alone. ]

[ Or, rather, you think you are alone, standing here in front of this cave system. ]

[ You aren't quite sure, but you think you heard someone cry. ]

[ A torn page, you are only able to read part of it as the other part seems to be water damaged. ]

Ever since they took that fucking subject in, and exposed him to such extreme amounts of chaotic frequencies and attribute combinations .. shit around here .. has started acting weirdly. I used to see rabbits and deer often, and every morning we could hear birds singing and bellowing boar ... but I haven't seen an animal in weeks. Last week .. they found a deer head, cut straight off. It was far too clean to be the work of another animal ... The birds stopped singing weeks ago. The burrows of animals are empty or buried. This isn't normal. Something is seriously wrong.

[ Static plays for a bit, and you watch as the camera slowly comes to focus in on a man. ]

[ The man is wearing what appears to be white robes, he sits with a forward lean, elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tightly together as he seems to hang his head. ]

[ It is silent for a while . ]

"I suppose if you are watching this, then you are looking for a way out of the archipelago.

First I want to say I am sorry it has come to this, but second I want to say is that if you are here, and seeing this video, it is already far too late."

[ There is brief static running across the screen. ]

"His name is Raziel. Although my colleagues have called him 00V9 up until this point, his name is Raziel.

By now I am sure you have learned that Raziel is not what he seems, and puts on a very good show, much like the citizens of Rinascita do.

But what you do not know is how truly gone 'Raziel' the human truly is.

The archipelago was an off-shoot set of islands from Rinascita, secluded and just out of the distant shores that you could not stumble into it on accident if you knew how to navigate the waves and various TDs of the ocean.

Because of it's seclusion, it became the perfect place to branch off from The Order, and the empty void of the Sentinel, who by now has been gone long enough for people to have started to wonder if the Sentinel was even real at all.

Some of us, choosing to leave The Order willingly, and with some assistance, were able to come to this place with a new goal: A man made Sentinel and Resonator.

Deep within the cave systems, a very intelligent TD was trapped and imprisoned, and through extremely experimentation, we found a young resonator who, despite his unwilling nature, was able to connect and artificially resonate with the TD at hand."

[ The man pauses, his grip tightens, and he sighs deeply, ]

"Raziel was exposed to an extreme amount of frequencies, particularly of other havoc resonators and, for a lack of a better phrase, 'canned attributes' of past resonators.

Ever since this, Raziel had begun to .. change. As did the archipelago.

Animals stopped almost entirely, disappearing or showing up mangled. Rabbits half devoured, foxes hanging from their tails and gutted, deer heads left in unusual places .. but the animals left behind .. the owls started to become unusually .. observant. Despite their usually nocturnal nature, I had started to see them in the daytime, watching, and observing from a distance.

I had also started to notice the frequency of serpents increasing, including those that swam the oceans and rivers, and those that would fly from branch to branch ..

...

I regret to inform you that even now, as you stand here listening to this recording, Raziel knows what you are doing.

He has and always has known what you were doing.

From the moment you stepped onto my shores, I knew.

Even now, I see you, tensing your muscles and looking around .. perhaps in fear?

Hah ... hahaha ..."

[ The recording becomes very corrupted, as eyes begin to bloom around the area, staring you down. You begin to realize you are trapped, as the massive body of a serpent-like tacet discord begins to coil in towards you. ]

"Go ahead.

Run."

[felixcloud6288]

Higurashi: Festival Accompanying Chapter 9

Hey look! The protagonists are coming back to the story!

I was curious about Satoko's last name and relation to Teppei. Turns out Hojo is just the latest in a long line of last names she's been given due to her mother frequently divorcing and remarrying. Meanwhile, Teppei isn't a blood relative. He's her step-uncle.

I think this drawing is Satoko's mother in a wedding dress. She probably has come to hate seeing her in that dress because it means the cycle of marriage and divorce has started over.

First thing's first, we're given a recap about Rika and her Queen Carrier status in the village. I don't think we ever learn how the research came up with that idea or how they determined Rika is the queen. Also, if it does exist, how does transferal between generations happen? Was Rika's mom the former queen and that queen had an offspring that infected Rika at birth and then abdicated its status?

Of course, the more likely reason for the village's behavior around Rika is that she actually is Oyashiro-sama incarnate.

A year later, Irie is still guilty about what he did and Takano is still as unbothered as ever. The only reason I think Irie hasn't reported Takano's behavior to Tomitake and Tokyo is because he'll likely be tried for killing someone during the research. Takano probably wouldn't be so open about discussing vivisections if inspector Tomitake were around.

Irie wanted to be a doctor to help people. And he specifically went into neurosciences to help people with mental illnesses. He started in the field of psychosurgery but was kicked out of academia due to the grave ethical concerns surrounding its methodology. This is his great second chance, but he killed someone for it.

He seems to look at Satoshi as another chance to prove to himself that he can be a doctor who can save someone. Irie is powerless to cure the festering wounds from the Dam War, and he is powerless to fix the Hojo's family circumstances, but he can at least give Satoshi some relief from everything and provide him some relief.

Massacre is the only time I recall where the village treating the Hojos as pariahs was ever really brought up or shown. I recall a scene in the anime where Satoko dropped her groceries and no one offered to help until Rika did, but there's never really anything that comes across as even passive-aggressive behavior from the villagers.

The introductory scene with Satoshi is the first time I think I've ever seen any villagers being openly hostile to a Hojo. The Dam War is still fresh in everyone's minds, so tempers are still high. In a few years, that anger will turn into sadness, shame, and fear.

Since this chapter is from Irie's perspective, I was afraid the first time he met Satoko would be accompanied by a shojo filter and the sound of an angelic chorus. But thankfully, he isn't being a creep...yet.

I just love seeing Satoshi smile. It genuinely makes me upset that all of Irie's efforts to improve his life are going to end up lost because of the aftermath of his parents' deaths.

The more these cases progress, the more and more Takano shows how unhinged she is. When she approached Irie about Satoko's condition, she started by giving him a serious status report. And then she got giddy at the idea that they now had another specimen to dissect.

She's not even trying to give a justification this time. She's not suggesting this will advance their research, nor that Satoko has done anything to deserve this. Takano's only reason is Satoko will die anyway so they might as well get some data before then.

Some quick thoughts on how Hinamizawa Syndrome works, particularly the throat scratching thing. One detail brought up a few times is the pathogen cannot be found in a dead body. They were only able to find the pathogen by dissecting the 1979 murder ringleader while he was alive. So even though this is an internal parasite, it has some way to quickly escape the body after its host dies.

Maybe the throat scratching thing is a method the pathogen uses to perform an emergency escape. It treats high stress as a sign the host is about to be killed, and it responds by amplifying the stress levels and inflaming the lymph nodes in the throat to make the host scratch at it. By combining the increased blood pressure from the host's stress response and them ripping their throat out, the pathogen can make a fast escape through the blood vessels and out of the host body.

But I have no idea what happens next. So much of this brain parasite stuff is fantastical to the point it feels more like some weird curse magic. The whole "It vanishes when the host dies" thing is such a bizarre thing and Irie actually having to dissect a person's brain to find the pathogen means it does not travel through the body at all. Otherwise, they likely would have found it from blood samples.

Y'know what you should do Irie? Get on the phone with Tomitake and report Takano's behavior to the board at "Tokyo".

NIPA BEAM!!!

back

[ria-writes-stuff]

...hi ^^

also wanted to finally send an actual ask because ouughhhh your writing's so good (plus it encouraged me to know you enjoy anons!)

may i ask for any intell on underworld duo? i would like to know more it intrigues me 🌹

- 🌧

WOOOO HELLO!!’ YES YES I LOVE ANONS YOU FEED ME MOTIVATION AND LOVEEE

I’m so glad you like my writing, I’m a little shy over it but I put so much effort into it!!

And- OUGH UNDERWORLD DUO MY BELOVEDS

I’m afraid that i meant this to be a quick explanation and it devolved into 1.5k… a full oneshot size……..

SLAMS THE DESK - OKAY!

I adore Underworld duo, they are my children and I will make them both suffer greatly :3

In order to understand them, though, you’ll need to shuffle a little bit back to the context. The first au where they interacted (and the one that earnt them their name) is called RMILY (the red means i love you), which I’ve spoken about once or twice here, but essentially is an au of ITE where everything went a little different in the early days, and the future is unrecognisable.

Ranboo, for instance, became homeless a whole lot earlier, learnt to survive on his own instead of being scooped up by Teagon, became the leader of a pack of feral street children, and then went on to be the apprentice of a mad scientist, who married into the Syndicate and dragged him with her. In RMILY, the sweet, shy, broken boy you know is a sadistic monster, one of the most dangerous killers in the world, training to be the replacement right hand of the Syndicate when the current one, Gore, steps down or is killed. He’s incredibly dangerous, a little sociopathic, and a terror to meet.

I actually have a couple of oneshots written about Doc’s backstory in RMILY (girl in the mirror and glass shard to the brain, on AO3), but the basis is that she was in an experimental facility for the best part of four years as a small child, and by the time she broke out, was a feral shell of a person with no memories, no identity, and no idea how to function as a human. She’s a mimic, watching and learning from the shadows, and then replicating what she sees into her own behaviour. A patchwork of everyone she’s ever met, quite literally. Her name was a gift from a certain feral street child, who insisted he couldn’t just call her ‘the cannibalistic demon who lives in an underground lab and has the face of an angel’, and decided that since she owned a laboratory (which she stole from an eldritch being called Jerry, another story entirely), and she vivisected people as a hobby, she would be The Doctor.

RMILY!Doc is fairly strict about using her full name - she is The Doctor to almost everyone, to call her ‘Doc’ is a privilege few ever earn - but I use Doc anyway out of habit.

In case you hadn’t guessed, she’s the mad scientist who adopted Ranboo, and yes, she did actually marry Gore in this AU, they’re both insane cannibals who think dismembered limbs is romance, they’re literally perfect for each other.

Her vivisection habit started originally as- an exploration of what made a human, human, in a literal sense. She poked around body after body, sliced them up, stored the parts she liked (being made by an eldritch being, the laboratory naturally defies all the laws of time and space and has a TARDIS-eque storage room), and refined her practise as time went on. She found fascination in cadavers, and then more so when those cadavers were in fact living, conscious humans. A sadist in the truest measure, she’s an incredibly curious creature, always pushing further, to see what the limits of the human body are in every sense.

Underworld duo’s story first starts when Doc was fifteen. She’d been free for two years by this point, could pass herself well enough as human as long as you didn’t prod too hard, and was just starting to make alliances with the pack of street children who roamed her area of the Lower. It’s an uneventful night for her - wandering the dock-side, spotting a solitary victim, walking alone, grabbing him, knocking him out, and then dragging him back to her lab, where she removes his heart while he screams and thrashes. Nothing about the rest of him is particularly intriguing, and so she dumps the body in the river as is her standard (a lot of bodies end up in the river, and she makes up only a small proportion).

For Wilbur, however, it’s the night he was kidnapped by a fucking child?, murdered horribly, and then woke up six hours later in the middle of the most polluted river in the world, with a slightly wonkily stitched up chest and a horrible hollow feeling in his chest. (He also wakes up with the most judgemental bitch he’s ever met, who calls himself ‘Ghostbur’ and says that if he didn’t want him to be around, he shouldn’t have died then).

It’s like the world’s worst hangover, the next few days, as he staggers around trying to put himself together. (He wasn’t exactly ‘together’ in the first place, but dying didn’t help much) Of all the people in the City who should have the tertiary power (which are usually triggered by life or death scenarios) of immortality, he should not be one of them. Nonetheless, his lot in life has come out rotten as ever, and so he goes on with the rest of his- unlife? As best he can, filling the void where his heart no longer beats with somehow even more alcohol than he was already consuming, and enough cigarettes to give himself a heart attack. The upside to being dead is that he doesn’t run the risk of drinking himself into the grave!

Skip six years, and he’s somehow driven himself below rock bottom, which is quite impressive and he thinks he deserves a reward for, and apparently he goes ‘ah yes, my reward shall be going back to the person who killed me and asking if she wants to poke around in my chest again so that I feel anything accept the numb bleakness of eternity’.

And hence Doc gets a knock at her laboratory door, with a slightly grey-tinged man smelling of smoke and wearing a long coat thats seen better days, asking her if she’d be as kind to oblige him a request

What follows is unfortunately lost media, since 90% of this interaction was done via discord roleplay, and that server was deleted by a bastard I shant name and shame, but I will never forgive, because we lost *so* much stuff from that. I’m mad as fuck that we lost most of the original vivisection, because it contained what I consider to be some of my best writing, full of metaphors and purple prose, hitting the discord character limit twice, thrice over in one reply-

Yeah I’m a little upset over that

But the long and short of it is that during that interaction, we (and by that I mean my darling @saint-hymn who i adore and also has permission to butcher me if I’ve gotten anything about Wil wrong and with all the liberties I’ve taken) stumbled into each other with the metaphor of Persephone and Hades

She’s Hades, with her underground home and the blood and the gore and the passive gaze of death. He’s Persephone, with the exeption that he took the pomegranate seeds with a willing hand, an empty look in his eyes, and a crooked smile.

I could gush for hours about how cute they are and how much I love them (she calls him exclusively Persephone, she never even learnt his name, he calls her either The Good Doctor, Hades, or the occasional vague reference that I have to google frantically). She’s a very cold person, so different from her ITE counterpart (this version cannot use her healing powers, they’re locked away under her trauma), but she has a spark of fondness for this straggled rat of a man who waltzed into her sanctum with a confident grin and the lack of a heart that she doesn’t even remember taking. She killed so many people in her youth, she trusts that he would recall his own murderer, and she recognises the slightly less skilled stitches on his chest, but his face meant nothing to her when he stepped inside.

I would almost call what they have intimate - nothing quite like dragging a hand through someone’s intestines to bond you - it’s not romantic but I also wouldn’t call it platonic. Two flightless birds, one who lost his wings and the other who never had them, and can no longer remember why she has the urge to take flight

She doesn’t believe in fate, if you asked her about him she’d pause and shrug, and then say that it was mere coincidence and there was no cosmic force pushing them together, just happenstance and the right timing. (and yet also there was something missing before him- or perhaps he carved out his own place in her chest and now she would be the hollow one without the presence of a nicotine-stained figure draped across the couch in her office)

If you want to know anything more about Underworld duo, uh- hit me up! You know where i am, i love asks and anon is turned on always

[thricewire]

Posting my personal DRDT Literature Girl Insane notes

These are my personal notes. I'm happy if they can be useful to anyone, and am posting them now in part as a jubilant showing of proof that this video seems to have driven me insane, but I make no claims of completeness, accuracy, or ease of reading.

If you want to read this post, it'll probably be for the literary sourcing.

I cannot read Japanese myself, so the translation for the "translation needed" section is almost certainly horribly off after going through Google Translate to get the characters and then an English-Japanese translator.

edit: though I promise I did the research independently, it seems this work has already been done by user 1moreff-creator in their Vivisection video :] I think having it down in text form is important, so I'll keep this up, but wanted to give the necessary recognition that someone did the sourcing work first (along with a full analysis)!

0:30

These are not tagged to a roman numeral, and so I believe they are aids for understanding David's character.

Flowers of Buffoonery (Osamu Dazai)

‘Welcome to Saddness. Population one.’ All my friends have left me. They look back at me with eyes of pity. Come back, friends. Let’s talk together, laugh together. But no, you turn away as if we’ve never met. Speak up, friends. Ask away. I’ll tell you anything. It was me—these are the hands that pulled Sono underwater. In my satanic insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die.

This is the Oba Yozo character from No Longer Human, referring to the suicide pact with his lover, wherein she died and he did not. I think there is another layer. David's classmates do not remember Xander. He does.

Dogra Magra (Yumeno Kasaki)

…Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! How idiotic! What does it matter what my name is? Forgetting it was not a handicap at all. I was myself, of that there was no doubt. Ah-hah-hah-hah-hah-ha…! Once I came to this realization, I turned over and over on the floor. I clutched at my head, pounded my chest, I pounded my legs and laughed. I laughed.. and laughed… and laughed. I was choking on my tears as my laughter twisted and convulsed my body.

…A-ha-ha-ha-ha. Will there ever again be anything this ridiculous? …Did he fall from heaven, or rise up from the earth? Here is a man who doesn’t know his own nature. How can I know such a man. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha….

Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)

If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it – often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce effect. That is the only way to conduct this case. I select each passenger in turn, consider their evidence and say to myself, ‘IF so and so is lying, on what point are they lying and what is the reason for the lie?’ And I answer if they are lying – if, you mark – it could only be for such a reason and on such a point.

0:37

[wagahai] An archaic personal pronoun rarely used in real life, but popularized in fiction by the book I am a cat ["dog", then "whatever" overlaid on "cat"].

I am a cat (Natsume Souseki)

"The so-called human beings, one and all, conduct themselves with the most arrogant audacity, taking undue pride on their superior strength. There is no knowing how far they will carry on their arrogance, if some stronger creatures do not appear in the world to suppress them. Such an instance of selfishness, however, may be leniently regarded. I have been informed of a much more lamentable proof of human wickedness."

A teacher's cat that has learned to speak as a nobleman would.

0:46-0:52 All Osamu Dazai.

No Longer Human

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. I was born in a village in the Northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained [under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.]

Brackets: extended past what actually appears on screen. I did this for context. NLH contains many expressions of what came off to me as societally and intrapersonally unrecognized neurodivergence. Yozo has an idea of what signals will produce certain results in others. However, he is not privy to the underlying emotions/affinities that are supposed to produce these signals in "humans", or occasionally experiences too-extreme versions of them. I tend to read David as autistic.

The Setting Sun

We will live in perpetual struggle with the old morality, like the falling slanted* sun. You, too, please continue to try to fight your struggle. The revolution is far from taking place. It needs many more valuable, unfortunate victims. In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.

*The translation I used to confirm the source just says "like the sun".

Flowers of Buffoonery

Rolling with laughter and turning into clowns*, I play the role of the fool doomed to chase them down forever.

The translation I used to confirm the source says this in reference not to clowns but the consequences of using certain words.

I have some additional commentary for this section: the translation was probably interfered with for The Setting Sun and Flowers of Buffoonery to produce associations with certain characters. I don't engage readily with the colored text on LGI, but will probably try assigning characters to the colored text for completeness someday later. I can tell you that "a life of much shame" is assigned to Teruko, in green, and unaltered. The obvious assertion would be that David is doing this to mock Teruko, but I personally believe that David perceives himself as inhuman, and perceives Teruko as the same kind of entity.

0:57-1:03

If you escaped from the tunnel / it would be a disastrous scene

Snow Country (Yusanari Kawabata)

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.

-

I did love you once / so / you should not have believed me

-

Go escape! ["escape" in red, image seems to be a green pixelated version of the books by David's side]

but

where to? [green, books have turned dark blue]

implying Xander or Mai were involved in trying to effect Teruko's escape from an undefined location? I can imagine it being Mai talking to Teruko, then Teruko to David.

And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

He thought: Peaceful sound. Peaceful place…. He thought: Best of an island is once you get there—you can’t go any farther … you’ve come to the end of things…. He knew, suddenly, that he didn’t want to leave the island.

This appears with "but" from the overlay text above, but I couldn't figure out a good way to place it there without disrupting the idea. I believe this may refer to Teruko not wanting to leave the facility.

-

If you're Hythlodaeus, then I must be Morus.

Refers to the Utopia characters, not the Final Fantasy character. Hythlodaeus, "speaker of nonsense", refers to the narrator/messenger in Utopia. Morus is a lawyer, orator, and disbeliever/skeptic.

Utopia

Achora[?]

Polylcritae[?]

Macarenses[?]

This text was hard as fuck to read, man. I guess it refers to the Achorians, Polylerits, and Macarians in Utopia.

-

1:05

so then

even if you cry make noise shout go mad

the world won't change!

[bunch of meta comments I'm not replicating here]

So

therefore (and)

consequently

for that reason

thus

make a 🍋💣 and 💥 it!! Lemon (Kaiji Motojiro, Alfred Birnbaum trans) I was absolutely taken with that lemon. The color, pure and simple, like lemon yellow pigment straight out of the tube, solidified. And perfectly shaped like a squat weaving spindle. I decided to buy just one. Then where and how do you think I walked? I walked the streets for the longest time. I was out on the town, extremely happy, for the moment I grasped the lemon I sensed a slight easing of that curse so heavy on my heart. To think that this melancholy so pertinacious should have been diffused by something as simple as a piece of fruit- unthinkable, but paradoxically true. The heart is one strange and wonderful thing.

Now together with me play a game!

A

I

you

this guy [orange]

that guy [green]

whoever else

are all just idiots! so

With anonymous hopes ["anonymous": green] let's play! [orange]

5 pointed star -> ☆

✧ <- 4 pointed star

5-pointed star: evening star?, Mai portrait side. 4-pointed star: morning star?, Teruko portrait side

goodbye triangle square

Bye [red]

Bye [yellow]

Bye! [green]

Refers to traffic light on Mai's side? Teruko's dream was of her turning back on a sidewalk. Triangle above square appears earlier in the video. Unable to decipher meaning except maybe "square triangular number".

1:26 - 1:33

dictionary/wikipedia entries for electrocution

Electrocution is death or severe injury caused by electric shock from electric current passing through the body. The word is derived from "electro" and "execution", but it is also used for accidental death.

Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole--and yet--and yet--it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life!"

The Little Prince (Antoiné de Saint-Exupéry)

“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

In yellow.

idk i guess the wikipedia entry on electrocution

Low currents (70–700 mA) usually trigger fibrillation in the heart, which is reversible via defibrillator but is nearly always fatal without intervention. Currents as low as 30 mA AC or 300–500 mA DC applied to the body surface can cause fibrillation. Large currents (> 1 A) cause permanent damage via burns and cellular damage.

Flowers of Buffoonery (Osamu Dazai)

A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that's beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. Life's a farce, so we might as well make it a good one. But real life is a realm that I may never reach. [The best that I can hope for is to loiter in the memory of these four days, so steeped with empathy. Four days that count more than five or ten years of my life. Four days that count more than a lifetime.]

Extended.

note: can't read [pink]

I hate the things I love, and I love the things I hate [red]

1:33

It's around here that the roman numerals kick into gear. I'll attach my annotated crossword at the end of this post, but I'm not interested in them right now so they'll tend to be omitted.

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

Some reference to haruspicy here. I think it's important to remember that Yossarian was trying to comfort Snowden in his final moments.

Note also that thing David says about burning garbage at trial.

And that Catch-22 ends with the notion of "escape."

The Little Prince (Antoiné de Saint-Exupéry)

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” [indigo]

possible reference to I Am A Cat, but I can't verify it because this is effectively common knowledge:

A cat has 9 additional lives.

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

there's a "subtract 4 due to tetraphobia" here in an interesting magenta color, but I'm pretty sure it's to do with the cipher, which I cannot solve.

1:51

become brainwashed: go do it!

-

:P overlaid on this description of the five stages of grief model:

The five stages of grief model (or the Kübler-Ross model) postulates that those experiencing grief go through a series of five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

1:55

I've made an exception on the roman numerals for Teruko, as her section is heavy with literature.

To be? [cyan]

XIII. or

Not to be?

Hamlet (Shakespeare) [To be?]

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd.

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause—there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay [The insolence of office, and the spurns [...]]

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (Ursula K. Le Guin) [XIII. or]

Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

My belief is that Teruko is an existence comparable to the child in Omelas. That would mean that her suffering in some way allows others in her world to have a better chance at existing in a state of peaceful exuberance, so trying to release her from it necessarily causes others to suffer. I think personally that this may have something to do with her bad luck [perhaps it is a nonrenewable resource - if you concentrate enough misfortune in one entity, you can avoid it in greater society], but of course we are far too early on in the story to be able to know anything like this.

Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie) [XIII. or]

Only the eyes belied this assumption. They were small, deep-set and crafty. Not only that. As the man, making some remark to his young companion, glanced across the room, his gaze stopped on Poirot for a moment and just for that second there was a strange malevolence, an unnatural tensity in the glance.

Teruko is associated with Poirot here I think, as she is the leader in the class trials...? Some kind of reference to her distrust of others?

Hamlet (Shakespeare) [not to be?]

That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Teruko was implied to have at least one failed suicide attempt. I think though that the inclusion of this speech possibly has more to do with the idea of dreams and potentially losing sight of material reality.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows?

Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie) [Who knows?]

The matter begins to clear itself up wonderfully! The murderer was a man of great strength—he was feeble—it was a woman—it was a right-handed person—it was a left-handed person. Ah! c’est rigolo, tout ça!

Danganronpa always operates on this idea of arbitrary certainty.

But

on the contrary : on the other hand

notwithstanding -> used to connect coordinate elements

Let's decide!

[2:01] Democratic-ly

In the case of a murder, all surviving must participate in a class trial. During this trial, everyone must discuss and vote for one of the remaining participants as the "blackened" murderer.

[2:02] Voting results: Everyone will be executed There is no such thing as "victory" in a killing game.

after all

cry make noise shout go mad

The acclamation is great applause!!!

that was amazing

standing ovation

i think i cried

so amazing and the perfect orator

waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa [approximation]

wooooooooooooooooo!! [approximation]

the crowd roars

encore!! encore!!

So sing a degraded copy

certainly this song)

now

do it

like that

let's live together!

What is the most important thing?

?ain

f?ces

ide?

t?o

?ost

sa?e

?at

I'm pretty sure the answer to the "what is the most important thing?" puzzle is "Resolve". That makes it rain/feces/ides [as in Ides of March]/too/lost/save/eat. If you're wondering why DRDT would make any mention of feces, as I was, it's more than likely that this is another Omelas reference. See the end half of the speech in Hamlet up there for a possibility for why it's "Resolve" as well, or perhaps Xander's behavior right before stabbing Teruko.

2:11

The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

I

you

this guy

that guy

whoever else

won't change no matter what!

therefore

with an original style

let's act big!

Legal Information Institute definition of derivative work

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

Breakfast was a curious meal. Everyone was very polite…. Six people, all outwardly self-possessed and normal. And within? Thoughts that ran round in a circle like squirrels in a cage…. “What next? What next? Who? Which?”

2:20

Ah, you've killed so many [red]

Macbeth (Shakespeare)

I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er

let's laugh!!!

[shit ton of MonoTV emotes]

if something is important,

then it'll break and disappear

???: Go and cry. [Hu]

???: But you're in my way, aren't you? [Eden]

move aside

move aside

just like that

and disappear!

2:32

I'm just giving the name of the works. I can't be bothered to give the actual excerpts this time.

[No Longer Human]

[Hamlet]

[Lemon]

[Murder on the Orient Express]

[The Little Prince]

[not sure where from, but seems to be a discussion of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9]

[Alice in Wonderland]

[Thomas More's Utopia]

2:38

Note to self: put something here

2:42

mind exercises 1 2 3 4

even if I try to think, idk!! (lmao)

look aside from that the usual medicine give me

look, aside from that, give me the usual medicine

^ text transposed on a model of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 orbital trajectory.

aha........................

29 ellipses in the video, I didn't count the number I put here

The sheet music is apparently, or is related to, the Entry of the Gladiators, but I can't read music.

2:51

introduction

[David's design changes to ch 2 trial design. Worth noting the stars making up his halo were always four pointed stars; this does not change.]

secondary delayed introduction

black and white cat sitting on a chair

one of six bullets - can you find them all? (hint: no you can't)

dresser

candle in a candle holder

assassin's teapot

(not) a prop gun

a bowl of assorted fruit

portrait full of enigma [blank X portrait, as if someone died and their identity is not yet revealed]

a clock, non-functional [a fork has been stabbed through it]

stupid kid's toy [smiling yellow balloon]

portrait of someone dearly loved -> Mai

Teruko <- portrait of someone dearly unloved

I hate the things I love and I love the things I hate [red], 1:26 - 1:33

lying by Teruko's portrait:

gavel

skull [Hamlet?]

a kitchen knife

mirror <- reflection is due

center:

a comfortable looking chair

books of various kinds

low down on Mai's side:

unused gas mask theater mask

materials for a noose

a safe with unknown contents

disembodied arm of a mannequin

an albino mouse, arabidopsis [model organisms. Changes in arabidopsis are easily observed. "Other examples include drosophila melanogaster and E. coli."

piles of letters

flowers of an unknown species

traffic lights <- ???

et cetera

low down on Teruko's side:

many scattered hair clips [David's]

lemon

dummies, plural, none of which resemble a human [there's actually only one visible wtf]

obviously a tv

terrorist iconography [bat with four-pointed star on its back]

dandelions (weed)

megaphone

high up on Teruko's side:

suspicious stains (might be blood)

snake (serpent)

3:06

Main Roles:

David Chiem

Xander Matthews

Supporting Cast:

Teruko Tawaki

Arei Nageishi

Hu Jing

Mai Akasaki

Ms. Naegi [?]

(i.e., these are the only characters who make an appearance)

3:10

I will reiterate -- very unreliable translation, I think you are better off trying to find it elsewhere.

革命家 revolutionary

気取りの seems to imply that the revolutionary was only putting on an act?

Xander's arm with gun

馬鹿 に鉛 の切符を 与えよう seems to say "Fool giving lead ticket"?

hand with Hope's Peak sealed letter

血で書かせよう seems to say "let's write it in blood"

自己否定の懺悔の書 "book of repentance + self-denial"? unclear to me

そうしましょ! "Let's do that!" [I'll cut through those words!/Break! animation plays]

3:20

after all even if we cry make noise shout go mad this world won't change!

Macbeth (Shakespeare)

There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Ursula K Le Guin)

Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.

*I decided not to extend this, but I really do recommend reading Omelas, it's like five pages and life-changing.

so

clown, clown, clown

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature[, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.]

let's go off to engage in self-delusion!

let's gulp down a cup of poison!

The Apology of Socrates (Plato)

How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was - such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me; - I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence. They ought to have been ashamed of saying this, because they were sure to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and displayed my deficiency; they certainly did appear to be most shameless in saying this, unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I was saying, they have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain th[at this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me.]

3:30

ah, what a foolish miserable painful pointless thing

isn't it?!

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Was ’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness.

so with a "kappukappu" Clammbon laughed

*Clammbon as in something from Kenji Miyazawa's Yamanashi, an unidentifiable word. Laughs then dies.

ah, remain undefeated by the rain

Be Not Defeated By The Rain (Kenji Miyazawa)

Be not defeated by the rain, Nor let the wind prove your better. Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

[shit ton of laughing overtakes the screen]

ah... haha...

???: Will you forget what you've done, I wonder?

???: Of course.

???: I was satisfied

so

I'll disappear!

Chapter 3

-

[formula cipher?]

find the n!

[screen is just "haha"]

call the noblest to the audience

---

I've attached my cipher transcriptions as well, but you shouldn't actually rely on them or should at least probably be cross-referencing from the video to save yourself immense pain. I don't actually know how to do deciphering, and I have brain damage. 👍

Correct 正

3aqxw97pktc8uki458fbdpfoa

cllex2f07bf8mg24b4mpfx2a

dc6v3f5yhxjd8i7sf11312zaj5

1azet47jod5jczec5mvb6bz2o

59r143sf2pe916sczn7emvbl

55ehe9iqb2708tt83482c8tw3

c77gn47ojca634gbcfz0016s6

47ww1akcn46bre1e0eam9

incorrect

(the world of abnormal sentiment dances)

4631484268

7374102014

30364511759

23368636278

93040492374

30824367720

69705217326

&

43607886503

71881152579

87643216864

95628071353

08595633071

75814983752

91444100526

[no-nic]

rin week 2024 unused ideas

🐚💜🌠

day 2: stars [fic/poem] dreams of being close to the stars in a society that doesn't even have airplanes, let alone space exploration scrapped, may be reworked into an unrelated (still rin-core) poem.

day 4: amnesia [fic] character exploration. amnesiac rin trying to find anything about her past personality, getting very different answers from people vs factual evidence. indie horror game vibes scrapped.

day 5&6 fusion: rival & bodyswap [art & fic] rin is inner sakura. rin can "swap in" sometimes. lowered headband, blood smears on her cheeks (pieces of first draft just to get it out of my head)

Something clicks for Sakura when she passes a tightly huddled group of parents at the playground. “That’s the demon boy.” “I’ve heard. The demon is in him.” “Same thing honestly.” “Psst, you know we can’t talk about that.” They pointedly don’t look towards the blond boy. He is about her age, blond and whiskered. He is standing near the edge of the playground, longingly staring at the other kids who are playing ninja. Sakura doesn’t stop walking. There is a demon in him. She needs to be alone. But she is never alone. There is an ever present ball of rage in the back of her mind. There is a demon in her. Sakura is six years old and ready to attend the academy. It just feels right. She is going to be a shinobi, so her parents don’t find it alarming that she spends hours in the library studying everything. Ever since she’s learned to read she’s been looking and looking. She hasn’t told anyone. She can’t. The presence has a few emotions it emanates: rage, desperation, loneliness, jealousy, some more rage, and fear of discovery.

work in progress, may be built into a bigger story.

day 6: truth potion [fic] things she wouldn't say even in her internal monologue!

The kidnapped girl sits quietly. She is smiling and looking vacantly forward. The jutsu should be working already. “Tell me about your friends.” The girl is smiling. “What friends?” “That Uchiha boy and Hatake. Tell me about them.” “I daydream about vivisecting them. Every day. I only fear they will die before I get to them. They are so weird. Sensei likes them more than me, which is fine, because I don’t like him either. I pretend to have a crush on Kakashi but if I had to choose I would marry Obito. I like his eyes. I want to eat them sometimes…” The man puts her to sleep with a genjutsu. He glares at his comrades. “I told you that the kinjutsu they sold us was complete rubbish. ‘Truth jutsu’ my ass! She’s just making fun of us!”

abandoned, another prompt chosen (body-swap).

day 7: [no prompt] [mini zine] inspired by the databook entries that describe rin as "kind, intellectual, devoted", i'm Just Asking Questions. reads like a conspiracy rag it's on a4 paper, 8 tiny pages in total, and i kinda want to make it printable? like i don't know if anyone would even care, but it's just one page, and if was drawn digitally, thin black lines on white (or whatever color paper you stuff in there), easy to print & fold pdf...?

cut off text:

when was she kind? when she threw herself forward or just stood in the way of an unstopable force with a thousand birds already celebrating her corpse

work in progress, haunts me & needs to be perfect.

well that's all folks! 🌟 and remember:

every week can be rin week if you like rin! 💜🔪

(onwards to rock lee week 2024)

[veliseraptor]

that unknown orchard | Trigun: Stampede

1595 words, pre-canon nai pov, uhh some vivisection related body horror but the show did it first, new fandom ma i'm scared

thanks to @portraitoftheoddity for being a terrible influence and also giving this a quick beta read

--

Vash is…

Nai doesn’t have the right word for it, exactly. Rem says kind, Rem says sensitive, but Nai thinks maybe a better description is vulnerable. He’s so exposed, so raw, his heart on his sleeve. Right now it’s just them and Rem and a few other people they don’t see very much, but when everybody else wakes up Nai isn’t sure that’s a good thing. He’s not sure everybody should see Vash like that. There’s no guarantee that they’d treat him as gently as they should.

He’s not sure he wants anybody to see Vash like that. Sometimes Nai thinks it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the other humans never woke up and it was just him and Vash and Rem. Vash is excited about it, excited to meet all the humans sleeping in pods, but Nai’s not sure it’s actually something to be excited about.

Maybe Vash hasn’t noticed, but Nai hears it in Rem’s instructions: be careful. It’s not safe. Why would she tell them to pretend to be humans if there wasn’t some sort of danger because they’re not? He doesn’t know what the danger is but it’s there, Nai can feel it. Vash doesn’t.

So that’s what worries him about Vash. It’s what he thinks about while watching him sleep, the bond between them a warm and thrumming pulse more reassuring than his own heartbeat. Nai tried to talk to him about it once – do you ever wonder why Rem says we have to pretend? – but Vash brushed him off. Either he actually doesn’t see it or just doesn’t want to and Nai doesn’t know how to change that.

Maybe it’s fine for now. If Vash can’t or won’t protect himself then Nai will just have to do it for him. If Vash is fragile then Nai has to be strong, like walls around a city, or ribs around a heart. When the rest of the humans wake up he’ll do what he has to so that Vash will be safe. Whatever that means.

Whatever it takes.

**

Vash flutters nervously (are you sure we should be here, we’re going to get in trouble) but he doesn’t leave, because he’s just as curious as Nai is, and he knows, same as Nai does, that there’s something here to find. There’s something Rem is keeping from them and that means it’s either bad or interesting; either way Nai wants to know. 

Nai’s struggling to get through the security when Vash puts in the access code. Nai would kind of like to know where he learned it but isn’t going to ask right now, not when he doesn’t know how much time they have left. He does make a note of it though, just in case he needs it sometime later and Vash isn’t there. 

Everything after that happens very fast.

At first he doesn’t understand. Or, he does understand but it doesn’t make sense, won’t make sense; how can the picture of the girl – the Plant – have anything to do with these bits and pieces floating in tubes? 

He can feel it coming in that brief moment like the worst most terrifying monster of any story he’s ever heard and there’s nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he can do to unknow what he’s about to understand. But as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.

That’s her. There, that’s what’s left of her. There was another Plant like you and this is what they did to her.

Nai’s not sure who starts screaming first, if it’s him or Vash or both of them at the same time, only that the room’s full of it and it’s like he can hear her screaming, too, with them, he’s hot and cold at the same time and the only thing he can think is get away, we have to get away, we have to go, but he can’t leave without Vash and his body won’t move right, helpless, frozen, he wants to look away but he can’t look away, keeps going back to the eye, her eye, green rather than blue, their sister he never got to know because they took her away, why, why–

The door slides open and for a terrifying moment Nai is certain they’re going to die. It’s only Rem and that should make it safe but when she scoops them into her arms Nai tenses.

She pulls their heads to her shoulders like that will wipe away what they saw. Vash is bawling; Nai is still paralyzed. Floating, suspended, like one of the other normal Plants. Like their sister here. 

Rem is saying something. Nai thinks it’s meant to be reassuring, you weren’t supposed to see this or this isn’t going to happen to you, but it sounds like gibberish. He’s still seeing it, seeing her, every time he blinks, so he tries not to blink. He’s sick and woozy, his ears ringing like somebody’s still screaming. He can hear Vash saying his name but he sounds very far away and what’s closer is the voice in his head that says that could be him. That could be you.

He wants to be somewhere else but there’s nowhere else to go. Just this ship and the vastness of space outside.

**

When he can think again, he’s in the room he shares with Vash. He doesn’t really remember getting there and isn’t sure how long it's been. He still feels weird, weak, tired. Scared.

“Nai?” 

He turns to look at Vash and the relief on his brother’s face cracks some of the ice that’s formed around him. “You’re back!”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” Nai says. He feels like someone else than he was. A clear sharp line between before and after, something fundamentally changed, and it seems strange that everything else looks the same. 

“You weren’t answering me or Rem,” Vash says.

“Oh,” Nai says. 

“It’s going to be okay,” Vash says, like he has any way of knowing that. “Rem said…she says she’s sorry, she said it was a mistake, and she would never let anything like – like that happen to us.”

What Nai thinks immediately is and you believe her? Rem has always been good to them. Maybe he should believe her too. 

Nobody ever said there’d been another one like them. 

Nai wonders if there were others, too. And where they are now.

*

Vash is quick to accept Rem’s reassurances but Nai wonders why she says she’s sorry if she didn’t have something to do with it. She obviously knew. She knew all along; every time she told them she loved them she knew what was in that room and said nothing. 

Nai can’t stop thinking about her, the other one like them. Tesla. He wonders what she was like, what her Gate was, whether she would resonate with him the way that Vash did. 

What her Gate is? Alive, her file said. Nai can’t stop thinking about that, either. Alive. What does it feel like to live in pieces? Does it still hurt? Is she scared? 

Why did the humans do that to her?

Are they going to do it to us?

He wakes up from a nightmare where he’s looking at Vash’s eye in a tank where its swiveling around wildly, and Nai knows that Vash is looking for him (what’s left of Vash because they took him apart like a machine to be disassembled), and three things occur to him with the cold clarity of truth.

One: humans use Plants for what they can provide. What they can do for them, make, produce. That’s what Plants are for, he knows. That’s why all the other Plants are here on the ship, because humans take what they give and Plants don’t ask for anything back. Plants don’t need food or water or rest.  

Two: Vash isn’t like Nai. Vash needs to eat and drink and sleep and he hasn’t shown his Gate yet. Vash consumes resources. Vash isn’t useful.

Three: Vash’s file wasn’t in the same place as Nai’s. It was with Tesla’s. 

Nai doesn’t usually feel cold but he feels cold now. Shivery and sick. He thinks of the dream, Vash’s eye searching for him. Nai is supposed to keep him safe. 

There are two of them, and so many humans all around.

Nai doesn’t know how to keep Vash safe.

Right now – right now maybe he can do it, if he’s vigilant, if he’s careful. But when the others wake up, when all those people these ships are carrying around wake up, then what? They’ll be outnumbered and if they come for Vash, Nai can’t fight them all. 

They’ll take Vash and they’ll cut him up into pieces. They won’t kill his brother. It’ll be worse. He won’t be able to stop it. And who’s to say they’ll stop there, maybe they’ll come for Nai, too, maybe they’ll decide he’s more useful when he can’t ask questions or argue or say no. 

He can’t. He can’t he can’t he can’t. It’s not going to happen. He’s not going to let it happen. 

Drawing his knees to his chest, Nai tries to think of how he can stop it. The beginnings of an idea are already starting to take shape in his mind. 

Vash – kind, sensitive, vulnerable Vash – won’t like it. But he doesn’t have to. 

Someone needs to do the hard things. Nai can, and Nai will.

Whatever it takes.

[franceblr]

super halfbaked sasodei hc, modern edition

despite their frequent arguments and bickering, sasori and deidara are an extremely stable couple. like, ride or die type of committed; they’re thoroughly enamoured and obsessive and totally dependant on each other and not the best communicators but even with their many differences, they understand each other on a molecular level and couldn’t imagine dating anyone else. it’s them or nothing. they may be toxic and neither knows what they’re doing, but they’re dead set on making things work and learn along the way through trial and error. deidara is entirely devoted to sasori, body and soul; to sasori, deidara is everything he saw in others and wanted for himself, but never dared to even dream of.

though both sasori and deidara are resolved on staying together no matter what, they did discuss hard limits in their relationship; boundaries that if crossed, they’d never be able to recover from. one both of them agreed on is cheating. with their pasts and the way they are, neither of them would be able to cope with the other cheating, and would take it really really badly. another hard limit for deidara is substance addiction; he’s familiar with its effects, and he’s absolutely positive he cannot have that in his life, ever again (though this is more like a fair warning prompted by his personal trauma, than something sasori is likely to fall into). for sasori, dishonesty is an immediate deal breaker. under no circumstances is deidara allowed to lie to him, ever: no white lies, no omission of information: sasori asks, and deidara has to answer.

entire honesty on deidara’s behalf came with a lot of work: he’s by nature evasive and not one to trust easily, so in the earlier days of their relationship, it was a lot of deidara tiptoeing around answers and sasori seeing right through his bullshit. eventually, deidara learnt that he owes sasori the truth under all circumstances, even if he has to force it out through tears. it’s non negotiable.

quite the feat considering deidara is a compulsive liar. or a rehabilitated one at least. lying is what gets him the most attention, doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative. deidara HAS to be seen and heard. it’s not that he enjoys deceiving others either, it’s more a thing he learnt to pick up quick as a child, in order to survive in an unstable environment created by abuse, addiction, neglect and fostercare. deidara has perfectly mastered the art of keeping a chill and laid back façade, of always being friendly and upbeat and yet never letting anyone in too close to see if there’s anything deeper than that. not that sasori ever fell for it: there’s something so twisted and damaged and somber and guarded about deidara, that sasori can see it bleed through even when he’s all sunny smiles and quick jokes. even when he thinks nobody is looking. once the layers were peeled back, for sasori it was like looking in a mirror: sasori sees the darkness, the hurt, the resilience, the maturity that comes too soon, the shame, the anger, the compulsive and the desperate, and instead of being turned off by it, he wants to observe and touch and devour deidara whole with all of his fucked up quirks and habits. feels the animalistic urge to put deidara on a table and vivisect him and analyze every fiber of his being, learn and consume all there is to deidara so intimately, it hurts and makes him want to hurt. he wants to squeeze out the life out of deidara, brutalize him and put him back together. wants to know and own him inside and out.

one thing they both had to learn and get accustomed to was trusting the other, and giving up control. both sasori and deidara are by default weary, hyper independent, and over all not well versed in emotional vulnerability. it took a lot of experimenting, frequent check ins, and reassurance to make things work. sasori is paranoid to the point of the pathological, and deidara would rather eat a shoe than show a single weakness. slowly, the Talks became less dreadful, they started picking up on each other’s patterns, thought processes and non verbal signals, and communication got much easier. the hurt lessened, the ever crushing weight of loneliness lessened, the guard came down and sasori and deidara went head first from hyper independent to codependent. deidara makes always sure to keep all of his promises to sasori, never betraying his trust or casting doubt over his love and devotion for him.

they’re both in it for the long run. and still, despite them both being ready to take it to the next step, it took months of persuasion and time to get deidara to move in with sasori; sasori still pretends he’s not aware deidara keeps an escape bag packed with clothes that still got the tags on, passport, cash and his most important documents stowed away and ready, in case he ever has to get out and fast. deidara keeps it underneath the driver seat of his car, and sasori found it accidentally while fixing an issue with deidara’s car on his request. at first sasori was terribly hurt and betrayed. but he eventually understood that his partner’s reluctance to move in with him and fear that he’ll be thrown out every moment now, has to do more with deidara’s continuous home insecurity throughout his childhood and teenage years, than with any sort of plan of leaving sasori.

they both need SO much reassurance. jesus. deidara has the insufferable tendency to treat sasori like he’s made of glass: he makes sure to caress him and repeat disgustingly sweet, gentle, comforting words to him until they’re engraved in his frontal lobe, like he’s stupid, or a baby. sasori hates that it works. sasori hates how he feels the tension melt right off of his shoulders and jaw, how he feels his brows unfurrow and his traitorous body always nestles deeper against deidara. how he feels the ache, the doubt and the worry slowly uncoil from the deadly grasp they have on his throat, his ribcage, his stomach. can barely stand the way his heart breaks in two whenever deidara’s upset. hates hates hates the way he seems to always know what to say and where to touch him, to placate deidara’s inner turmoil and restless mind.

[abysmal-black]

@pxison

This has only ever been a hypothetical in his training. Sanji never expected one of his siblings to actually go M.I.A during a mission let alone his eldest twin.

 Ichiji was always meticulous about information on a job and sticking to his plan, the few times Sanji had the misfortune of being partnered with him it was more stressful than it needed to be. All of his brothers were annoying but working alongside Ichiji made work feel more like work somehow. 

It’s when Judge adds that if Ichiji can’t be recovered fully to destroy all Germa technology with a thermite bomb does Sanji sit up straighter. Their father goes on to say this mission is incredibly important and as difficult as it is to not have a body to bury, Ichiji is the pinnacle of Germa ingenuity. Knows at this point the old man is trying to soften the duty as best he can while still distancing himself from the dirty work, he wouldn’t be there after all. Judge wouldn’t have to set the explosives and watch Ichiji disintegrate into black ash and pungent flames. That’s only if he wasn’t ‘salavagable’ as their father said. 

At the time two days ago those words hadn’t stood out to him, Sanji was often put on recon and salvage jobs when assassinations dried up but the knot in the pit of his stomach told him it wasn’t right. Shouldn’t Judge have moved mountains to return his heir? A show of force had always been their style, anyone dumb enough to dishonor the Vinsmoke name was only left alive to share stories of the desolation their armies left … and yet. 

The knot in his stomach doesn’t affect the infiltration, Sanji taking it slow and steady, never lingering or pushing his luck with opportunities. The lab his brother was held in ran like clockwork and Sanji took his time learning the ten hour routine scientist ran on, mentally cataloging their positions at any given time and securing egress before locating the cell that held his target. Maybe he was avoiding learning Ichiji’s fate, the bomb heavy and flat in the pouch on his back. Ichiji was the strong one, stoic and unmovable. Something like this was expected to happen to Niji or Yonji  but Ichiji was different. He understood his place in the world and eventual ascension to the throne and what it meant. Sanji didn’t want to see his brother as anything but that, annoying as he could be.

When their escape is foolproof Sanji begins the countdown to a night shift change; it was the only time in the facility with enough moving parts he could move about without hesitation and creep to his brother’s cell with a pilfered I.D card and opens his door silently. 

The knot in his stomach finally begins to churn, Ichiji just beyond a drawn curtain. What he managed to find that remained of his red raidsuit can had already been dissected, parts stripped and laid bare but a discreetly placed bomb would destroy its components and provide cover for their escape.  Sanji takes a tight throat inhale as he approaches and slips behind the curtain, distink balls on the bottom of his boots canceling any sound of his movement. 

“Ichiji.” Eyes dart between the E.K.G machines steady peaks and valleys of a strong heartbeat and his twin strapped to a surgical bed. From the chart he’d glanced at during recon Ichiji was scheduled for vivisection early tomorrow morning. Scientists had been running endurance and stimulation tests on his exoskeleton  during the last shift change, the blood and fluid samples they’d already taken waiting to meet the same fate as his dismantled raidsuit. “Ichiji, I need you to say something.” Lips lean into the man’s ear. “We only have a seven minute window to get you out of here.”