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orqheuss · 1 year ago

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Snake Charmer

(Ominis Gaunt x F!Gorgon!Reader) Fluff? World building? Set up? Who knows tbh. It's a story.

Summary:

Ominis could hear her pulse quicken as she stilled. Everything else in the cramped space fell away, leaving just the two slytherin’s, each one with their own morose history that has been broadcasted for all the world to hear. Two peas in a pod— two sides to the same coin— two scales on the same snake. *** Why was everyone so interested in the new girl? Ominis Gaunt was about to find out.

Word count: 3.8k

AN: because I wanted to write a story about Ominis and a Gorgon falling in love

Ominis was sure he was going mad. In fact, he was positive— some point between the end of his fourth year and the beginning of his fifth, he had gone absolutely batty. That was the only logical conclusion to the fact that he was hearing voices at all hours of the day.

It started the day the new fifth year won in a duel against his best friend, Sebastian. The Defense Against the Dark Arts class was moving at the same pace it always did: introduction to the new spell, practice on a small object, practice on a larger, vaguely person shaped object, and then finally a duel between each pair of students to prove their mastery. This day, though, took a different turn than what the young blond was expecting. Ever since starting at Hogwarts, Sebastian Sallow was Ominis’ dueling partner; there was never any question about it. It became such a habit that no one dared approach the pair once Professor Hecat announced the beginnings of the school sanctioned battles— you would never see one Slytherin without the other. So, when Hecat decided to pair the new fifth year with his best friend, well, it could be seen quite plainly that Ominis was not happy about the matter.

As the duelists took their positions across from each other, the blond haired boy leaned against the nearest wall, a distinct look of annoyance turning down the corners of his lips and narrowing his eyebrows into a straight line. Most people would consider the look on his face a pout— not that anyone would ever dare at mentioning this to the boy. Ominis Gaunt did not pout, and he certainly did not scoff under his breath at the sound of his friend joking around with the new girl. What a preposterous idea. He wasn’t jealous, don’t be absurd.

Though, it was nice hearing Sebastian get knocked down a peg by someone who had never held a wand in her life up until that point.

Once the class was over, all Ominis wanted to do was slump himself into the Undercroft and take a well deserved nap. His head was pounding, and the near constant whispers of his classmates about the new girl were driving him up the wall. He couldn’t help but make snarky remarks in his head, quietly laughing to himself at the ridiculous questions his classmates were mumbling.

“Why do you think she wears that head scarf? I wonder what’s under there.”

Hair, probably.

“Did you hear her accent? Where do you think she’s from? Certainly not around here!”

Ten points to Ravenclaw for stating the obvious.

“Did you see how she was looking at Sallow? She just got here and already thinks she can take the most attractive boy in our year. The nerve!”

Sebastian has the emotional range of a teaspoon, but best of luck!

“How could you even tell where she was looking? I couldn’t see a thing through those glasses of hers! Why is she wearing shaders inside?”

Bold style choice, but alright. Not that he could really judge, of course.

“Do you think she’s blind like Gaunt? Great, another person I have to make sure I don’t trip over.”

That statement got his attention. Could she be blind like him? He didn’t hear any echolocation charm on her wand, nor did he sense a seeing eye animal or a cane around her. A very small part of him warmed slightly at the idea that he wasn’t alone in his struggles anymore. He craned his head more to the side, trying to catch more of the gossip as everyone began to file out of the classroom.

“No, she can’t be blind. It looks like she can get around just fine on her own— no charm blinking on her wand or anything. Still quite weird, though.”

Ominis’ shoulders sank minutely at the news, the warmth in his chest freezing over once again. He sighed to himself before pushing away from the wall, deciding to just let his body carry him to the Undercroft on autopilot while he stewed in his thoughts. Sebastian was off talking to the new girl, so he would likely not be joining him until well after his next round of Crossed Wands later that day. Normally he would join the boy, cheering him on from the sidelines with the rest of his fawning fangirl club, and he was about to turn in the direction of the clock tower when the brunette’s voice broke through the haze.

“Suppose I could interest you in some unsanctioned fun?”

Well, if his new best friend was going to be there, then he wouldn’t miss Ominis’ presence all that much.

Just as the blond had resigned himself to an afternoon of solitude, another voice came through the crowded musings of his classmates.

“Gods, I’m starving.”

A completely mundane statement, one that had likely been uttered by half of the class as they left, but something about the voice drew him in. It was low in tone, like they were trying to hide their voice instead of projecting it to their friends, and had a slight hiss to it just under the words like the person was speaking through a mouthful of fangs. Ominis paused in his steps just outside the doorway, his ear turned towards the classroom as he tried to find the voice again. All he found was silence and the tiny ticks of professor Hecat’s dark magic detectors.

Shaking his head, he leaned away from the door and made his way down the stairs, his mind puzzling through what just happened. He must have been imagining it, he thought to himself. The voice hardly sounded human, let alone familiar. Must have just been a trick of his mind, he had slept terribly the night before so it was logical he was just tired. Rounding the corner towards his secret alcove, Ominis stepped through the clockwork door to the Undercroft and began to climb down the winding staircase, hopeful that a bit more sleep would do him good.

Fortunately, he had a lovely nap on the chaise lounge he conjured. Rather unfortunately though, the voice persisted. Morning, noon, and night he heard that incessant hissing tone in his ears, each day getting louder and more bold with what it was saying. First it was small things, things that most people would think to themselves throughout a normal day.

“Where’s the bathroom in this place?” “My head itches.” “What I would give to take a nap right about now.”

Normal things. But then, the statements started to get a bit…odd.

“There’s something under my scale!” “He was rude, I want to bite him.” “I can hear a mouse somewhere. Can I eat it? Please?”

While Ominis was tired of hearing the random, grating voice slither through his ears at a constant rate, he was happy to report that he no longer thought he was going mad. The voice belonged to a snake— that much he was sure of. But, where was the snake? Did it know he could hear it? How was it somehow always in his vicinity?

That was the question that was currently keeping him up at night.

Everything culminated one faithful day when he next had Defense Against the Dark Arts. Today was lecture, and much like the rest of his classmates, he bemoaned having to sit and listen to professor Hecat go on and on about some unknown entity or creature that he could never encounter for the rest of his days. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a good teacher, far from it! But, much like any professor in the castle, she was not immune to the dreaded monotonous lecture voice.

Upon entering the classroom, the first thing Ominis heard was Hecat’s voice speaking in hushed tones to someone. He would never admit it outloud, but the boy was dreadfully nosy. Honing his ears in the direction of the whispering, he caught on to her tone first— caring, soft, gentle, words that normally wouldn’t be found within one hundred feet of the professor— then the tail end of her words.

“—if you are uncomfortable with today’s lesson, please know that you can leave at any time.”

An equally soft voice replied in turn, a hint of uncomfort lacing their words. “Thank you, professor. I appreciate the sentiment, but I will be fine. It is not the first time I have been a part of such a lecture.”

Ominis stilled in his seat, the hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention when he recognized the voice. It was the new girl again. Merlin, it seemed she had everyone wrapped around her little finger, even the formidable Dinah Hecat!

It wasn’t that he had a problem with the new fifth year, in fact she had been quite nice to him when they met in the common room, it was just that all the rumors surrounding her made her sound a bit big for her britches. First she beat Sebastian in a duel, something no one has done since he started going to Crossed Wands and honing his talent, then she invites him to Hogsmeade with her and suddenly a troll is hellbent on clobbering up the street? Not to mention all the other things Ominis had heard about: taking out Ashwinder camps in her spare time? Flying all over the sodding Scottish Highlands and getting into all kinds of trouble against the Ranrok Loyalists? Sneaking into the restricted section with Sebastian and earning him another bloody detention, because what, she batted her eyelashes at him and he folded like a cheap suit? Who was this girl, and why did trouble follow at her heels like a pack of hellhounds? No, Ominis didn’t have a problem with her, he was suspicious of her, and the fact that the voice started soon after she got here certainly didn’t help.

The blond sat back in his seat, arms crossed across his chest and a befuddled look clouding his expression as the professor took her spot at the front of the room, tapping her wand on the rickety old chalkboard and writing out the subject of the lecture for today.

“Today, class, we will be discussing Gorgons, another creature traditionally deemed mythological but in fact walks among us magic folk unseen. Though, they very rarely make the journey across the sea to our backyard.”

Ominis’ eyebrows narrowed more in confusion as he thought about Hecat’s words to the new girl. Why would she be uncomfortable with this lesson? What secret was she hiding that was related to Gorgons of all things? He tuned back into the lesson, hoping to answer some of his questions.

Professor Hecat paced around the room as she talked, taking strides up and down the lengths of desks and weaving through her collections of artifacts from her time as an Unspeakable.

“Gorgons, or ‘gorgos,’ meaning ‘fierce, terrible and grim’ in Greek, are inherently female creatures with snakes for hair and the ability to turn anyone who meets their gaze into stone. Many of you are likely familiar with the myth of Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon that was callously slayed by the Greecian hero, Perseus. But, there are two other Gorgons known in history: Stheno, the mighty or strong, and Euryale, the Far Springer.”

The room was bathed in silence as Hecat paused in her speech, giving the class time to take notes on the creatures. Ominis sat still, his mind awash with possibilities for why the new girl would need to be excused from this lesson. Her accent was Greek, that was for sure. Could she have a history with Gorgons? That wouldn’t make sense, though. Many students have had run-ins with the creatures discussed in DADA, but they were never offered to skip that lesson. So, why was the new girl so special?

A sharp, insistent sound shook the blond from his thought spiral, causing him to wince at the volume suddenly ricochetting in his ears. A terrible hiss filled the room, slithering throughout the encompassing space and echoing off the tall, vaulted cathedral ceiling. It was haunting, eerie, constant, like the creak of the floor in an abandoned house or a busted pipe in the middle of the night when you’re the only one home. A shiver ran up Ominis’ spine at the sound, trying desperately to block it out while also listening to those around him to see if they heard it too. He heard no whisperings, but with a quick flick of his wand, sparking the wood to life, he could see the silhouette of his classmates looking around like they were trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. Ominis relaxed slightly, relieved that he wasn’t the only one hearing the incessant hissing.

His relaxed posture only lasted for a moment as a voice suddenly cut through all the noise, low and dangerous like a rattlesnake's tail in the tall grass. It was similar to the snake he had been hearing, but different somehow— richer, more human sounding. Ominis’ heart stilled in his chest when he recognized the cadence, knowing it intimately from all the times he spoke it while living at home. Parseltongue.

“Be quiet. Everything is fine, no one is going to hurt us.”

At once, the hissing stopped, shrouding the room in a blanket of silence once again. Dread began to curl its way around Ominis’ chest at the understanding of what that meant— what that could mean for the future of Hogwarts in general.

Someone in the room was a parselmouth like him, and he would bet all of his galleons on it being the new girl.

But, what did she mean by “no one is going to hurt us?” Who was “us?”

The professor continued her lecture, drowning the never ending list of questions permeating in his mind that seemed to grow longer by the second.

“Gorgons are the children of Phorcys, a primordial sea god, and Ceto, a sea goddess, who happen to be brother and sister.”

A snicker came from the back of the classroom, followed by the voice of none other than Andrew Larson, the class’ resident moonmind. “Purebloods know all about that!”

Hecat leveled him with a glare, not an ounce of amusement present in her tone as she spoke. “Must you make that joke whenever we talk about Greek history? I dare say it wasn’t funny the first handful of times you’ve said it, Mister Larson.”

Ominis could almost see the embarrassment on Larson’s face when he stuttered his reply. “Um, n-no, professor. I j-just meant—”

“We all know what you meant.” She silenced him quickly, her smirk present in her voice. “Now, back to what I was saying. Phorcys and Ceto had a large family together, including the Graeae, the trio of elderly sisters that share an eye, Echidna, a being of half-human, half-snake, Ladon, a fearsome dragon who was tasked with guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides, and Scylla, a woman with dog-headed loins. Because of Ceto’s reputation for giving birth to terrors, each larger and more colorful than the last, she became known as the “mother of sea-monsters.” Ominis could feel Hecat’s eyes linger on him for a moment, her speech stilling slightly as she took in his deeply puzzled expression. “Of course, among those children were also the Gorgons.”

The aging professor continued, her steps ebbing and flowing around the classroom like a steady stream. “According to myth, Medusa did not begin life as a Gorgon. She was Ceto’s only mortal born child— human as any other babe. Some even say she may have been of magical nature, like all of you in this very room.”

The blond slytherin heard Hecat’s steps falter for a moment, the soft swish of her hand running along a desk off to his right. He craned his ears in the direction, his wand picking up the movement as he tried to discern the student that the former Unspeakable was paying special attention to. The silhouette of a girl filled his mindseye, her form slumping down slightly in her desk as she tugged lightly on the scarf wrapped around her head. Ominis’ frown stretched deeper across his face at the realization that the professor was checking on the new girl, again. What was so special about her? Why was everyone so enraptured by her presence? She didn’t seem all that remarkable when in the school building at least. She was just mysterious. He was mysterious at first, but the fascination with him soon dwindled as his peers realized he was the same as everyone else.

So, the slytherin pondered, why was she still the talk of the halls?

Why was Hecat teaching this lesson?

Why was it important for a group of pubescent teenagers to know about something that existed across the ocean from them?

Ominis had more questions than answers, and each one confounded him more and more by the second.

“Medusa was a devout follower of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and war. One night, while praying to her goddess, she captured the attention of Athena’s brother, Poseidon. He appeared to her, intent on taking what he believed should be ‘his.’” Hecat paused, her stony gaze sweeping across the classroom as if challenging anyone to so much as breathe too loud. “He took her there, in the temple, leaving her on the floor as she sobbed and prayed to her goddess for forgiveness.”

Ominis could cut the tension coating the air of the room like a thick, viscous fog with a knife. No one dared make a sound, enraptured by the words of their wise mentor.

“Some myths say that Athena took pity on the girl and transformed her into something that no man could ever gaze on again. Some say she punished her for leading a man into her sacred temple and letting him defile it. No one knows the true story except those who were there, and the old gods have long since left our realm for their own paradise on Olympus.”

The apprehension screaming in every magical mind surrounding the dearly loved, and feared, elder was palpable in the tiny class space.

“Now, some of you may be wondering why I teach this lesson.” As if reading his mind, Ominis felt Hecat level him with a stare that burned hotter than even the most blistering fire poker. “The answer, of course, is that no one knows what happened to the child of Medusa and Poseidon.”

The young Gaunt felt all the air get sucked from his lungs as if a dementor escaped from Azkaban just to find him specifically. A child of a god and a witch? It was unheard of— it was disastrous. Their magic would be unstoppable; nothing in their world would ever match the power of a child brimming with that much otherworldly energy. Whether they used their powers for good or evil, or even some mix of the two, they would be legendary all the same. At that moment, a thought came to Ominis. Would they also be part Gorgon? If Medusa was transformed while with child, who's to say that the babe would not share the same affliction.

As suddenly as a strike of lightning, or a downpour in April, Ominis Gaunt answered the question that had been on his mind since the start of term.

The new girl was a Gorgon.

How had he not realized before? The snakes that were always around when she was— how her head and eyes were always covered— how no one knew where she hailed from and had no hint other than the fact that her accent was vaguely Greecian? It was right in front of his blind eyes from the beginning; he was just too much of a jealous fool to see it.

Just then the bell chimed across the campus, signaling the impending class change. Professor Hecat’s voice broke through the bustle of his peers standing and gathering their things in preparation for their trek to their next lesson.

“We will continue our discussion on mythos and magic next week. Please remember to study for the upcoming OWLs! They are written and practical, so be sure to practice the physical spells as well as memorize the theory!”

Ominis scrambled to gather his things, determined to catch the new girl before she disappeared into the crowd. Dodging around a loitering Sebastian— the brunette’s hand raised as if gearing to make some idiotic, yet somehow still brilliant, point— he all but sprinted into the congested hallway. His wand waved in front of him as he scanned each person he passed, his ears tuned to any noise that sounded vaguely serpentine in the hopes that her reptilian tresses would sound out as they always did this close to lunch time. Alas, they were as silent as a dead rodent in a viper pit.

Just then, the young boy caught sight of the girl, her silhouette moving ferociously among the masses as if she would rather be anywhere but there. Underneath all his confusion, morbid curiosity, and pulsating anger at how she has been endangering, and possibly enchanting, his best friend, Ominis felt a pang of pity. He didn’t blame her one bit for wanting to leave as quickly as possible— not at all. He knew all too well how it felt to have all eyes burning through his skin at every turn, even if no one else seemed to figure out her secret other than him. He couldn’t let her escape, though; he needed answers, he needed closure. Halting in his tracks, he racked his mind for what he could do to get her attention. She wouldn’t hear him call her name in the ruckus around them, nor could he keep up with her brusk pace. There was really only one option to choose, and as much as he hated to do it, snakes had an incredible sense of hearing, or rather, in their case, an excellent sense for vibrations.

His voice flowed from his lips in a strong hiss, the air seeming to break just for the words to slither their way to their target like a bush adder in a pile of leaves. “I know what you are.”

Her “pets” were startlingly silent as her hung head raised from its slumped position against her chest, her sigh heaving her shoulders into proper posture— a constrictor poised to strangle.

The boy felt her words before he heard them— the air stilling around him like a world born anew.

“I suppose it’s my turn to explain things, then.”

AN:

Shes baaaaaacccckkkkkkk :)

***

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marsmarbles · 9 months ago

Note

Ooo what are their respective powers and abilities? (For the superhero au)

Sausage has the classic superhero abilities like enhanced strength and endurance. He can also fly due to his wings. A lot of his powers are light based and could probably be compared to the Green Lantern’s where he can pretty much summon anything he wants out of light(the only differences being the light is gold instead of green and probably has a lot more limitations to what he can make). A limitation I have in mind is maybe he needs enough light to take from his surroundings to make what he needs. Kinda like photosynthesis where he needs to charge up light. I also can see him being able to make plants grow really fast.

For Mog, he has vampire and bat like abilities like gliding, flying, enhanced speed and strength, night vision, echolocation, and other things I’m probably not thinking of. Mog relies more on his goofy gadgets than any magic or superpowers. These tools being a multi setting ray gun and spider legs attached to his back

#mars ask #mythicalswamp vigilante au #msvau #mythicalsausage #mogswamp #mcyt #sos smp #empires smp #mythical man #count quagmire

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soraviie · 2 years ago

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them as boyfriends.txt

━ type: bts x gn! reader ━ masterlist

━ about: fluff ━ pictures taken from Pinterest

━ previously posted on soraviii

NAMJOON:

Conversations! I am extremely chill about it but still insistent

Conversations about stuff!

Doesn't even have to be like here's the top 10 reasons why Auguste Comte was a cunt but like overall

Why do you enjoy doing some things and why are these things his hobbies you know

Why he knows that some of his habits are bad but he can't seem to stop them and so on

I always think that Namjoon is very concerned about doing the Right Thing, you know, being an objectively good person within a subjectively impossible world he probably worries a lot about "oh, was this thing I said perhaps going to rub you off the long way", "is what I'm doing with my influence enough, is it right?" "oh, you said it was okay but could it be that when I did this you wish I didn't and so on"

Wants to do right by the people he loves so open, frequent communication he views as an opportunity to improve and be assured that he's not an ignorant tool

A multifaceted individual so you get to see all sides - cute and cuddly, shy and embarrassed, the hoe side

Does absolutely wake you up in the mornings like "get up, sucker, we're going somewhere, get up"

Often says he's bringing you to a little something and it could be anywhere between a specific tree in a park and a booked-out art gallery during the night

Tries to echolocate you if he's out and forgot to take his glasses

He's insecure that he can't cook so he probably cleans a lot

Probably has read an article about weaponized incompetency and therefore tries to split chores evenly and keep them regularly done

He's actually torn up he can't do most things he would want like - wait for you after work or walk along the river freely

So he puts the extra effort in all he gets - lazy mornings, eating brunch abroad etc.

I can for some reason imagine him slow driving a bike at night and you're walking beside

Why is he not giving you a lift? He's scared he'll crash and you'll be hurt

If you can drive and own a car he will indicate that he wants to be driven not by asking but by sitting in the seat and putting a seat belt on in front of your eyes

When on tour or working late nights sends you short videos of the animals he finds along the way (think of that Instagram video of him harassing a crab on the way home from work)

Deep morning voice! Lord!

Absolutely the one on the list to have sex to relieve pent-up anger

Sleeps shirtless

Just get like ear plugs or straight-up knock yourself out because I just know he snores like a whole ass truck

If he's in love, really, I mean truly in love you're straight up becoming immortalized in the songs

Like he assigns a symbol that he associated to you whether a specific flower or a word or a concept but it's a little thing that keeps mentioned throughout

If it's a private track will ask you to moan for it to be used in a track

On like one day in a year when you convince him to be lazy, for sure, sits and watches TV with like a passive-aggressive frown and munches on chips really loudly

It's not even a bad show it's just how his face looks then

When meeting your friends, has an awkward "smile and wave, boy, smile and wave" stance

Definitely plays up his hotness once in a while - sleazy smiles, and those bedroom eyes, there are two wolves within him, a romantic and a player

If you're walking through an art gallery, for sure talks about every single thing he sees

The way you're on his Instagram is by sharing the photos you take, through them he can see the man you fell in love with and he becomes giddy over it

YOONGI:

So hear me out but when Yoongi is crushing he's like a boyfriend, when he's in a relationship he's like a married man with two kids and a mortgage

It's not that the spark is missing (guy can get you hot and bothered in a matter of seconds, you know what I'm saying) but it's literal comfort

Everything about him is comfort

He's like what men think men should be but so much better

E.g. fixes stuff - lamps, chairs, bulbs

Has plans on doing renovation

He never does it but he insists that when he gets the free time-!

"Next weekend."

"Yoon, you said it last weekend."

"Yeah, and eventually I'll do it. Consistency is key."

If he's home and you're there cooks meals 100%

For some reason, I always think he's really into cooking breakfast

It's more likely for him to cook breakfast than dinner because he would oftentimes order it in

Soft lighting in the apartment, no overhead lights

His type of touching is subtle

When you're watching say a movie, he doesn't lean into you wholly but like sits and keeps a hand slumped on your knee

Listen to this - fleeting hand holding

If you're keeping your hand on the table and he's near, he'll stroke your hand for 3 seconds take it away and repeat

Touches your pinky with his - it's like saying "hey"

Now hear me out, gossip

Jimin is for sure the no.1 gossiper but Yoongi is not too far behind himself

You're getting the freshest hottest brew about every single idol and producer he finds repulsive

Not too big of an outdoors guy but he'll do literally anything for you so if you want to go on like a few-day retreat, you sit him down and ask him:

"Is this something you want?"

"Yes -ㅅ-"

"Be honest! Are you really okay with going away this weekend and doing absolutely no work?"

"You'll be happy -ㅅ- yes -ㅅ-"

Hates it but you're happy so he's happy

I think he gets a little bit insecure about his partner not being to be able to do a lot of things so he spoils them a lot - trips and rest days and such

Is a hypocrite though

If you drink a lot of coffee nags the shit out of you only to drink seven cups himself

And here's the hill I'm going to die on - really strict when it comes to eating sweets before proper meals

He might be chill when you say you're not hungry, it sometimes happens you know, but will not! have it! for you to eat candy before dinner!

"What are you - my mom?" you sneer as he shOVES a pack of gummy worms into a deep, dark corner of a pantry where it most likely will never see the light of the sun ever again

"I'll call her," he warns, stirring whatever he was cooking that evening. "Don't test me."

Fights with him are rare and very diplomatic

He treasures you a lot so he takes a logical stance and flat out states "we both could say something hurtful, let's take a breather"

If you're in a foul mood and anNOYED at everything and itching for a fight, he'll cock an eyebrow and just say: "Is that really something you want to be spoken out there?"

Sometimes gets you cute plushies

You once walked in on him reading omegaverse fanfic and no, there is no backstory, nor an explanation given

Holds an incredibly harsh critique of snacks

Tastes a chip, hates it, discARDS the packet with a "d i s g u s t i n g"

You will absolutely hear a fuck ton of "back in my day" and "these are not Korean nuts, these are x nuts, they're no good"

Somehow I think he shits himself more before meeting your friends than parents???

Because he knows how to get along with older people but your friends who are convinced he's going to cheat on you, he's nothing but another over-inflated popstar stroking his ego? not a clue, he's a lost boy

He's so humble and helpful that, of course, he wins them over

Probably has driven your friends somewhere where they need to be, like a reception, probably offered his car for moving purposes (does anyone else help their friends move in and out of places?)

When on long car rides absolutely tries to gaslight you by saying the most impossible shit like:

"Of course, there is."

"There are no rivers in the Gobi desert!"

"But there are! Ancient people, how do you think they managed to travel all that distance? It's because they got to the river and that replenished them halfway."

Actually just wants to talk to you and this is an easy way to do so

dRUNK Yoongi just think about it and enjoy, he's so giggly and smiley and probably calls out for you with annoying frequency

Your nickname is an inside joke, many don't think it's cute at all but you know better and that's what's important

JIN:

Gets irrationally shy even after dating you after a while, say, you're changing and he walks in, for some reason puts a hand in front of his eyes??

Definitely covers his body if you're checking him out

"Can we please have some respect? Some decorum?" he whines, neck flushing at an alarming speed

Annoys you a lot, he's the annoying boyfriend

Tells the most ridiculous things, like:

"______________, I was in the bathroom and I did this," flicks hair. "And wow, I'm just so handsome. You must be a very strong person indeed to be able to bear it every day."

His confidence is a Schrodinger's cat - half true, half - farce

Somedays he wakes up and doesn't feel it at all and hides away from you saying he's ugly right now

Please assure him a lot during that time

If you work too much he's the best remedy for that

Jin is wise and helps you see how your time is the most important thing, that you don't have to prove your existence to anyone and can occupy space without proving your worth over and over again

Conversations with him don't often delve into deep waters but at the same time you don't feel unheard because he listens very attentively even if he doesn't share these anxieties and concerns

Does, unfortunately, give you secondhand embarrassment quite often

Has and will wear ridiculous outfits that have people turning their heads around

You're trailing with him, hand in hand, head low and Jin's ears too are flaming like gasoline on fire but who is he to prohibit himself from indulging things

Most likely to want morning sex, I will not elaborate

He has a special soft smile for when he feels properly cared for and babied

Appreciates being given flowers, hair tugged behind the ear

He doesn't give a fuck what's a norm, it makes him feel nice, fuck you, he'll continue doing it

If you find fishing boring, sorry you'll have to put up with it

"I guess this will be our thorn, honey, you'll just have to endure this for love"

He takes no shit, not even from you but in return never, ever prohibits you from enjoying things

For example, diving into ice-cold water in a lake is not his idea of a fun time but if you enjoy it, he'll be by the side shivering with a towel and a thermos

Definitely, 100% rehearses meeting your parents and quizzes you on his

It is no surprise at all when you meet that both of you know just the right words, the right gestures

Jin loves his family and to be put in a conflict between you and them is a walking nightmare

So he does his best to avoid that

You often eat at very random places scattered throughout the town and sometimes out of it

One day it's a luxury five-star restaurant in a penthouse, the next you're sitting on a wobbly chair at a marketplace, eating a small vegetable or meat skewer from a plastic cup

But Jin always knows how to bring a good time, so both times are just perfect

HOSEOK:

Okay so if this makes sense but Hoseok is the type of boyfriend who wants you to improve

So he wouldn't be super clingy or overly protective or madly jealous but he shows his care by reminding you to do self-care

Like skincare routine, morning and night he's there to ask you if you did it

Or whether you ate well, why not, why are you neglecting care in your life

I don't see him as overly romantic like big-ass gestures but really consistent care from the start

Now hear me out and don't tussle, he partially views you as a responsibility and a project

and befORE YOU GET PITCHFORKS LEMME TELL YOU SOMETHING

He works hard, correct?

He's a strict teacher and absolutely works himself 100% for maximum improvement

And it's not like he's hovering over you like a helicopter parent, moulding you into a version of his liking I just think he wants you to be the person you really like

So obviously it depends on what your goals are but he's really quietly motivating you to do better for yourself

It may not sound most romantic but at its core he wants you to be happy and I think he realises that it doesn't always just means being loved by a close person

So he wants you to improve, feel better about yourself and feel better about the world in such a way

Because the world is a very dark place, it can't handle even more negativity

Kinky, 0 explanation iykyk

A hype man for sure

If you're ever feeling like you can't do something he'll convince you that at the very least there's not so much loss involved as you think

Handmade jewellery especially if he's been away for a long time

I imagine him sitting at a studio, taking like a 15-minute break and he's tinkering with beads, arranging them and stringing them into a bracelet tailored to your interests

Buys you clothes more than anything else say like a car or a house

He splurges reasonably

Though them triangle bags he had back in the day cost like 300 that's my whole rent homie

It's hard to read what he'd be like as a boyfriend but out of all most likely to feel like a friend with added stuff

Which isn't bad at all

I think he struggles between the view of love in the traditional sense he's been taught and interpreting it his own, more peculiar way

Buys subtly matching clothes

Has a private Instagram and definitely hypes you up there

If he's upset but not overtly mad, he'll lie in the bed and Complain using full VFX of Hobi sound effects

Somehow managed to friendzone you once

As an act of revenge, you did that as well and now has learnt his lesson

100% has inner demons but out of all is the most likely to not share it, above Yoongi, above all

He doesn't struggle with communication per se but struggles with understanding that he himself can have faults and he doesn't have to do everything alone

He holds people he loves in high standard hence why he's so insistent on self-care; on being the best you can be within your own eyes, so it makes complete sense that he holds himself up to the highest standard, cutting himself the least amount of slack

Makes you feel like you're the most hilarious person in the world but doesn't talk much at home

If you feel awkward at an event and pressured will leave immediately, I just have a sense about this

JIMIN:

Has a knack for jealousy but the type to end with you being railed the entire night with his jaw clenched

I know we all like his cute side but he can be scary

He can be standoffish and sharp he just mostly chooses to not be

He chooses the high ground though that doesn't always mean he wants to take one

So if you have an ex he particularly loathes he will be near poisonous to that person

But lets it go because it's not about them, it's about you and you deserve his undivided attention

He needs assurance a lot because I think he's convinced himself you'll leave because honestly, it's a hard lifestyle to tolerate in a partner

Touchy but listen to this his favourite is not hugging you but leaning into you

Because it can be so variable

Like cutely leaning onto you whining at you at a full volume or pressing his nose in your cheek with a smirk

I have a feeling he'd enjoy it if you have some temper

He hates fights, absolutely abhors them, and probably has fights because he didn't voice something in the first place because he didn't want to fight

But if you're mad at someone else? If you're angry and getting heated and being bossy?

He just ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

But he often has ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) he's in tune with his sensual side

Speaking of sensual, reads the most toe-curling, filthy romance books in his free time

I'm talking like casually sipping coffee and calmly listing through like a BDSM orgy

He's the type to try everything once, within reasons

Often when talking has a soft, whiny voice and holds a part of your body rubbing circles there

I can't imagine his flirty nature not getting him in trouble at some point

But he makes his commitment known in very intense ways

Like gripping your jaw, making eye contact and saying something along that he can't even sleep without you, you're in his bloodstream

Kind of corny but manages to make it sexy because it's Park Jimin

He wants to know everything about you - what you're thinking, why you're thinking it, what made you to be who you are now and who you want to be tomorrow

Desires to make eye contact

Steals more of your clothes than you do his

Drunk, kind of out of it dancing to slow, sexy songs is a MUST for him

In a way there are two parts to being loved by him which are very representative of his sides - one is cute and cuddly, wanting you to be happy, like an idealized version of kids being in love and the other one is hungry

He wants you in and out, if you're not his in the understanding that he knows you best, that he can please you physically and please you mentally by giving you comfort, he's not happy

Sentimental, probably secretly keeps tokens of yours from the beginning of the relationship

Has a copy of all your childhood pics, argue with a wall

The one true no. 1 gossiper, he knows everything about everyone like your workplace for example

He knows why exactly that co-worker of yours left for a two-week vacation and the reason is salacious as all hell while you could be sitting there - "I have a coworker by that name?"

If you're out and he sees someone being rude, will viOLATE them

His sense of humour could make a person suicidal fr

But unlike some, he uses his inside voice

Has things that annoy him in your relationship but I don't think he says it unless it's really bad

He lets small grudges pass hoping to preserve the balance

Because only the mere thought of you leaving terrifies him

Once Jimin ties himself to someone, genuinely, he doesn't want to let them go for nothing

If you're away for a long time, let's say going abroad or really busy with work, his emotions get the best of him and he gets quite upset

But he hides it and frankly somewhat succeeds

But you can also tell when you return home that he was missing you like crazy

He needs to be pampered then, reassured that everything's fine

Does everything you want even if it's not what he would usually do

If you feel like driving for a while to stare at the moon, he absolutely would

Seduces you over and over again

Partially I think the reason he changes up his behaviour so much is to make sure he's keeping you on your toes and you wouldn't leave

It's lowkey a phobia of his

It's so obvious he's dating you

You can just see the Love

Also if he would just stop glARING at strangers for bREATHING your direction, that would be great

Reminds you to do a lot of things but also needs those reminders as well

Often so tired he forgets to do basic things so you have to wrangle him to take a shower or brush his teeth before bed because he really works himself very hard :(

If you're on your phone when it's time to sleep will yANK it away like a mOTHER

Love to him means sticking together - always

TAEHYUNG:

bops

Oh, you're expecting an explanation?

You're not getting any :)

Very soft

Also very weird

Being his partner means being his interpreter at times

You two have probably developed a language of your consisting chiefly of sounds

Sends you a shit ton of selfies

Mostly stupid and often blurry

He's a blurry sort of guy

Has sent a selfie taken from underneath his nostril

You could be sitting at work and he sends you a wet, shirtless selfie

Cause he's a menace

Big enthusiast of having soft lights as well

It makes the atmosphere feel more intimate

Everything is about intimacy when he's with you

Emotional, spiritual, physical

Where Jimin is in love with love, Taehyung loves romance

So big, classic, romantic gestures are a part of the Kim course

Date nights are unavoidable even let's say you're in two different countries he'll find a way

Sometimes by spontaneously flying out, sometimes by arranging the most ridiculous zoom call known to man

Like the camera placed where you would sit across the table with a restaurant dinner in front

Buys you lingerie, jewellery and fancy clothes

Teases you about loving him

"Ah, ______________ your passion for me makes a guy shy."

Cue to you sitting like -_-

Cause by now you're tiRED

I imagine he does get on your nerves a lot but by weaponizing all of that infamous charm at this point you're convinced he could get away with breaching the Geneva conventions

Always looks at you like he's done absolutely NO WRONG

Even if it happened like 3 seconds ago

Gatekeeps you in a way

He wants you all to himself and he's afraid if you don't like his friends, you might end up not liking him as well

Really values your opinion of him

Has gone to a fortune teller to ask how your future would look like

When you're going through a tough time, he "lends" you his angel

Misses you like crazy when you're apart

And sometimes even when you're here

If he's miraculously drunk, you're not getting him off you

Fucking Clingatron 3000 over here practically treats you as a plushie when you go to sleep

If you're the more reserved type, he's simply over the moon trying to make you flustered

And if you're really cuddly, he invites it eagerly and joyously

Jump atop of him and he'll laugh head thrown back onto the bed

Absolutely the type to find you being angry quite cute, with the exception that you're not so mad you're breaking up with him

This is of course really annoying because what if you want to establish dOMINANCE

Well good luck with that

He'll just smooch you to pacifism

Is lowkey always horny

Has kinks but I do not have the strength to think about them

Every week attempts to cook a fancy meal which ends up being an inedible concoction tasting like an armpit sweat

Promises to not do it again but lo and behold next week!

Watches a lot of movies with you

Watches you if you're out

Really zones out when you're ordering or simply waiting for something

If you're both at home plays soft music in the background so he could pull you into dance at any time

Fresh flowers whenever the old ones wilt down :(

Brings you to a lot of hipster cafes late in the evening

Quite often says the most inappropriate shit at absolutely the wrong place and time

For example, you're about to throw the bins out and he casually lets it slide -

"What if we tried for a baby right now?"

Smiles at his phone when texting you

Recalling back to the finding you cute when angry, definitely smiles and chuckles to himself if you're being huffy and complaining about work or what some dumbass did today

Begs you to share food

The type to bump into you playfully when walking

If he's going to bed, you're going to bed (can't sleep without his plushie)

Increasingly ridiculous nicknames - honey, babe, dearest, flower, sweet bean, rice cake, jujubii (warps it to sound more cuter version of jujube)

Eats up every capitalized love celebration ever invented - white day, rose day, his own made - "our first kiss day"

Really sentimental in that way

I think he wants love to feel more like a movie than it necessarily is so tries his hardest to make that dream a reality

JUNGKOOK:

It is often and with an honestly worrying frequency that you think there is nothing but mii music behind those eyes

Zones out a lot

Stops mid-sentences

Sometimes forgets to listen when you're ranting

It's because he feels safe with you

He feels that he doesn't have to make perfect sense so his mind wanders a lot because he's very relaxed when with you

The type of guy who holds your legs crossed in his lap, one hand caressing your calf when watching a movie

Speaking of movies, yes, you probably have a whole list of tv shows to watch together

(which he absolutely cheats by squeezing in extra screen time)

But you know what he absolutely does

Plays the most horrible otome games known to man

I'm talking about the horse dating simulator, every and all butler romances in the app store

At first, it's just to make fun of it

But then naturally gets really competitive and complains quite hard if the butler he's supposed to be romancing doesn't like him

"Why are men so hard to please?" he growls, fingers gripping the phone so hard the knuckles are white. "I spent 45 diamonds on this dress and "okay" is all YOU CAN SAY?!"

Though you started the game together, he's the one to finish them because it's just slightly hard to develop a romantic interest in an anime pigeon for you but not for Jungkook

Does as he's told when it comes to chores - washing dishes, cleaning, laundry, does it all eagerly

If you're messy, nags you but doesn't go as hard as, for example, Hoseok

Before you stop by his apartment, 100% tried to make it more "palatable" for you

Meaning, shOVES those 7 mattresses of his lying around into a closet or something

Whilst he's pouring a glass of wine you hear a crash come from somewhere

"What's that??" you ask and he sweats, absolutely shits himself

"Nothing," he replies, voice squeaky

"Didn't sound like nothing..."

"...dON't even worry about it."

If he has to take out the bins and your high-heeled shoes are the only thing available, he'll be strutting down to the garbage like a Victoria's Secret model

Has switched those LED lights to red to try and dance sexily in front of you only to bump his crotch into the corner of a closet

You're 90% of his impulse control so if you're gone, expect to see him with one eyebrow upon returning

Has cried at least once about thinking how much he loves you

Turns up his hotness just to see what happens

Is HIGHKEY ready to go at any given point

Even if he's dead tired, he's like "just a quick, lazy sesh, okay 🥺🥺🥺"

If you're scolding him also does this 🥺🥺🥺🥺

Finds it absolutely hilarious and endearing if you're bossy

Obeys whilst giggling all throughout

Your ass is a source of comfort for him, it's not your ass it's OUR ass once you're with him

If you're close with your family, probably the one most likely to spend a lot of time with them (of course, only with you there cause he cannot handle that tension A L O N E)

When you first brought him to meet the fam, anytime you tried to leave he would look at you with a smile on his lips but wide panicked eyes, hissing:

"do nOT leAVE me"

"I need to go to the bathroom..."

"Hold it! for the love of gOD hOLD iT."

After a while, he's a bit more chill, the type to be brought along to every camping trip and cookout

Is probably used for labour by your relatives

No, does not send you memes, he's breaking the Gen Z stereotype as he's not attached to the hip with his phone

Makes a conscious effort to spend enough time with you

He can be weaponized to kill bugs, shoo away birds, glare threateningly at strangers

Gently wrestles you for fun

Really enjoys it if you take care of him, like put hair oil in his hair, massage his shoulders, cream his hands etc.

Doesn't like spending a lot of time hanging around somewhere so he whines in your ear

"Are you going to be done soon?"

"We just got here. I need to buy a new shirt."

"You have plenty at home and they all look great on you. Let's just go eat. There's online shopping for a reason."

Gets jealous a lot but never gets angry at you and quickly lets it go

Mostly pouts and fusses if he thinks you're being too friendly with someone

Sometimes utilizes you as weights whilst working out

Like makes you lay on top of him when he's doing push-ups

Adores if you try to manhandle him only to then show you how it's really done by taking a hold of your legs and hoisting you around his waist

You have had a talk about whether he'd choose Namjoon over you and the results of that debate were relayed to Namjoon himself who just looks at you both with a frown that says "what the hell are both of you on"

Gets lowkey combative if you have bad habits that impact your health like smoking, too much drinking, or not eating regularly

Health to him is very important in spite of you pointing out the hypocrisy of it

As he often fails to take proper care of himself

But he tries so he wants you to try your best as well

Makes a secret tattoo about you

Like your favourite flower, or a favourite thing

Similar to how Namjoon immortalizes you in a way, but on his flesh

Sings around the house but is too shy to give you concerts

Sneaks you into the studio, however, for you to express your opinion

Sneaks you into a lot of places

Like an afterparty or a press conference

A member will see you and wonder out loud:

"I think I saw _____ walking by."

"You're just getting old, seeing things," Jungkook replies trying not to seem too guilty

You can absolutely tell if he has a surprise planned for you

"Jungkook, are you planning to bring me on a secret date?"

"0.0 no 0.0"

If you're mercilessly destroying him at a game, he threatens to cry

Would get upset at you for something he dreamt

Glares at you over coffee cup:

"You said you liked Yoongi better than me."

"In a dream you Dumbo," you roll your eyes. "I'm literally making you breakfast."

He answers with a vague hum, then turns up his nose, all offended:

"Said you liked his hip thrust more."

Wants to adopt more dogs, so you'll have someone to keep you company when he's on tour :( and so that they could protect you in case of home invasion or stalkers

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mmmfanfiction · 10 months ago

Note

Hi‼️‼️ If it’s not that much of a problem, Could you do flippy/fliqpy with a Bat reader?? (Romantic plss) ok have a nice day/night byeeee

hello!! I’m really sorry it took so long to start this, and I truly hope that you enjoy!! I had quite a bit of fun with this one! I might even add more later!

Flippy/Fliqpy x bat reader

Flippy

🧸he’s kind of bummed that he doesn’t get to spend much time with you, given how your nocturnal.

🧸sometimes he’ll try to stay up late, to have more time with you, but he always ends up falling asleep. Of course, you’d try to do the same too, I mean who wouldn’t want to spend more time with this precious baby?

🧸neither of you really like loud noises, so I imagine you two have a few pairs of noise canceling headphones around the place, just in case things get to be too much.

🧸Flippy definitely put padding around corners in the house.

🧸has watched you trip over a coffee table before

“Omg, [name], are you okay!?”

“Yeah- this is normal-“

🧸if you don’t have glasses, he’ll sometimes urge you to get glasses, but is never pushy about it.

Fliqpy

🔪I feel like before you two started to date he definitely blew an air horn in your ear-

🔪however now he tries to be quieter, at least around you.

🔪if it’s too loud he’ll tell the person being loud to stfu

🔪has probably asked you to fly him somewhere before

🔪I don’t think Fliqpy minds you being nocturnal. He can honestly swap from being a day person to a night person pretty easily.

🔪definitely tells you to get glasses if you don’t have any, but in like a passive aggressive way

🔪like if you trip over something he’ll be like “get yo blindass some glasses idiot.”

🔪you can always tell when he’s near due to echolocation, so before you two started dating you’d often just fly into the air so you wouldn’t die as often.

🔪I just think that last one was a cool fact,

But Fliq does get pissed off you know where he is at all times if he gets within a certain radius of you.

#htf flippy #happy tree friends #htf #htf fliqpy #flippy x reader #fliqpy x reader

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bonecrowneddoe · 1 month ago

Text

So! I've been getting into Pokémon lately, as you might have figured out, and I wanted to create a list of my 10 favourite Pokémon! All of them will have at most a paragraph about why I like them, as to not have this run too long.

10-smolive

This, this rh? This is basically what I look like...so, so SO stressed, all the fucking time, and it is really really relatable and also, unlike me, this thing is really cute!

9-shinx:

Again-he just a cute little guy! Just a lil dude! He looks so happy and adventurous, and he just looks in general like the animal companion of the protagonist of a show I'd watch as a kid. And speaking of this line-

8-luxray

Look, does this choice make me look like an edge lord? Yes, a little...but like..!! Bro he's so cool!!I like the stripes, I like the mane, I like how it keeps the silly little star at the end of it's tail-he's more of an adult now, but he still has a bit of that silly little kid in him.

7-cofagrigus:

Look, I might well be the only person in the world who likes this Pokémon this much, but I don't care, it is so so so cool! The idea of a spirit possessing a tomb, presumably the one where it was buried? Very creative. And bro, the hands?? Look, I watch A LOT(too much...) Jujutsu kaisan and the evolution sega from fallen London(which is amazing, btw-look it up) impacted me STRONGLY, so I have an obsession for anything with a mass of writhing hands that is going to get you, so this Pokémon appeals to me strongly

6-decidueye:

Again, my only justification for this is "I think she cool :)", but like. She is!! She really is!! This Pokémon has a fucking VIBE, an aesthetic, and a 10/10 one at that. Bro, it's an spirit channeling owl archer nerd, that's just a cool concept-and also, frankly?? It looks like a nerd, actually! To be clear, it is cool, but it also looks like it watches anime-It's just that it has excellent taste in anime.

5-mismagius

Can you tell I like ghost types yet? :D I have almost nothing say about this one besides that it's an excellent combination of witch and ghost elements into a stylish, mischievous package. Excellent Pokémon.

4-noivern:

As you might have noticed, I like cool, "dark" Pokémon, but this one has the benefit of also just. Looking like a friend! It looks like, well, your buddy! It looks like you could ride it to your job and cuddle it to sleep while it cuddles you. Also, I love bats, so that helps. Plus, the megaphone ears are, in fact, a very cool idea-i like sound asked attacks almost as much as I like hand based creature design, and "what if a bat used it's echolocation as an attack" is a cool way to go about it.

3-hisuian typhlosion:

If you make that joke I will punch you

Now with that out of the way! Yeah I like typhlosion, and I LOVE the hisuian version of it even more. It just looks so tricky! So cunning! And the idea of it keeping spirits on it's neck and channeling their power for its fire? BRO that is so, so cool!!! Maybe the coolest idea on this list!

2-Delphox:

As you might have noticed, i think witches are so, soon cool. I also think foxes are awesome-however, that really *shouldn't* make this my second favourite Pokémon. But you know what? For some reason, I just really really like this! Can't explain why, but I do, and frankly I think that's valid, sue me.

1-scolipede

Reasons why I like this:

Just look at it!! It's perfect!!

Anyway, this has been fun! I should note that my rankings change very very often, those are just the 10 Pokémon I like the most rn. Frankly if you'd ask me in a week I'll probably give you a list with mostly different Pokémon-there are just so so many cool ones and I love a lot of them.

#pokemon #my favourite pokémon #top 10 list #decidueye #mismagius #cofagrigus #scolipede #noivern #hisuian typhlosion #shinx #smoliv #delphox #luxray

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an-avocado-at-law · 6 months ago

Text

(Matt Murdock RP blog ⁉️)

I'm Matt Murdock. A really good lawyer.

Foggy forced me onto this app, he said I could make more friends, not that I really need any, whatever makes him happy.

You need friends Matt! Not just me and Karen! - Foggy

Thank god for screen readers..

(( )) or (( - ooc

((so for people who dont know who matt murdock is, he is a masked vigilante who protects hell's kitchen at night. he goes by daredevil or 'the man without fear'. in the day he is a attorney-at-law with his friend foggy. when he was a kid he was trying to save someone from a truck, but he got hit with radioactive chemicals, blinding him but enhancing his other senses by a lot. (this is why he can randomly just throw away his cane and basically do parkour up buildings in the show lol). with these enhanced sense he can 'see' just not with his eyes (its kinda like echolocation in a way) ))

((im still watching the show so im still figuring out how matt acts,, sry if you dont like it lmao. im fucking ass at roleplaying im kinda just putting myself into the character))

((hi!! uh this is a rp blog for matt murdock, matt cant see little details (blog text) very well with his radar sense thing, especially on screens, so he'll be using a screenreader and speech to text for replying (not actually but yk cuz hes blind lmao) ))

((im gonna be open abt being daredevil lmao))

((matt uses he/him and blog admin uses they/he))

((please no sexual asks, admin is a minor.))

((im okay with swearing but if like every two words is you saying fuck then I might not interact 🥶))

((no homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, zionism, etc. here please, its a roleplay blog we do not need to get serious))

((if im missing any info please tell me))

((canon and oc blogs can interact with me, and blogs thst just wanna send asks))

((some headcanons for matt: ))

i think matt is bi,, like some scenes hes so clearly in love with foggy, "your not gonna kiss me" (he was talking to foggy) WHY WAS THAT YOU FIRST THOUGHT MATT?? /pos

he has foggy pick out clothes for him sometimes, they either look like complete shit or it makes him look really good

he secretly wants a dog to help him get around (even though he said he didnt want one to foggy), he probably loves dogs and their silly ways

he WILL not stop bugging foggy abt the time he said grande avocados (that was my favorite scene fr)

he almost said “fuck you, your honor” to a judge one time /hj

(for roleplay) he uses one of those braille keyboards to type sometimes

((okay i might edit this later, so check back every now and then!!))

((run by @overtlyonyx btw))

((have a nice day!))

#daredevil rp #matt murdock #matt murdock rp #marvel roleplay #marvel rp #mcu rp #really good lawyer #marvel #mcu #daredevil born again #ok to interact #matt speaks

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builder051 · 1 year ago

Text

Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies

—————-

Chasing Ghosts. Warning for drug mentions/implied drug use. Meant to be stupid and funny.

—————-

James sits at the table. He presses his cheek to its cool surface and wraps his arm around his head. He should go, he thinks. Somewhere. Not here. Or at least turn off the light.

The logical thing to do is plant himself in the bathroom and wait out his seasick headache. The thought of the bathroom sends James’s throat up to throb behind his clenched teeth. He won’t be turning off the light. He won’t be moving at all.

“It’s bad?”

Steve seems to have materialized in the kitchen. James doesn’t know how long he’s had an audience. He’d taken his hearing aids out a while ago. With his echolocation gone and his eyes hidden, James knows he’s a sitting duck. Not that Steve would ever hurt him. Well, not on purpose. He sometimes gets a little rough when administering first aid.

“Eh,” James says to the inside of his elbow. “You probably know better than I do.”

“Mm,” Steve muses. James imagines him stroking his chin in contemplation. “You have a headache and feel like you want to hurl?”

“Yeah…” James pauses to draw in a shaky breath. “I don’t know. When, I mean. If.”

“You never do know.”

There’s a scraping sound and a vibrating sensation as Steve pulls up a seat. James bites his lip. He’d rather taste blood than bile.

“I mean, I can guess. I can try to help. Hold your hair. Or a mop.” Now that he’s close, James hears the uncertainty in Steve’s voice.

“Yeah. Try consulting your magic 8 ball or something. ‘S as good as anything else.”

Steve gives a quiet laugh. “I would if I could.”

“Wait, what?” Tasha’s running up the hallway, her words going from muffled to sonorous. James pretends he doesn’t suppress an instinctive swallow. He can’t acknowledge what doesn’t exist. Logic bends as James’s head makes a particularly strong throb. He’s losing his grip on reality. He must be. Tasha awake and moving at this hour on a Saturday morning? James assumes it’s still morning. It was morning when his mild headache turned to extreme vertigo and sent him tilting toward a chair.

“Oh, hey, Tasha.” Steve says.

James forces out his own sound of greeting.

“Who has an 8 ball?” Tasha speaks quickly, tripping over her words. She’s probably on an upper already. Hopefully her very own, very legal Adderall. She has absolutely no need for cocaine.

“Nobody,” James groans. He lifts his head just enough to give his sister a scathing look. Her hair is piled on top of her head, and she’s wearing a bathrobe that hangs far to low in the front.

“I heard you—“ Tasha starts.

“No.” James shuts his eyes and bows flat to the table again, this time cooling his aching forehead.

“It was, you know.” Steve sounds slightly embarrassed. Maybe because he won’t leave the bedroom in just boxers. Whose dignity he’s still pretending to protect, James will never ask.

Steve clears his throat and goes on. “Like, the toy kind? Where you ask it a question and shake it?”

“Oh.” Tasha’s disappointed. She recovers in a beat and says, “I had one of those once. As a kid. It was dumb. It wasn’t right about anything.”

“I was thinking about ordering one on Amazon.” Steve puts too much positivity into his tone. The man will do anything to avoid a confrontation.

“If you really want one, just give me a few bucks. I can have it by tonight.” James sincerely hopes she’s joking. Well, not joking, exactly. He hopes she won’t do it, whether to spite him or any other reason.

“That won’t be necessary.” James sees Steve’s gluey smile projected onto the backs of his eyelids.

“Might help your headache.” Tasha pokes James in the shoulder. He grunts and swallows frenetically, determined not to lose control.

“Tash…” James sighs. “Just leave it.”

“If you say so.”

Silence briefly ensues, then a cabinet opens and the sink starts running. Then the table jiggles again as Tasha joins them. She sips her water, then casually asks, “What question were you going to ask, anyway? The 8 ball?”

“Oh.” Steve laughs.

“You can tell her,” James says, then breathes deeply and focuses on the feeling of his nose squashing as he rests his forehead directly against the hardwood.

“It was, um,” Steve warms himself up. “We were going to ask, uh, whether or not James is going to puke.”

“Hm.” Tasha sets down her glass. “Well, duh. You could’ve just asked me.”

“What sayest you?” Steve gives James the floor. Which he may or may not be about to soil.

James has reached his limit. If he speaks, if he so much as acknowledges his turn in the conversation, his jaw will unhinge and everything will fall to pieces. He steels himself and clenches his abdominal muscles as much as he can. “Yeah.” It comes out in a gasp that’s probably inaudible as he takes off in a rush toward the bathroom.

#fanfic #fanfiction #marvel #mcu #captain america #steve rogers #winter soldier #bucky barnes #black widow #natasha romanoff #natasha romanov #chasing ghosts #college AU #sickfic #emeto #tw drug use #tw cocaine #this is stupid and funny

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brandwhorestarscream · 1 year ago

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I want it all because I'm greedy :D let's go in whatever order you prefer? I just love reading this stuff

Let's start with Soundwave and Wavelength, because I have the most concrete idea for them

This Soundwave lost his carrier when he was a young teenager. His sire, Sound System (he's a good guy I promise, but millenia of isolation and depression made him very mentally unstable) had him kidnapped. He was trapped living in Iacon when Wavelength died, and he never learned what happened to him. He didn't even get to properly mourn. It's the thing that cemented his deep-seated grudge against the elite.

So now, here he has a second chance: presented with a version of his carrier that's been subjected to a fate worse than death. Merged with the destructicon's mothership, his personality and consciousness fragmented, scattered, ruined. They had tried to fix him, to coax him out of the ship's systems, but they never managed to succeed. Especially since Wavelength himself always tried to foil them: he wanted this. He didn't want to live anymore, but also couldn't bring himself to die while knowing his amica endurae and the rest of the destructicon movement still needed his aid. So he sacrificed himself, essentially taking away his own free will, and turned himself into a machine so he could be of service while still ending his own suffering. It brought on new horrors for him, but he wasn't conscious enough to decide which was worse.

Soundwave's honestly kind of impressed, but hates to see Wavelength like this. His carrier was always very softspoken and treated him with endless love, raising him the best he could despite his disability. They truly loved each other, and now he's got another chance. He sets out to extract him from the ship and put him back together, one nanite at a time. After all, if anyone could do it, it's probably Soundwave, and now Wavelength has no reason to resist. He can "see" Soundwave through the ship's systems, like I mentioned. His systems let him know about the temporal disturbances, how they've jumped dimensions. This is Soundwave, what his sparkling could have become if he'd been allowed to live

It's a painstakingly slow process, and it takes years. As Soundwave works, he talks to his carrier: the war is over, and his vow of silence is null. He's gotten so used to it though, that he still doesn't speak to anyone outside of Wavelength. In his world, when he was young, he used to talk to his carrier all the time, 24/7, to help him echolocate and find his way around, and also just because he really liked talking to him.

The first time Wavelength manages to say something back to him, it's a magical moment. The ship is alive all around them, cables moving about to help where they can, panels opening and closing and screens pulling up dozens of schematics and equations. One of the longer, sturdier cables that's implanted directly into his carrier's neural net snakes across one of the consoles and wraps around his wrist, and his carrier's jaw creaks as he goes, "souNd~WaVE!"

His face is still blank, frozen in that eternal scream of pain, but he says it again. "So-ouNdWAve!"

The cable on his wrist wraps tighter around him and the screens all explode with the same glyphs, listed thousands of times, blinking rapidly

Love you

Soundwave still wears his visor, so no one can see the tears, but they're there. It's been so many millions of years since he heard Wavelength's voice, since anyone had said those words to him, and he never dreamed of ever having another chance.

He continues his diligent work, and slowly Wavelength comes back. He slowly puts his mind back together, and his broken consciousness is slowly repaired, until he's able to start speaking and having small conversations again, and eventually, one day... he's fully released, and they get to walk out of the ship together 💖

#hindsight au #cross dimensional shenanigans #Wavelength #soundwave

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viridiankat · 1 year ago

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Oh??? Time to infodump about how I think they’d turn out!

Frida takes more after Jennika, she’s a hardass and the second eldest behind Raph. This child can fit so much perfectionism in her, I’d give her tekkō and color code her with yellow

I’m also going to emphasize the music aspect Jennika had, maybe her ninpo is leaning on sound waves and echolocation?

I’d probably make her a spotted river turtle, for no real reason other than they’re neat

NOW FOR THE SECOND SISTER, THIS IS FUN

Levinia, “Vee” for short, is based off of Venus! She’s the actual youngest, and she got yoinked into some version of dimension X as a child (if you want to squint at it, maybe the prison dimension?)

She’s a feral kid and she needs a hug, she’s VERY close with Raph, who coddles her and I can see her sitting on his shoulder while he does stuff. She has so much emotional baggage ❤️❤️

I’m making her a diamondback terrapin off of vibes, they’re really pretty turtles and I saw some that were really well socialized and were really excited to see me and they give off the same energy. Also, probably give them a teal?

Now, the oc that I accidentally named after Frida Kahlo before that was taken, Kahlo!

They’re a common musk turtle yokai, and have no connection to Draxum, they’re a red herring that doesn’t know for a while.

Kahlo was abandoned as a child and they picked up on stealing stuff to live, and they collect shiny trinkets and sell trash from humans like Eda

They run into Leo and he’s like “yoo a color coded turtle that can fight and stealth? Lost sibling real??” And they get adopted by the found family

..Draxum shows up like “lmao who the fuck is this,”

“You said we had 2 lost sisters, but this one isn’t a girl but it’s still applicable?”

“Why the hell would I mutate a musk turtle? They’re too small, and stinky.”

Kahlo has an identity crisis!

Like, imagine being alone your whole life and then you find the family that left you and you finally get what you’ve always wanted, and then you realize you’re a mistake at best, and a replacement at worst

Imagine how angsty I could make that!!! They’re named after the same person as Frida too, and !!!!!!!!

#rottmnt #i’m losing my mind #giggles #rottmnt au #tmnt oc #rottmnt oc

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lilykong · 2 years ago

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Things I want to remember about Lori

Among many memories:

When we were in 8th grade, we somehow got the inspiration to try out to be 8th grade commencement speakers. We had no business trying out for this - we didn't really like anyone and we didn't particularly have much school pride. But there must have been this inherent drive to make our mark at the school; maybe it was our way to do something together at school for the last time. I distinctly remember we AIM-ed a friend of mine for some inspiration, and he said to say something along the lines of how middle school is the "stepping stone" to the rest of our futures. We definitely put that in the speech and definitely didn't get chosen.

In 7th grade, I met Lori. I'm sure we met in 6th grade, too, but we didn't get close until 7th. She always brought these little tic-tacs to school that were individually wrapped. The tic-tacs looked more like Advil shaped and on contact with the tongue, tasted like marshmallows before mint. She always brought me one or two. She'd fiddle with the wrapper in her hoody front pocket, and by the end of the day, her fingers were metallic. I'm going to buy a bunch of those tic-tacs if I ever see them in the future.

In 8th grade, a group of us got to go to Catalina Island on a trip to learn about marine biology or something. I honestly don't remember much about the trip anymore other than learning about echolocation by crawling through a pitch dark tunnel and eating little bits of cooked squid. But the funniest thing I remember is that Lori and I decided that we would not take showers after snorkeling in the afternoon, because we'd go back in the water the following day. The following day, the showers were out of service, so Lori and I returned home with unwashed ocean hair (compounded over 3 days). My mom was not pleased.

Lori and I went to different high schools, but we still made it a point to see each other throughout the year. Definitely every summer and every winter. Our catch-up sessions always lasted for hours, and our favorite places to meet were Catalina Coffee and Coffee Cartel. She was such an amazing listener, and I always felt so heard and seen. I think we trusted each other at a young age.

When we were grown adults, Lori came to visit me in Berkeley when she was living in Napa. We went to an Allen Stone concert and decided to go out to Raven, which was the hottest club in SF at the time. At Raven, we ran into Lori's Coffee Meets Bagel date from earlier in the day, lol. He bought us drinks but Lori was definitely not very interested. To be honest, I don't have many memories of Lori from the actual club, but when Raven closed for the night, we somehow got ourselves out and called an UBER POOL (to save money). Lori sat in the back with two strangers, and I sat in the front. Once we got to my apartment, Lori was so knocked out, I had to lift her out of the car. I was not quite stable myself so we teeter-tottered a bit in front of said strangers and fell in unison onto the ground. It was so embarrassing, and we got scratched and bruised, lol. The funniest part of this continuous story is that the next morning, I woke up to Lori sleeping on the floor. When I stepped on the ground, I felt that it was damp and authentically thought that Lori peed on the ground in her sleep. Later, we found out that Strawberry Creek ran below the apartment building and it literally seeped up into my room, which is wild and a total housing code violation that we probably could have gotten rent abatement for.

Later into our adulthood, Lori and I got to fulfill our teenage dreams and became roommates in a dingy Berkeley apartment. She told me one day that she was considering adopting a dog and that if she did, she would write off dating for the foreseeable future. She was truly a woman of her word. She adopted Daisy, a spunky yorkie mix, and we co-pawrented her. She was an annoying (but cute) dog, and my blood pressure used to rise whenever she would bark without reason at just about anything. I will love Daisy in perpetuity though, because she will always be something Lori and I shared.

The image I remember of Lori - petite as ever, hair color of the month (pink or blonde balayage or black), skinny jeans, t-shirt (for some reason I imagine a striped shirt), cardigan, scarf, little backpack, and flats. Or shorts with leggings and flats. Bitten nails, aside from maybe one or two longer nails. And a hint of mustard yellow, of course.

Lori was generally a pretty quiet person but when she thought something was funny, she'd have a little explosive burst of laughter. And on the topic of her quietness, she was by no means a pushover. She had immensely strong personal convictions/integrity and drive (and stubborn).

Lori always sent cards - for the holidays, birthdays, big moments. Her message was always short and concise, but she never missed one. She also always sent a little something for Abbie.

She always called kids, kiddos, and called dogs, puppers.

I miss her so much already. Lori was kind of a time capsule for me -- a witness to the most insecure and awkward years as teens. The safest place to be in friendship. A vault of a confidant. Lori may have been the one who taught me loyalty and reciprocity in friendship. She could not stand to owe anyone a single dollar, even though there were moments I just wanted to shower her with love. I wish I did more for her. It really is true that when you lose someone, you think about the things you could have done while they were alive with you. I will miss you forever, Lori. Thank you for being one of the best friends I could have ever asked for.

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laxyaklovesloz · 8 months ago

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The Legend of Zelda: Real Courage | Chapter Fifteen: In the Secret Corridor

The path to Castle Town was pretty much straight through Hyrule Field, and therefore uninteresting. The town was split into six sections. An outer wall hugged an inner wall about ten feet across. Guards stood in various spots within the gap and upon the walls, but they looked bored and lazy. There hadn't been any conflict in Hyrule for decades; most of the soldiers probably haven't been in real combat.

Inside the inner wall, the town was divided into four quadrants and the center of the city. Each area buzzed with people, but it wasn't as crowded as Kakariko Village, for which Lila was grateful. Castle Town was small enough, it didn't need a bunch of people pressed together.

As far as she could tell, all of the soldiers who should have been patrolling inside the town chose to congregate in the taverns. The sheer number of bars surprised Lila the most. While Kakariko had maybe two, Castle Town boasted two taverns in each quadrant. The town was not protected in the least. That was something Lady Ganondra would like to know.

Then again, she had sent Lila to Castle Town to orient herself, not give him details of its weaknesses. With that in mind, she began seeking out various pathways from each gate to the castle, which she had not yet seen. She wanted to discover other ways to the castle other than the main gates. The main entrance to the castle was foreboding with guards and openness. It was maybe the only well-defended location in all of Castle Town.

Mori was the one who found the sewers.

"Really? Sewers?" Lila complained. They stood – or flew – outside the entrance.

"Really. Secret tunnels," Mori replied with snark. "Your mission."

"Alright, alright. Sheesh."

Once underground, Lila was immediately accosted by a miniblin, its tiny spear jabbed into her kneecap.

"Ow!" she shouted and kicked at the offender. Several others swarmed to take its place. "Get away, fiends!"

"Meenp meenp!" they shouted back.

She pulled out her sword and swiped at the miniblins, but they stepped back from her blade as easily as though she was moving through a thick liquid. Frustrated, she growled, "Go away! Mori!"

"What can I do?"

"I don't know! Something!"

Mori flew down in front of the miniblins and flapped his wings hard. That was enough to scatter the miniblins, hopefully for good.

"Thanks. I don't know why that worked, but thanks."

"You're welcome, I guess."

The two continued through the sewers. Most of the muck flowed along the bottom, and ledges allowed for clean travel. ("Thank the Goddesses.") The miniblins poked around but didn't approach again. ("Annoying little demons.")

When Lila and Mori exited the sewers, they were in a prison.

"Is this the castle prison?"

"Must be. I don't know of any others in or near Castle Town."

"Nice. Now we know how to get in."

"But how do we get into the actual castle?"

"Um..." Lila pointed down the one way they could go. "That way, of course."

"It's probably guarded."

"Probably not. Why would they defend empty cells?"

"They probably know about the entrance to the sewers."

"Oh. Good point." Lila stopped walking. "Wait, what's this?"

Where she had stopped, there was a small opening that was hardly visible. Mori flew into the space, and his wingspan fit perfectly. Then he disappeared.

"Where'd you go?"

"Come in and find out."

Lila stepped into the opening. She couldn't see a thing and placed her hand on the wall. With her fingers trailing, she followed the sound of Mori's wings. Her foot hit something.

"It goes up," Mori supplied.

Lila took the stairs. They went up about two stories and then there was an arrow hall, still pitch black. At the end of it, she bumped into the wall. She would have panicked if she didn't hear Mori on her left.

"Hurry up!" he muttered.

"We've been over this," Lila replied, going up even more stairs, "I don't have lechonotation like you."

"Echolocation."

"Whatever! I'm blind here."

"Poor humans."

"Poor armless keese."

"Hey!"

Lila chuckled. This stair wound in a spiral and seemed to go on over twice as long as the first one. When they finally reached the top, Lila's foot fell hard on the floor. "Ooh, that was a jolt."

"Shh, I can hear voices."

"Really?"

Lila walked forward slowly, trying to calm her breathing. She kept one hand on the wall and the other outstretched. Slowly she began hearing what Mori was talking about. She gasped.

"Zale..."

"Shh!"

The talking stopped. Lila's breath caught in her throat. She couldn't believe Zale was within hearing distance. Her heart pounded, making her ears ring. She wanted so badly to see him again, but she didn't know why.

A girl's voice said, "I didn't hear anything. Zale, keep telling me the story! How did the Hero save the Zora?"

"Well, Zelda, he had to get eaten by a giant fish."

The girl gasped and squealed. She giggled, and Lila could imagine her rocking back and forth in laughter. "You're teasing me!"

"Nope, it actually happened. The Hero was swallowed by Jabun."

"Lila, let's go."

Lila knew this story. She didn't care to hear it. She just couldn't stop listening to Zale. She closed her eyes and felt tears. Maybe if she made a loud noise, she would at least have an excuse to talk to Zale, to see him.

She shook her head slowly. Such thoughts were foreign to her. She didn't know why she was thinking this way.

"Okay."

She turned around and left.

#fanfic #fanfiction #legend of zelda #genderbend #Real Courage #LoZ: Real Courage

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sparkletastic-cookiedough · 2 months ago

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On one hand, Danny thought, being humiliated in front of some wealthy stranger would be his worst nightmare. The guy on the other end could be some sort of criminal, theres a lot of those in Gotham. On the other hand, the cash.

The cash is why he ends up DMing the stranger later that day.

The cash is why he ends up looking over the contract.

The cash is why he ends up actually considering it.

Danny forces himself to imagine the worst case scenario: the guy is an ugly, smelly creep who tries to get into Danny’s pants (or skirt, cause he’d be wearing the maid dress). Gross, but he’d fought living sewage before. He could put up with gross, especially if there was money involved.

And even if the guy tried to force himself into Danny’s… skirt… Danny was a half-ghost. He could fight back. And then blackmail the dude into keeping the whole “half ghost” thing a secret.

He’d still get the cash, and with that money, he could get so many new space documentaries.

If this was even worse- like some human trafficking thing- then Danny could fight whoever bought him, and potentially save lives.

Worst case scenario, the donor was Vlad. Danny had beat up Vlad before, and would do it again.

Was he really doing this? Was he really going to dress up as a maid for some rich dudes entertainment?

The answer? Probably yes, actually.

Just before he signed the contract, Tucker sent another message.

Apparently, the viral-ness of the meme meant he had a few alternative contracts. Each were worth a lot of money. Like, a surprising amount. They just varried on who they were for.

Most were from strangers with screen names Danny didn’t recognize.

“FuckSuperman” wanted him to go to metropolis.

“TuxedoStyle” wanted him in Gotham. As did “RomanEmpire” and the original donor, “NotAReplacement”

Oliver Quinn had offered under his real name.

Vlad had made an offer. Danny would not be doing anything with that one.

There were also offers that were clearly fake, or jokes.

Thirty different Batman accounts offered him money to do tasks ranging from “wax the Batmobile” to “let me scream at you so I can see your face, I’m a bat and have echolocation, eeeeeeee”. Many offered to pay Danny in “Bat-dollars” or “delicious delicious mosquitoes”

Danny hoped the actual Batman saw these. Serves the guy right for having such a dumb theme.

Danny considered his options.

He was definitely going for that screaming Batman. After all, the guy was funny.

After losing a bet, Danny has to spend some time acting as a maid for Tucker (including wearing a full maid dress, where the heck did you even get that, Tucker??)

And as if that wasn’t mortifying enough, it turns out that he accidentally was visible through a partially-open door during one of Tucker’s streams.

…

Tim Drake choked on his drink. There, hidden in the background of a tech streamer he’d been watching, was the cutest boy he’d ever seen, wearing a maid dress.

He immediately queued up a sizable donation and a message.

And now it was Tucker’s turn to choke on his drink at what he saw show up on screen.

#dpxdc

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casspurrjoybell-29 · 1 year ago

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Healing Ties - Chapter 23

*Warning: Adult Content*

Fanner followed Cookie through the dark woods.

It was eerily reminiscent of his nightmare, at least until they got far enough from the settlement that Fanner felt safe throwing up a ball of mage-light and it properly illuminated their surroundings.

Interestingly Cookie also walked much more confidently now that they had light.

Despite her lack of eyes, she didn't seem unaffected by darkness.

Fanner had assumed she navigated by echolocation or something.

He didn't really know what that was but he had read a book that said that was how bats avoided obstacles and found food in the dark.

The woods were less scary now that they had light but Fanner was well aware that this was still extremely dangerous.

There could be monsters lurking anywhere.

But... maybe these areas were less dangerous than some of the ones he had travelled through with Yore?

He didn't understand everything very well yet but it seemed like there were some territories that were actively inhabited by a group, like the area The Inn had been in or the area Yore lived in and others that were blocked by natural barriers.

It was the latter that they had run into danger in, both times.

Though, actually, Fanner wasn't sure whose territory he was in right now, if anybody's.

In the dark, with Cookie leading him on a winding path through the cabins, he hadn't really known which direction they'd exited the settlement from.

Maybe she was just leading him deeper and deeper into the wilderness.

This was a bad idea.

He was going to get himself killed.

But... maybe that was fine.

Maybe he didn't care all that much anymore.

As long as it was quick.

Death was better than becoming a dangerous burden.

It still made him feel sick to think about the fact that he'd killed Whelan but if he had killed a child, if he had killed his own nephew...

How could he have lived with that?

If Jasper hadn't bitten him, he would have done it.

Cookie just kept walking.

Every now and then she'd turn and lead him off in a slightly different direction but she seemed to be moving purposefully.

She was taking him somewhere... probably?

They crossed a shallow stream, scrambled up a rocky hill and then Cookie stopped and chittered.

Something stirred at the edge of the shadows.

A breath caught in Fanner's throat and he took a step back as he pushed his mage-light forward, illuminating a large, naked man.

The man lifted a bloody hand clutching a knife up to shield his eyes from the light.

Fanner wanted to run but Cookie stood calm and still at his side.

He put a hand on her clammy shoulder and held on tight.

The man blinked as his eyes adjusted to the light and lowered his hand.

"Oh, hey. What're you doing out here?"

Fanner couldn't speak.

Should he run?

There was a naked, bloody man holding a knife in front of him but he seemed... friendly?

"Oh, you're Fanner, right?" the man asked. "Danya's brother?"

How did everyone know who he was?

Fanner nodded.

"Yeah, Yore told me what happened. Crazy."

He scratched his nose and then made a face when he remembered the blood on his hands.

"Oh, Yore's my brother, by the way."

"Oh," Fanner said. That made sense.

Yore was a very large man and this man was also quite big.

"Nice to meet ya. I'm Slone."

Slone looked down at himself and grimaced.

"Sorry, I don't blame you for bein' scared. I'm a bit of a mess. I got a deer I was in the middle of gutting."

Fanner guided his mage-light further towards Slone and it illuminated the figure of a deer hanging from a tree behind him.

"Oh. I'm Sorry, I..."

"Nah, nah, it's fine. No trouble. Is that Cookie, is it?"

Fanner looked down at Cookie and nodded.

"Yeah, Yore told me about her, too. Nice meeting you as well, Cookie."

Cookie chittered.

So she could hear, then?

"So, Fanner, what brings you out here in the middle of the night?"

"Oh, um, I was looking for Yore, actually," Fanner said. "Could you, um... would I... c-can I see him?"

"Ah. Hmm..." Slone said.

"Okay," a voice said from behind Fanner and he jumped and turned around. "I guess it's about time I showed myself."

It was Hamish.

Had he followed him all the way from the settlement?

"Hey, Hamish," Slone said. "Wasn't sure I should say anything about you lurking in the bushes."

"I thought you probably knew I was there," Hamish said. "Sorry, Fanner. I was on watch when I saw you sneak out. I wanted to know what you were up to."

"I... I just want to see Yore," Fanner said. "Please."

"So urgently it couldn't wait until morning?"

Fanner dropped his gaze.

"I didn't think anybody would take me."

"I suppose it would depend on why you want to see him. We want to help you and I'm sure Yore does too, but he has a lot of other responsibilities."

"It's important. I promise. I wouldn't bother him for no good reason."

"Hmm," Hamish said. "What do you think, Slone?"

"I reckon we should let him talk to Yore. Whatever this is about, he's the best one to sort things out."

"Agreed," Hamish said. "Do you mind going with Slone, Fanner? I mean, you don't really know me any better than you know him but I'm not naked or covered in blood."

"Oh, um, no, it's okay," Fanner said. "I can go with him. If he's Yore's brother, I'm sure he's a good person."

"I mean you're not wrong in this case but I've known some great people with some awful relatives," Hamish commented. "Do you mind taking him, Slone? I know you're sort of in the middle of something but I don't trust myself to find your settlement in the dark."

"Oh, yeah. I'm not done with the deer yet but I'm sure it'll be... hey," Slone said as they turned and found Cookie, awkwardly angled so that she could the entirety of one of its hind legs down her throat.

There was a lizard that looked a bit like a gecko but was around the size of a small cat hanging from the side of the next tree over, watching her.

It was light blue with black and white markings and it was emitting a gentle glow.

Cookie slid her mouth off the deer's leg.

"Show off," Hamish murmured.

"Sorry," Fanner said. "She likes to put things in her mouth. I know it's a bit gross but she doesn't have any teeth so she can't do any real damage."

"All right, I'll trust you then, Cookie. If you keep yer mouth off it I'll give you some of the offal. You like offal?"

"She seems to eat anything that fits down her throat. What about, um. Is the lizard...?"

"Ah, the lizard's fine. They just eat bugs. Normally moths drawn to 'em by their glow but if you're butchering something they'll come on over and wait around to see if anything else is drawn in by the smell."

"Oh, um. Don't eat the lizard, okay, Cookie? It's cute."

Cookie chittered, sat down on the ground and shoved a fistful of bloody dirt into her mouth from below where the deer was hanging.

"Huh? She really does eat everything," Slone commented.

Hamish walked over to Cookie and patted her on the head.

He lifted his hand, surprised at the feeling of her skin and then patted her a few more times, enjoying the pap, pap, pap sound it made.

"I'll stay here and make sure there's no mischief while you're gone, then I should head back before everyone starts to wake up. I don't want anyone to panic if they wake up and Fanner's not there."

Fanner dropped his gaze.

"I'm sorry. I... I know I shouldn't have but I... I don't know."

"I'm not cross and I don't think anyone else will be either but it was a very dangerous idea. Okay?"

Fanner nodded.

"If there's a problem, talk to someone next time. You're not alone anymore, Fanner."

Fanner took a shaky breath in.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Hey, no, I'm not trying to tell you off. It's just dangerous out here and it's easy to get lost, especially at night."

Fanner swallowed around a lump in his throat and nodded.

He still couldn't look at Hamish.

Hamish sighed.

"Don't worry about it. You go with Slone. I'll stay here and maybe Cookie can give me some tips on deep throating."

Fanner wasn't sure what that last part meant but he was fairly sure it was a joke so he ignored it.

"Thank you. And thank you for making sure I was safe."

"No problem. Say hi to Yore for me."

Slone stabbed his knife into the side of a tree and looked down at his hands.

"Hmm."

"Oh, can I...?"

Fanner reached out.

"Oh, sure," Slone said, offering Fanner his hands so that he could brush away the blood with his magic.

Slone smiled.

"That's so useful. Thanks."

"You're welcome," Fanner murmured.

"All right, ready to go?"

Fanner nodded.

"Yes. I'm ready."

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kammartinez · 1 year ago

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”

Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.

While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.

“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.

In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.

The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.

One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.

“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”

Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.

“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”

Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.

“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”

Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.

CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.

In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.

The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.

About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.

The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.

Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”

A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.

As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.

We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.

“I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.

Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.

The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.

On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called CETI 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.

Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.

The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.

“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.

Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan—the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.

I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.

“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.

Every sperm whale’s tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is CETI’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.

Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”

When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project CETI, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of e-mails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first e-mail David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”

A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)

The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.

Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.

Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.

“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.

The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.

“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”

After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.

The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale,” it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.

At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)

Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle—“a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing “Moby-Dick.” (His personal copy of “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”

“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”

The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.

Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.

Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”

The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.

If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.

When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.

A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)

Roger: 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 9I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 11I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I, 11I, 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3

The “conversation” continues along much these same lines, until Rita finally changes her tune:

Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 12R, 10I, 10I, 9I, 9I Rita: 9I, 8I

Not long ago, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite “Moby-Dick” from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled “Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale.”

In Moby-Dick’s “Moby-Dick,” the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.

“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote:

I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.

In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:

Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.

As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)

In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.

Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.

“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.

In addition to bugging individual whales, CETI is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.

One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and CETI’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy SEAL, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment—essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.

The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for CETI. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of CETI’s Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on CETI 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.

The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the CETI team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.

A sperm whale’s head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “big-headed blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.

Instead, I joined the crew on CETI 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.

Earlier that day, the crew on CETI 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation.

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.

The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.

To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.

“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.

“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.

What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).

“I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next,” Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.

“The pilot whales are just being pilot whales,” Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great “struggle for existence,” everyone on board CETI 1 was on the side of the baby.

The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat’s refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby’s mother as Rounder.) “So that’s good news,” he called out.

The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.

“There will never be a day like this again,” Gero said as CETI 1 headed back to shore.

That evening, everyone who’d been on board CETI 1 and CETI 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. “Let’s hope we can learn the language with that baby whale,” he said.

I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of “The Lion King,” when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.

“Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period,” he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.

“You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren’t here?” Gero asked. He said he didn’t even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.

“That’s a nice story,” Mevorach interjected.

“I just like to throw ideas out there,” Gruber said.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there’s a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There’s also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says “NERD XING.”

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL (pronounced “see-sale”), is a roboticist. “There’s such a crazy conversation these days about machines,” she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. “It’s either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct.”

Along with several other researchers at CSAIL, Rus has been thinking about how CETI might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?

“We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization,” Rus told me. “Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make.”

She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle’s plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.

“We need new methods for collecting data,” Rus said. “We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we’ve been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see.”

CSAIL is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. “People here are kind of audacious,” Rus said. “They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference.” She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.

“The question I’ve been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry,” Rus said. “Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, ‘I’m going up’? Or can we get them to say, ‘I’m hovering’? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure.”

While we were talking, another CSAIL professor and CETI collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. “I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem,” he recalled. “And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, ‘Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here’s a weird translation problem.’ ”

Andreas told me that CETI had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero’s archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. “The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger,” he said.

“The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ” Andreas went on. “Duality of patterning” refers to the way that meaningless units—in English, sounds like “sp” or “ot”—can be combined to form meaningful units, like “spot.” If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.

The question of whether any species possesses a “communication system” comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner’s, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor’s theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim’s interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp’s progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as “banana me eat banana” or “tickle me Nim play.” Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn’t really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.

“The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim’s ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence,” Terrace wrote.

Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species—orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins—have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts—Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot—became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.

Language is “a uniquely human faculty” that is “part of the biological nature of our species,” Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion.”

Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the CETI team said they’d rather not talk about.

“Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated,” Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. “For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages.” Sperm-whale codas “might not be as expressive as human language,” he continued. “But I think whether to call it ‘language’ or not is more of a formal question.”

“Ironically, it’s a semantic debate about the meaning of language,” Gero observed.

Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as “linguistic competence”? And who—or what—gets to decide?

“When we say that we’re going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?” Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to CETI, asked.

“Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for CETI—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.”

Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean “we’ve realized what the pattern of their speech is. It’s not satisfactory, but it’s something.

“What about the goal of understanding?” she added. “Even on that, I am not a pessimist.”

There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world’s oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It’s often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.

Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world’s remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who’d been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called “songs.” In 1970, he arranged to have “Songs of the Humpback Whale” released as an LP.

“I just thought: the world has to hear this,” he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the “Save the Whales” movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a “flexi disc” version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a “moratorium” on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.

Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the CETI team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought CETI was so important.

Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate “ourselves and our fellow humans” to combat these threats?

“Inspiration is the key,” Payne wrote. “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers—no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be—the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”

Several other CETI team members made a similar point. “One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans,” Bronstein said. “If we understand—or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication—that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth.”

“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star,” Gruber told me. “The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that CETI could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’

“This project is kind of an offering,” he went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?”

ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:

I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace.

#science #biology #technology #artificial intelligence #ai #language

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