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reissuedmommyissues · 2 years ago

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Band Practice

Melissa Schemmenti/f!reader

Warnings: alcohol ig

Words:1900ish

A/N: Listen yall English is my second language and I have not written anything since fanfiction.net was popular. It's also not proofread because I got too shy to show it to my partner/proofreader. Sooooo yeah have fun with that.

Melissa while not keen on newer staff surprisingly didn't hate the recent hire for Abbott. Primarily hired on as the new librarian you had started to double as IT after fixing a couple of computers in the library. Melissa admired that you were willing to do two jobs for the price of one, or at least that's what she told herself she hadn't been actively seeking you out for any other reason than to fix technology and library-related things.

Melissa walked into the breakroom and took her usual seat by Barbara "Hey Barb have you seen our tech guru, I need her to take a look at my projector, blew a fuse or somethin'" Barbara just raises her eyebrows and gives Melissa a knowing look, "Seems like you've been looking for Ms.L/N more and more often as of late" she has no time to respond before you walk in and head straight for the coffee, grumbling about a lack of sleep.

"Woah there hon get into a fight this morning, ya look a bit crazy" Melissa jokes. You turn to look at her in your half-asleep state, gaze lingering for longer than usual, not something that slips past Melissa "Not quite I stayed up later than I usually do, you know night owl and all that" Melissa narrowed her eyes, you hoped she wouldn't push further, the last thing you want is for her to figure out you've been preparing for a gig with your new band. Not that it was bad but you just felt it was dorky and you would rather not have your crush or coworkers comment on it.

"Well some of us were gonna go out for drinks today I was hoping you'd come with" Melissa could feel a blush creeping up her neck, she'd tried inviting you out very casually a couple of times but besides the occasional lunch, you seemed to always be busy. You bit your lip flattered that the redheaded beauty was inviting you herself. But with a gig today you definitely couldn't cancel, you attempt to come up with a decent excuse but in between a lack of sleep and brain cells in the morning you don't come up with much "I'd love to Melissa really but I.... uhh have a thing, after school rain check?" You flash an apologetic smile and are out before she can say anything else.

This put Melissa in a sour mood for the rest of the day, it didn't help that when lunch came around you were nowhere to be found. Melissa frowned maybe you didn't actually like her, she felt like a fool. Maybe she was too old for you and she read too far into your exchanges taking them as flirty, all of a sudden all she could feel were her insecurities swallowing her up.

Barbara ever in tune with her work wife set her book down and cleared her throat. "Girl, what in the Lord's name has got you in such a foul mood?" Melissa huffs and shifts in her chair, "Nothing, absolutely nothing is wrong why would anything be wrong I am living the dream Barb" She knew better than to lie to her closest friend but she hated being this vulnerable. Barb wasn't blind she had been watching both of you closely noticing how you started to buy Melissa pastries from her favorite shop and how she in turn began to bring you some of her famous baked ziti. "Maybe you should ask her when she's free, it seems she's nearly always busy on weekends perhaps she's free other days?"

"I don't know what you're talking about"

Barbara shakes her head, "Look I'm just saying that maybe you should look into it, rather than assuming Y/N doesn't like you" Melissa's eyes go wide "Keep your voice down" She didn't want to embarrass herself over some crush or cause Y/N any issues. "Whatever the deal is doesn't matter I do not want to think about it, I just wanna make it through the rest of the day and get to that happy hour"

************

As if things couldn't get worse, Jacob picked the happy hour joint and it was not their usual spot. Something about broadening horizons and how live music would really benefit them. Melissa didn't like it nothing was wrong with their usual bar and she highly doubted whatever Jacob had dragged them into would be worth it but he offered to pay for drinks and that was good enough for her. Jacob skipped over to their table nearly missing the chair "Wow look at us I love it when the whole Abbott family goes out for drinks, I wish Y/N was here though she's been with us for a while and hasn't gone to any of the happy hours" at the mention of your name Melissa perked up and curiosity got the better of her. "What do you guys think she does, seems like she always leaves right as school ends on the weekends"

"My vote is on stripper" everyone turns to Ava, "what have you seen what she wears it's all baggy clothing we don't know what she has under that"

"I'm not super sure about that, what about a part-time emt that could be it, maybe she's got some scars she's covering up from saving lives" Janine ever the optimist would assume this with little to no context.

Ava pretty convinced she was right follows up "Or she could be one of those strippers that go to your house dressed as an EMT for a lil surprise"

The conversation goes back and forth for a while, meanwhile, Melissa nurses a beer still miffed over your rejection. Barbara notices her friend's discomfort and looks around the bar to see if there is a pool table to distract Melissa. Instead, her eyes land on the stage right as the band starts playing.

"Good god, what is she wearing?" Barbara's shock has everyone at the table looking in the same direction even Melissa looked over confused by the outburst. Come to find you're on the stage concentrated on your instrument, ready for your queue to begin. Gone was the usual oversized sweater and baggy pants instead u wore a long-sleeved crop top and the tightest jeans Melissa had ever seen. She felt silly but she couldn't stop staring at your hands. Your sleeves were rolled up to the elbow revealing defined forearms and deft fingers running across a bass. Even from a distance, she could see you were very good at what you were doing resulting in not-so-tame mental images of your hands undressing her, holding her down, wrapped around her thighs - Jesus she was like a teenager again getting hot and bothered by just the thought of you. Ava must have caught her gawking and leaned over "If you don't get a move on and take her out, I will cuz damn who knew our librarian was this hot"

Melissa glares at Ava has everyone figured her out, she turns back to see your performance not wanting to miss any more of it. She'd never seen you like this so casual, relaxed, and all-around sexy. She wonders if this is why you always left so soon being part of a band would make sense but why wouldn't you say anything, she hopes this is the case failing to push her former insecurities back down. Your band wasn't a fancy ordeal you went up on stage and played some of your songs but mostly did covers. Still, Melissa couldn't take her eyes off you and it only got worse when you started to sing yourself, she was pretty sure you couldn't see her or any of the Abbott staff but the way you were facing and the suggestive lyrics had her feeling like maybe just maybe you could be directing them at her.

As soon as the performance came to a close Janine and Jacob cheered and drew the attention of everyone in the bar including Y/N and the band.

*********

Welp so much for not getting found out. Jay leans over and taps you with a drumstick "Yo Y/N do they know you?" You look back over at your coworkers hoping not to see your favorite redhead, indeed luck was not on your side as you caught her eye. "Uhh yeah those are my coworkers, I'll catch up with yall later"

Melissa looked mad, not sure what else to do, and feeling like you may as well accompany the embarrassment with a drink you headed to the bar and waved her over. "Double shot of tequila and a Corona please" The bartender nods and pours the shot following it up with a swift opening of your beer.

"Suprised you drink considering you've always said no to it" You look over at Mel, she's extremely close due to the crowded bar top and you can feel her press up against you causing your head to spin. You pick up your shot and down it finding comfort in the heat you feel in your chest.

"Yeah I haven't had the time to go out since I've been filling in for the band, I'm sorry" At the mention of that Melissa visibly relaxes, gone was the anger from before, maybe there was still a chance this could go well? "You know you could've just said you had to go practice for your band" she almost sounded shy, "I would've understood if you were busy" You look over at the redhead suprised to see her so vulnerable.

Reaching over you tuck a stray hair behind her ear, "It's silly didn't want you to know because it made me feel like a dork, I've been trying so hard to impress you it felt like a step backward to tell you I have band practice" Melissa feels a blush creep up and sneaks a glance at you. At that almost confession, the proximity between you two, and the sexiest outfit she's ever seen she once again felt like some goddam horny teenager. Capitalizing on the brief liquid courage of the shot you figured why the hell not make a move. In a burst of confidence, you lean into Melissa and pull her by the collar of her leather jacket, still distracted by the tight jeans she barely realizes what you're attempting to do. The kiss is tame, impossibly soft, gentle, and over way too soon for Melissa's liking.

"I.....oh my god I'm so sorry I should have asked" Melissa was stunned and taking her silence as a negative you start to freak out "I've just been wanting to do that for a while and I've wanted to ask you out but you make me so goddam nervous an-" it's then Melissa who can't help herself she pulls you back in by the waist for another kiss, this one was rougher, hungrier she felt a roller coaster of emotions today and this felt like the only outlet. She pulls back to look at you with that trademark Schemmenti smirk "Feelings mutual hon"

You feel your heart swell at her confession,

"Well to make up for all the missed outings how do you feel about going out for dinner tomorrow?"

Melissa leans in very close for her answer "Hon with those pants I'll follow you anywhere"

#melissa schemmenti x reader #melissa schemmenti

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genshingorlsrevengeance · 2 years ago

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(Genshin Impact) Lisa and S/O in the Library

I do write it, to the shock of most people. But like I said, I don't imagine ya'll come to the meme man for this content. BUT I can certainly try my best for some characters.

Thankfully it's for Lisa, where writing that comes naturally to the shock of absolutely no one.

NSFT UNDER THE CUT

Lisa is a very patient woman. Except when it comes to her books.

Depending on who they were, she'd let off with a warning, or zap them into a crisp.

Even her darling S/O was no exception to her rules as Librarian.

When they wanted to borrow a book, she happily lent them it. However, the due date was well past it's original deadline.

And so, with a quiet rainy evening with nothing to do, Lisa decided to do her job and find the missing book. And she knew exactly where it was.

She locked up the doors before heading home.

Sure enough, there was S/O reading the missing book in their bedroom.

(S/O) "Oh, Lisa! You're home early. Nothing going on at the Library?"

Judging by their tone of voice, it seemed like they forgot about it.

(Lisa) "Dear, do you remember what day it is?"

(S/O) "...Uh, Thursday?"

Lisa nodded.

(Lisa) "Mhm. And what is Thursday?"

S/O looked confused for a moment before looking back at the book and connecting the dots.

Suddenly, they grew pale before getting up.

(S/O) "Oh, crap! That's right, here I'll return this real quick and-"

Lisa stopped S/O from exiting with a single finger to their chest and locked the door behind her.

Seeing the glint in her eye made S/O even more nervous.

(Lisa) "Put the book on the table over there. I want to have a chat with you."

Once S/O did what they were told, they felt her hand on their shoulder with tingles of electricity from her fingers.

(Lisa) "I normally let people off with a stern warning if they leave a book overdue for the first time, but you should've known better, darling."

She then spun them around to face her before a tiny shock made them yelp, making Lisa smirk.

(Lisa) "I'll make sure you don't forget it next time."

...

Lisa calmly read her book as her breathing steadily increased.

(Lisa) "Ah...~ Be a bit more still, would you? I'm trying to not bend a page."

Lisa closed her eyes for a brief moment to feel the pleasure of S/O's licking.

Lisa sat right on top of them, having S/O eat her out as she read.

She'd be lying if this was entirely a punishment.

Her free hand slowly played around with their pussy/cock, riling them up even more, and the entire time she spoke to them in a gentle manner.

But at the same time, if S/O squirmed too much or came without permission, there'd be quite the shock. Archons forbid if they got their cum on the book, then it'd turn into a real punishment.

But for now, S/O was being a good girl/boy, so there was no need to go to the extremes.

Instead Lisa decided to ride on their tongue for maybe a little longer. Had it been two or three hours already? Regardless, they'd still go on for a bit longer. She went home early for a reason, after all.

(Lisa) "I hope next time, you won't forget. Unless...you were wanting this the entire time? Not that I blame you."

Lisa asked with a giggle, rubbing their lower stomach even though their mouth was occupied with her already.

(Lisa) "But I won't be so gentle if this happens again."

#nsft #genshin impact headcanons #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact imagines #lisa minci x reader #lisa minci x you #lisa minci x y/n #lisa minci

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lostfirefly · 10 months ago

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You’ve Got the Same Dream as Me (Ch.8)

Hello, kiddos! The idea for this fanfic came to me from a dream (again) I had about a month ago. Тhe main characters were T. Cruise & H.Cavill (don't ask me why), but with a light hand they have been replaced. The main action of the dream took place somewhere in the sands. Аlthough this fanfic will feature Sir Crocodile and our beloved Buggy, the action shifts to the desert. No marines, ships etc. The devil fruit's abilities are preserved. Catch the Mummy and Indiana Jones vibes :) Different titles and names from the original source material will be used to emphasise the general OP's vibe.

Since English is not my native language, errors may occur. As always, feel free to share your thoughts :)

And thank you to my dear @yujo-nishimura and @laurasoretta for believing in me :)

Description: Catherine, a librarian who is searching for the trail of her sister who went missing on an expedition. Notes in books and diaries lead her to Cairo. There she finds a retailer from an artifact shop who, in exchange for selling her a map and equipment, insists that Catherine take her along. They get into a little (or maybe a big) adventure..

Warnings: Catherine is still angry about the phrase Buggy said in Ch. 7 (he's a vulnerable idiot). That's why she can be a little annoying. F words. Croco x OC are two assholes. Adventures and fun are still here. Buggy x OC, Sir Crocodile x OC. Hope you enjoy it!

Words: 3262 (omg!)

The title is taken from «You've Got the Same Dream as Me» (Sonya Belousova & Giona Ostinelli) (One Piece, Netflix)

Taglist: @gingernut1314

✎﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

• Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

✎﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

"Oh, hi, sister!"

"Oh, hi, sister? Jules, are you fucking kidding me? You’ve been missing for almost two months, I come looking for you, and all you can say is, "oh, hi, sister"? Catherine could hardly contain her anger and slowly approached Jules. "What are you doing here? And why are you with the beehive?"

"Well, after breaking up with Pete, I decided to go on an expedition to clear my head.. There I met a man with a funny haircut in the shape of a three. He offered me an interesting case and good money. And this nice man is his boss", brown-haired girl said with a smile.

"Oh, God! Could you please shut up?" Rika said with annoyance. She walked up to Jules and pushed her towards Catherine. "Welcome to the team of misfits."

"Heeey", Jules squealed.

"All right, ladies and the clown. Enough of this chit-chat and all this drama. Now you put your brains together, if you have them, read your maps, your diaries, and tell us where we're going next."

Crocodile approached Rika.

"You've done a great job, my love. Look and learn, clown, what kind of woman you should choose", Crocodile said with a sneer and kissed Rika again eagerly.

"Thank you! But I want to remind you that you hurt me at that old man's house," Rika returned the kiss.

"It's still ew", Catherine said with disgust.

"Oh, fuck! You've tired me out this week," Rika stopped kissing Crocodile, approached Catherine and grabbed her shoulder. "You know how many times I wanted to punch you in your pretty face, so you'd finally shut up. Now be a good girl, go back to your loser's place and do what you've just been told."

"And when did you have time to contact Crocodile, Rika?" Buggy asked, taking Catherine’s hand and leading her behind him.

"About a month ago, why? Do you feel bad about me not being with you or something? No, thanks. I found the real man."

"Hell, please, no. Just curious. I don't understand why you need me."

"Oh, are you trying to sneak out, my clown boy? Well, somebody had to get us in here. Crocodile doesn’t know the exact way, and you've been here before, albeit from the other side, and you have our box. Plus, I knew you'd fall for the treasure and, obviously, the girl. So. Sorry, buddy."

"Will someone tell me what's going on here?" suddenly asked Jules and glanced at Buggy, "and who are you?"

"They are," Catherine pointed at Crocodile and Rika, "two bastards. And that brown-haired bitch I met at the airport. She gave me a flight ticket. And he..."

"What do you mean, she gave you the ticket?" Buggy interrupted Catherine and looked at her in surprise. "Did you just take the fucking ticket out of that girl's hand? Did you really think a random stranger would just give it to you?"

"Well...," she looked at him with round eyes and shrugged.

"God, you're even dumber than I am," he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

"Oh, yeah! And this is coming from the 'I don't need a plan' person," Catherine mocked Buggy, standing behind his back.

"That's enough!" Crocodile stepped closer to them. "Listen, clown. Please tell your girl and her sister to tell us where we need to go. Otherwise…"

He grabbed Jules with his hook.

"Okay, okay!" Catherine said, "I'll do what you want. Just don't touch her".

"Catherine, don't!" Buggy hissed.

"I’m not gonna let some guy with the hook hurt my sister or you," - she said in a whisper and blushed slightly. "Come on, Jules. Let's take a look at the map".

"Good girls. Laura, honey, stand next to that fucking clown. He's got powers and he could easily make a run for it," Crocodile sat on the floor and lit a cigar.

"As you wish, boss."

Catherine and Jules sat on the cold rocks, shining flashlights on the map and diary entries. A light breeze walked through the space. They spent a long time going over the pages with their hands.

"Look," Catherine pointed to the coordinates in the diary. "We were here, here, and here. I think we're here now, right? The map’s drawn the path."

"First of all, I'm shocked at what's happening. What's going on? Second of all, what do you mean, the map's drawn a path? And third," Jules smiled wryly, "who's that guy with the red nose?"

"Fuck! I'm begging you, let's first get out of this fucking cave or wherever we are now. This is all your fault. If you hadn't disappeared, I wouldn't have come here and I'd be sitting at home with coffee right now, and everything would be fine."

"Hey, I apologize for interrupting your family drama, but did you find anything?" Buggy squatted down next to them.

"Not yet. Why are you asking? Oh, you're worried you're gonna miss out on the treasure now? And then you can't get a girl for one night at the bar?" Catherine mumbled, turning the pages.

"Why are you so mad?" he asked in surprise.

"I'm not... I don't care about you and your late-sex life, actually. You could go out and fuck every girl in town in one night."

"Oh, wow, right to the heart!" he exclaimed in a mocking tone, but he changed it quickly. "Hey, listen. About what I said.. I want to ap--"

"How much longer are you going to suffer bullshit?" Crocodile asked with annoyance. "Any news?"

"Don't yell at me, the beehive! No upd.. Uh, wait. Buggy, hold the flashlight, please", Catherine ran her hand over the sheets and mumbled something to herself. "Hey, the hook man. Do you have the book with you?"

"Of course. Laura, give it to her," Crocodile said with a low voice.

Laura went to the bag, pulled out the book and handed it to Catherine.

"Thank you, bitch," Catherine barked.

Reconciling the entries in the book and in her diary, Catherine continued to mutter something to herself and surveyed the space. She ran the fingers of one hand over the pages, the other hand drawing some shapes in the air.

"What is she doing?" Jules asked Buggy with a whisper.

"I have no idea, I thought you knew. She’s your sister."

Rika and Crocodile watched Catherine's strange movements intently.

"I got it!" - Catherine jumped up abruptly, grabbing the book and diaries and walked quickly forward. "Jules, look at the map. Are there any changes now?"

"I see nothing," Jules said, looking closely at the map.

"Honey, you'd better tell us where to go next," Crocodile walked over to Catherine and took her firmly by the neck.

"Hey, let her go," Buggy walked over to Crocodile.

"Or what? All right, I can't cut you. But I can cut her. I can cut her sister. Or kill. You're not in a very good position right now, clown. So, save your heroics for some petty squabbling amongst lowlifes like you."

"You can threaten me as much as you want, I don't give a shit about it. But if you lay one finger or your hook on either of them…"

"Then what? Are you gonna kill me?" at that moment, Crocodile's hand began to turn to sand.

"Stop! Please!" Catherine took Buggy's hand and gave him a hard look. "It's okay. I’m fine. Anyway, the beehive, I have bad news for you. The map is useless now until we get out of here. It only points the way in daylight and, as I understand it, in direct sunlight. So, we'll follow the path where the road is drawn now, and if there's nothing further, we'll go blind."

Rika came over to Jules and looked at the map.

"I hate to break it to you, my love, but that bitch is right. So far, the path's partially drawn. I don't know why the fucking thing didn't draw it all the way through. You're not so stupid, are you, Catherine?"

Catherine rolled her eyes and started packing.

"What was that? His hand turned to sand. And what does that big man mean when he said he can't cut that guy?" she asked with horror in her voice.

"Ah, it's a side effect of the devil fruit," Catherine waved her hand, "I'll tell you later."

⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥫⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭⥭

They walked along the winding rocky paths for over an hour, lighting the way with torches. The wind continued to blow through the cave, bringing smells of damp and rot.

"God, I don't want to die in a cave and lie here like some pharaoh", Jules muttered to herself, shifting her feet heavily, "And at first that man with the hook seemed so nice."

"Bastards always seem nice at first. Don't they, Buggy?" Catherine cast a glance at the clown and adjusted her bag.

"If you have a problem with me, cotton candy, just say so," he said in a surprisingly calm tone.

"I don't have a problem with you, and I don't want to talk to you," she snapped.

Jules looked at them questioningly.

"But you keep doing it, Cathie-pie", he said with a slight irony in his voice. "One minute you're mad at me, and the next..."

"Shut up, please, I hate you," she interrupted him with a quiet growl. "Shit, if you knew how much you piss me off, silly clown, I'd.... Ouch!"

Catherine didn't realize she'd hit a stone wall.

"What the hell?" she touched the space in front of her.

"Are you okay?" Buggy put his hand on her back.

"What? Yeah, I'm fine... But..."

"What happened?" Crocodile's voice came from behind her. "Where are we?"

"I don't know...," Catherine shone the torch on the wall. "We couldn't have lost our way. We could have taken a wrong turn… in theory... There are a million paths."

"We could have taken a wrong turn, huh? Are you kidding me?" Rika took two big steps and grabbed Catherine's arm. "I swear to God, I'll rip your head off if you take us down the wrong path."

"Get your crocodile hands off me!" Catherine tried to throw off Rika’s hand. "We're in a bloody ancient cave in the middle of Egypt. You think there's only one way in a cave like this? I’m really sorry that it's not lit up like a fucking highway. Just give me a minute. Jules, the map!"

Rika let go of Сatherine's hand and continued to stand by her side.

"That's why I love you, baby. For your temper," Crocodile walked over to Rika and put his arm around her waist.

"It’s still ew, by the way," Catherine snorted and stared at the map. "Jules, the diary! Buggy, please, hold the torch. One more riddle is written here..."

Check the wall, and touch the floor,

It can help to open the door.

You'll be helped by a pillar of fire.

Just take it up a notch higher.

"And what does it mean?" Crocodile asked.

"Well, you're supposed to be the smartest guy here, so think about it", Catherine said mockingly.

"I'm sick of you!" Crocodile hissed. "Laura, I think our redheaded smarty-pants is a little out of touch. Maybe a gun would help. Will you please point that pretty thing at her little sister?"

Laura took out a gun, cocked the slide and put it to Jules' temple.

"You’re truly a piece of shit," Catherine whispered. "If the four of you want to get to the treasure, shooting somewhere in the dungeon is not recommended. You'll turn to sand and escape, the clown will fall to pieces and escape too, and the four of us will be crushed by something heavy. No offense, but that's not how I pictured my demise."

"Very funny, yes," Crocodile grinned. "Now go to your blue-haired friend and open the door."

"Check the wall, and touch the floor.. a pillar of fire. Jules, Buggy, obviously, we need to check the walls and floor with the torch or the flashlight, there must be some clues there," Catherine said this with undisguised admiration.

"I think you're beginning to like this whole treasure hunting thing," Buggy said with a grin.

"No, I just want to go home and be away from you," Catherine tried to sound serious.

With the torch, Jules and Buggy lit every millimetre of the wall. Catherine sat on her knees and ran her hands over the floor.

“You know, Crocodile, I know you're kind of mafia, but maybe you could help. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner you can get your gold”, Catherine said, probing the stone tiles in the darkness. “Check those rocks you're standing on, please.”

Crocodile snorted. Rika nodded her head slightly and they began to check the floor beneath them.

"There are some drawings here," Rika said.

"Yeah, and there are some on the wall, too," Jules mumbled.

Catherine sat down on the stone floor, Crocodile sat next to her. They both stared at the book. Rika and Buggy watched them both warily.

"Look, the hook, you see, one of the slabs in the book is marked with a sign. That's how the ancient Egyptians labelled something like a button, if I'm not mistaken."

"Buttons? To what?" Crocodile looked at Catherine questioningly.

"I don't know. Maybe it's your treasure behind the door, maybe it's sarcophagi with mummies or a bunch of man-eating scarabs. But you see, there's a drawing here. It's a diagram. We have to click on the pictures on the wall and the floor in the right order, I guess... But we need to find some kind of lever that activates it all."

"And if we press in the wrong order, then what?" Crocodile asked in a quiet voice.

"Well, then we have a good chance of turning into mummies, and in a few hundred years local kids will be scared with scary stories about us." Catherine said, barely containing a nervous laugh. "Yes, I've always dreamed of dying next to the sandman and the clown."

Crocodile stood up and offered Catherine his hand.

"Thanks, I guess," she said with surprise in her voice. "Okay, guys, we need to find a lever, a big button or something..."

Catherine and Crocodile continued to look at the book and diary while Laura, Rika, Buggy and Jules were exanimating the walls and floor.

"People, there's another sign here," Laura said, lighting an obscure symbol with her torch.

"Wait, that's...," Catherine sat down next to her, "it's Seth's sign."

"How is Seth?" Crocodile asked.

"God, сome on! You're in Egypt. It's an Egyptian god."

"Then what do these symbols mean?" Jules' voice came from the wall.

Catherine approached her.

"Jules, sister, hold the book. Buggy, hold the torch and the diary," she began to run her hands over the wall and the pages again, muttering something to herself.

"Anything?" Rika asked, coming up behind her.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, don't distract me," Catherine waved her hand away. "Guys, I get it. Look, these aren't just symbols. It's a puzzle. But not just a puzzle, a puzzle of myth. And a note that says "Beware of Seth".

"What myth?" Buggy asked in surprise.

"Osiris and Isis," Catherine said affirmatively.

"And what's it about?" Laura asked and Rika said together.

"Come on! Seth killed Osiris, Isis' husband, chopped him up and hid him in different places. Buggy, by the way, if you bother me, I'll do the same to you," she said with a slight smile.

"I'm sorry, what?" he raised his eyebrows.

"Isis went in search of her husband's parts. The symbols on the wall and floor match the ones in the book. And if you look in the diary, you'll know in what order to press the buttons."

"But what does this have to do with Seth?" Laura asked. "You know, I don't know much about all these Egyptian myths, but it seems to me that if something is mentioned in the text, you should take it into account."

"Seth is the god of storms and deserts, that doesn't make sense," Jules said.

"But he was also considered the god of deception," Catherine whispered. "We need to press these slabs in reverse order. We have to find the lever and then start this infernal mythological machine."

"There's something like a wheel in here, but to be honest, I don't really want to touch it," Jules said with excitement in her voice, pointing to a small object.

Crocodile and Buggy approached the wheel. Turning it a few times they both looked round.

"And now what?" Crocodile asked.

Catherine looked at the book and started pointing with her hand.

"Now we have to press the slabs in reverse order, that's what Laura, you over here, Jules, you over here, Rika, you on that slab, you two stand over there at those two slabs closer together. Just in case there's a door, of course."

She sat down on the ground, put the book next to her, and started rambling again.

-Feet.. Arms... Body... Arms... Legs. Okay, first brown-haired bitch Rika. Then Jules. No, no, no, no.. first Laura. Then Rika. Then Jules. Then beehive. Then Buggy."

In that order, everyone pressed the slabs.

"And what? Nothing happens. Are you sure you got it right?" Buggy asked with a distinct annoyance in his voice.

"I-I.. I don't know, I hope so."

"If you decided to trick us...," Rika moved with a quick step towards Catherine.

Suddenly they heard a strange noise and the floor started to wobble.

"Please tell me it was you who ran so hard," Catherine said with fear in her voice, getting up from the floor. "Oh-oh, that's not good."

Slowly the walls began to fall down. The floor began to move more and more.

"What's with the door?" Rika shouted.

"It won't open," Jules hit the wall with her hand.

"Oh-oh, that's too bad!" Catherine looked around, dazed with shock.

"Are you sure you read it right?" shouted Crocodile.

"Do you really have to ask that now?" Catherine yelled back.

The heavy stone door began to open slowly. Crocodile and Buggy tried to pull it to move it, but to no avail.

"Yes! Yes! It's opening!! Hurry!" Jules took Laura's hand, and they slipped through the narrow passage.

"Catherine, hurry!" Rika grabbed her arm and dragged her towards the door.

The floor began to slowly collapse. From the bottom of the cave came the muffled sounds of stone hitting stone. Catherine noticed the book that had been left on the floor.

"The book!" she broke free of Rika's grip and ran to get it.

"Rika!" Crocodile turned into sand and picked Rika up.

"Oh, Catherine, this was a bad idea. That's the dumbest idea ever," she muttered to herself as she watched the floor fall down in bigger and bigger chunks.

Suddenly, she felt someone pick her up and book.

"You will be the death of me, cotton candy!" Buggy's flying torso threw her on his shoulder and carried her to the door.

"Damn you and your chop chop abilities," she said, exhaling as she watched the remnants of the floor fall into the abyss of the cave.

As soon as everyone was behind the door, it closed.

"Is everyone alive?" Rika asked, lighting a torch from the wall.

"I think so," Laura and Jules squeaked in unison somewhere.

Buggy lowered Catherine to the ground and put his body back on his feet. She looked around.

"Well. I have two bits of news. One, we're all alive. The second is that the way back is cut off".

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greenninjagal-blog · 2 years ago

Text

The Rumor Mill Game (pt5)

Long time, no see. :) If you’ve forgotten what’s going on, you can find the previous chapter [here!] Or if you’re new to this, find the start [here!]

Summary: Office coworkers Logan and Remus have created the rumor that they are married and have a son, except that Logan kinda yelled that he didn’t have a son in front of a bunch of people.

Virgil is well....Virgil is going to change that. And he definitely has the blackmail to do it.

Word Count: 8346

Read on Ao3 || My General Writing Masterlist

Okay. So. It wasn’t like when Logan and Remus showed up at the restaurant, Virgil expected Logan to want to adopt him. For one thing, Virgil had parents. For another, Logan had never once shown even a remote interest in having a hand in the responsibility of keeping another, living, breathing being alive.

Virgil knew that. He prompted Logan once about it-- because Virgil at his core was a fucking masochist who needed to have his heart ripped out and stomped on sometimes just to prove he knew what life was like. There had been some stupid math homework that he had guilted Logan into helping him with during Logan’s lunch break (like the man wanted to be doing calculus while out eating-- he was a fucking accountant; he already did this all day for his job), and the problem had involved dogs, so Virgil had made up some stupid idiotic story about once owning a dog just to see if maybe Logan might have like a hundred dogs at home and oh yeah, what difference is a child compared to that, right? At least, you know how to feed yourself and can be trusted outside without a leash, sure I��ll take you in, Virgil! Do you want to call me Dad?

Yeah. And somehow Virgil was still failing his creative writing class-- he didn’t understand it either.

Logan didn’t have dogs at home. Or cats. Virgil was pretty sure he didn’t even have dust bunnies.

And Virgil of all people knew what type of burden children could be. You had to give them time and money and entertainment and if you didn’t then everyone would call you a terrible person! Once you had a kid, you really never had time to yourself to do things you liked to do because a kid was always in the way! How many times had Virgil’s mother reminded him that he was preventing her from enjoying her weekend after she spent all week working her tireless jobs and making him food and keeping the house? How many times had his father answered the door and started swearing because he forgot it was his week and he invited his girlfriend over and she didn’t know Virgil existed so Virgil was either going to spend the whole night in his room pretending to be a piece of furniture or his dad was going to have to cancel?

Virgil was a commitment! He knew it! He was another mouth to feed, his growth spurts just kept happening--he’ll never forget the fury on his mother’s face when she found out he outgrew the shoes she got him for Christmas by late January-- not to mention school fees. School lunch? More like School sit-in-the-library-and-tell-the-librarians-he’s-just-not-hungry. His personal finance class was his own living nightmare because he got to listen to every other kid in the entire class complain about how dumb it is that everything cost money, like bread hadn't always cost at least three dollars. There was a girl named Sally who told the teacher that she’d just show her boobs to the checkout clerk to get it for free so that she could keep up with her fictional mani pedi appointment, after the teacher told her she couldn’t just call her dad and ask for more money.

Virgil scored a perfect A on that assignment, if anyone was wondering. The teacher pulled him back after class to ask him if he was interested in going to a seminar outside of class time for the Next Business Owners of America(™) since he was meticulous with his number crunching. Virgil would have loved to, if it hadn’t been three hours away, pay-for-your-own-food, and hey, how about you bring your parents along? I’d love to meet them and let them know what a great son they’re raising!

Virgil had said he wasn’t interested. His teacher had insisted he’d take a flyer anyway, and now it was stuffed in the bottom of his backpack like a forty ton weight he was lugging around everywhere just to see if it really did get heavier as the day in question approached.

((There was still a week left for reservations. There was still a week left for reservations and Virgil was still very certain that if he did go and he didn’t tell his parents, neither of them would notice he’d gone missing and they would never remember him again and then where would he be?))

So yeah, Virgil was a commitment. Any child was a commitment. Basically a blackhole of money. Any self respecting, successful adult could probably take one look at him and think setting a couple hundred dollar bills on fire is less expensive and more eco friendly than trying to take in a teenager.

Logan probably had thought that, too. Virgil wouldn’t blame him for that.

He just… expected it to hurt a little less. But well. Logan had always been straightforward and it doesn’t get more straightforward than “HE IS NOT AND WON'T EVER BE OUR CHILD”.

Virgil liked that Logan was straightforward. He didn’t have to guess through passive aggressive comments or backhanded compliments to figure out what was being said when Logan was talking.

And really it hadn’t even been anything new being said there. Virgil got to stand there and not cry and very calmly ask Logan and Remus to step outside because they were upsetting the other patrons. Yep totally. Just the other patrons. Not Virgil because Virgil had never been their kid and he had his own parents and there were other kids with less who needed more and he hadn’t been going to mention the flyer or seminar to Logan so it didn’t even feel like the kick to the teeth that it should have been.

But if Virgil’s manager was going to give him a paid break to go stand outside and with a free soda and some mango sticky rice the man made him specifically, then Virgil was going to take it and enjoy it and definitely not cry or text Janus about. In fact he took it and he sat out back and wondered how on earth Remus landed a guy like Logan.

Because Logan was cool. He was smart, pleasant and polite and patient and other words that started with “P”. Virgil had seen Remus a handful of times-- just the few that he’d been desperate enough to get out of his mother’s house but didn’t have money for food-- but those times had been enough for Virgil to get a very super good fucking grasp on who Remus Prince was.

He was loud to Logan’s calm, eye-catching to Logan’s plainness, obnoxious to Logan’s civility. Even when Virgil had watched them walk in together, hands together, ring present it felt like someone grabbed the rug from under him and tugged.

Because-- and Virgil meant this from the bottom of his heart-- Remus was a fucking nightmare demon from hell. There were a lot of people who scared Virgil to no end, but Remus? Remus was on a whole other level.

Remus was The Adult(™) that Virgil avoided like the plague, that Virgil memorized the schedule for when he would be at the food kitchen for, that Virgil laid awake at night running scenarios about because Remus would be the only stupid asshole brave enough to blatantly ask The Question.

Because Remus remembered Virgil’s face, remembered what he looked like, what he wore, and where he liked to sit away from everyone else. Remus remembered Virgil like he wanted to when not even Virgil’s parents wanted to remember him.

Because there wasn’t a shadow dark enough for Virgil to hide in that would keep Remus from seeing him, and Virgil didn’t know a single thing that could keep him from asking hey, is everything okay at home?

No it’s not. Thanks for asking. And hey, I know you’re a mandatory reporter, so pretty please don’t call social services because Virgil cannot think of anything worse than being picked up out of everything he’d struggled to build here and plopped into the hands of someone who would insist they knew how to live his life better.

He didn’t want a family that would see him as just another meal ticket: free money from the government to take in the kid who was too anxious to sleep at night sometimes. Even thinking about the bad families-- the die hard religious people who would call him a sin if they knew he was gay, the abusers that might see him as a free punching back that spit out money sometimes, the too-nice,-but too-many-other-kids-to-worry-about-him couple that might only take him in out of guilt and pity-- made Virgil’s heart beat so hard he could barely breathe.

But what was worse was thinking about the good families. You know, the ones that most of the kids at school went home to? A mother who would insist that he wear brighter colors and eat all his vegetables and join every after school program because it looked good on a resume? A father who would insist that he apply to Harvard and Yale and take summer internships across the country or do hard labor outside because it built character? The ones who would say to him hey, you don’t need that job anymore so just go ahead and quit and we’ll supply everything you could possibly want and you better hope you don’t disappoint us like your first set of parents because then we’ll have the power to take it all away!

Logan… Logan was a safe daydream, okay? He was just a quiet guy who came in for Thai sometimes and ate by himself, tipped nicely, and didn’t try to send his food back because it was “too orange”. He was reasonable and knew when to stop asking questions and he probably wouldn’t care if Virgil kept his job and or if he kept wearing black and didn’t try to apply to schools that would probably eat him alive. Logan smiled at him, and helped with Virgil’s homework, and maybe if Logan hadn’t wanted to be the center of Virgil’s very pitiful stupid, secret wishes, he shouldn’t have been the first person to tell Virgil “good job” since Virgil had been eight.

“Fuck,” Virgil said, shoving another spoonful of mango rice into his mouth.

“Oh, please, do keep catastrophizing in my front seat,” Janus said in his stupid ass rich person tone. “I’m certain that will solve all your problems.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Virgil snapped back at him.

Janus stretched back in the driver's seat, hands above his head, folded neatly with those black biker gloves on still, and his shirt riding up his stomach in the way that makes Virgil kinda hate him. He had his eyes closed for the most part of it all; still content to sunbathe in the front seat as he had been doing for the better part of an hour now, but he opened the right just to side eye Virgil in that unbothered way of his that speaks to how amusing he found watching Virgil self destruct to be.

“Darling--” He said.

“Don’t,” Virgil jabbed his plastic spoon towards him threateningly. “Don’t start with me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Janus said. “Only merely ending what has been a truly delightful date with my very wonderful boyfriend who is certainly not-at-all distracted by a problem he has made up in his beautiful amazing brain.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ve known Logan since I was in diapers, Virgil,” Janus says. “He’s almost like a second father to me. You are worrying over nothing.”

“It’s not nothing!” Virgil said shrilly.

And that is when Janus finally dropped his arms back down and twisted to face Virgil completely. His eyes, which normally were filled with mischief and spite, were floating with a sincerity that made Virgil’s stomach do flips. The freckles on his face were just barely noticeable, the shine of his lipgloss still freshly applied and waiting to be ruined. His dark hair was highlighted with gold stripes, which Virgil knew from experience looked very dashing when hands were run though it.

“Virgil,” Janus said, soft and kind and knowing. “My own father wouldn’t hesitate if you asked him. And you know that there would be a room in my house painted purple with your own kitchen and fridge by three hours after you asked him.”

“Your father plays mind games,” Virgil said weakly.

“Are you still obsessed with the swear jar?”

“I’m not obsessed!” Virgil shot back. “It freaks me out, okay? The whole swear jar being a place that you both put money so that you have funds to pay for something if you didn’t want him knowing you were paying for? That’s like John Kramer levels of jigsaw puzzles. I can’t handle that on a daily basis! My heart would just fucking stop!”

“My father does not have any intentions of testing your will to live,” Janus said flatly. “Or whatever it is that happens in the Saw movies. He runs a company that’s sole goal is to make lives easier and more affordable. When he turns fifty he plans on giving the whole company to me, and then I will wait exactly one week before selling half the shares to you for a dollar and then you can handle all the gross business stuff and I will handle the very funny human complaints.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually,” Janus said. “He has it written in his main diary that’s stashed behind the headboard that he’s going to give it to me when he’s sixty, but the secret one he doesn’t think I’ve found yet that is stashed in the false wall behind the washer says fifty. Also the second secret one in the false bottom puzzle box drawer in his office says fifty too.”

Virgil stared at him, waiting a whole beat, but Janus merely raised an eyebrow.

“You understand that’s not normal shit, right?” Virgil asked him. “You understand that your father and you are the most insane people I’ve met, right? Why does he have three diaries? Why are two of them secret? Why do you know there are two secret ones?”

Janus frowned. “There’s three, but the third one is just all about how much he loves me and his billions of lists of things to get for me for my birthday every year. Sometimes I add ridiculous stuff to the list in his handwriting to see if he’ll get me it. That’s how I got my snake.”

“Unbelievable,” Virgil said, staring at him. Part of him was utterly terrified of Janus, of how casually he could say things like that, of how Virgil is pretty sure Janus had the means and the ability to hide his body if Janus decided one day Virgil was annoying him too much, but the larger part of him is just overwhelmed with an embarrassing amount of awe and love.

Something about that must have shown on his face because Janus’s eyes melted like ice cream and his lips curled into a smile that could have coaxed flowers to bloom if their car was parked in a meadow instead of a parking garage.

“I love you too,” Janus said. “Now will you please go into the building and blackmail Logan into being your pretend dad so I can have all my boyfriend’s attention during our dates?”

“Asshole,” Virgil said, leaning over the center console to catch him in a kiss.

Janus hummed enthusiastically, as if he’d been waiting for Virgil to do that all day. Virgil did his best to not roll his eyes.

Janus pulled back first, licking his lips as if to make sure the last of his cherry lip gloss had been cleaned up so that he could apply another coat once Virgil was out of his sight, and finding it satisfactory. “I’m going to eat the rest of your mango rice.”

Virgil handed him the little container, half eaten and not enjoyed quite as much as it should have been due to impending doom. Janus, who was rich enough to have his own plastic spoon, still used Virgil’s. Virgil grabbed the handle of the plastic bag for the other two carry out containers and pulled it into his lap.

“I’m going to get arrested.”

Janus waved a hand. “Get out of my car, Virgil. You can mope when you get back.”

“Pay my bail?”

Janus smiled at him, soft and sunny and causing all the sickening, disgusting butterflies in his stomach to flutter around. Virgil wasn’t sure why, considering he’d also watched Janus eat pavement at the skateboarding park once late at night, and then cry like a baby about it, and then demand that Virgil tell no one about it.

“Always,” Janus said, like he meant it, like he was making a promise, like he loved Virgil and wanted what was best for him even when Virgil didn’t have a single thing to give him in return.

He didn’t realize that he had a stupid smile on his face until he was ten feet from the car holding the bag of take out to his chest like some middle schooler who just got asked out by her crush. He swears at nothing, because of course Janus could draw this sort of reaction out of him over fucking bail money, what the hell. There was nothing romantic about bail money. There wasn’t anything romantic about Janus.

The same way there wasn’t anything nerve wracking about Patton Hart, or terrifying about Remus Prince, or fatherly about Logan Ackroyd.

He nearly tripped and face planted trying to walk into the lobby. His shoe caught on the tile floor and his balance went sideways and his heart jumped out of his throat into his mouth and nearly onto the floor with the mango rice he had just eaten.

There were about ten people wondering in the lobby, doing various tasks: three people in business suits discussing lunch plans, a janitor mopping up an area with cautious signs around it, two people waiting for one of the three elevators, two people at the front desk and a receptionist who was talking to a delivery man from a pizza place across town. And Virgil was pretty sure all of them saw him almost lay himself out on the floor.

It was fine. It was totally fine! If they asked what was wrong with him he would say something like Oh I haven’t possessed a human in at least a century or You guys didn’t see that rat? It was huge! or my plan was to lie my way up to the upper floors but I figured that I might as well give up and let you arrest me now. Do you want to call security or just hand me the phone and I’ll do it myself?

He hesitated on his feet for a moment, wondering if he could get away with going straight into the elevators even though he knows they require a keycard. Janus told him that much in their run throughs while preparing for this. But still the fluttering hopeful part of him was wishing that security risks weren’t a thing and he could just… walk upstairs.

Instead he steeled himself and headed in a direct line towards the receptionist’s desk. All he had to do was convince her to give him a visitor’s badge and let him go upstairs without calling either Logan or Remus who would definitely tell her they don’t have a son.

He was honestly already so lucky they hadn’t announced to the whole building via company-wide email that they didn’t have a child at all. Although the longer he hesitated the more of a chance there was that one or both of them were writing that email right now.

The receptionist nodded to him when he stalled his walk a few paces away from the desk, but continued her discussion with the delivery man. Instead the man and the woman lingering to the side had their eyes on him, watching with opening curious expressions that made Virgil want to hiss at them the way he hissed at the workers in the food bank-kitchen that he visited on weeks when his mother couldn’t be bothered to keep food in the house or his father had forgotten to leave him enough money to buy himself a pizza while he went out on another date.

You know. Before Remus had hissed right back at him and Virgil had realized oh shit, that guy remembered him and this was going to be a problem.

“Watcha doing here, kid?” the guy at the desk asked, taking a sip of his coffee. He was closer than the woman, with a crooked tie and a salt-and-pepper beard that made him look old instead of distinguished or whatever he was trying for.

“I’m looking for my dads,” Virgil said and holy shit this was a bad decision. “Lo-Logan Ackroyd, and Remus P-Prince.” He swallowed nervously, digging his fingers into the boxes of take out and trying hard not to let his spine fold like a chocolate éclair.

The man chokes, nearly spitting up his coffee all over his tie. “No way! You’re the kid?”

“Jeff!” The lady with the frizzy hair hissed.

“What!” Jeff exclaimed. “You heard what Logan said!” The man turned back to Virgil and Virgil forced himself not to take a step back or sprint for Janus’s car or melt into a puddle of human goo or start crying. “Man, that guy really is an unfeeling robot. How old are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Jeff!” The woman yelled. “I’m sorry, sweetheart; don’t mind him.”

“I’m seventeen?” Virgil said. “And it’s.. uh.” He swallowed, glancing at the receptionist who still looked to be deep in the conversation with the delivery man. “It’s-- it’s okay. I know what it sounded like yesterday. It wasn’t exactly… uh… Logan and Remus aren’t my parents!”

The man and the woman were looking at him now, with twin gazes just short of being hungry. Virgil felt distinctly like he’d just jumped into a lake full of piranhas and kindly asked them not to eat him alive, please and thanks. He took a deep breath, trying to untense his shoulders.

What had Janus said? It was like tearing off a bandaid?

“I’m adopted! But my parents, like the real ones, are still around. They just don’t have custody, you know? Logan and Remus do, because they are good people! Totally good people who probab--I mean definitely haven’t committed unspeakable crimes or anything of the like that could be proven in the court of law! But like yesterday, haha, I mean things haven’t always been easy because like, I’m kinda difficult and I don’t call them dad or anything because I have a dad already who is not Logan and I told Logan I didn’t want to call him dad and so he doesn’t really call me son and definitely not his son, you know? He really didn’t mean it like how it sounded because he’s cool and haha, yeah isn’t that like a horrible coincidence that it sounded bad? But he’s-- Logan I mean-- is really good! Really nice and helps me with my math homework. A really, uhm. He’s a good guy. You know?”

The receptionist was looking at him now, too. And so was the delivery man, their conversation entirely forgotten.

Virgil swallowed like he was drowning, wishing that he could shut up because there was no way these all competent adults were going to buy that horrible, terrible story that wasn’t even really a story as much as just a bunch of gibberish tossed out with Logan’s name in it. It was like he hadn’t even practiced with Janus at all. He barely even got a foot in the door before he just started talking! Did these people even know Logan? Or did he just spit out a fake life story to some random people in the company lobby and would absolutely never be able to show his face here again?

“On second thought, I’ll just go,” Virgil rasped out, and turned on his heel, preparing to bolt for the doors before security could be called for the random kid who just tried to buy his way into a company HQ building with cold Thai food and a fake story about fake parents who would never even want to consider being real parents. Would they charge him with espionage for that? Could they? Is there even bail for espionage accounts?!

“Oh no no no!” The woman exclaimed suddenly, putting her coffee directly on the receptionist counter. “Oh honey, I am so sorry! Of course Logan is a good da-fathe-- I mean a good guardian! Jeff and I didn’t mean to make you think we didn’t know that!”

“Did I say unfeeling?” The man said, laughing nervously and tugging at the collar of his shirt. “I meant unrelenting! An unrelenting robot who has nothing but… love… in his…uh heart. Hey, do you think that maybe you could not bring up this conversation to him? I like my job.”

Virgil couldn’t breathe. Like actually could fucking not. He was going to have to sit down because there was no way that should have worked at all. The woman and the man were doing a piss-poor job of having a subtle conversation under their breaths about which of them was going to get fired as if Virgil actually did have sway with Logan and Remus. The relief was so overwhelming it was terrifying.

Shit, is this what Janus felt every time he made up a lie? If so, Virgil might be able to understand it. He doubted straight ecstasy would come close to this feeling.

The take out boxes creaked in his sweaty, clammy hands as the woman turned back towards Virgil with a too-bright, too-wide smile, that reminded him of his mother when she was on the phone with his teachers who called to let her know that he was failing the class: placating and fake and screaming that she completely believed him and was not even going to bother asking for the other parties side of the story.

“Why don’t we get you upstairs, honey?” she said. “Candy will get you your own personal badge and then you won’t even have to stop around here and talk to us silly old people. Candy?”

“Uh, yeah,” The receptionist said. “I’ll get it to Mr. Ackroyd by the end of the day tomorrow.”

The other woman smiled at him and started guiding him towards the elevators, her badge dangling in her hand. “I’m sure your dads are expecting you, right?”

“It’s a uh…surprise, actually,” Virgil stuttered. “Big surprise.”

“Oh that’s lovely! What a thoughtful son!”

Yep, Virgil thought, swallowing back the urge to vomit all over her knockoff Christian Louboutin pumps (and the fact that Virgil knew they’re knockoffs is equally nauseating, damnit Janus). The thought, though, just for that moment, gave Virgil something to focus on (Janus’s stupid face, the taste of his lipgloss, “I’ll pay your bail.”). He clung to his take out boxes, and stood at least three feet away from the woman, and tried not to feel like he just entered the elevator to hell when the doors slowly rolled shut.

The woman might be talking to him, chatting with her pleasant and polite voice that does nothing to actually put Virgil at ease. Janus probably would be in his fucking element right here, probably soften her up further with a few on-the-spot made up stories that make him out to be a humble yet high achieving son (only half lies: Janus was high achieving, but the day he acted humble about anything would be the day that Virgil did stand up comedy for the whole school during his lunch block). Still that sort of thing would make Logan and Remus look really good, right?

Virgil should be saying something. He should tell her that he loves his parents and that they are the perfect family and Logan and Remus don’t have a 90% chance of responding “who?” when this woman tries to say he’s their son. He shouldn’t be standing ramrod still in the elevator, holding take out food so close to himself it might look as if he’s trying to wear it, or breathing so loud that people in the lobby could still hear him, what the fuck is wrong with him--

“Hey hun,” the woman said. “I don’t think I caught your name, now. What was that again?”

Virgil swallowed hard, forcing his tongue to unstick from the roof of his mouth. “Uh… Virgil. My name is Virgil.”

Why did that sound like he was making it up? That wasn’t even a lie! His name was Virgil! Unless it wasn’t? Would he have even known if Virgil wasn’t the name his parents-- real parents-- had given him?

“Virgil,” she repeated pleasantly. “That’s a wonderful name.”

“Yep, it’s mine. Totally mine. Why wouldn’t it be mine?”

Her eyebrows creased in confusion and Virgil debated slamming his head against the reflective metal doors. Before he could get to the part where he follows through on that one, the elevator diiiiinged! And the floor settled to a stop.

“Oh wonderful,” the woman said. “Now would you like to visit Remus first or Logan? Logan has his own office but Remus has a cubical nearby if you want.”

Virgil honestly hadn’t thought he would get this far. He’d been half convinced that Remus would just be… in the lobby, ready to discount his lies, or Logan would be in the parking lot ready to ask him who exactly he was because surely a random restaurant worker wasn’t worth remembering, or Janus would be telling him that he was an idiot and embarrassing and why are we even dating again?

He opened his mouth but no words were coming out, certainly not ones that would make any of this better than the dumpster fire it was already.

“Jen,” A voice said from nearby. Virgil almost jumped right out of his skin, but it turned out just to be another worker in the office: dyed orange hair and an infinity scarf and hiding behind a stack of files almost as tall as they were. They were looking at Virgil though with a nervous expression as if they thought Virgil was the herald of the workplace firing squad or the next round of interns that would eventually take their job. “Uh, who is your… uhm…?”

“Quin,” the woman said warmly, as if she had been just as put off by Virgil’s lack of response as he himself had been. “This is Virgil. You know, Remus and Logan’s son that they talk about all the time? He brought them a surprise lunch! Isn’t that sweet?”

Ah fuck, they talk about having a son?! Did Logan and Remus actually have a son?! Did Janus just forget to tell him about that?!

Janus, what the fuck?!

The new person’s eyes widened as they took in Virgil’s appearance, which was very much out of place in the entire building. He’d worn his jeans with the least amount of holes in them but his only pair of shoes at the moment were these converse and he’d scribbled black sharpie on them out of boredom in his history class last year. He didn’t exactly look anything like someone who lived with Logan might, considering Virgil had never seen Logan not wearing a business suit, but this was the best outfit he could come up with from his closet.

“Uh yeah, totally. Uhm.” The person said nervously and then leaned in close to the woman and whispered, as if Virgil wouldn’t be able to hear them at all, “Uh, didn’t Logan…uhm… say….?”

The woman laughed painfully in a way that made Virgil wonder what exactly they had all done when under the impression that Logan was an asshole who didn’t love his son (a son he didn’t have because Virgil was not his son and even if Virgil was he wouldn’t blame Logan for not wanting him).

“Oh it was just a misunderstanding! Virgil told Jeff and I about it downstairs. We can have lunch together today and I’ll tell you all about it!”

Virgil frowned slightly, because well… he didn’t exactly mind that people would be talking about it-- that was part of the whole plan anyway, to have people talk about-- but something in him was insulted that it would be shared so blaise. Like, didn’t his homelife situation feel even an ounce personal or private? This woman was just going… to talk about him… and Logan… and Remus…and their private, totally real family business over lunch like she knew everything about it and had the right and authority to disclose that information?

For a second, Virgil was half tempted to tell her that he was also royalty of a distance country and that it was super secret because there were people who would kill to know his whereabouts and they could be anyone, ma’am, and they could be anywhere and now that you know they’ll definitely come after you too. Did you know the last person whom I told, went missing within ten hours and the police are still finding body parts of them around the city?… Anyway, have fun sleeping tonight. Fucker.

“Quin!” A familiar voice yelled from around the corner, causing the person in front of Virgil to leap into the air almost a whole foot. The files they were carrying nearly took flight, but Virgil couldn’t bring himself to worry about them when he was busy watching a rolling chair skid out from a cubicle and bring him face-to-face with Remus Prince.

If hearing Logan say Virgil would never been his son was bad on Virgil, it looked like it had been absolute hell on Remus: the guy didn’t really advertise mental stability on a regular day, but now there were bags under his eyes, what looked like an actual rats nest in his hair, and his shirt was on both backwards and stained that spoke either of having never known what a washing machine was or he killed someone in his cubicle.

Whatever had gone down after Virgil (calmly, not crying, not hurt) asked them to leave must have been bad, if it got the guy who barely knew him to look like he’d been playing matador to eighteen wheelers on the highway.

Virgil knew the exact moment that Remus recognized (remembered, knew) him, too, even though his stupid monkey instinct brain had been shrieking that if he stood still Remus wouldn’t have been able to see him at all.

“Virgil,” Remus said, running a hand through his hair as if to pluck out whatever creature was in it and offer it to him as a greeting. His eyes darted towards the other adults around him with curiosity, as he stood up and kicked his chair behind him back into a cubicle. “What…are ya doing here, kid?”

“Uh, lunch?” Virgil says, surprisingly calm for someone whose brain was nothing but static and swears and scream-sobbing.

Remus stared at the bag in Virgil’s hands, and then up at him and then back at the bag. Virgil wondered for a moment if he had mixed up the plastic bags in Janus’s cars, accidentally grabbing the bag of live, feral squirrels instead of the takeout.

“Lunch,” Remus echoed. “For me?”

Virgil didn’t blame him for being suspicious. Virgil had never come close to acting comfortable in Remus’s presence and he knew it. Remus took whatever Virgil threw at him (hisses, sharp barbed words, the worst soda combinations Virgil could think of) and acted complete unphased, like Virgil was acting normal, like there was nothing wrong with him, like he enjoyed Virgil’s weird attempts at scaring him off.

Virgil took a deep breath and then set his jaw. “Yeah. You. And Logan. Like a family lunch. You. Me. Logan. I thought it would be nice. To talk. And stuff. As a family.”

“Family!” Another other woman from the cubicle behind Remus squealed. And then seemed to realize the attention had landed on her. “Oh sorry! Just pretend I’m not here!”

“Gladly,” Virgil said. He swore he saw Remus’s lips flicker into a wicked grin at the sound, but it was gone in another moment. Fast enough to give whiplash and remind Virgil why exactly Remus was nearly as terrifying as Patton Hart in terms of mind-fuckery shenanigans.

“Anyway,” Virgil said, forcing himself to look at Remus in the eye and challenging him to cut in. “I know that Lo was beating himself up about everything that happened, even though I told him it was… fine and that we talked everything out last night. I was worried about what your coworkers might be saying, even though it's none of their business, and you guys are really fucking good parents.”

Remus smiled, and then he laughed, and part of Virgil thought that he was definitely calling Virgil’s bluff and security at the same time. But instead the man reached out and ruffled Virgil’s hair the same way his real father hadn’t done in ten years. It was so jarring and sudden that Virgil just stood there and took it and definitely did not have to swallow back the sudden urge to cry.

“You are absolutely going to get me killed by Logan,” Remus said, low enough that it was probably just meant for Virgil. “Hey, LOGAN! DARLING, LOVE OF MY LIFE--!”

A door down the narrow hall swung over, nearly so sharp that it dented the inner wall and Logan stuck his head out “Remus, I swear to Newton you better have--Virgil?”

The man jerked forward, although he looked a bit more like he would have loved to slam the door closed again. His glasses had fingerprints on the lenses, and his shirt was the same shade as yesterday, although it did look like someone washed and ironed it, unlike Remus. Whatever morning he had, was certainly not going well, if the scowl that had been on his face was anything to go by.

Still Virgil waved at him, like his hands weren’t shaking, his knees weren’t about to give out, and his stomach wasn’t about to relocate to the office building’s tile floor because rent was cheaper.

“I--” Logan ran a hand through his tie, nervously, although Virgil had never seen Logan nervous. He was confident, honest, brutal; but that made his compliments feel like nobel prizes when they were given out and his scathing remarks hurt all that much more. ((You are not our son and never will be.)) “Virgil, what are you doing here?”

Remus was grinning, though, winking at Virgil as if there was a secret he didn’t know about happening. “Didn’t know you, Lo? Our son brought us lunch.”

Logan leveled him with a glare that Virgil was an extreme fan of. Something he saw Logan give a rude customer at the restaurant once and had ever since been trying to replicate because it was the perfect blend of you’re embarrassing yourself and I’d burn down your house with you in it if I had a lighter on me right now.

And Remus didn’t even look a bit put off by it. It must have been a married couple thing. Or a Remus thing. Or a Remus-was-married-and-got-that-look-enough-to-build-up-an-immunity thing

“What did you do?” Logan asked his husband.

“Logan!” The woman from the lobby scolded. “I can’t believe you! Your wonderful, sweet son walked all the way here to bring you lunch and you--”

“Yeah, our totally sweet son!” Remus chimed in. “He just came in here. All by himself!”

Logan ignored them both, turning his clinical gaze on Virgil the same way the counselors of his previous schools would when his teachers informed them that he was “purposely” failing their classes. Straight and cutting and you are not my son and never will be and--

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your work,” Virgil said in a small voice. “I can come back another time. Or never. I just… I thought… you guys came to visit me yesterday and we never really got lunch so I brought you Pad Thai with tofu. And uhm…” Please. I could make a good son. You don’t even know me yet.

The women around him all took a sharp intake of breath, the person with the orange hair absolutely whimpered as if he’d stabbed them.

“I just… wanted to spend time with you,” Virgil said. “To, uhm, talk.”

“Holy fuck, you’re ruthless,” Remus murmured under his breath, and it nearly felt like praise. He wasn’t exactly sure what the fuck he was being praised for, but he must have done something right.

Logan’s face ran through emotions too fast for Virgil to catch them and classify them. His lungs were pounding against his ribs, trying to expand past what a normal human can breathe for, but then Logan’s eyes melted a fraction, and Virgil thought he could walk on air.

“Of course,” Logan said. “I-- of course, Virgil. Why… why don’t you and Remus come in here and we’ll have lunch.”

Virgil didn’t sprint towards him, but he could understand if everyone else in the office made the mistake of thinking he did. He heard Remus say something about kids that made it sound like he was feeding into that whole Virgil-is-his-son thing further. However all Virgil could think was Logan, and Logan’s Office Away From People, and I didn’t think I was going to get this far did the elevator break and did it crash to the ground killing me on impact?

Remus closed the door behind himself, trapping Virgil in the office with the two adults. It looked a lot like… well… an office. There weren’t any pictures of Remus or anyone on the walls. There weren’t even knick knacks on the desk. Impersonal, kinda cold, uncomfortable, as if Logan didn’t want any distractions from his 9 to 5 day shift or simply did not like anything-- which Virgil knew wasn’t true because the man was married and once went on a rant about space when Virgil was serving him. There was an Excel sheet pulled up on the computer which it seemed that Logan had been correcting before he’d been disturbed by Virgil’s… mess.

((There was a chair in the corner with a suit jacket tossed over it. It didn’t match the one Logan was wearing today.))

The room was silent for a whole second while all three of them listened to the people outside go back to whatever their jobs were.

Then.

“Did you,” Remus started slowly, a light in his eyes that made Virgil’s knees threaten to give out. “Did you just spread the rumor that Logan and I are good parents?! That’s so ballsy, kid!”

Virgil wasn’t sure how much of his smile looked like a grimace. He held out the boxes of food to Logan and Remus. “I am, uh, blackmailing you. Both of you.”

“Blackmailing,” Logan echoed, as Remus grabbed his shoulder and shook them both at a frequency that probably wasn’t safe for humans to be shaken at. “I think I need to sit down. This is not....”

“Oh my god,” Remus whispered. “Holy mother of Culthulu on a butt fucking stick! He’s playing The Game!”

“Game?” Virgil repeated, trying to reign in all the terror welding in his throat that honestly he was surprised hadn’t straight up killed him already. “Uh no-- I don’t-- Look, it’s really simple! I just need Logan to pretend to be my dad for a day. Like shake hands with my teacher, tell him everything is a-okay at home, and then we don’t ever have to speak about it again! Or speak to each other again! Unless you need your coworkers to think you’re a decent person-- not saying that you aren’t! Because I know you both are! Obviously! Because I wouldn’t agree to a three hour car ride with murderers-- did I even say it was a three hour car ride? Oh fuck I’m sorry, this was stupid--”

“Is there a reason things are not… “a-okay” at home?” Logan said, just short of sounding strangled.

Luckily before Virgil could start sobbing Remus threw a hand over Logan’s mouth and leaned forward. “The kid wants you to play parent, Lolo! Stop thinking so much!”

Logan batted his hand away. “Why me? Why not Remus? Or your actual parents?” Logan asked. “Why… me?”

Virgil wilted back despite his best efforts, already feeling his face do that stupid thing where it heats up beyond humiliation and his entire soul craves spontaneous combustion. “Please don’t make me say it.”

But Logan and Remus apparently couldn’t read minds (fuckkkkk) and just continued to stare at him in baffled confusion. Virgil curled his hands into fists and forced himself to stare at the wall behind Logan’s head and state, out loud, for everyone to hear, “You’re cool.”

“Cool,” Logan echoed. “I’m cool. I’m so cool that you think that makes up for the fact that--”

“Look, my actual parents would be excited if they found out a serial killer grabbed me off the street,” Virgil blurted out. “Remus freaks me the fuck out-- no offense, or actually a lot of offense, please stop grinning at me like that-- and you’re cool, don’t ask me to do anything stupid, never told me I was stupid for not understanding calc-- fuck calc-- so yeah you’re at the top of my adults I trust list right now and I just need someone to be my parent for one day so I can go to this seminar that I really want to go to about business finances management. After that you can tell your coworkers whatever the fuck you guys want from me! Tell them I died! I don’t care! I just… please. Just for ten hours. I’ll find a way to pay for gas, food, and housing so you won’t have to spend a dime!”

“Absolutely not--”

“Please!” Virgil said.

“You’re not paying for it!” Logan said. He shoved his glasses up to his hairline and massaged the bridge of his nose and Virgil’s heart stopped in his chest, leaving him as frozen as a statue.

Remus leaned back against Logan’s desk, far too casual. “So….you’re going?”

Logan didn’t answer right away. Virgil didn’t often subscribe to the idea that hope felt like a fluttery thing, but goddamnit did hope feel like a moth with a broken wing struggling to find some way through a glass window pane. He felt like he was going to be sick; he felt like he was going to pass out.

Logan placed a hand on his desk to steady himself. “...where… is this event.”

“YES!” Virgil couldn’t help himself. Luckily, Remus and Logan didn’t look too bothered by his outburst. He dug the crumpled folded flyer from his pocket and smoothed it out for Logan to look at, which he accepted easily, already scanning the red, green, and blue writing with a critical eye.

Virgil knew he was grinning stupidly-- like more stupid than when he watched Janus trip on the sidewalk or answer a question with an abundance of confidence just to be wrong-- but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear and turned halfway, to find that Remus was picking through the takeout boxes, and watching him.

“Uh,” Virgil said, smile dropping. “Sorry. That I’ll be stealing your husband for a day. Is… is that okay? Do you guys need to talk about that?”

Remus snorted. “Yeah so, funny story: Logan and I aren’t actually--”

“--in need of discussing it,” Logan cut in, suddenly talking over Remus without looking up from the flyer, or his phone where he was googling something. “I seem to recall a conversation where…. What was it? Ah yes: Just because you let me put a ring on your hand does not mean that either of us controls the other.”

“Oh my god, were you guys actually going to have a divorce?” Virgil blurted out. “Oh shit, did I just make this worse?”

“No,” Remus and Logan said at the same time, in such an agreement that it startled both of them and Virgil raised his hands in a placating move.

“No, kid,” Remus said. “Logan and I just need to have a… conversation.”

“More than one,” Logan added.

“About what we want out of…this.”

“Yes. This.”

Virgil glanced between them. “You guys are acting weird and I don’t like it.”

“Virgil, I am concerned about the statement you made about your parents not caring if a serial killer killed you,” Logan said. “Please, elaborate.”

“It’s not important,” Virgil said automatically. “Really. I think whatever the two of you have going on is far more detail worthy--”

“I also would like you to know that I will not be starting any rumors about you having died, especially not to my coworkers. Remus?”

“The game is not fun when people are getting hurt,” Remus… agreed? Virgil wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. “So, for the foreseeable future you are going to be our son, which is technically providing a service, wouldn’t you agree, Lo?”

“Yes. Providing a service requires a payment. How does thirty dollars an hour sound?”

“What the fuck,” Virgil said. “Wait--”

“This event is an all day affair, which means both of us will be too tired to do any driving afterwards, so that means a hotel,” Logan continued. “Remus, I assumed that you would like to join? Excellent. I’ll have Patton approve your days off. Two bedrooms. Virgil, you mentioned you like to sleep in so I assume a check out around noon the following day, plus a three hour drive back here, would make a total of…. Around twenty seven hours. Which comes out to a total of eight hundred ten dollars. Does that sound adequate?”

Virgil looked at Remus. “I think I made a mistake.”

Remus laughed at him. “I think we should round it to an even thousand.”

“No!” Virgil shrieked. “That was not a solution!”

“Face it, kid. You just won yourself two sugar daddies in one go.”

“Stop talking!” Virgil said. “You are not going to pay me to be your son on a trip that I am blackmailing you into going on!”

“Sure we are,” Remus said, talking through a mouth of food. “Gotta make up for all the birthdays we missed for our son.”

Virgil thought he was going to melt into the floor. But uh, it was nice? Kinda? Logan was definitely holding a piece of a smile on his normally stoic face and Remus was almost chill and they had been in this room together for a whole five minutes and nothing had exploded and neither of them had tried to kill him for pretending to be their son or otherwise revealed that they were insanely evil.

So, yeah. When Virgil saw them in the restaurant he didn’t think he was going to actually get adopted, but well…Virgil was tentatively hopeful for how this might turn out.

(Part 6)

#sanders sides #intrulogical #anxceit #remus sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #janus sanders #patton sanders #Hahah yeah that certainly is one way to gain a son #fake marriage #fake dating #fake adoption???#Rumor Mill Au #sympathetic remus #Maybe having a child really will save this marriage #Far too many OCs #Virgil has a +20 to Charisma despite literally everything #Because I make the rules

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loderlied · 1 year ago

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i am crawling into your inbox like a depraved creature from the depths of long abandoned fungal ridden sewers, holding to you the mycelia born from a long dead corpse in offering so that i may pick your grey matter about zeke's time before the temple of bhaal, im curious as fuck and the dynamic you have written for him and gortash is SO fun and interesting, also really fun to think about in comparison to my own durge and gortash, g-d your brain is huge, but i really want to know what experience he had outside of baldurs gate before mr butler extraordinaire walked into his life like hey! ur like. the chosen of bhaal lol :) i want to pick apart zeke as if he is a new and rare creature of the deep sea that i have to keep in a pressurized tank just so that his body does not melt and turn into mush from the depressurization

waughhh thank you sm!!!! framing this ask on my wall i feel like you understand™️ hi hi hi yes of course i will talk about my creature!!

so, i don’t know how others handle timeline stuff but i always imagined zeke being no older than 10 when being taken into the temple of bhaal, so most of his life was the temple, but there is some stuff that i can tell you because i am spending all of my braincells on him (and gortash) these days lol:

his adoptive parents were older, humble librarians who didn’t have much, but took in a few children without homes like him. about 6 other kids lived with him. i feel like due to their experience they could sort of tell that zeke was. different in a way? they loved him all the same.

didn’t learn how to speak at all before sceleritas taught him (he perfectly understood people, just didn’t like doing it/find it to be a necessary skill lol) he mostly wrote to people in a little notebook he carried around with him everywhere.

of course my uquiz declared dweeb spent most of his free time in the library with his parents.

was one of those kids who you can just tell is a genius from an early age—he could not only read books with an advanced reading level as soon as he could hold them in his hands, he could also comprehend a lot of these concepts.

he never had any friends or genuine connections. he tried to befriend others, which for him looked like stalking them around the street, learning every possible thing there is to know about them and never actually approaching anyone because he was too scared to.

his first “kill” was during one of those uh. watches? ig. a girl he liked was playing alone near a creek and started to pick a beautiful bouquet of flowers—wait, he’d read about those, they were highly dangerous to touch. before he could step in and warn her, she already fell over groaning in agony. he tries to take another step towards her, but then his entire body shudders and freezes at the sight of the light leaving her eyes. he doesn’t go over and finish the job or call any help—he just watches. watches until he is sure that she is beyond saving and cries. out of sorrow? fear? joy? this he doesn’t know or understand (yet), those pesky little nuisances called emotions always puzzled him way more than a book ever could—in himself or others.

while those “need to please father/parents above all else i’m worthless otherwise” tendencies of his were of course highly amplified by his life in the temple, they were already there before. he tried to be the “best child” of his parents, wanted to impress them at every turn. that there were so many of them certainly didn’t help either.

so, one day his father complains about one of the other children, they were all troublemakers/outcasts in their own way—one of them had accidentally smashed a window while playing. and zeke thinks to himself that he would never do such a stupid thing, how dumb could you be? and decides this is the perfect opportunity to test out a thing he read about.

later that evening, despite the quarrel from earlier, everyone is sitting around the dinner table, and zeke voluntarily and eagerly helps with setting the table today. a few minutes after starting to eat, the kid who broke the window starts coughing heavily, spitting blood, everyone starts panicking when zeke interrupts them by tugging at his father’s sleeve and excitedly showing him his notebook, his father thinks that zeke being the clever boy he is might know what’s going on or even how to help, so he leans down and reads. reads a detailed description of how zeke created a poisonous powder with the flowers from earlier and coated his sibling’s cutlery in it to not spoil the food they had. the last sentence of the page says something about a “perfect solution” to mom and dad’s problem.

his father is obviously starting to lose it, then his wife tells him that their child is beyond saving and already dead, which just makes him fully lose it—he just starts screaming and uncontrollably sobbing and shaking the confused to the hells and back zeke demanding why he did it. the others eventually start catching on what happened and understandably freak out as well.

zeke is just so confused man. wasn’t this a good thing? he certainly thought he felt good watching his own sibling die—his bloodshot eyes and fingertips turned black just like how the book described it would happen. he did it perfectly. so why were they acting like this? weren’t they proud? they were supposed to be.

next thing zeke remembers is standing in a pile of corpses and a ruined house in a pool of blood and tears streaming down his face, when a certain little butler approaches him.

#thank you for the ask <33 #oc: zeke

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soakedinbloodandmagic · 1 year ago

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MEET OLLY PRINCE

NAME: Oliver Lee Prince.

AGE: Forty-two years old (born January 25th, 1981).

ZODIAC SIGN: Aquarius.

ORIENTATION: Unlabelled, but not straight.

PRONOUNS: He/him.

SPECIES: Spiritwitch.

LOCATION: Nightshade Hollow, Virginia (the only home he’s ever known, though it holds just as many good memories as bad).

OCCUPATION: Head librarian at the town library.

FACECLAIM: Ethan Hawke.

ABOUT: Like his three cousins (although he was born before any of them), Olly was born in the town of Nightshade Hollow, to a couple who were both witches. However, unlike the Hawthorne siblings, he was not raised in a loving home. Olly’s parents, Stella Hawthorne-Prince and Michael Prince, hadn’t really wanted a child in the first place, and they began leaving Olly home alone so they could go out to the local bar when he was only six years old, barely paying attention to him when they were at home.

Because of how little his parents payed attention to him, Olly knew very little about witch types and what his life would have to be like a witch; he just knew that his mommy and daddy could do magic, and that someday he would be able to as well. Unfortunately, this also meant that at the age of five, when he was confronted with the rotting apparition of a little girl a few years older than him, he had taken off screaming and crying down the street to his aunt and uncle’s house, only to be told that what he had seen was perfectly normal for a spiritwitch, those who could see and communicate with deceased people whose spirits chose to hang around on Earth.

Olly’s witch type was not the only thing his Aunt Maria and Uncle David helped him figure out - recognizing that David’s sister and her husband were not the best parents, to say the least, the couple made sure it was clear to Olly that their home was always open to him if he needed a place to stay, and he received lessons in magic and “hunting” in his other form right alongside his cousins. While David and Maria never did attempt to get Olly away from his parents, they did make it clear to Stella and Michael that they knew and hated the way they were treating their son, and made sure to get Addy or Layla to invite their cousin to stay over on nights they suspected his parents were going to be out drinking.

Despite knowing his aunt and uncle would be likely to take him in if he ever moved out, Olly stubbornly stayed at home until he was eighteen, taking care of his parents whenever they came home stumbling drunk, dealing with the way they basically ignored him when they were home, and escaping into the books he was constantly checking out of the school library in order to try and ignore the fact that his parents didn’t love him the way they were supposed to. Unfortunately, the absolutely wrecked self-esteem that came from his parents’ neglect led to Olly struggling with an eating disorder during his first two years of high school, but with the family who did care about him and his only friend Charlie, he was eventually able to get better and start to build a positive relationship with food and, by extension, himself again.

Almost the second Olly turned eighteen, he was out of his parents’ house and down the street to the Hawthornes’ house, ready to stay there until he could get a job and enough money to rent a room at the local motel. However, that quickly turned out not to be necessary, as mere days after he’d moved in, Stella and Michael stopped by the house to inform their son that they were moving out of Nightshade Hollow now that they were “free from taking care of a child,” and that Olly was free to have the house since he had “spent more time in it than them anyway”. They had then left without another word, David yelling at the pair of them their whole way down the driveway and Layla flipping her aunt and uncle off through the window as they drove away.

Surprisingly, Stella and Michael’s departure had done little to hurt Olly; he fully acknowledged that they hadn’t really loved him, or at least not in the way parents were supposed to love their child. His aunt and uncle had been much more like parents to him than the people who had created him, his cousins like the siblings he’d always wanted. So although Olly quickly moved back into the house his parents had vacated, he still spent a good amount of time in the Hawthorne house, and part of his paycheck from his job at the local library went towards what he insisted was paying David and Maria back for all they’d done for him over the years.

But then, years later, the Hawthorne parents were killed in a car accident, and all the grief Olly perhaps should have felt at his parents’ abandoning him came crashing down. Entire days went by when he couldn’t even leave his bed, crushed by the weight of the only true parents he had ever known being gone and the added guilt over being this grief-stricken when his cousins had lost their actual parents. He suffered a temporary lapse in his eating disorder, unable to even think about eating, and it was all he could do not to try and reach out to David and Maria’s spirits, knowing that they had more than likely not stayed on the earthly plane and that he would only be further crushed when he was unable to reach them.

Eventually, though, Olly got better, as the whole family did. He started taking care of himself once again, resumed his job as head librarian at Nightshade Hollow’s library, and took over the job of regularly reinforcing the protective wards around the town boundaries that would prevent the family’s enemies from getting in to hurt his cousin Addy. More years went by, and now he has somewhat settled into his role as the new head of the Hawthorne family - helping people find books during the day, conversing with the dead and protecting his hometown by night, and dealing with his family’s (and found family’s) nonsense in between.

But then Addy and his new flame get attacked by the very thing the wards at the town limits are there to keep out, and all of a sudden they’re all plunged into a magical war, because with this family Olly can’t get one bit of peace and quiet.

I present to you Olly, my witchy medium king who desperately needs just one night of rest and relaxation. Don’t worry, I will allow him to get some love eventually, but for right now I hope you guys like him!!

Tagging the slasher OC fam: @raraeavesmoriendi, @jmathesonandsiblings, @shadowworldwanderers.

#character intros #olly #oliver prince #slasher oc #slasher original character #witch oc #witch original character #witches of the woods and co.

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bronzewool · 1 year ago

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Scar by China Mieville is the second book in the New Crobuzon trilogy, set in the fictional steampunk world of Bas-Lag, and while Scar is a direct sequel to Perdido Street Station, we follow a brand new set of characters.

Bellis Coldwine is trying to get as far away from New Crobuzon as possible after the events of the first book and has been granted safe passage on a slave trader ship in exchange for being the crew’s interpreter. Before she can reach her destination, however, they are attacked by pirates and taken prisoner on the Floating City of Armada. Curiously, Bellis and the rest of the crew are made citizens of the moving city and assigned jobs allocated to their respective fields. Bellis is now the city librarian, given a fair wage, free reign to go whatever she wants, and has her own accommodation. Everyone is treated equally on Armada, including the newly freed slaves, with the only condition being that they can never leave.

Not wanting to spend the rest of her life in exile, Bellis teams up with Silas Fennec, another passenger on the ship who needs to get back to New Crobuzon to warn the city of an incoming invasion. Together they conspire a means of getting a message to a New Crobuzon military vessel while getting dragged into a conspiracy involving the final destination of Armada.

Bellis is the opposite of the previous book’s protagonist, Issac Dan der Grimnebulin. Whereas Isaac was loud and friendly, but had a tendency to make himself the centre of the room and talk over his companions, Bellis would gladly sit quietly in a room and let people run their mouths off in order to gather as much intelligence out of them as possible, all the while internally judging them with her dry sense of humour.

Tanner is the other main character of the book and a Remade, a person who has had his body altered against his will as a form of punishment. His body has been grafted with useless octopus-like tentacles and over the course of the book he grows to like his new form as it makes him a better worker at the docks and he willingly volunteers to go under the knife again to have his body properly adapted to the sea.

Perdido Street Station goes into great detail about the corrupt government of New Crozubon and its use of the Remade as a form of artistic irony towards criminals and the crimes they committed, but Scar puts a Remade front and centre as one of the main protagonists. Unlike Yagharek from the first book, we never learn what Tanner did that got him Remade or sold off to a slave ship, because it ultimately doesn’t matter. Whatever twisted form of ironic retribution was supposedly done to him cannot be defended by basic human decency. The process of Remade cannot be undone and we see many characters whose lives are forever ruined for the sake of this twisted art form. A girl with her eternal organs replaced with a primitive engine that will kill her if the furnace ever goes out. A man with bird wings surgically sewn onto his back that are left to rot, and who can only find work in a freakshow as he’s slowly dying from the decay. Tanner, despite his criminal status, is a brave and kind man whose experience on the Armada is greatly contrasted with Bellis as Tanner already had everything taken from him and was given a second chance at a normal life with the Armadians. They do not judge him or sneer at him for his appearance and instead accept him as an equal. If anything, Tanner’s unique appearance makes him an invaluable asset and his loyalty to Armada gives him a voice that Bellis lacks.

The narrative does a beautiful job of making you sympathize with Bellis’s position as a captive onboard the Armada, while also acknowledging it is hard to feel too bad for her when Tanner and his friends were going to be sold into slavery and she has still kept some of her autonomy even if it does mean she can never see her family and friends again. You are routing for her to escape as this is not an environment she will ever come to see as home, but you also don’t want Tanner to get sucked into her schemes when he now has something to protect. Their eventual conflict is beautifully tragic in how it didn’t need to go down the way it ultimately did.

There’s also an ongoing motif with scars in the book, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Armada is searching for a literal scar left on the world by magic and their relentless pursuit of it ends up scarring many people along the way. One of the ruling powers of Armada are The Lovers, two physically scarred individuals who inflict wounds on each other as a demonstration of their twisted love and devotion. And poor Bellis and Tanner have been used by so many political powers outside of their control that leave them scarred by their experiences on the Armada and come out of it with two very different mindsets.

As one character beautifully puts it, “Scars are not injuries…a scar is a healing. After an injury a scar is what makes you whole.” Scars are not wounds but evidence that a wound has been healed. Yes, they are ugly and painful reminders, but they are evidence you survived that pain, It’s in your past, and more importantly, they will help shape your future if you take the lesson with you.

#charl's book journey #I love this book series #and there's still one more book left to read #I really hope someone gets a happy ending #because these characters go through so much #and I just need someone to get a happy ending #that isn't 'congrats you actually survived the trauma'

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merrock · 2 years ago

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CHARACTER INFORMATION

face claim: Lili Reinhart

full name: Vivienne Faye Quinn

nickname(s) / goes by: Vi, Vivienne, Queen, Quinnie

pronouns & gender: she/her/hers and cis woman

sexuality: bisexual

birth date: March 23, 1995

birth place: Merrock, Maine

arrival to merrock: since birth

housing: downtown with roommate, Sylvia

occupation: Student, part-time librarian, part-time stripper

work place: Merrock Public Library

family: Elise Quinn - older half-sibling, potential other half-siblings on both father’s and mother’s side

relationship status: single

PERSONALITY

Feisty wild-child with a free spirit sums up Vivienne. Being the youngest of the Quinn’s by way of being a half sibling meant she got away with a lot more than she probably should have. Product of an affair between her father of the Quinn’s and her mother lead to her rebellious attitude. He’s always tried but she’s the quintessential daddy issues wrapped up in the need to rebel, be wild, and go a little crazy.

WRITTEN BY: Bri (she/her), est.

BACKGROUND / BIO

triggering / sensitive content: sex work tw, drug use tw, toxic relationship tw, stealing tw, jail tw

Vivienne being considered the ‘oops’ of the Quinn family would be an understatement of Merrock history. Product of an affair from her father, a well-known family of Merrock, the Quinn’s, and her mother a woman passing through to visit an ailing aunt. The Quinn’s had long since decided to stop expand their family but the affair had other plans and on March 23rd out popped Vivienne Faye. For awhile her mother settled down roots in Merrock in attempts to make things work as best as she could, being the other woman. Not that she wanted a relationship, just a father figure for her little girl. Which was something that Vivienne got, she had a supportive father who tried not to treat her differently, a step-mother who never took any anger out on her, and step-siblings that didn’t seem to hate her. Of course when she was younger she didn’t understand why they didn’t all live together. It wasn’t until her teen years did she understand that she was the product of an affair her father had which crushed her a little bit. Especially given the fact that she idolized her half-siblings, specifically her older sister Elise.

Elise was the picture perfect image of perfection in Vivienne’s mind. She was gorgeous, smart, powerful, had grace, and everything she wished she could be. While she loved her older half-sibling that didn’t stop that bit of envy she had wishing she was more like her. Instead, because of the age difference, she pushed buttons, pressed boundaries, attempted to act out, and most definitely had some daddy issues. While he was always in her life, she struggled knowing that she was never ‘fully’ a Quinn, and that she was the blemish on a perfect family. Once old enough and the needing space developed some more confusing feelings, she went off on her own way traveling through the US, down the East Coast, working when she needed the money in bars, restaurants, and wherever she could make a few quick bucks. That also meant she wasn’t afraid to jump up on stage and remove her clothes for men who threw money at her. When she started working at strip clubs more frequently she ran into an older male who took advantage of the fact that she had glaring daddy issues and dragged her further into trouble.

She became wrapped up in the life of posting online videos exposing her body on sites such as OnlyFans, stealing, doing drugs, and pretty much doing whatever the older man requested of her. She thought he was showing her the world, but all that ended with her in a pair of handcuffs and in jail. During the time that she was gone, her mother moved away from Merrock settling in Upstate New York no longer needing to be close to the town that reminded her of the decisions she had made. When Vivienne was arrested, it was her father who bailed her out and gave her a choice. Move back in with her mother and get a full time job or move back to Merrock, enroll in community classes and he’d help her find a part time job. At first it had been an adjustment living in the Quinn household full-time until she got a part time job at the library and moved out into Downtown with her roommate. She’s enrolled back in school but doesn’t have a clue what she wants to do with her life or what she’ll ever be good at other than being the ‘messed up Quinn’ but she is where she is now. For now she’s happy reading books to little kids in between stocking shelves at the local library, taking random courses while she figures things out, and sometimes when money get a little tight, dabbling back into her online life with videos for her ‘fans’ but this time she controls the dynamics.

#merrockbio #viviennequinn #sex work tw #drug use tw #toxic relationship tw #stealing tw #jail tw

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cloudii-reads · 1 year ago

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artwork credit to: nellseto.mp3 on instagram !! created via their picrew <3

About The Reviewer 2023 !!

featuring Rain !!

1. What are some basics about me?:

Feel free to refer to me as either Rain, Cloud, or Cloudii! I use they/them pronouns, my birthday is December 26, and I’m interested in a variety of content/hobbies besides reading! I love writing short stories and creating OC’s in my free time, and a few of the things I’m most interested in would be Genshin Impact, Sanrio, Pokemon (both the games and card collecting,) and practically anything relating to the ocean and fish! I’m also a full time college student and aspiring to become a librarian! :)

2. What are my favorite genres?:

Nowadays, I typically find myself reading fantasy and literary fiction, however I do really enjoy cozy mysteries and magical realism! I also do love reading the odd non-fiction book here and there if it’s about a topic I find interesting, so usually fish, the ocean, or books as a general rule of thumb! I also adore reading books with solid lgbtqia+ representation!

3. What are my favorite books so far this year?:

So I’ve read quite a few books already this year that’s made it in my “all time favorites” category, but I’ll be limiting it to my top three for the sake of this question, haha.

1. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

- A charming opening book to a series about old people solving murders! I had the audiobook playing in the background as I was reading a physical copy, and it really made the experience for me! I don’t normally listen to audiobooks since I can get really picky with voice acting and how it sounds, but I think that the VA for this book did a wonderful job! <3

2. Good Omens : The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

- To simply put it, the apocalypse is coming and it’s just a silly time. I absolutely ADORE this book (along with the show, in which I highly recommend watching !! Season two is breaking my heart, why Neil, WHY) and it’s pretty much absorbed my entire existence. Like The Thursday Murder Club, I listened to the full cast audiobook while reading along with the physical copy and.. holy moly. Season two may have broken my soul in two, but at least I can pretend like everything’s fine by listening to the audiobook with the actual book !!

3. Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

- When I tell you that I practically cried ugly tears over this book, let me tell you, I cried BAD. This novel, as a queer person, made me feel so seen and heard, especially as the book follows the perspective of a trans girl, Katrina, and omg. It honestly just felt like Ryka took a part of my own soul and shoved it into the pages because I related to her struggles and story so, so much. Basically this whole book is just filled with all kinds of heart breaking stuff, and I absolutely loved it for that. Highly recommend looking more into it if you’re interested in reading it, though definitely take a look at the trigger warnings before going in!

4. What are my favorite and least favorite tropes?:

My favorite tropes absolutely have to be found family (as a general rule of thumb) and slow burn for romance! As for my least favorite tropes, I cannot STAND surprise pregnancy and fake dating, both are just really big ick’s for me.

5. What are some of my bookish goals for the year?:

So far, my basic reading goal is to read 25 books this year! The number’s a bit low since I started really getting back into reading a bit late into the year, but I’ll say I’m pretty settled into completing my goal so far, having read 15 books so far. Besides that, I want to try and read a more varied set of genres besides what I normally would read. Due to that, I’ve been trying to get into more non-fiction and I’m thinking of getting into poetry eventually, oh and recommendations would be really appreciated! This isn’t limited to just non-fiction and poetry but any genre, I’m always looking to expand on what I read! :)

#booklr #books #bookish

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astridbeckett · 1 year ago

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.*･｡ﾟ ━ ( daisy ridley / cis female / she/her ) i think i just saw ASTRID BECKETT on the subway. the 29 year old EVENT PLANNER has been living on cornelia street for THREE YEARS. astrid’s friends know her to be determined, compassionate, and imaginative, but she has a reputation on cornelia street for being obsessive, stubborn, and a perfectionist. when i see astrid, i can’t help but think of strings of fairy lights, sticky notes everywhere, never a stray strand of hair out of place, faint laughter lines adorning tired eyes, and the clinking of champagne flutes ! in fact , i sometimes i think i hear NEW YEAR’S DAY when i see her walk by.

THE BASICS

Full name: Astrid Fey Beckett

DOB: October 26

Zodiac: Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon, Aquarius Rising

From Burlington, VT

SO, YOU WANT TO GET TO KNOW ASTRID...

Astrid was an only child for the first 3 years of her life. Then, along came Iris. She'll be the first to admit she wasn't thrilled about having a baby sister, but once Iris was actually around, Astrid loved her. It was like having a Baby Alive doll but even better!

The girls got closer as they grew older, Astrid preparing Iris for milestone moments in advance so they wouldn't be scary. Astrid leaving Vermont to attend college in New York was the first time in a long time that she'd ever been apart from her sister for an extended period, so she made an effort to call weekly and text constantly.

While in college, Astrid picked up a job at the campus library, mostly assisting with check-outs, booking study rooms, preparing meeting rooms, and re-shelving books.

After graduation, she transferred to an assistan librarian job with the public library system, thanks to a letter of recommendation from her former supervisor.

This bitch loves organization and solid schedules. She may need sticky note and/or phone reminders sometimes, but overall, she has her shit together.

I'LL BE CLEANIN UP BOTTLES WITH YOU ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

Welcome to Astrid's life on Cornelia Street.

After tiring of her normal routine, she transferred yet again to a new library branch, this time in Greenwich Village. Most of her friends at the time were either library patrons, former co-workers, or college friends who moved miles away.

New towns are an opportunity for new friends, right? Astrid had always been somewhat of a social butterfly, but her schedule didn't allow for much socialization outside of after-work drinks and weekend get-togethers.

Who would have guessed a New Years party would change Astrid's life? Read all about it here. New best friend and platonic soulmate, new living situation (hello, roommate!), an entire career change, etc — all because she cleaned up the remnants of the party with a stranger the morning after. Honestly, though, she couldn't be happier.

Since quitting her 9-5 and starting her new job as an event planner with [MUSE B], they've coordinated quite a few beautiful weddings. Is it a little obsessive to start planning the New Year's parties in October? Maybe, but it's one of her favorite ways to spend her birthday and it ensures her clients the best experience possible.

MISC. / OTHER

Find Astrid's stats page here.

Astrid is bisexual & biromantic.

She has a collection of flower crowns in a basket at the top of her closet that she's purchased at renaissance festivals, which she attends every year.

This bitch loves fairy lights, and has strings of them throughout her bedroom. They're also one of her favorite decoration requests from brides.

Her favorite colors are purple, rose gold, and sky blue.

Flower preferences: wisteria, baby's breath, lavender, hyacinths.

Unfortunately, all of her favorite flowers are not pet-friendly, so she's given up her dream of being a cat mom.

She collects crystals & her favorite is currently amethyst.

about the mun

hi! i'm gianna (27, she/they) and i reside in the hell state that is florida in the EST timezone. i'm open to all kinds of plots, so please feel free to message me here or on discord at any time! i also write aurora 'rory' thorne who is muse a in the anti-hero skeleton. 💛

#corneliaintros #[time to go do rory's intro rip]

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mangher-a · 2 years ago

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Jangmi blinks as the student asking her a question leans forward, reaching up to tuck some loose strands of her hair behind her ear. Her cheeks flush pink. She is sometimes very bad at reading the room when it comes to people hitting on her, she hadn't even realized this guy is interested until this moment. She grabs his hand and lowers it to the front desk, clearing her throat. "The book you want to check out is on the second floor." "And what if I want to check you out?" he asks, and she takes a step back as he tries to hold her hand. "I... am sorry, I have a boyfriend," she replies honestly, to which the student just 'tch'es. "I don't see him here. You'd think if that were true he wouldn't let you go out dressed like a sexy librarian." Jangmi wasn't really sure what about her outfit was sexy but she took another step back when he went to grab her hand again. "So how about it? Will you go out with me?" Her jaw drops, absolutely stunned at the gall of this man.

@vartouhix

He had been bored for a few hours now, mainly because he was waiting for Jangmi to get off from her stupid little job. It was taking her far too long, nevermind she still had an hour or two on the clock to begin with. So, what he decided to do was to go to her instead. Unheard of. Him seeking up his girl, when it usually is the other way around. Someone like him did not run after women.

Hands deep in his pockets he walks up the stairs to the library. A few students give him more space than required. He did have his reputation after all. Some idiots made the mistake of approaching him, thinking he was his idiot brother, but those had been corrected early on.

(Sadly Yuuji also was getting attention he didn't deserve, thanks to Sukuna's influence.)

He pushes the heavy door open, walking in, a brow arching at the blatant display of disrespect towards him. Some lowlife was touching his girl.

I have a boyfriend.

Pride swells inside him, splitting his lips into a feral teeth baring grin.

I don't see him here.

With long strides he walks over to the two, grabbing the guy by his wrist, while his other arm loops around Jangmi. The student's hand is slammed down onto the desk, while Sukuna leans over slightly, his grip tight on Jangmi, voice low and words laced with venom, "I am Sukuna, and I am her boyfriend. So unless you want me to break your fingers," he uses the edge of the desk to his advantage, bending the wrist and hand of the guy painfully, listening to him cry out, watching him struggle to free himself but also try pry his deathgrip off him, "one by one, you will keep your filthy hands off of her." Tears streamed down the jerk's pathetic face. "Are we clear?!" Sukuna barked out, voice booming loud in the silent space, making a few of the studends present jump. The reply was a quick and nearly equally loud 'Yes!' before Sukuna let go of the hand, glaring holes into the guy scurrying off to lick his wounds, crying.

"And you," he turns to Jangmi, "the fuck are you flirting with others when you have me?!"

#. 宿儺 . answered #vartouhix #. 宿儺 . palingenesis

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tallestcat · 2 years ago

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Challenge #1

This challenge has to do with the bad hand we were dealt. I felt like I had a manageable hand.

My health was a concern. My parents were old when I was born, 40 mom and 45 dad. Who knows how my health will be in the future because they decided to be old parents. Mom was always kinda sickly and I knew I inherited something not amazing if her health was like that. I'm often tired and was never able to run long distances. I struggle with ADHD and paying attention. I still can't run a mile but have to jog/walk it. I don't have any structural health problems or diseases.

I felt the most insecure in my education. In elementary, I tried really hard to do well in school. I would fill out those huge Costco Grade X workbooks and collect the moneys from mom and grandma. Ok, I did it all for money. I would read tons of books and compete to get many leaves on the reading tree (grade 5). I came in 2nd. To be fair, I had to compete with the girl who brought a book to our Girl Scouts Christmas party and anti-socialed us to re-read Harry Potter. She's hilariously and fittingly a Librarian now.

I wasn't bullied but I could see being the weird vomit girl could cause me to be bullied. By middle, I was struggling with anxiety but that horrifying type where I would vomit a lot. I would get the cold sweats, rapid heart beat, and my hearing would intensify. It destroyed my health and body. Something about Catholicism and Catholic school didn't sit well with me. I'm glad my teacher was so understanding, the school nurse wasn't. The first time she called my mom to pick me up, she told her nevermind because I was reading a book while waiting lmao. I should have seen a doctor, psychiatrist, anybody. I was already very skinny and losing my breakfast or lunch every few days if not everyday is very extreme. By 7th grade, I was more comfortable with that school. Going to public school would have been a nightmare, I'm glad I stuck it out.

My mom didn't want to pay for the nice Catholic high school all of my friends were going to. It was beautiful and a mile from the beach, we just couldn't afford it. In middle school, I was playing too many video games and totally forgot about school. Grades and studying were not a concern. I didn't appreciate school and didn't deserve to go. I think a lot of people my age are like this. I did the homework, did the schoolwork, did the projects, and never studied. I went to the local Catholic school, very fucking good for sportsball and that's about it.

By high school, I made some friends but not close friends. I stopped caring about school but did the same as middle school. I went to an ok state school after getting rejected by my first choice. I was obviously not going to get a 3.5GPA to enter the nursing program, so stupidly switched to premed. I got a rude fucking awakening after skating by in school for so long. I was too dumb for premed but finished the degree.

I actually had to study to get good grades. Instead of letting that destroy my self-worth like I've seen it destroy others I learned how to study and be productive. I didn't think 'whoops got a B+ in intro to intro to chem, guess I better drop out of college.' It probably didn't effect me because I knew I was kinda dumb and didn't put much stock in being 'naturally smart' the way mom likes to blow smoke up my ass. Keeping in mind, she's the one who went to UCLA. I don't know their rank in the 70s but it was #14 in the US and News Report for Global University rankings in 2022-2023. Sooooo whatever mom. From then on, I knew I had to put the effort in. I just knew I had to graduate and min wage jobs are not my jam.

I switched to computer science, got the degree and am now working as a programmer. It's not even really programming. I'm not at a big tech company and I probably never will be but I want to. Damn, do I want to. I want the free lunch. I can't even be a charity case hire because there's no free money anymore.

I'd say I have achieved things many others haven't but I'm still dissatisfied. I got my degrees, I got my name on a research paper, I got a very high impact project, I got a cute bf and we're getting married in about a year. My limiting factor is still my time management and my ability to work hard, which is why I'm doing the 100 days of productivity and ill do another 100 until I get what I want. Nobody is standing in my way, it just me and my brain and a quiet life of no impact and mediocrity waiting in the wings. I'm not underappreciated or overlooked for opportunities, they're out there I just need to get started.

#badhand canthurtme

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waitingformyfavoritesongs · 2 years ago

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20 March 2023 3:28 pmpdt Monday

In this world do bad boys get to have more fun than the bad girls? 3:29 pmpdt &young women are punished for things the incubus made us do? But guys have an excuse Bcz it’s natural so we should forgive? Bcz we are held hostage Bcz all guys are naturally heinous? 3:32 pmpdt makes sense I guess. 3:32 pmpdt

so incubus rolled back roe vs wade, prop 8 will most probably face more legal battles Bcz the world will never be different. It will give the younger generations some things to do. A futile attempt to make the world a better place. Bcz if there are always people who want to prejudge someone or they’re completely heinous in secret then it seems like why pass laws when people are not genuinely going to uphold the law like government & police? 3:39 pmpdt

3:43 pmpdt my youngest sister once said infront of me that I’m “well read.” What does that mean? I have not looked it up & I did not ask for explanation. I had difficulty reading text books usually. I don’t recall finishing any assigned text reading without running out of time for something, in high school I had to keep working before classes, during breaks & lunch time. A lot of times I didn’t finish. 3:48 pmpdt I read whatever fiction books we had. When it’s free reading choice stuff you’re not really given much testing for comprehension. 3:50 pmpdt English teachers focus on grammar. My hotel neighbor is noisy. 3:52 pmpdt incubus/miñion is still burning my bag with acid. I think I did all the 4 guys too many favors for very little in return, except for the first one. I think I did them favors having access to my vag without marriage vows/oaths. Men usually feel more pleasure than women do during s*x. I was basically numb when Scott inserted himself without condom. But he seemed extremely pleased doing a happy touch down dance. I think he’s extremely ungrateful & heinous. 3:56 pmpdt

3:57 pmpdt pain vag. My Myers brigs first test results told me I’m an introvert. & librarian came up as a suggested career choice. Eventually this seemed like the best option. I thought I enjoyed helping people find books in the campus book store as a temporary employee & I would be surrounded by many reading options to satisfy my curiosity & play catch up on all the reading assignments I failed to finish for school. 4:01 pmpdt I even applied twice to be a library page at the public library near my community college. But it seemed I was doomed to never reach the goal of becoming a librarian Bcz there was no bachelor degree at the time for library information science. Only masters. So I thought ok I will do art major. Bcz it didn’t matter the bachelor major to go into the masters program. One summer, I was looking for a temporary job & I applied. But they were looking for someone permanent. I passed the test & I think they liked me that time. There was a really nice Filipino? Lady there named Lenni B. Who seemed to like me. I tried again after I graduated/walked the ceremony (but didn’t get my diploma Bcz UCB held it hostage Bcz I was stupid & applied for a Paris language program I didn’t need to graduate & I didn’t have enough money to pay it all at once.) 4:08 pmpdt she seemed to still like me but her boss didn’t. It was ironic. I could have had the job if I was going to stay home than go to UCB, & then when I was done I couldn’t have it. I was tired of going to college after the last semester of having a lot of difficulty with my eczema & infections that I took a lot of antibiotics for, & not making it to class on time a lot of the times. 4:13 pmpdt

4:16 pmpdt I want to show people how heinous incubus is Bcz he wants to hide the truth. 4:17 pmpdt

4:23 pmpdt I want to show how damaged my vag is that the incubus did to me. This shows, w/ the roll back of roe vs wade & the continued fight for prop 8, that the incubus has no intentions to make the world a better place Bcz he himself is evil wicked heinous. Maybe all people are evil. & to eradicate evil means to eradicate the human race & capitalism. 4:27 pmpdt maybe it really is not possible at all. & incubus mislead me completely last year. 4:28 pmpdt

4:28 pmpdt since the day of king Herod they killed babies. Today miscarriage happens. 4:29 pmpdt there was a baby born to my sister’s in-laws. The baby first looked like the dad & then when she was a toddler she looked like the mom. People’s faces change. 4:31 pmpdt weird. During the days of Herod maybe they knew already about which genes make a heinous person but they choose to keep them. Same sh*t over & over. 4:33 pmpdt

4:43 pmpdt why is benni blanco trying to kill himself with blowfish 🐡?????? 4:44 pmpdt spit it out blanco!

4:46 pmpdt maybe it is futile to live in this world. 4:47 pmpdt incubus & his family thinks it’s ok to mess with my mind & emotions. They think it is okay Bcz they’re all heinous. Why bother to teach me a lesson? It seems like it isn’t to teach me anything Bcz they destroyed part of my brain so how can I learn if I’m missing part of it? I guess I’m actually being made into an example then. A warning, that some people are allowed to be bad very bad & be rewarded handsomely. Like to steal something from someone else & then torture them to death if they ever try to reveal the truth. Bcz they cannot live otherwise if people knew who they really are Bcz they would really lose it all in court with a proper investigation. 4:51 pmpdt

4:52 pmpdt in a real utopia woman will never be raped, & punished for revealing it, even if she didn’t call it rape. In a real utopia woman would never be raped. In a real utopia there would be no human s*x trafficking & be drugged to be a prostitute. 4:54 pmpdt that’s what was in the movie taken with Liam neeson. 4:56 pmpdt In a real utopia woman would never be kidnapped & forced into prostitution. 4:57 pmpdt am I barking up the wrong tree? Do these women need saving? There was something I was going to write... 4:58 pmpdt incubus utopia there will always be human s*x trafficking. I know this Bcz he’s destroying me. Destroying my vag & brain & body. 4:59 pmpdt

6:22 pmpdt there were a few times I probably said “love” to Q & Ep Bcz they said it first & my mom was probably around and told me to say it back. A lot like when parents tell their young children to say “love you” to a grandparent. I don’t think I made a habit of it. I hope I didn’t. Why I cannot remember. At least I told Q to make lots of friends so that when I did leave her she would not be friendless. I think that Ep would have been more qualified to be Q’s best friend Bcz I think they hung out more & a lot of times without me. There was a Christmas once Q spent at Ep’s house & I was not invited even though I was home. 6:28 pmpdt me & Ep were not close but when Q started shutting her out to spend (acid throat pain 6:29 pmpdt) more time w/ RG, she asked me out to dinner with one more person k.o. 6:31 pmpdt she asked me out to eat it seemed to ask about Q what she should do, that she felt unwelcomed? She was starting to feel like a third wheel 6:32 pmpdt I told her maybe it’s time to hang out with different friends. The way she described the situation sounded sad for her like Q abandoned her & she was like a puppy (vag pain 6:34 pmpdt right rib front pain) shut out in the cold by her owners. She said it with different words though saying she felt alone, it seemed like a ntentional neglect of the friendship. 6:36 pmpdt after that (acid pain 6:36 anus area vag) she hung out with different people. I only remember hanging out with her one other time probably before this happened but I don’t remember. & it looked like she got a boyfriend at one point but he looked as if he was flirting with a blonde haired woman in the pictures. 6:38 pmpdt 😥6:39 pmpdt I don’t think I use the word love frequently. It’s not something I take lightly. 6:40 pmpdt I don’t appreciate incubus messing with my feelings. Bcz after he said that & b4 he said that I did wish for something romantic to come true. If in reality I adored him, then sure it sounds like a fantastic reality. But it looks now like that’s not going to happen. 6:42 pmpdt I can’t believe he would go this far to destroy me & drag it on this long if it were true. 6:43 pmpdt 6:44 pmpdt

6:45 pmpdt murdaugh looks like he is treated better by god than me. He gets to keep his bones. He is so tall. 6:47 pmpdt in France I think the legal age to drink is 16 years old. 6:48 pmpdt

6:59 pmpdt 7 pmpdt I told Q that Ep came to me after I think probably after she told me that RG & her broke up? & her response Was like oh no! She should have told me! 7:02 pmpdt feels a little like Q was a really good actor. 7:03 pmpdt

7:04 pmpdt it’s okay if her feelings changed & she started feeling like she was closer to someone else. But if she was, Idk, stealing art ideas & getting credits for it that I should have, that’s different. & discouraging me from reconnecting with old friends Bcz she was planning to get rid of me, that’s different. I suspect some things Bcz around 2014 apple had some stuff in their products graphics that were the same colors as my pictures & also the fighting? Fish looked similar to my goldfish picture that she highly likely saw Bcz it was in a website that we both uploaded pictures to & she commented on. 7:10 pmpdt (acid throat pain)

7:11 pmpdt I think it’s too much of a coincidence. Q likes photography & photoshop & worked for apple for years. 7:12 pmpdt

8:57 pmpdt incubus miñion? I think is trying to tell me without using his own voice that he wants me to talk again what I already wrote about several posts ago. I think he wants me to retract what I wrote. I think I wrote that my thoughts were mysteriously switching back & forth until I touched the kid with the tricycle who was also on a tricycle. Incubus miñion? Keeps on acidically eating my v*agina. 😖😭 I thought about stopping but I kept on going after pausing in every other alternate if thought. The other thought which kept me going was that I needed to stretch my legs, but the bad part was I felt that I wanted to hit that kid. I think deep down the real me didn’t want that. I made contact with him what felt & seemed like in slow motion. I’m not even sure what made him cry & dismount the tricycle & be in the floor. It doesn’t make sense to me unless it was his funny bone. The bone that feels like even the smallest hit it would feel painful. But I don’t think it was his funny bone. He was a brown skinned boy. I never met him before. I was friends with brown skinned people. I didn’t see him do anything than pedal that tricycle. There was no reason to motivate me to hit him. Usually when I feel angry to do something it’s always? When someone hurts me in some way. 9:10 pmpdt

9:13 pmpdt it doesn’t make sense for me to have felt that way when I did. After I did it & ran away I felt a lot of shame & I think I remember feeling bad about it & scared to go back to that place. I accidentally drove to the place, infront of it. Even though I was avoiding it!! And then this thought? Or head voice in my mind said in that moment “he’s going to be ok.” & then I drove away. Incubus said through autocorrect something like: true self? I think he’s trying to make me think that’s the real me who would have feelings like that to want to hit a boy about probably 8 years old? On a tricycle with a tricycle. He wants me to think I’m that bad. 9:20 pmpdt throat acid pain. I don’t usually sit at home thinking I want to hit a kid with a tricycle. I didn’t make any plans ahead of time to be there and ride a tricycle. It was a spontaneous decision. & a lot of people were around to witness it. One even strangely yelled at me to “run!” 9:22 pmpdt maybe he knows something I don’t???? 9:23 pmpdt I even stay at home a lot thinking about staying out of more future troubles. Z <— did the incubus miñion make me typed “Z”?????? Incubus! What are you trying to do to me? That’s not funny. Nothing you do is funny. 9:26 pmpdt heinous creep.

11 pmpdt the stretching part which was to pedal, comes from around the time my mom’s friend’s husband was trying to teach me to ride a bicycle with out training wheels. He said that people are meant to stretch their legs when they pedal. He maybe said it was going exercise. 11:03 pmpdt

11:24 pmpdt *good exercise not going exercise.

11:59 pmpdt I should clarify that me & Q & Ep hung out together a lot. But while we did that I was more comfortable with Q than Ep. I tried to like Ep but my feelings wouldn’t let me at the time. It he one time I remembered hanging out with only Ep I think I really enjoyed it. Maybe I m not sure why. Maybe Bcz she’s not perfect? Like she did have the tendency to use the word bitch. & she called me it 2xs at least. But maybe Idk more relaxed that one time? Maybe Bcz I wasn’t trying too hard to be perfectly nice & adoring to her before that? Like one time she was walking next to me & then I left her side to walk next to Q. & there was a time she didn’t invite me to a dinner Q was invited to. Maybe Ep was more real than Q? Idk. Mayb I didn’t feel pressured/or to expect myself to be perfect around her? I think I did try to be nice to her but maybe I didn’t feel.. idk. I bought her a smoothie at the mall to repay her for the day & picking me up. And then that was it. It was a very short friendship. One day that I felt like maybe I liked her. & I think she got enough hints from my body language that I wasn’t there yet. 12:10 am pdt she called me a bitch when I pointed up towards the ceiling in the parking garage - I m not sure if it was a misunderstanding created by the previous stuff Bcz I maybe wasn’t trying to be a bitch in the parking garage but it came off that way. & the other time I had wanted to go to Applebee’s Bcz I saw a commercial but Q said she didn’t want to go there Bcz if her ex boyfriend usually went there & Q seemed sad about it. This ex boyfriend of Q’s, my little cousin said he was ugly when she saw his picture with her that me or my sister took at the park. I never saw Q kiss him, but I did see Q jump in his back to make him carry her. He usually picked her up Bcz Q didn’t get her drivers license I think until after they broke up? & Q told me after they broke up that he usually talked about a Kayla. Which I think he started dating soon after they broke up. I don’t know when he & Q started dating but he seemed to suddenly make an appearance after I started dating my first boyfriend. There was a time she hung out with us & she seemed maybe single at the time? I dont recall her saying she had (left eye pain 12:19 am pdt) a boyfriend (vag acid? Pain tummy upset diarrhea?? 12:20 am pdt 🌫<- what’s that?🐒💨) at that time. 12:21 am pdt her boyfriend was Asian. 12:22 am pdt

1:42 am pdt I told my aunt we had to move her tall filing cabinet 🗄 vag acid pain! 1:43 am pdt Bcz it’s not feng shui. All she said was I trust in god & she had put the Virgin Mary modern painting 🖼 on top of it. Yeah she trusts Bcz it was more likely to fall on my mom in her sleep 🛌 than her. Heinous backstabbing b*tch. Her excuse for anything? To do what god says so she gets into heaven. 1:46 am pdt same god as all the medical 🏥 professionals Bcz she was a pharmacist 👩‍⚕️. & police 👮‍♂️ who omit searching sheds in the backyard of a s*xoffender. I told her that directly & her response was I trust god. Her mattress was stacked higher than my mom’s bed 🛌. 1:48 pmpdt

2:04 am pdt when she first got it I think I remember telling it asking her if she was going to bolt it to wall. I maybe even suggested her returning it & getting a shorter one? Now I don’t remember. 2:06 am pdt nausea tummy ache 😖😖😭😭2:07 am pdt 🥵 sharp pain!

3:26 am pdt incubus only virtue signals and the politicians/judges does what he says such as rolling back roe versus wade. He never meant what you think 💭 he meant or what you hope he meant. Adam Noah Levine posts men should not make laws about women’s bodies but those who are listening 👂 to his commands took that to mean no abortion rights. Bcz roe vs wade was made into law to give women rights. I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ roe or wade, but if they’re both men... idk 🤷🏻‍♀️ I guess I will have to look it up 🆙 & who the judge was. 3:32 am pdt maybe 🤔 I’m jumping to conclusions. 3:32 am pdt

3:33 am pdt he posted may 4th, 2022. Stuff started happening end of 2021? If incubus is god, and for a weird reason they decided to do that out of the blue? 3:35 am pdt who do you think made it happen? Incubus is trying to save his own face. 3:35 am pdt he’s not women’s friend at all. Not a friendly unicorn 🦄. 3:36 am pdt

3:37 am pdt I think 💭 you’re all gas ⛽️ lighting yourselves into thinking 💭 he’s an angel 😇. 3:38 am pdt

4:07 am pdt incubus, you shouldn’t hold against me what happened between me & Scott after he bit me. I wasn’t thinking straight. 4:07 am pdt

4:09 am pdt I already told my sister that I thought 💭 I fell in love with josh. & I tried to tell Scott that I didn’t feel that way about him. How did I get so distracted to not put the pieces together in that moment? How did I forget easily? I think 🤔 my own inner dialogue distracted me? I think 🤔 I was so into trying to figure out what I wanted that I didn’t fully realize it? And or I easily forgot? It would make sense if Scott relied on the incubus to manipulate my memory/mind. That Scott followed a script given to him by the incubus. If Scott knew he could manipulate my memory, he probably relied on incubus to erase or alter specific memory to bend it into his favor. With out being something sincere about the more gentlemanly stuff like asking me about the condom, & if we had that experience in the car 🚗 with almost having s*x b4 that like I think/figure was the chronology Bcz of other memory I had, then he could pretend that I didn’t say/ask him if he is ready for little Scotty feet 🦶 [babies] 4:21 am pdt so he can make the excuse that I was a whore he fell for, Bcz he didn’t answer me. Which would have drawn a hard line on the ground of what was not allowed 🚫 which would have made taking off my clothing off limits. I wasn’t ready. I did not have a high paying 💰 job. He didn’t either to my knowledge. He was only selling bonsai trees 🌳 at someone’s business, not his own & living at his parents house 🏠 like a kid, doing whatever he wanted. He mentioned no educational goals plans etc. he liked the history channel. All I knew. But he seemed smart at one time saying something that I didn’t realize. 4:27 am pdt he smoked cigarettes 🚬 & weed. & he said stuff that made it sound like he drank alcohol 🍷 all the time with his friends. Said stuff like jack Daniel’s is a baller drink. Whatever that means. 4:29 am pdt

9:16 am pdt incubus is still eating 🍽 away my vag with acid 😞😖😭😰acid throat pain. Left hip joint pain 9:18 am pdt clock ⏰ skipped a minute. “Brendan” said he wanted to eat me out. Melissa Cuen wrote that I was a cyber slut? In a notebook under a picture of my back in high school 🏫 but I don’t think she knew who Bcz we were not close. 9:21 am pdt “Brendan” said his birthday 🥳 is June 16. 9:22 am pdt

9:25 am pdt on prom night I forget which year, might have been 2002 or 2003 at the double tree 🌳 hotel 🏨 she arrived talking I think 🤔 in a New York accent. Which is not her real accent. I wasn’t paying 100% attention but for some reason I catch her saying ADAM in a very enthusiastic 🤩 & bubbly way and my attention? strangely drops. I think 🤔 I maybe wanted to pay attention but I don’t hear 👂 what she said after ADAM. I think 🤔 the incubus was controlling me so I stopped paying attention to her. It’s strange. Idk 🤷🏻‍♀️ how to explain it otherwise. 9:31 am pdt

11:13 am pdt incubus looks like he is in Las Vegas now? I did not expect things to stretch out for this long. Suddenly I am worried about Courtney wood ? Woods? Who I think 🤔 Scott dated after me who was I think 🤔 not yet graduated from high school 🏫 when they started dating. Some people will probably say it’s none of my business & it’s okay he started dating a high school 🏫 student back in 2010. & that they were probably f^cking Bcz she called him mr. big on his Facebook wall. They probably broke up 🆙 not long after that. Pain accidentally scratched a pimple 11:18 am pdt. I got a pimple there even though I shampooed everyday the last 3-4 days. Incubus causes pimples. 11:20 acid vag pain😰 heinous b*tch. I guess there is something wrong with Scott genetically Bcz he goes for high school 🏫 girls in 2010 & the incubus does not want it broadcasted Bcz there’s something genetically wrong 😑 with the incubus and all his miñions. That they all want younger girls to f*ck which is why they’re okay with stuff happening to Jon Benet Ramsey Elizabeth smart? Jaycee dugard and more. Heinous creeps. 11:23 pmpdt

11:30 am pdt I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ I think 🤔 if you’re serious about finding someone right for you you care enough to hold it if you don’t have addiction problems. & you stay away from temptations. He was smart. But he didn’t advance in school 🏫 it seemed Bcz in 2010 he brought up finally that he wanted to transfer to UCB. After I already went. He basically stayed employed in a pizza 🍕 place who employed high school 🏫 students. He put himself in a place of temptation. 11:33 am pdt if a guy is serious 🧐 about marriage I would think 🤔 that he would try not to eff it up with premature s*x especially when you’re 25 years old and probably dating someone 7 years younger. But if you get to f*ckg b4 marriage with someone as young as 17/18 years old and you only met a few months ago I don’t think he’s being honest with anyone about his intentions after saying it wasn’t his fault he fell for a whore when he never had intentions of even liking me, & he asked to kiss me after only a few times of hanging out one on one. Hanging out with Scott one on one is bad for anyone’s health Bcz he’s best friends with incubus like Nick carter & Justin Timberlake. 11:41 am pdt

11:45 am pdt after I think 🤔 the first time making out w/ Scott, the next time we hung out, Jorge was driving us home 🏠. I think I remember I didn’t want to continue making out. I needed to slow it down. I think I remember I wanted to be dropped off home 🏠 first, b4 Scott? I didn’t want to be alone with him Bcz I thought 💭 it would happen again. But some how I went back to hanging out with him alone & became addicted Bcz it was the first time (vag pain 11:50 left shin pain) The kisses 💋 were good. I am not sure anymore, maybe 🤔 I felt some thing throat acid? Pain when I sneezed 🤧 11:52 am pdt. It’s difficult to remember and I’ve only kissed 4 people when I became an adult. I randomly did one time kisses 💋 when I was a little & preteen? But no make out sessions until I was 19 years old. Pain head 11:55 am pdt. Did I feel something more w/ Scott when we kissed 💋 ? 11:57 am pdt

12:05 pmpdt there were only 3 men that I vag acid pain 12:05 12:06 pmpdt I thought 💭 I fell in love with 😍. But I was in and out with the first one but he rejected 🙅‍♂️ me first several? Times b4 I rejected 🙅‍♀️ him. I didn’t understand why I felt what I felt when I felt it. But I figured later that he probably said things that probably killed the feelings. Like finally telling me he had been traveling to Texas to see his ex girlfriend in different words; only being good enough to finally consider for marriage Bcz I was transferring to UCB which was #1 public university at the time according to a student 👨‍🎓 who called me to congratulate me for being accepted probably to help the university 12:13 pmpdt. It seemed to not matter that I was feeling I thought 💭 feelings of being in love 😻 12:14 pmpdt

12:20 pmpdt incubus is a fraud. He only seeks to control & mislead those he abuses. He masks 🎭 his true heinousness with false promises. He is dirty and probably the dirtiest man alive. 12:22 pmpdt there is something seriously wrong with his head. It’s not death ☠️ he says when comments about dugard. That’s his opinion. A man. Who does not have a vagina. 12:23 pmpdt serious lack of empathy/sympathy for females’ pain. 12:24 pmpdt

12:25 pmpdt he is a F R A U D.

12:27 pmpdt he really should quit dating & quit marriage.

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