#her ex wife went missing and is very likely a murder as of her knowledge

[monards]

wonder if dove’s fire arm was legally owned

[procrastinatorimagines]

I Want Us Part 3

Fandom: SVU / One Chicago

Series: I Want Us

Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 // Part 5 // Part 6 // Part 7 // Part 8 // Part 9 // Part 10 (Final)

Pairing: Carisi x Reader

Warning/s: kidnapping, guns/shooting

Word Count: 2,602

Summary:  When a child abduction case crosses state lines in New York, Intelligence flies out to meet the Special Victims Unit and track down the missing boy. With the clock ticking, both units decide to mix up partners in order to combine their knowledge of the case with knowledge of New York City, pairing Intelligence’s newest member Y/N with Detective Carisi. After a successful stakeout the pair finds themselves on the tail of the suspect, determined to bring him to justice and bring the boy back home.

Tags: @the-baby-bookworm​ // @inlovewith3​ //

Action came sooner than you were expecting, both you and Carisi silently agreeing that the gun shots that sounded from inside the building constituted absolutely necessary as burst from the car, gun out your holster in seconds as you peered around the fence.

A man was running out of the building, Ronny you assumed by the child he was forcefully dragging along under his left arm. Even in the available light, it was clear both were unharmed, the metalic glint of an object in Ronny’s right hand causing you to make the fair assumption that he’d fired the shots you heard.

There was no way to sneak up on him, but soon you lost all need to as he paused by the car he’d arrived in, hesitating before frantically looking around and taking off down the road and into the night.

“We can’t lose him,” you said forcefully, both of you making your way quickly to the entrance of the bar just as another car rolled up. Halstead and Rollins jumping out.

“We’ve got Ronny and Logan, there are at least two men inside, potentially injured,” Carisi told the others, you and Halstead sharing a nod as you followed Carisi down the street, hearing the others disappear into the building followed shortly by a request for two ambulances to their location over the radio.

You followed just behind Carisi, hands gripping your gun as you made your way down the street, footsteps echoing in the silent night. Ronny had heard, glancing back at you before picking up his pace, but if your footsteps could be heard down the road, Logan’s cries and shouts were unmissable. He disappeared around a corner and you lowered your gun slightly in one hand, sprinting with Carisi, the sound of Logan’s despair all the motivation you needed to not slow down for a second.

Not only had this man abducted his own child, he’d just shot two men in front of him. You didn’t understand how anyone could do that, and you never wanted to.

As you reached the corner Carisi signaled for you to hold back, checking the coast was clear before you took off running again, Ronny still on the move. He was getting slower though, you realised, and you weren’t surprised given the uncooperative child under his arm.

He peeled off down and ally as you continued to give chase, seemingly trying to lose you both with his various twists and turns. It wouldn’t work though, you had him now and he wasn’t getting away.

Stopping again to check the coast it was your turn to peer around the edge of a wall, your head barely going an inch before you jumped back, brick breaking off where your head had just been.

“Dead end,” Carisi whispered to you, apparently knowing where you were. Ronny was trapped, which may have been worse you realised with a sinking feeling. He was already a desperate man, and desperate men often thought they had nothing left to lose.

“Ronny!” You called down the ally, your voice bouncing off the stones as Logan’s sobs quietened. “Ronny there’s nowhere else to go, just put the gun down and let us take you in, it’s over, no one else has to get hurt.” You tried to sound demanding but it came out as more of a plea.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said back, though it sounded like he was talking more to himself than you, “he’s my son, mine! He should be with me, it’s what I deserve-”

Your blood was boiling, knowing full well that all that man deserved was a jail cell. Still, you could tell he was unravelling, and that wasn’t good for anyone, least of all Logan. With a ‘trust me’ look to Carisi you holstered your gun, taking a breath as you stepped out into the opening of the ally, in full view of Ronny and his gun.

Carisi’s eyes went wide in protest and he reached out to pull you back but you shook your head at him. Looking down to Ronny and Logan, you were staring down the barrel of a gun, hands raised as Ronny stood frozen, not expecting you to be so stupid probably. You got that a lot.

“Hey Ronny, hey Logan, my name’s Y/N, I’m a detective with the Chicago police department,” you told them, keeping your hands where he could see them at all times. Out of the corner of your eye you saw Carisi with his finger on the trigger, ready to jump in if this got out of hand.

“Don’t come any closer!” Ronny waved the gun in his hand at you.

“I won’t,” you told him, “okay, I just want to talk okay? See if we can figure this out huh, so how about you tell me what happened?” Make him think you understand him, sympathise with him, make him think your on his side and let his guard down, de-escalate the situation.

“He’s my son, but she wouldn’t let me have him, wouldn’t even let me see him when I was inside, and when I got out... a restraining order?! What gave her the right? No... no no no, so I took him, I took what was mine and I came here, O’Connell promised- he promised!” Ronny ranted as you tried to keep your features neutral as images of the beat down he’d done to his ex wife flashed through your head.

“He lied to you, broke that promise,” you prodded, trying to sound indignant on his behalf so he’d open up more.

“Yes! Said there was too much publicity, he wouldn’t risk getting us out the country, I mean the selfishness- I did what I had to do,” He told you, gun lowering slightly as he poured out some of his frustration.

You inched yourself forward a step, then another, noticing Carisi practically stop breathing from where he stood, completely alert and ready to step in.

“And he shouldn’t have done that, okay, I get it, you’re the victim here alright, so why don’t you put the gun down and we can talk about that huh,” you tried, “it’s clear you love your son okay? Look at him Ronny, look at how scared he is.”

Ronny glanced down at his boy as you took the chance to take another couple of small steps. He was shaking and pale, snot and tears covering his face as his bottom lip shook uncontrollably.

“No!” Ronny snapped, gun back up at you as Logan shrunk back in fear, “you’re scaring him, this is all you!”

You level your breathing and straightened up, “I’m not the one holding a gun Ronny,” you said with a scary calm, watching the realisation dawn on Ronny as he looked from the gun in hand, to his son, who was staring at the weapon with trepidation.

“I...” he floundered. Was he a monster? Yes, but every monster had a weakness.

“Give me the gun Ronny,” you told him as he glanced from it to you, not really registering how much closer to him you had been in the beginning.

“You’ll take me back to jail, I can’t go back to jail,” he muttered, but the gun looked suddenly very heavy in his outstretched hand as he weighed the decision in his mind.

You were very close to him now, so close that what happened next was too quick for Carisi to react to. Logan took that moment to bolt, his father’s grip on him slacking enough for him to break free as he ran past you to try and get away. You didn’t blame him for a second, if you were his age you would have done the same thing, you’d even been anticipating it.

So when Ronny’s focus snapped back, rage filling his eyes again as he now viewed you as someone else trying to keep him from his son, grip tightening back on his gun again with a new found purpose as he began to take aim, you were ready.

Carisi barely had time to step out from around the corner, gun raised but unable to take a clear shot as a small boy collided with him, hiding behind his legs as his father let out a cry of anger.

Ronny was fast, but you were faster, catching his wrist and twisting it around so you ended up behind him, his arm behind his back as you aimed a kick to the back of one of his knees, knocking him to the ground. Ronny tried to twist but you was it coming, shoving him forward so he lost balance and sprawled onto his front on the floor. You kicked the gun across the floor and out of his reach, planting your knee on his back as he struggled, grappling with his wrists as you cuffed him.

“Ronny Parker, you’re under arrest for kidnapping and attempted murder,” you told him, looking up and grinning at a relieved Carisi just as the glorious sound of sirens could be heard approaching from down the street.

Carisi put a comforting hand on Logan’s head as he continued to hug the man’s knees, shaking his head at your actions as you hauled the protesting Ronny to his feet.

Logan looked away as his father was brought past him, struggling to get away from you as you held him fast.

“That was... reckless,” Carisi commented, earning a smug wink from you as you passed Ronny off to a couple of uniforms that had arrived on the scene, the rest of Intelligence and SVU in tow.

“It’s her middle name,” you heard Antonio say, turning to see him approaching with Voight and Benson, who carefully coaxed Logan away from Carisi’s legs.

“Well Logan’s safe and Ronny’s going back to jail for a long time, good job guys,” Benson congratulated you both.

“Honestly Cap? All her,” Carisi told her, gesturing with his head in your direction as Antonio clapped you on the back. You put your hands in your pockets, accepting the praise as you tried to cover up the fact that your hands were shaking.

“Good job detective, you ever consider a change of scenery you let me know,” Benson told you.

“You trying to poach my detectives?” Voight asked and Benson chuckled, saying something to a uniform before Logan was escorted back to a vehicle. He seemed a little reluctant, but at the mention of his mom he couldn’t have moved quicker if he’d tried.

You smiled as you watched Logan wander off, back to his family and his home. You wanted to go with him, but you knew you’d have a lot of paperwork to do before the night was actually over, and it was already past 3 am.

“Hey,” Carisi appeared beside you as he removed his vest, “want a ride back to the station?”

You took a breath of the not so cool night air, sweaty from the heat and the chase, in desperate need of some food and a shower, then sleep. But you weren’t finished just yet, so you gave an appreciative nod to Carisi and let Voight know that you were going to make your statement and write up your report.

He let you go and soon you were making your way down the street with Carisi, back to your car near the bar, which was currently swarming with police and forensics. Carisi greeted a few of them in passing and before you knew it you were driving back to the district.

“Your gut was right afterall,” Carisi noted. You’d found Logan, he was safe, and Ronny wasn’t going to ever be able to hurt him again. It had been a long night, but you’d done good, so you allowed yourself a moment of satisfaction.

“Hell of a night, but yeah I guess so,” you replied, staring off out of the window as the buildings and lights passed by. New York was something else, and you wished you’d gotten a chance to see more of it under better circumstances, and during the day, but it had certainly been memorable.

Your hands weren’t shaking quite so much anymore, but jumping in front of a man with a loaded gun had certainly rattled you more than you’d let on. It had been reckless, more so than usual, but your need to protect Logan and get Ronny behind bars had overridden that bit of sense. It had paid off this time, but you really did have to be more careful, or so Antonio kept telling you.

You turned back from the window when you noticed Carisi throw you a couple of glances as he drove. “You know, there’s a pizza place not too far from here, they’re not gourmet, but they are open this time of night.”

Before you could answer, your stomach growled, earning a laugh from Carisi as he changed course, discussing the best toppings as he did.

Soon, you were both back at his desk at the district, a couple of others had came and went, offering pats on the back for a job well done, but you and Carisi found yourself talking even further into the night until both the paperwork and pizza were done, feeling very satisfied.

“I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t the truest representation of the best New York pizza,” Carisi laughed, throwing on his jacket as you both got up to leave.

It was going on half 4 in the morning, and any food and drink you had after dark hit differently, especially after a long case on a nearly empty stomach. “You won’t hear me complaining,” you replied.

God, you needed a shower, you thought as you put your jacket over your arm, knowing that it would just feel way too uncomfortable and hot to put it on. Voight had booked you all into some cheap motels for the night, but the picture Vanessa had sent you earlier on was making you dread the experience. Carisi had visibly cringed when he’d seen it.

“I know I should probably head to sleep when I get home, but I’m still a little too wired,” Carisi said as you made your way towards the exit.

“I know what you mean,” you told him, eyes and mind still wide awake after the events of the night.

“What, not looking forward to getting back to your five star accommodation?” He teased and you rolled your eyes.

“God don’t remind me,” you complained, earning a laugh at your expense, “but it’s either that or sleep on the street... though the street might actually be more appealing.”

A odd kind of silence filled the elevator then, neither of you seeming to know what to say next before the doors dinged open and you wandered out back into the night, or well, more like very early morning.

“You could... stay somewhere else?” Carisi offered, half awkwardly half suggestively. Was he, suggesting what you thought he was?

Your heart skipped a beat, taking in Carisi as he stood before you, a look on his face that definitely told you he was unsure of whether he should have said that or not. You were still wired, and you’d had half a mind to do a quick workout back at the motel to let off some more steam to try and take a grimey shower and sleep, but that was before you now had another option...

“Lead the way,” you answered, smiling as he did too, your night in New York continuing to surprise you in the best possible ways...

[latenightsleuth]

West Mesa Murders: Theories differ on the identity of the West Mesa Bone Collector, or if he even exists

On Feb. 2, 2009, Christine Ross was walking her dog Ruca in a suburban housing development on Albuquerque’s West Mesa when they found a bone. Realizing it was a human femur, Ross contacted the police. As they investigated the area where the body was buried, authorities uncovered the remains of 11 women and one unborn child.

The women had gone missing between 2001 and 2005 and were similar — most of them were sex workers, most of them were Hispanic, and all of them were murdered. Authorities believe that a serial killer was responsible for the deaths, but in the almost 12 years since the crime became known, no suspects have ever been named.

The Albuquerque Police Department considers the West Mesa murders an active investigation, but as time goes on, it seems less and less likely that the city will ever learn who killed the women — or whether they are the only bodies buried on the mesa.

BONES ON THE MESA

In 2005, Albuquerque police detective Ida Lopez compiled a list of missing women after noticing that an inordinate number of women with ties to drugs and prostitution had vanished off of the city’s streets. Four years later, ten of them — Jamie Barela, 15; Monica Candelaria, 22; Victoria Chavez, 26; Virginia Cloven, 24; Cinnamon Elks, 32; Doreen Marquez, 24; Julie Nieto, 24; Veronica Romero, 28; Evelyn Salazar, 27; and Michelle Valdez, 22, who was four months pregnant when she was killed — were found buried on the mesa. The other one, Syllania Edwards, was 15 and had run away from her foster home in Lawton, Oklahoma.

The area where the bodies were found had been barren, empty land before housing developments began to encroach on it in 2006. The 2008 Housing Bubble collapse, however, halted that development before it reached the burial site. Before it ceased, the development had covered an existing arroyo, and complaints of flooding from nearby residents led the developer, KB Homes, to build a retaining wall to channel rainwater into a retention pond. This construction inadvertently uncovered the bone found on Feb 2.

The resulting criminal investigation, which uncovered the bodies of the 11 women over a two month period, was the largest in the history of New Mexico. It took almost a year to identify all of the victims, and the bones did not reveal how they were killed, though authorities have said they suspect strangulation. The fact that the bodies were found in a group led investigators to believe they were killed by one person — a serial killer who has come to be known as the West Mesa Bone Collector.

The investigation, at least publicly, was unable to establish any major connections between the women.

“We know that some of these women definitely would have known each other just by virtue of where they were,” said Tierna Unruh-Enos, an Albuquerque-based journalist who started “The Mesa,” a podcast delving into details of the murders, this year. “Albuquerque is not that big of a city. There have definitely been some more interesting connections that have come out in terms of like family members somehow knowing each other randomly, children of the women being in dance classes together, even though that wasn’t necessarily a factor either.”

Very little, if any, evidence was uncovered pointing toward the identity of the person who killed the women. As a result, the police have never named anyone as a suspect in the case, which remains active. They have, however, mentioned two individuals as persons of interest. (The distinction is important: A “suspect” is someone the police believe committed a crime; a “person of interest” may or may not be involved or have information about a crime.)

On Dec. 19, 2006, 19-year-old Shericka Hill met Lorenzo Montoya, 39, in a chat room and agreed to meet in person. During the meeting, police told the Albuquerque Journal, Hill and Montoya arranged for Hill to come to his mobile home — a few miles away from where the West Mesa victims would be found three years later — to perform a dance for him. Hill’s boyfriend, Frederick Williams, drove her to Montoya’s house and remained in the car while Hill went inside.

After waiting an hour, Williams grew concerned and went to check on Hill, bringing his gun with him. He encountered Montoya outside the home and Montoya brandished a gun. Feeling threatened, Williams shot him dead.

Williams found Hill dead inside the residence, bound with duct tape and strangled. It appeared that Montoya was transporting her body to his car.

“You don’t see this type of violent act committed the way it was,” Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz said at the time. “It seemed like he knew what he was doing. It was very well planned and orchestrated, and that is what is worrisome about this.”

According to court records, Montoya had previously been arrested in 1999 under suspicion of sexually assaulting a 23-year-old prostitute, who told police Montoya had put his hands around her throat and choked her before he was caught by detectives. The case was later dismissed in metropolitan Court and never refiled. Montoya had also been arrested on suspicion of patronizing prostitutes in 1998 and 2005.

As Unruh-Enos points out, the fact that he killed one sex worker and may have tried to strangle another does not necessarily mean he killed others. No evidence connects him to the West Mesa killings. But notably, all of the West Mesa victims were killed before Montoya’s death.

JOSEPH BLEA

Within a week of the discovery of the first bone on the West Mesa, April Gillen contacted the police and suggested that they look into her ex-husband Joseph Blea. The man already had a significant history with the APD.

According to a search warrant affidavit, between 1990 and 2009, police had run across him over 130 times, usually in the area the West Mesa victims were said to have frequented — the East Central corridor. He was charged with the rape of a 14-year-old he knew, but that case was dropped. And his DNA was found on a prostitute left dead on the side of a street in 1985, though he was never charged for that crime.

After the discovery of the West Mesa Murders, police tailed Blea’s car for four days as he drove back and forth along Central Avenue. Police wrote that he appeared to be stalking prostitutes but never approached them. When police searched his home in late 2009, they found women’s jewelry and underwear. His wife, Cheryl Blea, told police that she and her daughter had found articles of both that didn’t belong to them around their home.

Years later, Robert Cloven, the father of West Mesa victim Virginia Cloven, told the Journal that families of the victims had noticed that the women’s jewelry was missing.

The only piece of evidence that the APD says may connect to him the murders, however, is a plant tag for a Spearmint juniper that was found near Virginia Cloven’s buried remains. The tag was traced to a nursery in California that provided plants for others in Albuquerque. Blea’s business records as a landscaper showed that he bought plants from those nurseries.

The case for charging Blea as the West Mesa Bone Collector never materialized, but evidence of other crimes did.

A rape kit collected in 1988 after a 13-year-old eighth-grader was assaulted near McKinley Middle School was tested in 2010 and led investigators to Blea. He was convicted for the crime in 2015. He then pled no contest when charged with the rapes of two women and another child that occurred between 1990 and 1993.

Blea, who is now 63, is currently serving a 90-year prison sentence. He has repeatedly denied any involvement in the West Mesa Murders, and he has never been charged with killing anyone.

OTHER THEORIES

It’s far from the most popular theory, but some believe that there is no individual West Mesa Bone Collector.

Thomas Grover is currently a lawyer in Albuquerque, but from January 2004 through December 2011, he was an officer with the APD, with the rank of sergeant when he resigned. These days he spends a lot of time representing officers throughout New Mexico in administrative matters and bringing whistle-blower actions against law enforcement agencies.

To him, the inability of the Albuquerque Police Department to find a suspect in the killings is emblematic of the disorder within the department.

“The best way to describe it is like a giant family domestic relations dispute where you’ve got some alliances working together, you’ve got antagonisms between others,” he said. “Ranks within the department personnel, cliques within the department, even units or divisions, have this acrimony, and from that, you don’t get the best application to whatever issues are going on that the community needs addressed, whether it’s large scale crimes, criminal events, ongoing patterns of criminal activity — criminal rapes for instance.”

He describes a department in which many of the best officers have departed over recent years, and supervisors with little experience and a relatively weak knowledge base are running the show. As a result, the APD has gotten increasingly less efficient and effective. Grover said that when he left the department, he thought it was going off the rails by not recognizing the concerns of citizens about the use of force and the escalating number of officer-involved shootings. That trend eventually brought the Department of Justice in to investigate the APD, which he said further reduced the police department’s efficiency.

As for why he doubts a West Mesa serial killer exists, he points to the fact that there was not a search for one prior to when the victims were found. Though Grover was never involved in the investigations, he knew people who were and confirms that there was a perception that prostitutes were disappearing — something that officers like Ida Lopez were concerned about at the time. But patterns of behavior surrounding the disappearances never suggested that they were directly related or that one person was behind them.

Grover compares this to the efforts to capture a serial robber who stole from Albuquerque businesses in the early 2000s by disassembling safes after hours. He said that even beyond the burglary unit, there was a massive effort among street-level officers to know what to look for that might indicate a robbery was being committed by this individual rather than a common thief. The burglar was never caught, but the search nevertheless illustrates to Grover that even a department in chaos was able to devote resources to catching a serial offender when they thought one existed — something that was never done in relation to the vanishing sex workers.

“Whenever there was a notion that there was an adversarial type entity out there, whether it was the burglar, or some sort of gangs, or something that really attracted a lot of attention among folks in the department ... just sort of the notion that there was a true bad guy out there — this is why a lot of people become cops,” he said. “You don’t necessarily want to go after the guys that are just committing crimes to fund drug habits. I mean, we’re talking about someone who’s a true antisocial adversary. And when those types of investigations were going on, everyone would sort of hear about it. And even if — and I don’t think this would be the case — but even if you’re talking about someone who preyed on the most vulnerable ... spectrum of society, sex workers, I don’t think that would take away from anyone’s interest.”

Why were the West Mesa victims all found in the same general area? That’s just where bodies ended up in Albuquerque, regardless of the crime.

That’s sort of the history of the West Side and the unincorporated abandoned area,” Grover said. “Detritus would just get left out there.”

ONGOING INVESTIGATIONS

The West Mesa Murders have never been designated a cold case by the Albuquerque Police Department, allegedly because the team investigating them, the 118th Street Task Force, consistently gets new tips about the killings. This also has the obfuscating effect of the department sharing few details about the investigation with the media and public, citing that doing so would interfere with the case.

This is part of the reason Tierna Unruh-Enos started her podcast. Now the managing editor and associate publisher of The Paper, Albuquerque’s new alternative weekly news publication, she was a journalist at local ABC affiliate KOAT when the bodies were found. She said the media covered the investigation extensively for about a year as it got national and international attention. But then interest died off and now it only really gets dusted off about once a year for anniversary stories.

“Watching this whole thing for the past 11 years, I just thought, there is a different way to tell the story,” she said. “I don’t want to just keep rehashing the same details over and over and over again that just don’t really take anyone anywhere. I want to talk to the families — a lot of these women had children, and those children are now adults or teenagers. And, you know, let’s talk to them and further the story than what was really being done with it.”

She is also seeking to humanize the victims.

“They were not just women who were on the street. They were not just women who were possibly a victim of their lifestyle — although that still hasn’t been proven. They were mothers, they were daughters. And this is a legacy that their children now have to deal with. And I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t really have a lot of sympathy and kind of just want to move on and put in the past,” she said.

The majority of the women on Ida Lopez’s list of missing sex workers were identified as victims in the West Mesa Murders. But six were not. Felipa Gonzales, Nina Herron, Leah Peebles, Darlene Trujillo, Anna Vigil, and Shawntell Waites were all in their 20s when they disappeared between 2001 and 2005. They would all now be in their 30s or early 40s.

Since 2009, the West Mesa, which was previously open space, has exploded in development. A memorial park was built over the acre where the bodies were found, but the other 95 acres of that lot have gone undeveloped. Unruh-Enos believes it’s only a matter of time, though, before KB Homes finally develops that area as well. Perhaps at that time, more bodies will be found — assuming they’re not already under existing houses.

According to the city of Albuquerque’s website, a reward of up to $100,000 is still being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders. The 118th Street Task Force can be reached at 1 (877) 765-8273 or (505) 768-2450.

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By: Nick Gonzales

DGO Staff Writer

Dec 2, 2020

Read full article at: https://www.dgomag.com/contents/west-mesa-murders-theories-differ-on-the-identity-of-the-west-mesa-bone-collector-or-if-he-even-exists-4474

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#westmesamurders #westmesabonecollector #rememberthevictim #latenightsleuth #murder #unsolved #jamiebarela #monicacandelaria #victoriachavez #virginiacloven #syllanniaedwards #cinnamonelks #doreenmarquez #julienieto #veronicaromero #evelynsalazar #michellevaldez

[chaoswillfallrpg]

RODOLPHUS LESTRANGE is TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD and a DEFENCE BARRISTER in THE DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT at THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC. He looks remarkably like JACK FALAHEE and considers himself NEUTRAL. He is currently TAKEN.

→ OVERVIEW:

tw: death, murder

Raised to have a strict worldview due to the fanatic attitudes of his parents, Rodolphus Lestrange has never had reason to question the nature of his reality. Rodolphus and his family resided in the beauty of Lestrange Manor in Nottinghamshire, Rodolphus’ childhood family home stood secluded on the outskirts of Nottingham. A gothic chateaux that took inspiration from their family home of the same name near Paris, it was surrounded by fields and trees, far away from muggles and cloaked in magic in the event any came for a walk in the forest. Brought up away from the Muggle world they detested, with only his mother and father for company until his younger RABASTAN was born, Rodolphus was absorbed in the thinking of his parents with very little reason to doubt anything outside of their word. MARIE LESTRANGE loved her children more than she loved herself and showered both Rodolphus and his younger brother in affection. Whilst most Pure-Blood families they associated with had nannies and school masters to aid in the raising of their children, Marie disagreed with handing her children over to someone else and insisted on doing everything herself with only the aid of a single house-elf Posy for help. She taught her children to read and write and ensured they were fluent in French by the time they went off to school and well versed in many authors that had been pre-approved by Marie for them to read. 

Rodolphus and his younger brother were raised given almost everything they could ever ask for with a childhood spent taking afternoon tea in the garden and discussing the future she wanted her boys to have. His mother upheld tradition and longed for her children to make respectable Pure-Blood marriages to people who loved them. The relationship his mother and father shared captured the attention of a young Rodolphus, who longed to have a relationship like the one his parents shared and provide for them and the rest of his family. Though the Lestrange family were wealthy, their ancestors had wasted a lot of the Lestrange family fortune throwing balls and having custom couture outfits made to line the walls of their wardrobes. The building of the British Lestrange Manor cost their family a great deal and began the long tradition of the Lestrange family working in government and slowly rebuilt the fortune the rest of the wizarding world had no idea they had slowly lost, beginning with Radolphus Lestrange of who he was named. His father THIEBUAT LESTRANGE worked directly for The Minister as her Senior Undersecretary, a job which he believed was beneath him especially in a traitorous administration and had aspirations of climbing higher. His plan would be to groom Rodolphus to work in government and have him infiltrate The Department of Magical Law Enforcement to keep an eye on the goings on there and report back to him. 

Before Rodolphus was sent off to Hogwarts he was given one particular request from his parents and that was to grow close to influential families within the wizarding world, particularly the Pure-Blood families who his father remarked he might need in the future. BELLATRIX BLACK was of particular interest to his parents, with a father who worked in Wizgamot and wealth and beauty that would make a good wife. Rodolphus went to school in the knowledge she’d be someone he’d need to at the very least befriend but was disappointed with the person he found. Bellatrix was incredibly loud and opinionated with a fondness for torturing other children and an inability to follow even the most simplest set of rules as did her friends CASTOR WILKES and EVAN ROSIER. An intelligent young man, Rodolphus had a high opinion of himself which was solidified by the praising of teachers and almost flawless grades which made hanging around Bellatrix and her posse even more difficult for him. He tried to keep them sweet by sitting with them at parties and occasionally handing in a page of homework for them but mostly preferred to seek the company of his roommates LUCIUS MALFOY, ARISTAEUS GREENGRASS who he found far less tiresome despite Lucius’ over inflated ego and Eirik’s constant mood swings. Though he narrowly missed out on being a Prefect due to PROFESSOR SLUGHORN’s clear favoritism of Lucius, Rodolphus did graduate a celebrated member of the Slytherin Quidditch team and Slug Club which greatly pleased both his parents. 

Upon graduating from Hogwarts, Rodolphus was quickly swept up into a job at the Ministry and began training under Bellatrix’s father CYGNUS BLACK. Rodolphus wasn’t quite sure if it was his legal knowledge, spotless record from Hogwarts or a polite word from Bellatrix or his father that had made Cygnus agree to be his mentor, but either way he was glad to have such a respected name in the wizarding world teaching him how to practise law. Training to become a barrister was certainly grueling and required Rodolphus to sacrifice the majority of his personal life in order to be taken seriously by Cygnus. When he wasn’t at the office, he spent the majority of his time at the Black family home helping Cygnus prep for his cases and eating dinner with his family who had come to slowly replace Rodolphus’ own due to the amount of time he spent with them. Bellatrix thankfully was hardly ever home, supposedly travelling or working on personal projects her father hoped would be beneficial to their family Rodolphus had chalked up to meaning a polite term for finding some direction beyond sneering at mudbloods and barking at her sisters. The Black family seriously lacked direction from Rodolphus’ point of view, NARCISSA seemed harmless but if you looked at her often enough you’d see the way she looked at men with eyes like a snake, burrowing into the souls of helpless men. 

Rodolphus had been suspicious for some time that Narcissa's trained gaze had been on his younger brother, considering he’d notice him acting strangely lately and spending a lot of time at the Black home, which he disliked. Bellatrix was Bellatrix. Then there was ANDROMEDA, the middle daughter who was quiet and studious. She cared not for parties and rolled her eyes at the idea of finding a husband often along with a rude quip that made Rodolphus chuckle to himself. The two exchanged the odd piece of polite conversation, though Rodolphus only fully began speaking to her when he took over her father’s job when he became a judge. Andromeda had graduated from an accomplished witch with a longing to learn and better the world she’d been raised in which he found both admirable and misguided considering she came from wealth and privilege as he did. Nevertheless he agreed to train her using the same methods her father had used on him. The life they had chosen was a lonely one and whilst Andromeda did have friends and a personal life he noticed she spent the majority of her evenings in his apartment in High Gate attempting to find something useful which would help them win their cases and slowly became more than just his mentee. He began to learn things about her that he found interesting, her relationship with her sisters and her theories on blood purity he hadn’t really considered before. 

Rodolphus still thought being a Pure-Blood made you better than others, but he did consider those he knew of the same blood as them who were not fit to wipe their shoes. As Andromeda nears the end of her training, Rodolphus has come to regard her as a close friend of his and a much needed warmth in his life he’d been missing in the pursuit of greatness. Though their caseload is often petty crimes such as underage wizards using magic, there have been a few more interesting cases recently that have kept both him and Andromeda busy as Aurors attempt to find the culprit of those kidnapping and killing multiple people across London. Most recently the pair have been defending SILAS CRUMP, an unregistered werewolf frightened he’d be framed for the killing of his daughter. Supposedly found by a witch and wizard he can’t recall the names of, Silas was put under the Imperius Curse and given a false memory both he and Andromeda can’t seem to break through. Curious, the pair have been trying to find other cases of other magical creatures with similar stories, until the case took a turn. The Minister’s son BOOKER BAGNOLD was found dead in the Ministry’s fountain on Halloween with one named attached to the killing. Silas Crump. Confident there is more lurking underneath the case, Rodolphus won’t rest until he has won his case but with his client missing, people closest to him keeping secrets and dark forces at play has no idea what else he may be uncovering in the process. 

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Blood Status → Pure-Blood

Pronouns → He/Him

Identification → Cis Male 

Sexuality  → Up To Player

Relationship Status → Single

Previous Education → Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Slytherin) 

Societies → N/A

Family → Thiebaut Lestrange (father), Marie Lestrange (mother), Rabastan Lestrange (brother), Ilar Travers (uncle), Vivienne Travers (aunt), Isolde Travers (cousin), Evora Travers (cousin)

Connections  → Aristaeus Greengrass (best friend), Andromeda Black (close friend/mentee/potential love interest), Lucius Malfoy (close friend), Decius Flint (friend), Bellatrix Black (friend), Castor Wilkes (friend), Isolde Travers (friend), Cygnus Black (ex-mentor), Silas Crump (client), Regulus Black (assistant) 

Future Information → Eventual Member of The Death Eaters, Husband of Bellatrix Black

RODOLPHUS LESTRANGE IS A LEVEL 7 WIZARD.

[magneticmage]

Quiz Meme; OC-style

I was tagged by @rozhevisny to take this quiz.

I also ended up doing a number of my OCs. They are under the cut for length.

I am tagging @awellboiledicicle @mikkeneko @changeling-fae @higheverweave @yusukesmomjeans @dalishious and @draxen1123 but don't feel pressured to do so if you don't wanna! It's all for fun.

(Inquisitors)

Paeriel Lavellan="You're choking on how much you have to try". Accurate by the time of Inquisition (specifically around Skyhold) as Paeriel very much embodies the virtue of suledin. She can handle the amount she's dealt with but it is still a burden and she worries about how it will affect others if she slips and drops under the weight. She doesn't want more harm to come to innocents and those who are already struggling under their own burdens (mages, dwarves, elves, even the templars to some degree), and yet it is a fight that continues on and on seeming without end. Just as Solas walks his path to break the systems oppressing people, she tries to work within those same systems to better chances for those who need it.

Armashok Adaar="You were meant to". Accurate prior to his joining the Inquisition. He spent so much of his life struggling to find his place as everyone told him what to be; silent, obediant, a weapon to be protected against. He chafed and struggled to find comfort in it and yet he ultimately realized that he was his own person. No one could tell him who and what he was or was meant to be, not even his wife. So he chose for himself; To be Armashok Adaar.

Ransley Trevelyn="This isn't enough for you" Also accurate for pre-Inquisition Ransley, as he balked against his family expectations. They wanted him to marry a nice noblewoman of status and wealth. He courted them but couldn't quite bite the bullet as something about them just lacked....something. Even when he met his lover, he struggled against the fact that they had to be discreet for her reputation as a Knight-Divine. His family demanded he become a Templar, he decided the Seekers would be a better use of his talents. Always when he was told something, his innate ambition would push him for more and better things. While he can give up things as needed, he dislikes it. That last part is something he struggles with-and notably fails during Trespasser-post-Inquisition. This is a trait that Josephine can understand, though like their lover Cassandra, she tempers it in herself and him with patience.

Naranka Cadash="Because you have made mistakes you cannot swallow" Pfft. Yeah, this is very much her. She seeks redemption just as badly as Paeriel does for Solas, just as badly as Blackwell-her love interest-does.

(Inner Circle)

Kara Adaar="Because you cannot hold freedom". Very true. She's seen what freedom has cost her parents to give her a better life and plans to make the most of hers. That desire to enjoy life is shared with Sera. The desire to understand the world through the lens of ensuring that freedom for others is something she shares with Dagna.

Emilyse Trevelyan="You swallow pain and fold around it" Yikes. This is accurate to her time in the Circle, however. She spent much of her time trying to be a "good" mage, despite a number of abuses by the Templars and the Chantry. It was only when her brother visited her during his training as a recruit that some of those abuses came to light and she was brought to the Circle in Ostwick, closer to home and with the newly added bribes to ensure her safety, she did much better. However, this newfound life did not for too long as the Rebellion broke out and she was left adrift for a time before making her way with some other refugees to the Conclave at Haven. She was nervous about so many Templars, but eventually found solace and peace with Cullen as they each began to heal over their own traumas of their respective sides, and together as they began a family shortly after Trespasser.

Samrel Lavellan="because you cannot hold freedom" Interesting. He's actually one of my simplest OCs; a simple life with his clan and husband, First to the Keeper and cousin to Paeriel, is all he wants. Unlike some of my other Dalish OCs, he hasn't faced quite the same level of hardship and loss, and though he does mourn the loss of his clan, he seeks to rebuild it alongside his husband and the few survivors that managed to escape the humans' blades. So perhaps that defiance of the losses inflicted harkens back to the Dale's and the elves' refusal to submit to the Alienages, by simply standing up and saying "No, you cannot silence us" is enough? That could be a type of freedom and there is power in that refusal. Thoughts to consider more later.

Pyrmar Cadash="This isn't enough for you". Oh that's interesting. Pyrmar is one of those characters that seems super simple (ex-surfacer Carta bruiser with a notable penchant for leadership as a Champion) and, for the most part, he is. He likes drink and fun as much as any other mercenary like the Chargers. But, like Dorian, he sometimes feels inadequate in some way. As if he is meant for more; to be and do more. Most notably for basic respect and care, something his upbringing in the cutthroat nature of the Carta was missing. Dorian shows him that he is capable of love and being loved and The Iron Bull gives him the respect and belonging he lacked previously. While he can still fall orey to his baser nature at times, his heart as grown much over the years and so it becomes less common to "want more" as he used to.

(Last Court)

Aurore de Serault="Because you have made mistakes you can't swallow" Ooo. She does carry some lingering guilt and grief over her late husband's death at the hands of the Game. She struggles with the Orlesian court at times, and much prefers solitude and peaceful quiet to gossipy ballrooms and noble Lords and ladies demanding a dance, a bonding point for her and her love interests of The Silent Huntsman and the Elegant Abbess. However, it's not that she's unskilled in the Game; in fact, she's quite good at it. She simply prefers simplicity to more complex machinations. All that said, she does regret the ferocity with which she holds grudges; she had gone on to murder the entire families of those individuals responsible for her husband's death.

Marcel de Serault="You swallow pain and fold around it". Hmmm. Not sure of this one. Marcel divorced his wife to pursue a cloistered and scholarly life in pursuit of knowledge (he was once a Chevalier). Eventually he began to crave the adventure of the Game again, which is how he fell for The Wayward Bard and the Dashing Outlaw. Again, not too sure but it's interesting. Perhaps he simply internalized his losses and pain?

(Hawkes)

Knight-Commander Jasper Hawke of Kirkwall="because you've made mistakes you can't swallow" Oh cool! Jasper watches his younger siblings-three of his fellow quadrupled and Carver- go off into the Deep Roads expedition. He made the decision to stay behind to protect Bethany and their mother in case things went south. Despite assurances from his departing siblings, things did go south. After being pissed at Batrand, he sighed and went to work for the Templars. Shortly thereafter, despite his best efforts, Bethany was caught by Templars and taken to the Circle. Jasper did what he could to protect and shield his sister from the worst abuses of the Templars under Meredith's command, no matter the personal costs and enmity it earned him from his siblings and companions. It even ended his relationship with Anders around the beginning of Act 2. After Meredith was defeated, he worked with Cullen to try and reform the Templars and rebuild Kirkwall post-Chantry boom. His efforts were strained once red lyrics began to show up and corrupt his fellow templars. Despite narrowly avoiding being swept into the group while infiltrating it to gather intel, he succeeded in driving them out. When Cullen left for the Inquisition, he stepped up to continue reforming the Templars for protecting the mages. While he originally balked at the pro-mage decisions of the Inquisition, he ultimately agreed that the Chantry had abused all of its charges-mages and templars both. He began to reshape the Templars under his command to fit in line with the changing world; a choice to take lyrium, and a recovery and rehabilitation plan set in stone for all members who wished to leave, new rules and regulations in place to protect the rights and dignity of both mages and Templars, slowly making them a secular force beyond the Chantry but under the control of Vivenne's newly reformed Circle of Magi perhaps. He does what he believes to be right and for the best of his family, even if they dislike his decisions. A trait he no doubt picked up from his mother.

Lord Gray Hawke of House Amell="You swallow pain and fold around it" This is fitting for Lord Amell. While Jasper and Violet always held loft goals to pursue and Skye simply wanted to go and see the world for all it was, Gray preferred to remain at home and tend to their family. He is the one most connected to the Amell legacy rather than the Hawke self-made determination. That's not to say it isn't there; he's more than willing to help others and make something of himself, but it comes back to wanting to appease and help his family in whatever ways he could. He pines for Anders for a great deal of time, but doesn't make a move due to either Jasper dating the mage or simply not wanting to be a rebound for his brother. In the end, however, Anders surprises him (perhaps nudged on by Skye and Violet) by initiating a kiss and the two quickly develop into a stable relationship. He is even willing to leave all he'd built to go on the run with Anders and further aid him in his cause. Gray is just a cutie who wants a simple meal and a nice husband. If he gets to watch Anders shoot lightning at fools, well, who is he to laugh?

Viscountess Skye Hawke="Because you cannot hold freedom". Accurate. Skye loves her freedom. While she is certainly ambitious, it often comes down to more power means more freedom. She rules as Viscountess of Kirkwall for a time until abdicating in favor of Varric so she can pursue Tallis across the seas, but also to simply go back to adventuring and exploring. While she does not care for the Qun and its Qunari, she cares about people and her family most of all. It is one of the few tethers she did not choose but it is the one she keeps above all others. After all, even the Sky must touch the earth at some point just as a Hawk must return to its nest to rest and tend its young.

Champion Violet Hawke of Kirkwall="Because you have made mistakes you cannot swallow". Fitting given that Violet is both a blood-mage (also a spirit-healer and force-mage) and extremely pro-mage freedom, and her choices often led her to conflict with Jasper due to their views and lives. She has only ever wanted to be free to live her life as she chooses, with is how she fell for Isabela. She fell for Fenris because she's a bleeding heart who wants to help everyone as much as she can. Kirkwall left its mark on her and she's struggling to do better than what she views as a failure due to her diplomatic nature in the name of mage freedom by the time the Inquisition comes around. While just as driven by the cause for equality as Anders, she often privately struggled with her mother's death among the many other revelations and choices of her family, fearing the loss of all she called dear. Luckily Fenris and Isabela returned to her and they made a pact to live well on the seas after everything had settled down and Champion Hawke was no longer needed.

(Awakening)

Senior Warden Dion Caron="This isn't enough for you" Okay. So, Dion joined the Wardens to escape the Templars (p.s. it didn't work) and his adopted sister Victoire-Ainsley was already joining and he had promised to protect her for their parents. He's happily married to Garam and spends much of his time training recruits and fostering camaderie in the ranks of the Wardens. What more could he want? Perhaps it is nothing and the doubt is simply there as is human nature, perhaps he frets about his dwindling time in the world before his Calling, perhaps he does want more. Who can say?

Senior Warden/Warden-Constabke Victoire-Ainsley Caron of Orlais="This isn't enough for you" Pfft. Victoire-Ainsley's ambition to make a name for herself and her family (she came from a long line of Chevaliers) nearly cost her her life and resulted in her father's death. Her mother adopted an orphan boy-Dion-in the hopes it would curb some of her darker tendencies. It partially succeeded. While she did not go as far as she'd once been willing, she still acted ruthlessly and this earned her quite the name in the Game for a time. However, her fall from grace was just as bloody as her rise, and she was only spared by the intervention of the Wardens' Conscription. She lost a great deal and was now forever barred from reclaiming it. She acted out for a time and was surprised when the Wardens allowed-encouraged even-it. However the death of her husband to save them during a nasty skirmish against a powerful broodmother she'd led them against resulted in a mission successful but at a cost she hadn't wanted to pay; only her, Dion, Garam, and I senna made it out alive. Since then, she had been working towards redeeming herself, opening up to the criticism and vulnerability she'd been so afraid of, much like Loghain is when he is sent to Orlais. And so while her pride demands more of her, she focuses instead on what she can provide and tries to bite back the bile this causes. After all, this is for the best and that is enough. Right?

Senior Warden Isenna Andras="You were meant to" Isenna lived first under the Orlesian cruelty in the Alienate and then the Templars' in the Circle. It is no wonder she fights to carve a name for herself in history, to make herself her own, to be what she was never meant to even dream of. She wants to be a hero but struggles against her own inner nature to survive. She is driven by the conflict of selflessness and self-preservation. Perhaps Mhairi's idealism is enough to tip the scales for her.

Senior Warden Garam Kader="Because you have made mistakes you cannot swallow" Accurate. He joined the Wardens after passing off the wrong Carta Boss and then spent years helping Victoire-Ainsley and her brother grow their ambition and then....his unit died beyond the four of them. And all the glamor of the Wardens fell away and he realized just how far some would go and he began to wait for them to step back, hoping they would step back. Victoire-Ainsley and Dion and Isenna did. He did. But the Clarel didn't. He hopes Loughlin will do better as the Warden-Commander of Orlais. He knows he will do better and he knows his husband, Dion, will.

(Wardens)

Warden-Commander Lynera Mahariel of Fereldan="You were meant to" Ouch my heart. Lynera lost Tamlen and never quite recovered. She was forced into a Warden and then into leading the party as the Hero of Fereldan and then into the role of Warden-Commander/Arlessa of Amaranthine and she did it. She took all the pain and hurt and losses over the years, the Taint and its horrors and its strength sapping, the politics and hard decisions; she took it all and she did it. She did what was needed, became what a Grey Warden Commander and hero was meant to be. She can't even say she regrets becoming a Warden anymore as its become so central to her identity now, only mourns the things and people she's lost to get there. I think Sten-excuse me-the Arishok understands this. Perhaps that is why they both hope to never meet on a battlefield unless they are on the same side again.

Warden Isemaya Tabris="You swallow pain and fold around it" Okay that's like SUPER interesting. See, Isemaya learned about the injustices elves face early in life. It cost her her mother's life and very nearly her twin brother's as well, after all. She became a warrior to protect them (her family, her community, her home) and she was good at it. But then she saw a glimpse of a different life with Nelaros, one where she might be happy simply letting someone else deal with all the fighting and clawing and exhaustion. She wanted it, she realized, she wanted it very much. But then she lost him and Shianni was hurt and she was hurt and Vaughn was dead and the humans were so angry. She geared up to protect her people again, to be the brave warrior like her mother before her. And then....Duncan Conscripted her. She was forced from her home, alive and angry and proud, and so she expanded her family to her companions. Then Zevran tried to kill them and they let him live and she watched him like a hawk and saw the same longing for a life, for more in the absence of loss, in him. She helped him heal and learn to live again and he helped her set down her weapons and her anger for a time and then the times became more frequent and they grew closer. She told him she loved him in the brisk Haven air and he gave her a golden earring to match the old and blood-stained wedding band she still wore, and she had found peace. She continued with the Wardens, with helping him take down the Crows, with searching for a cure so they could have more time. She took her pain but instead of weaponizing it like Lynera and others did, she learned to let it go and continue on. She learned to live in spite of, not because of, her pain.

Arcane Advisor Catriona Surana of Fereldan= "Because you have made mistakes you cannot swalllow" Oof. This is definitely Catriona during Origins. Her decisions to betray Jowan, to use blood magic at Ostagar and then to continue to practice and study it despite the stigma it holds, the merging with Compassion to save Cale, to give up her dreams of marriage and freedom and let Alistair marry Anora for the good of Fereldan and again when Leliana went on to become the Left Hand of the Divine and then again as the Divine Victoria...she makes a lot of mistakes and the consequences haunt her for a very long time. While she does manage to find some good in them, or at least simply makes peace with them, they still color how she becomes in 2 and Inquisition and beyond.

Warden Cale Amell=

Teryn Fion Cousland of Gwaren=

Paragon Prince Barran Aeducan=

Warden Paragon Tatha Brosca=

(Origins)

First/Keeper Vireth Mahariel=

"Dark Wolf" Elthorn Tabris=

"Stormcaller" Alaros Surana=

Lord Azul Amell=

Lady "Nightshade" Raven Amell=

Lord Carmine Amell=

Lord Reed Amell=

Lady Marigold Amell=

Captain "Highever Spitfire" Aelynne Cousland=

Princess and Orzammar Commander Valda Aeducan=

(Canon Solo Shepard)

Commander and Spectre Annette Shepard=

(The Sibling Shepards Canon)

Spectre Riley Shepard=

Spectre/XO Roscoe "Ros" Shepard=

Spectre/Commander Joanna "Jo" Shepard=

(Shepard Cousins)

Angelus "Angel" Shepard=

Elliot "El" Shepard=

Jaden "Jay" Shepard=

Alexandra "Alex" Shepard=

Kristopher "Kris" Shepard=

Clover "Clove" Shepard=

(Starship Ryders Canon)

Pathfinder Lucas "Luke" Ryder=

Pathfinder Rebecca "Becca" Ryder=

Pathfinder Shiloh "Shy" Ryder=

Pathfinder Evander "Evan" Ryder=

Pathfinder Asher "Ash" Ryder=

(Baldur's Gate)

Cei Gloomdraft=

Faenerys Elendir=

"Sable Shades" Risaeder Rosandoral=

Saga "Muse" Musehart=

Lyr(e/a/an) Lovemoor=

Rune Mistsea=

Lucine Mistsea=

Roan Roarke=

[marvelthalia]

Hellenders Team Redesigns and backstories

Key:

Home Team (Bass Camp)

Team A (Team USA)

Team B (Team International)

Team C (Backup Crew)

Requiem (Artemis of Bana Mighdall) + Sojourner (Henrietta ‘Henri’ Jessup formerly ‘Hank’)

Artemis the amazon fallen from grace recently back from being the princess of Hell and from being dead meets Henri, Jax and Kyle in a graveyard in the most random way possible and somehow gets recruited to fight demons even though she’s actually in love with the demon General Belyllioth (and also married to the demon Prince Dalkriig-Hath but she hates his guts so that doesn’t count). She’s been Wonder Woman, she’s FRIENDS with Wonder Woman, as different as they are, Diana is her sister and she descended onto hell just to save her. She’s 25 but she spent 10 years in a demon dimension so she grew up quick.

Henri wanted to be a police officer but fell short, one tree as become a rent-a-cop security guard for Freson Corp who she hates. She stops a murder in a graveyard across the street form her post but gets fired anyways and Artemis manages to get her a new gig with the Hellenders and starts training her in the ways of the Amazons. The Hellenders are her second chance to be a hero so she takes it seriously but she holds on to her sense of justice that made her want to be a hero in the first place, she also comes to realise her place was never in the police force. She’s also 25 and an out of town New Yorker, she’s not the best trained but she learns quick.

Sureshot (Jackson ‘Jax’ Edwards) + Deadfall (Kyle Adams)

Sureshot is the field team leader of the whole team when they’re together but mostly just Team A (aka Team USA) who operate mostly in America, sometimes they go a bit North of the border. He’s a 27 year old government super soldier program washout which is where he got the power to control a weapon that can become any weapon he can imagine and his perfect aim. He washed out because of PTSD and anxiety so Gabriel has him on fear blocking drugs to make him an effective soldier in his war against demons.

Deadfall is a meta with the power to manipulate his own strength and the testosterone in others. He was recruited in a similar way to Artemis in that Jax came across him, they worked together to fight a demon and since he had no family ties or a steady job he joined up. He acts tough and is kinda misogynistic but the Hellenders were his first real family, he’ll be damned if anyone messes with that. He’s 30 making him older than Jax but he respects the hell out of the blonde (even though he doesn’t often show it). His weapon is an axe in an iron chain and he very smartly has iron chains on his legs so that if a horde of demons tries he grab him, he’s got a fighting chance.

Helter (Gwaine Woods) formerly Pellmell + Jotünn (Rurik ‘Rick’ Kiselev) formerly Snow Owl

Helter is a British Speedster from London. He was visiting Central City on his after uni trip when he got stuck in a speed force storm. When it became clear that God speed was killing speeders from the storm, he went underground and Gabriel picked him up and offered him some protection until the situation blew over in exchange for joining the team. He misses his family back home and he’s bored out of his mind half the time being a 22 year old speedster but his world travelling at least keeps things interesting.

Jötunn is the leader of Team B and since Helter is the baby of the group hand he’s one of the older ones (32) he took the kid under his wing. It’s kind of ironic he and Helter became such fast friends when cold is a speeders greatest weakness. He’s Russian and used to be in the FSS (the new KGB) before he defected. His skills in intelligence gathering make him very useful in trying to spot demons and demon hotspots. Since everyone on his team is European they all like to make fun of the Americans together. He’s a meta with thermokinetic cryokinesis and heat energy absorbtion powers.

Gabriel (Nathanial Greene) formerly Nathanial

Gabriel as he’s known to basically everyone at this point is the son of a Preacher. He’s the leader and founder of the Hellenders, he’s dedicated his life to wiping demons off the face of the earth and sees himself as an avenging angel type hence the code name Gabriel. He’s Ex CIA, Ex FBI, Ex anything really. Every government agency has wanted his help with the demons they suddenly had to acknowledge existed after people like Etrigan, Wonder Woman and Zatanna became common knowledge but mostly they just let him run his own operation because it means thhey can operate in foreign countries without causing an international incident.

Shock (Marcia Hargis) formerly Shock Treatment + Myst (Noriko Himura)

Shock is Gabriel’s right hand woman, bodyguard and most trusted adviser. She’s a meta with electrokinesis, energy absorption, electro-blasts, electrical energy manipulation and flight. She’s 29 and an ex-CIA agent, her father, Elijah Hargis, was also CIA which is where he met Gabriel and unfortunately where he lost his life.

Myst is the team’s trainer and sometimes mission co-ordinator. She’s a Japanese-American 25 year old lesbian recruited out of the Police Academy before she even graduated after she stopped a demon using only her knowledge of Japanese protection wards and her trainee firearm.

Signal Ray (Almir Babić) + Pitch (Santo De Rose) formerly Catapult

Signal Ray is a Bosnian telepath.

Pitch is an Italian Footballer (Soccor) who got into a major accident that ended his career on the pitch but kickstarted (lol) his career in demon hunting with his cybernetic limbs. He’s a 27 year old adrenaline junkie whose main source of fun just got plugged, what better way to get that adrenaline flowing then to fight demons?

Corrode (Levi ‘Chase’ Chase)

Chase is a meta who suddenly developed the power to erode anything. Unfortunately he can’t control it and after an incident with his wife, Joy Chase, they split up and he was recruited onto the Hellenders. He is now the leader of the C team and in charge of keeping Warhammer in line. Team C goes anywhere and everywhere they’re needed from remote islands and villages with demon problems to big cities, they also back up other teams if they come across a particularly big demon presence.

Warhammer (Owen Knight) + Spiral/Rewind

Warhammer was one of the first to join the Hellenders but the reasons he’s been relegated to the C list crew and is not a leader is because he’s hard to keep in line, no one likes him and he’s fanatical, even for Gabriel. He carries a big... war hammer and he’s got heightened strength and durability.

Spiral/Rewind is a meta that can generate Cyclones

General Belyllioth

The demon that Artemis happens to be in love with, the general to Dalkriig-Hath (one of the 13 princes of Hell) and leader of the Hell rebellion.

Left to right: Artemis’ leg, ???, Spiral/Rewind, Corrode, Sureshot, Deadfall, Shock Treatment (above), Warhammer

[dontcallmecarrie]

Are you planing on ever making By Dawns Early Light into a full blown story? ... And is Thanos an issue in this AU? I think you havent mentioned him in it so well, I wondered?

UMM. *looks over what I’ve got in that tag, and winces*

geez this thing’s longer than some of my actual fics, when did that happen?

Here’s the thing, though: this AU’s meant to be a writer’s-block-buster. Which, if the current evidence is anything to go by, has been a resounding success. 

However. 

As of right now it’s just that, a thought-and-snippet-writing exercise, because there’s a lot of things that’d need tweaking before I’d even consider posting it on AO3 [aka my inner perfectionist strikes again]. 

Again, this is mostly just me messing around with a fluffy tumblr-exclusive [for now, anyway] AU because this feels smaller stakes than if I were to round this up and make it into a full-out fic.

Also, in regards to the second part of your ask: not exactly. By Dawn’s Early Light is, at its core, a fairly fluffy self-indulgent AU, which for me is also code for ‘nobody dies if I can help it’ and ‘if the MCU can have a Gary Stu villain then I can do what I want, Deus Ex Machina-levels of fixits included’.

How? Simple. By nerfing the heck out of him, while also unfridging as many other moms as I can, with a side of I-have-yet-to-forgive-the-writers-for-pulling-this-bs-seriously-what-kind-of-writing-was-that. 

Here’s how the entire Thanos situation would go down, in By Dawn’s Early Light (spoilers for a fic I have yet to write):

First, let’s take a step back, shall we? This is, among other things, a timeline-crunch AU. There’s a lot going down in a very compressed time frame [originally just because I wanted Howard to still be around just for Tony to be able to punch him, but now I’m invested in this so time go the full nine yards, buckle up everyone].

So. The entire situation around Maria Stark and Tony and Bucky’s been covered fairly well, but to sum up: when Howard turns out to be an abusive asshole of a husband, his wife smiles at him and promptly turns around and burns both SHIELD and Stark Industries, revealing HYDRA and Obadiah Stane’s double-dealing ahead of schedule [unintentional fixits ftw]. In the chaos, Bucky manages to escape and joins up with Maria and Tony as they go in hiding. 

Ripple effect that didn’t get mentioned: Hank Pym sees this shit going down, realizes that the most famous missing child in the country is about the same age as his daughter, and decides to not aim to be Absentee Father of the Year. He ends up being a tad overprotective, sure, but is way more involved in his kid’s life and Hope Van Dyne grows up with at least one (1) parental figure in her life, so…there’s that. 

Things happen, and the timeline for bringing Janet back gets moved up somehow, right around when the Avengers assemble.

Note to self: adjust part of Scott Lang’s origin story in this? Compare whistleblower laws of that time era, alt. entrance for him could be him somehow helping Tony hide because BDEL!Howard’s the type of petty and vindictive asshole who’d pull some strings if he found out this rando interfered with his search somehow. 

Bonus for giving Scott and Hank something to commiserate about, later on, and would also have Tony and Co. feeling indebted to him [which would result in a lot of shiny prototypes and records being expunged, later on, probably]

…though that might be a bit much. Hmm.

Reason to bring Janet back: I do what I want also I think the MCU fridged moms because otherwise they’d be too powerful 

Ripple effect that didn’t get mentioned, the second: since this is also the AU where moms get unfridged, Frigga’s going to be derailing the plot from her corner of the galaxy.

Also, since I finally watched Ragnarok but was a mythology nerd as a kid and have a passing knowledge of the comics, time to revamp how Hela fits into this universe.

Okay, she’s still murderous and powerful and ruthless. 

Only, turns out there’s a very good reason for it: she was one of Loki’s students [iirc she’s his daughter in the myths, that’s the best I can come up with atm] before Odin saddled her with the thankless duty of being the watchkeeper of Asgard’s enemies and prisoners. As in, Odin just straight-up went ‘hey you look pretty talented, here, I now hold you responsible for this entire goddamn realm of assholes and creeps, if any get out we’re all screwed’. 

Which is something Hela absolutely did not sign up for, but she’s now just about the only thing standing between said realm of undesirables and her home so she stays put […also maybe Odin sealed the only way back? Maybe? Idk].

It didn’t help that in the early days, these ruffians thought they could overpower her and escape to wreak havoc. So she had to kick everyone’s ass six ways to Sunday, until they finally accepted her as the head honcho of this dump and as someone Not To Be Fucked With.

Thus, why Hela’s known as the goddess of death and ruler of Helheim.  

…and it’s also why she accidentally came to Thanos’ attention.

(Because why the hell not, as if her day wasn’t bad enough Odin you owe her big time—)

Thanos, of course, is in love with her carnage and seems to be the kind of guy who doesn’t take no for an answer. Hela just wants to be left the alone but can’t tell him to fuck off because if she did, she’d risk leaving her home open to attack from enemy agents, which is how we get the story behind why Thanos is known as the madman who courted death. 

[Hela: fuck you and the horse you rode in on shoo you bastard and take your stupid flowers with you—]

Thanos was on one of his especially annoying ‘let me woo you with the ashes of this one civilization!’ kicks [Hela: ashes. How romantic. Not. Leave me alone already.] when some of the Dark Elves snuck out and killed Odin. 

Hela…is only pissed she couldn’t have done it with her own two hands. Also slightly embarrassed that the Dark Elves escaped in the first place, and relieved that it was only Odin who’d kicked it because his wife had seemed pretty nice, the one time Hela’d seen the lady before she’d been drop-kicked to this hellhole. 

Also— apparently she now can leave this place? Sayonara, bitches. 

.

Thanos is very displeased when he doesn’t find her standing guard over Helheim when he returns.

Displeased enough to get creative, as far as courting gifts go, and think that if she didn’t like rings or jewelry, well, maybe this Lady Death would appreciate a shiny, fully-assembled Infinity Gauntlet instead.

well…let’s be honest, if it weren’t for his ‘don’t take no for an answer’ thing, you’d have to give the guy props for trying. Nothing says ‘I love you’ more than ‘here have this item of absolute cosmic power’, amirite? [just kidding]

.

Hela now has mixed feelings about Asgard. Before she was crowned Queen of This Dump, she’d been a student of magic, had been used to certain things. There’s quite an element of culture shock to be had, now that she’s back. It’s the first time she’s seen sunlight in thousands of years, and also there’s a lot of systemic changes going on now that some of Odin’s dirty secrets are coming out at last. Turns out she’s not the only one who’d been pressed into duty: some of Loki’s other students[/children in the myths] came back with stories of the same. Fenrir was apparently voluntold to be the guardian of the Reality Stone, Jormungandr had apparently been busy on Midgard […which now had a school of Mystic Arts? Pfft. Overachiever], and the more Hela thought about it the angrier she got.

Especially when it turns out that her teacher had been mocked for suffering a breakdown and was also tortured by the creep who’d been flirting with her for millennia [Everyone: wait what Hela: I am going to KILL THAT BASTARD NEXT TIME I SEE HIM]. 

However, thanks to Frigga being Frigga and having a crazy-high charisma stat, Hela is still mostly willing to play ball with everyone else on Asgard. Despite her not being happy with how ungrateful the general populace acted [oh, magic’s just ‘tricks’? Here, have a fireball TO THE FACE I FOUGHT MONSTERS WITH THESE TRICKS FOR MILLENNIA]. 

So when Thanos shows up again, he gets one-shotted by Hela, who’s very very pissy about her vacation being interrupted.

Because this planet has sunlight and hot chocolate and punk rock and she’s got centuries’ worth of time off and she is damn well going to enjoy it.

.

…aka why Thanos is a bit of a non-entity in this one. Again, fixits are the name of the game for this AU.

[moonstone-blues]

Fallout 4 AU: October 24th

If you guys remember, a while ago I quickly sketched up an idea of a modern/what if the bombs didn't drop Fallout AU for FOCCA (I'll get round to finishing the rest of the submissions eventually.)

Well, I've been doing some thinking and just wanted to share my notes on how the story would go. (This is my own personal interpretation.) 

For now, the name is October 24th. Although the main story takes place after that, the name is supposed to symbolise that we're after the day of reckoning and everything is fine… mostly.

Be warned: This is a long one. 

Story:

Okay so the story starts on the Morning of October 23 2077. Everything is the same as in game. River and Jack do their thing, joking around and making sure they look good. Shaun in this story is older, being around eight years old. (This is because I wanted to keep the 10 year old Shaun element and he can't be an old man in this version.) The television continues playing the usual news and… The bombs never fall. Not a single detonation. The McConnell family continue on with their day and attend the event at the Veteran's Hall. 

When they go home, that night as they're sleeping, Kellogg breaks in and attempts to kidnap Shaun. In the struggle, Jack is shot dead and River is attacked, being knocked into a coma. This coma lasts a year with nearly another year of physical and mental therapy to go through before she returns home. Upon realising they never found Shaun or Jack's killer, she sets up on her own, trying to find her son and avenge her husband. The story beats are obviously very similar but adapted to be more modern. Synths are now clones because I felt like synths would be too Sci fi for this story. 

Factions:

The Minutemen - A kind of neighbourhood watch organisation. Funded by the army, they were supposed to try and keep the peace, without using violence. Thus made sure the military had all of their soldiers back so they could fight. However, after some fighting within the organisation and the military suddenly cutting off funding, things quickly went downhill from there. 

The BOS - This is simply the army. After the shut down of the Minutemen, a new group was made, the Brotherhood of Steel. These were soldiers sent by the military to patrol Boston, much like how they did before the Minutemen. However, since the threat of war is now gone, they have the soldiers to spare and want to show off their muscle to intimidate the people. 

The Institute - I'm still not entirely sure about the synths being clones instead things so this one is really up for debate. My thoughts so far are that the Institute still kidnaps people. They harvest their organs and make a clone to send off to replace the original person. I know, not the best idea. But I was thinking about what they would do with the kidnapped people that seemed justified in their minds? Well, they still have the same belief that humanity is doomed with the way it's going. Rioting, corrupt governments and the rest. They replace people with clones of themselves, engineered to behave. And they kill and harvest the organs of the original person and send them to hospitals for people who can't get organ donations because they're too low on the list. In their minds, they're getting rid of corrupt people, replacing them with people who they see as being better for society and giving people who may not have one a chance at life. They're technically doing good, but they are killing people. They still work out of the CIT but in secret laboratories.

The Railroad - Very similar to their in game selves. A secretive organisation dedicated to setting clones free and stopping the Institute. 

Characters:

Dogmeat - A stray dog that kept turning up on River's doorsteps during the first couple of weeks she stays at home. She eventually takes him in, being reminded of her other dog that ran away. She calls him Biscuit. 

Codsworth - Mostly the same. A faithful robot butler mourning the loss of two of his masters and constantly worrying over River. He makes sure she takes all of her medicine and never let's her miss an appointment. 

Preston - An ex Minuteman who spends most of his free time handing out fliers that promote it and tries to get people to sign a petition to bring the Minutemen back. His efforts are mostly in vain until he meets River after being attacked in an alleyway. 

Piper - The same noisy reporter working for the Boston Bugle. Known for her sometimes controversial articles and her willingness to do anything for a story. She's very interested in River since the kidnapping of her son seemed to be the beginning of all of what she believes to be the Institute's kidnappings. At first River wants to stay away from her as Piper is particularly intruding in her life but accepts her help. 

Nick - After the original Nick Valentine went for his brain scan, he was disposed of. The new Nick was made with Nick's DNA but due to the fact that the cloning technology had only just started being put to use, it wasn't perfect. He wasn't a complete copy of the original Nick and he was more than aware that he wasn't actually the original. At first he was loved up, the scientists not knowing what to do with him, but eventually Nick was broken out with the help of DIMA. He tried explaining that to 'his' boss and coworkers but they said he was mad. Eventually, Nick quit the police, feeling like he hadn't deserved to be there in the first place. After all, a man was murdered so he could live. He roamed the streets, no clue of what to do. He eventually found his way at the original Nick's home, still covered in evidence against Eddie Winters. Eventually, people started knocking on his door. They knew Nick Valentine was a great cop and did his job damn well. So when the police started ignoring missing person cases they came to him. Nick would've refused but without a job, he had no money to live. He begrudgingly accepted a job from someone in high power. (The same missing person case he dealt with in the original game but without the hilarious beeping part.) When he succeeded, he was overcome with a passion to help people. He stopped feeling sorry for himself and officially turned his place into Valentine Detective Agency. With the knowledge of his big case, people came to him from all over for help and he continued to give it to them. He had his lower right arm, some of his face, some parts generally all over damaged when one of Eddie Winter's men planted a bomb in his mailbox. He only placed his hand in so it wasn't as bad as it could've been. He did need everything below his left elbow removed and he now has a prophetic arm and eye. River Meets Nick when she rescues him from Mafia boss, Skinny Malone. 

Hancock - John and his brother came from a poor family. Honest but poor. Living in a bad part of town, their parents tried to instill good values into them despite their circumstances. Unfortunately, neither really took it to heart. They were still a happy family, doing the best they could, even taking trips to museums as a treat. As they grew up, John found himself in a lot of trouble. Joining gangs, drinking, doing chems. However, his brother was going places. He worked hard, eventually becoming assistant to the mayor. However, once it was found out the mayor was using taxpayer's money to build his own luxurious vault, he was kicked out of office. With a position to fill, Hancock's brother worked hard. His campaign was brutal. His major promise was to move the poor people to the opposite side of Boston so they couldn't bother the more wealthy. This also meant they would be receiving less help from tax payers and left to fend for themselves. The people, after having plenty of money taken off them for years, loved this plan. He won at a landslide. John was furious. He thought with their situation, his brother wouldn't dream to hurt those who could barely afford to live. But his brother still carried it out. He left the promise of a cushy life with his brother and decided to live with the less fortunate. It wasn't the best situation but anywhere would've been better than with his brother. The particular section of Boston was horrible. Mostly lawless, police not even wanting to go near the place. It was a dog eat dog kind of town. Eventually, a mob boss named Vic overtook the town, making himself the leader. Forcing people to pay for protection or they would be beat. John watched every day. Despite wanting nothing to do with him, the mayor still gave John protection. He hated it. Being treated better than everyone else who was suffering. He got insanely wasted one night, feeling horrible for the protection he got and the way he ignored Vic's actions. He needed things to change. He couldn't stand the man he saw in the mirror. He poured his remaining bear over himself and set himself on fire. Most of the damage was on the left side of his body, mostly burning his face so that he was hardly recognisable. After putting the flames out, he broke into one of the museums he loved so much as a kid. He remembered learning about the men that built America. It was when he looked up at the coat of John Hancock that he decided enough was enough. After a very long trip to the ER with a very expensive medical bill his brother paid off, he went back to the town with a crew who hated Vic and challenged him directly. He managed to kill Vic, albeit not as barbaric as he does in the game, and took over the town. Vic's old crew feared John's strength and left the people alone. Hancock stepped up to be the leader, officially naming the town Goodneighbor. He even changed his name to John Hancock, fully separating himself from his brother and becoming his own person. He runs it mostly the same as he does in the game. River meets him after going into Goodneighbor with Nick following a lead on her case. 

MacCready - Grew up in an orphanage in DC. He was roped into criminal activity at a young age. When he met his wife, Lucy, he claimed he was military being deployed in many places when he was off committing crimes. When his son was a few years old, Lucy was killed by a pack of rabid wolves when he didn't check out a camping spot. Duncan eventually became sick so MacCready moved to Boston with him after hearing that Med Tek was working on a cure. Unfortunately, that meant that Duncan had to live in the Facility and the cost to keep him safe and quarantined was high. MacCready works odd jobs, even stooping to criminal activity to help his son. He meets River after she hires him to help with doing some shady things since he knows his way around a lock and he's good protection. 

Curie - Curie's 'father' Kenneth Collins works as a scientist in the CIT. While he isn't aware of the Institute, he had a friend in it who he confided in about how he was sad he could never have a child since he was alone and old. This friend wanted to surprise him one day and using his connections, managed to get the Institute to create a clone for him. They created an amalgamation of personalities, most intelligent and scientific and put it in a young woman. This became Curie. Collins quickly figured out that his friend must've been part of the Institute. After all, the rumours were largely spread around the CIT building. He kept Curie a secret, knowing how suspicious it would be for a random woman with no records of anything suddenly popping up. She stayed in mostly total isolation, learning everything she could about everything to do with science. While she did very rarely step outside her home only under the supervision of her father, she still didn't understand a lot and yearned to be outside to explore and study. Eventually, the Institute found out that their 'property' had been given away. Kenneth was killed and Curie remained trapped, locked in her room. River meets her after walking past her house, hearing her bang on her window. She eventually gets her out of the house and with nowhere else to go and no clue of what the outside world is like, River offers her guidance. 

Danse - A Brotherhood member who is very patriotic and eager to defend the people and his country. However, despite his love for his country, he hates how the country is run. Despite the threat of nuclear war disappearing, Danse believes that America has become too relaxed and lazy, expecting everyone else to do the work. He believes the military are the only people pulling their weight and the American people need to wake up. He was replaced with a clone shortly after being deployed in Boston. River meets him when she comes across a small riot going on in the street between Danse's small squad and some members of the Minutemen. She steps in and resolves the situation. Danse is, of course, mistrustful since they were her people and he doesn't know if the Minutemen are a threat yet. However, River offers her help, guilty that Minutemen were involved in riots and Danse finds her to be quite useful for his mission. 

Deacon - He was always a con man, weaseling his way into situations for his own benefit. However, he was also very troubled by the growing tensions between America and China. He joined a group that were against the Chinese and harassed any they met, even lynching a young man. Deacon left the group after this, being disgusted by his involvement and soon met the love of his life, Barbara. A Chinese-American woman. Despite some lingering feelings of fear and hatred, he eventually came to love her, growing out of his previous beliefs. They were happy together, even wanting to have a child together, however, before they had the chance, his old group found out about the pair and reported Barbara to be a Chinese spy, taking her away forever to what Deacon assumed to be her death for sure. Using his skills as a master of disguise and a con man, he managed to ruin every single one of their lives. The least someone got was being put in prison for life. He felt empty after he had his revenge. He didn't know what to do with himself. That's when he heard about the Railroad. A group dedicated to helping people. Deacon found his new cause. He may not be able to protect everyone but he could at least try to protect some. River meets him when she finds the Railroad, looking for their help. However, Deacon has had his eye on her for much longer than that. 

Cait - Her parents abused her much like in the game. After she turned 18, her parents made her work on the streets to get money for their drinking, drugs and debts. Cait was isolated most of her life with the abuse and didn't know what she could've done to escape. Eventually her parents revealed their debt was too great to be paid off by Cait being on the street. So, as part of a deal she wasn't aware of, she was forced into an underground cage fighting ring. The owner of the ring itself was Tommy who was sympathetic towards Cait but the real people in control were the gang that took over, the people Cait's parents owed money too. She was forced to stay there under a contract, her only option to fight. River Meets her accidently when she wanders into a bad part of town and uses her legal knowledge to get Cait out of her contract. 

Strong - Armstrong was the youngest out of six brothers. With his parents dying too young for him to remember, he was raised by his brothers, being abused and neglected by them. He was looked in his room most days and given the scraps of food. His brothers would fight them, knowing he was a weak target. Armstrong became stronger this way. Eventually, he escaped from his home. However, due to his lack of socialisation and education, he couldn't find work. Fortunately, he eventually found a free education program for adults. There, he was taught by radio personality Rex Goodman about literature. Macbeth stuck with him especially. Rex offered him work in his studio, hauling equipment but Armstrong still doesn't have the best socialisation and Rex doesn't get to spend as much time with him to teach him. River Meets Armstrong after she is invited on Rex's radio show to talk about her son. River feels bad for Armstrong and after some explanation about his life from Rex, River offers to help Armstrong and educate him in her free time. 

X6-88 - A clone working as security for the Institute scientists. During the times the Institute scientists are not working, he works as a security guard at the CIT. He also brings in any clones who figure out they're clones. River first meets him when she enters the CIT looking for answers after she gets clues that the CIT is where the Institute is.

DiMA - Dima was the Institute's first attempt at creating life without the use of cloning. He was put with Nick who was the first attempt at creating life with the use of cloning and the two formed a bond with their imprisonment. They even considered themselves brothers. However, with Dima's lack of an imported personality, he tended to be quite unemotional, something the Institute would take advantage of when making their security. However, Dima could tell how much Nick was suffering and wanted to freeze him. He himself wanted to be free too, of course, but he wanted his brother to be happy more than anything. He eventually helped him escape but something happened. Nick was injured in the escape, causing him to lose most of his memory of the Institute and Dima. Dima was scared, especially since his brother didn't recognise him anymore so he fled. He hoped to see him again some day but he would wait for Nick to find him. 

Obviously there's more characters and stuff but this is what I've thought of so far.

Feel free to ask questions or request something about this! 

[a-d-n-d-journal]

Game Session #10

Characters:

Mirri in the wind, tabaxi; rapier

Rysiel, half-elf druid; acid burns, simple clothing and leather armor, scimitar

Teir, tiefling warlock; acid burns, vibrant gold skin and black hair w/silver highlights, horns, hooves, expensive-looking clothes and leather armor, carries a dagger as his only (physical) weapon

Zastu, dragonborn rogue; white scales almost completely covered in a hooded cape and mask, leather armor, short bow and shortsword + dagger

Noteable NPCs...

Sydiri Haunlar, human (Chondathan) fighter; brunette, chain shirt, dagger, shortbow, wooden club

Zephyros, cloud giant; windswept white hair, wispy white bear, billow purple robe with gold stars

Amarath and N'von, two human cultists missionaries and their seven human cult followers friends; all dressed in tight fabric wrapped around their thin bodies, topped with head wraps and decorated with feathers. Amarath carries a disturbing "smiling bag"

We were all tired and braindead during this one, so details are sparse...

Zephyros welcomes the party (Rysiel, Teir, Zastu, plus Sydiri at this point) to his floating tower. He explains that his extra-planar allies have told him that someone would come to help fix the mess that is the Ordning. What is the Ordning? It's giant society. Ever since forever, giant society has been ordered by type—with Storm Giants at the top, and Cloud Giants (me, Zephyros) below that, then whoever –handwaves– below that (fire and frost giants, stone giants, hill giants). Giants used to rule this land, until the war with the dragons millenia ago (giants and dragons are mortal enemies you know). Well, with the recent uprising of the dragons (a couple years ago), Annam got angry at us and called us all lazy and complacent. Oh, Annam, he's the Giant god. He looks over everything. And he broke the Ordning, that's why you've been hearing about giant attacks lately—everyone is trying to prove they're the most fit giant to rule over all of us. Er, you have heard about that, haven't you? Well, I thought that king Hekaton, lord of the Storm Giants, would be able to keep his seat of power, and hold control over giant society. He certainly seemed like he was going to continue that way. But then... Well, his wife, poor Neri, went missing. She had a soft spot for the small folk (that's you), and met with them on a regular basis, on an island off the Sword Coast. She turned up dead a while later—murdered. Hekaton, as you can imagine, flew into a rage. He would have led the giants to smash every small folk settlement on the coast, if it weren't for their youngest daughter—Serissa—who held her mother's affection for the small folk. She convinced Hekaton not to destroy you all, for Neri's sake. But now he's... Well, nevermind. Rysiel and Teir pipe up, insisting that Zephyros finish that thought. He's resistant at first, but they guess the truth, or near to it. Hekaton has gone missing now too. He went in search of his wife's murderers, but hasn't been heard form for weeks. His youngest daughter—Serissa, remember?—holds the throne, with her elder sisters—Mirran and Nym—acting as advisors, along with her uncle Uthor probably.

The party decides that going straight to the Storm King's throne is the best idea, and ask Zephyros where it is. Unfortunately, it is beyond them for many reasons. Maelstrom is a citadel deep within the Trackless Sea. Technically Zephyros' tower can bring them there—or close anyway, but they'd definitely be destroyed without magical protection, and Zephyros isn't interested in risking death. He offers to bring them close, but assures them they would die (kind of non-chalantly, at which point Mirri tells them that Zephyros isn't all there due to his fondess for contacting other planes and sometimes going temporarily insane). He knows how to get there, but they aren't near important enough—yet—to be able to manage it. The party sighs collectively, and asks to go to their second destination—Triboar—to deliver the news of Darthag Ulgar's death to his ex-wife at the Lionshield Trading post there. Zephyros brightens up immediately and says it'll take about 11 days (275 hours exactly) to get there. He asks if there's anything else he can get them before he retires upstairs to consult his extraplanar allies (Mirri rolls their eyes, "Not again!") —I also tell the party that they can treat Zephyros as a sort of merchant, but his supplies might be limited since he's a giant. Zephyros mentions that Mirri's (+1) rapier used to be a clothes pin, so who knows what he might have. (Rysiel asks for -something-, but I roll for it and he doesn't have it :/ ); They get some food—very airy spongcake-type stuff, and Zephyros brings down one of his many journals from the Moonshae Isles, which he wrote and illustrated himself. Mirri can't read them, but has been looking at the pictures a lot. Rysiel translates for Teir, who is increbily interested. The journals are about 100lbs each, and 4-5ft tall, made of thick parchment. (They can be used as a mundane item that grants advantage on certain knowledge rolls, but specific information isn't really available unless I go read a jillion wiki articles about the Moonshae Isles and their history/fauna/flora/etc). There's also some roleplay with the Tressym (Rillix) as they figure out what to feed it. Zephyros drops a hunk of raw meat at some point (and some of the griffon's hay bedding for Bobble), and Rysiel creates a bonfire to cook with. Zephyros reminds them not to come up to the second floor, or the griffon aerie. (Not that they have the ability anyway) The days start passing... Teir seeks Sydiri's help in wearing armor and using shields (they improvise with a giant wicker coaster). On the first day, Zephyros approaches "Ryan" to tell him that someone is looking for him. They go aside (outside) to talk, and Teir sneaks behind to eavesdrop. Both "Ryan" and Teir are disappointed though, when Zephyros reveals that "someone is looking for you" is the entirety of the message. Zephyros doesn't seem to notice, but the next day he comes down after speaking to his allies again and tells "Ryan" that "A Rainy Kevin" (or is it "Kevin Rainy"?) is the one looking for him, but that it will be someone else that finds him. Ryan/Rysiel thanks Zephyros, but looks confused.

On the third day, the party is surprised by some visitors, because no one wants to stand in the wind and cold to watch the fucking majestic countryside far below. There's a fluttering of many large wings, and then a moment later—some shouting. The voices ask—in the common tongue—for the owner and resident of the tower to come out and say hello. Zephyros is sleeping upstairs at the time, so the party waits until the owners of the voices make their way inside. Nine slendar humans appear, all dressed similarily in fabric wrapped around their bodies, tied tightly. They have more fabric wrapped around their heads, and are decoraed with feathers. Two of them appear somewhat more decorated, and one carries a shoulder back with a distrubing-looking smiley face. Teir recognizes the bag as magic, but doesn't remember why. The newcomers seems somewhat surprised to find some small folk, but ask if there's a cloud giant around. The party stands around looking offended until Zephyros calls down and greets them. "Have you heard of our Lord and Saviour, Yan C Bin?" One of the cultists missionaries asks. Zephyros looks confused. Two of them introduce themselves (to Zephyros) as N'von and Amarath, and explain that Yan-C-Bin wants his help to 'restore the planes to their rightful primodial state'. They're hazy on what this means, they just want a yes/no from Zephyros. Zephyros is confused, so he asks the party. Teir seems to think this is a bad idea, and is jealous of the newcomer's arrival, and also: how the fuck did you get here? The missionaries try to ignore him, but it quickly becomes obvious that he's not going anywhere, so: "On our giant vultures, of course." Teir tries to recall what he can about giant vultures (kind of an unusual choice of mount, but not unheard of) and what cultures/societies/groups were known to use them (no one close by! probably from another plane?) (I don't remember the rest of the conversation, but Zephyros goes upstairs to consult his planar allies on the matter, and the missionaries go outside because they like the wind and open air)

More than an hour passes and Mirri realizes that Zephyros must have had an 'accident' (he failed his saving throw on the spell), and is lying comatose upstairs. Teir sends his raven up to check on the giant, and then they have a game of pantomime to try to figure out what's going on (Zephyros is laying on the floor, but is alive). Mirri explains that he'll be "fine" in another 8 hours or so. A little while later, the two speaking missionaries pop back inside to see what's taking so long. (I don't remember what was said) They have an argument with Teir and Zastu (Rysiel is brooding in the corner or something? Idk), and Mirri walks by with 'Calm Emotions' (make targets indifferent), causing one of the missionaries and Zastu to chill out. The missionaries go back outside. Moments later they hear the flapping of wings and a scrabbling on the tower wall. Normally they'd ignore it, as the grphyons that Zephros keeps are constantly coming and going, but something is suspicious. Zastu sneaks outside and counts the missionaries and vultures there—only seven of nine of them are there. She goes back inside to tell the party. They are very offended by the presumptuousness of these cultists missionaries!!! To be continued...

Spells cast:

Mirri:

Abilities:

Cantrips: Mage Hand

Spells: Calm Emotions

Slots used: 0/4 1st; 1/3 2nd; Regained: All (multiple rests)

Rysiel:

Cantrips: Create Bonfire

Spells:

Slots used: 0/4 1st; 0/3 2nd Regained: All (multiple rests)

Teir:

Cleric abilities:

Cantrips:

Spells:

Rituals:

Slots used: Warlock 0/2 Cleric 0/2 1st Regained: All (multiple rests)

Killcount:

Mirri: 0 Rysiel: 0 Teir: 0 Zastu: 0

Treasure looted:

Supplies for 4 minor Potions of Healing (bought for 12gp ea. by Zastu)

Made 2 minor Potions of Healing (Zastu)

[samstiels-deactivated20201212]

The Entire Article Under The Cut

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

[chaoswillfallrpg]

FRANK LONGBOTTOM is THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD and an AUROR in THE DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT at THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC. He looks remarkably like HENRY GOLDING and considers himself aligned with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. He is currently TAKEN.

→ OVERVIEW:

A hopeless romantic with a strong sense of self, Frank Longbottom was raised an only child in the wizarding village of Barnton in Cheshire by his mother as a single parent. Frank only got a short amount of time with his father, though he was a warm and funny man that Frank grew to resemble greatly despite the little amount of time they spent together. Alatar Longbottom was a respected wizard working in The Ministry of Magic’s Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures in The Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau and was known as a knowledgeable and curious character. The only memories Frank had of his father were positive ones, including the pranks he enjoyed playing on Frank’s very serious mother AUGUSTA LONGBOTTOM. A good friend of NEWT SCAMANDER, Frank often remembered his father bringing home infant dragons to scare his wife to the delight of Frank. His father died when Frank was around six years old after succumbing to Dragon Pox during a working visit to Romania, leaving Augusta to raise her son alone. 

An intimidating but loving mother to Frank, Augusta had a very particular view on the world she preferred Frank to adhere to which centered around hard work, strength of self and good breeding, although she was adminant she was not a blood supremacist. Augusta wanted to raise Frank to be a strong wizard like his father and worked tirelessly to educate him ahead of Hogwarts to ensure he received the best start to his education. Subjects like Herbology and Potions she was both fond and very good at, whereas certain subjects such as Charms and Care of Magical Creatures she remarked as “soft” and paid little attention to teaching her son. Although he was the only child in his family, the sheer outlandishness of his mother, grandparents and uncle were enough to keep him entertained. Family dinners which occurred each Sunday were always an interesting affair and often resulted in food thrown up the ceiling and heated arguments about the course Frank’s life ought to be heading in to best continue their family legacy. 

His family were hardened, insane characters, leaving Frank as the most tender member who simply obeyed what his family wanted out of his dislike for confrontation, though he always had his own sense of agency he privately prioritised. Like his father, Frank was fond of plants, magical creatures and research which kept him at his happiest. Alone in his bedroom before dinner Frank would sit and enjoy his own company, reading his father’s old journals, visiting all of the places he had promised to take Frank in his head and creating adventures he hoped to one day have. Whereas his father was fond of beasts such as dragons, Frank realised he was interested in darker creatures which were often categorized as beings. The mention of werewolves, vampires and Inferi were enough to keep most children awake at night, but Frank was simply fascinated by them which would bode well when he began attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Sorted into Gryffindor, Frank immersed himself in his studies and became a standout student in Defence Against The Dark Arts and Care of Magical Creatures. 

Frank’s knowledge within these subjects rivaled that of even EMMELINE VANCE and HESTIA JONES who were renowned as the smartest students in Frank’s year at school. A part of Frank had always longed to follow his father into the Ministry working in The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, but a chat with PROFESSOR ALBUS DUMBELDORE in his fourth year had him reconsidering his future career. A personal favourite of the Professor's, Dumbledore urged Frank to consider becoming an Auror and use his knowledge elsewhere, suggesting he join Duelling Club to sharpen his skills, alongside his best friend KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT. Dutifully, Frank agreed and was introduced to a girl who changed his outlook on the world for the rest of his life. ALICE YEN was slightly older than Frank and a Prefect for Gryffindor he’d seen in and out of the common room and a regular at Duelling Club. The best duellist in the school, Alice often offered to battle the newcomers and quickly befriended Frank after he was able to best her. Alice saw the world differently to Frank, she looked at the injustice and the cruelty and hoped to change it for the better and urged him to try and see it from a different perspective. 

Though Alice was unaware of it, her sharing her thoughts and opinions was what cemented Frank becoming an Auror. He felt inspired by her words and had a niggling feeling it was because of Alice that Dumbeldore had sent him toward Duelling Club in the first place. Frank applied to be an Auror alongside Kingsley and a few other people from his year at Hogwarts, including close friend AMOS DIGGORY and two witches he’d become close to during his Prefect and Head Boy duties, Emmeline Vance and ex-Head Girl Hestia Jones. The training was as difficult as everyone said it would be, but Frank was lucky enough to excel in the majority of the training and his extensive knowledge on dark creatures and duelling ability served him well. During Auror training Frank felt them become somewhat of a family, which helped when training stopped and the real work began. As well as his work as an Auror, Frank was one of the first people alongside Alice that Dumbeldore asked to join The Order of The Phoenix. As more people began to disappear and people they’d known from school drop off the edge of the earth, Dumbeldore began assembling the finest sorcerers he knew to form an elite team in the event it was required. The Order has been on standby, apart from to train and recruit other members who may prove useful in the war, leaving Frank to mostly focus on his job at The Ministry, though he is always on the lookout for potential candidates. 

Due to his expert knowledge, ALASTOR MOODY tended to assign Frank to cases involving dark creatures and beasts which he felt he’d be better at handling than the other Auror’s. The work was often violent and involved staying back at the office looking at crime scene photos with a series of crime scene photographers who often quit shortly afterwards due to the nature of the job. When the rate of disappearing witches and wizards went on the increase, people began to point fingers at dark creatures suggesting magical folk had been turned into werewolves and vampires, which Frank disagreed with. The rate of reported werewolf bites had been relatively the same as had werewolf and vampire related murders which looked noticeably different from those committed by wizards. In the past year however Frank has noticed that change and whilst missing person cases pile up around them, the number of people drained of blood or left torn apart has had a sharp incline. Alongside his new photographer REMUS LUPIN who took up a permanent position last year assisting Frank, the pair have been investigating FENRIR GREYBACK who has been on The Ministry’s watchlist for sometime, though Frank fears he has stepped up his well-known mission to build up a werewolf army, although he is unsure as to why. WIth the help of Remus, Frank hopes to understand what Fenrir is up to and how best to stop him ruining any more lives.   

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Blood Status → Pure-Blood

Pronouns → He/Him

Identification → Cis Male 

Sexuality  →  Up to Roleplayer 

Relationship Status → Single 

Previous Education → Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Gryffindor)

Societies → N/A

Family → Augusta Longbottom (mother) 

Connections  → Kingsley Shacklebolt (best friend/colleague), Amos Diggory (close friend/colleague), Alice Yen (close friend/colleague), Hestia Jones (close friend/colleague), Emmeline Vance (close friend/colleague), Benjy Fenwick (friend/colleague), Alastor Moody (boss), Remus Lupin (colleague/mentee), Harrison Bagnold (friend)

Future Information → Husband of Alice Yen, Father of Neville Longbottom

FRANK LONGBOTTOM IS A LEVEL 8 WIZARD.

[raleigh-ocean]

[the original archives]

American Horror Story

Dara Ann Lynch

Dara is a medium, expert in both tarot and reading hands, that isn't really a fan of her 'powers' or at least she isn't fond of them at all. Her personality is the thing most of the people are curious of, because she is really secretive and gives that sultry vibe thanks to her low voice; but in reality she is a really down on Earth person, calm, patient and positive half of the time, with some antics that got their way into her after being with Billie Dean Howard for almost such a long time. 

Since her mid-20′s, her clothes and her habits always made her seem older than she was, but all of that is just a combination of Billie's lifestyle rubbing off on her. She also seem to held a secret, but this isn't something anyone can notice.

Dara an Billie met through mutual friends at a cocktail party and ever since they found each other comfortable and overall loved in the presence of each other. They have never addressed their relationship, however, not even when Dara moved from her tiny studio to Billie's apartment after four years into their 'affair'.

Billie tries to put her on her show, but Dara often refuse since she doesn't really like any kind of fame. However, she appeared there a couple of times as an assessor of some sort. She also is specialized in the 'white spirits light'.

During Murder House’s events, Dara accompanied Bilie most of the time, being her like an ‘item’. She is interested in the house, but it scares her to no end and she doesn’t want Billie to go there alone. Nora and her met while Billie was busy helping Violet and Costance, talking to her here and there about what’s going on in the house but also bonding over their experiences.

At some point she takes in her cousin Dahlia, hearing from her about the Roanoke house and trying to talk her out of the idea of going back there. 

From this on wards, Dara and Billie started to see Audrey as their new lover thanks to Billie, also helping her get through the rough patch that was Roanoke’s trauma and becoming quite close. Once Billie and Dara eloped, Audrey remained as a close friend and eventually, she would meet Danielle, one of Dara and Dahlia’s cousins, and started to think she deserved to love again.

Age: 25 (before Murder House, 2010), 30 (Hotel, 2015), 35 (post Cult/Roanoke, 2020)

Birthday: May 22nd

Description: 5'9, with heavy brown eyes and dark brown hair, wavy and styled short (under her chin). She has several moles all over her body but have a couple of beauty marks in her face: a little mole in her lower left eyelid and in the right side of her nose. She also has a double scar that go up her chin to almost the left corner of her lips in two lines, Dara got it when she was a teenager. Her complexion is a bit strong, broad shoulders and strong thighs, and natural tanned skin.

Relationships: Billie Dean Howard (wife), Nora Montgomery (Billie and Dara's lover, close friend), Constance Langdon (acquaintance), Violet and Vivien Harmon (friends), Dahlia Deen (cousin), Shelby Miller (sister-in-law), Danielle and Danna Bishop (cousins), Damien Bishop (niece), Audrey Tindall (Billie and Dara’s ex lover, close friend),  Ally Mayfair-Richards (sister-in-law), Oz Mayfair-Richards (nephew-in-law).

Powers: Mediumship: Sixth Sense, Clairsentience, Divination, White Spirit Light, Empathy (ability of swifting the mood in a room with her own feelings, unknown by herself).

Karina Sväre

Adopted and raised by a Swiss couple, Karina grew up being the eldest sister of four. Since young age she is strongly opinionated and very vocal about social injustices, which gets her in trouble more often than not. During her childhood the only one that seemed to not be backed out by her personality is the youngest McKee, Mary Eunice, and both become best friends.

After Mary Eunice decided to devote herself to God, Karina got terribly mad at her because in her words ‘she couldn’t let some fucking posh hicks ruin her life’ and she was sure her aunt brainwashed her. 

She took that chance to put not only distance between them because she was disappointed with her but also because she was in love with Mary Eunice and didn’t want to hurt her. They kept in touch while Karina was in college trying to become an athlete and afterwards, but when Mary Eunice stopped from replying to her letters it worried her that something could have happened to her.

Karina went back to their hometown just to learn that her friend was in Briarcliff and she set her mind in ‘rescuing’ her from there. It took her a couple weeks to go ‘undercover’ as a new novice, but she never felt more relieved than when she saw Mary Eunice fine. Karina really tried to talk her out of there, telling her that she could help her to escape and that she could live with her if Mary was afraid of going back to her family.

However it only lasted a few days until The Devil took over Mary Eunice’s body and everything went downhill. Karina learned about Kit and Lana and, as much as she wanted to take her friend with her too, she set herself the goal of helping them out as much as possible. As time pass and she sees how much Mary Eunice has changed, Karina start to lose the will that first drove her there, being her sudden death the last straw. Mother Claudia caught her trying to leave and also knew that she wasn’t really a nun, so when she helped Lana flee from Briarcliff the mother superior put Karina as Lana’s guardian so she could get out of there safely. 

Time eventually healed Karina, but she still blamed herself for not being able to help Mary Eunice. She found in Lana a good friend, setting aside her athlete dream to help her with her journalism career. It put her in contact with the second-wave feminism and Karina redirected all her pent up feelings into it, standing up for it and also dedicating her life to it. She never married, but she usually engaged here and there with women (even with Lana, both turning to each other for over the years but always remaining as good friends) and devoted her life to help young girls in need.

Eventually she moved to Michigan’s suburbs, wanting to rest and finally mourn for Mary Eunice’s loss. She became the Mayfair-Richards family’s neighbour at some point and took a like for Ally quickly, being both their emergency nanny for Oz and a friend. During the events of Cult she tried to help Ally with her phobias and talking her through it, being the one to be Ally’s confident during her hospital stay. Karina spent the end of Cult at Lana’s, only coming back to Michigan when Ally called her to ask if she wanted to be her counselor in her political campaign.

Age: 25 (Asylum, 1964), 73 (Asylum, 2012), 77/78/79 (Cult, 2016/17/18)

Birthday: April 4th

Description: 5′7, black long hair when she was young, short when she is old; and green-hazel eyes. Freckled, a little mole under her eyebrow, where she has a scar from her teens when she punched a guy for catcalling Mary Eunice. People used to pick at her for having a more boy-ish complexion and she had some troubles with coming to terms with her body, but as she grew older she started to appreciate herself more. She was going to be an athlete, so even when that goal changed she still trained and was in a very good shape for almost all her life. Karina always had this half-annoyed expression, frown and all.

Relationships: Mary Eunice McKee (former love interest, best friend), Lana Winters (friend, casual lover), Ally Mayfair-Richards (friend, counselor in Ally’s political campaign); Gabrielle Summers (grand-niece).

Raleigh Ocean

Raleigh is a witch the same age as Cordelia, knowing each other since they were 12 or so. She has been missing since 1998, only appearing again in 2013. Coming from a long line of witches with the Future Sight, Raleigh seemed the first one to skip such power but Fiona put a hex on her, triggering that magic, to use her powers for her own benefit. As magic is something that doesn’t like to be contained, the power overgrowth with such strenght that put Raleigh into a trance and made her body flee away without her mind being conscious of it.

After nine years in trance, Raleigh woke up in 2007 to find herself at a sanitorium in Vancouver. After a few weeks awake, her power took over again and repeated the process from the first time after six years just for her body to find its way back to the Academy. During that time, Raleigh saw what was coming and when Queenie and Cordelia woke her up, she begged her best friend to put an end to it. Cordelia, as the years passed by, improved a concoction that would put at ease her friend for short periods of time, nothing ever-lasting; and Raleigh took advantage of that concoction to research for a definitive way to stop it. 

During her new stay at the Academy she forged a strong bond with Zoe, which she took under her wing and became her favourite; and she found herself involved with Misty in only a sexual way that ended turning up in romantic feelings, but they never got to address it due to Misty’s death at the Seven Wonders. Cordelia and Raleigh’s relationship kept growing over their past feelings, still loving the other to pieces but having the situation with Hank and Raleigh’s disappareance as something they couldn’t move past on.

Before the trance, Raleigh was quiet young woman with dark humor, methodic, intuitive (thanks to the dormant Future Sight) and an admirable hunger for knowledge. Cordelia’s happier demeanor rub off and she started to be more open and less anxious when she was around. However, after being on and off of the trance for fifteen years, it’s hard to say that there’s something left from that persona. She became more quiet, shameless thanks to being in pain and being tired; and also sadder and kind of selfish. As much as her body grew, her mind grew up slower, sometimes showing a demeanor of a younger person than she physically is (she may look like 33 but she behave as someone in their early 20′s). Thanks to Zoe, Cordelia and Misty she started to crack that toxic shell, only to be completely broken when she got stuck in the Hotel Cortez with Saly.

Thanks to Fiona’s blood and magic heavily involved in the hex, Raleigh couldn’t kill her herself out of fear that everything could backfire; when Cordelia became the Supreme, she broke unknowingly the hex and gave Raleigh her cue to leave in order to find a way to heal and also a way to help the Coven in what was coming for them. 

She went to the Hotel Cortez to use all the power within its walls to trigger and speed up her Future Sight (now more bearable, only taking her away for days), Sally nursing her and both developing a strong bond with each other. It also helped her to find the right spells and potions to lock the Future Sight. During that time, Raleigh started to grow more powers thanks to being free of Fiona’s hex, which made her powers stop blooming so the Future Sight could burst more powerful at the expense of everything else, making not only her Future Sight but her Elektrokinesis and Power Supression too; but both her new founded telekinesis and Destiny’s Touch are much weaker. 

Raleigh was the one finding Mallory, full knowing she would be crucial for both the Coven and herself, and sent her to the Academy with a hidden memory spell which only could be broken after using Tempus Infinitum. In that hidden ‘memory’, Raleigh explained Mallory what she had to do in order to help her lock her power and apologizing for putting her through all that.

From 2015 to past the Apocalypse, Raleigh spent it all buried in the backyard of Misty’s shack, trapped inside her Future Sight as to not lose her knowledge and see if she could be strong enough to heal herself; but she also saw everything display and suffered from it. She set concealment charms around the patch so none could find her. When Mallory used Tempus Infinitum, it was clear that she needed her to heal, and Raleigh spent three years hidden in Misty’s shack (again) until she herself woke up when both Mallory and her magic locked the Future Sight. That day also marked the day for Madison to come back from Hell.

After that, Raleigh still is a quiet woman but her tiredness and anxiety skyrocketed, making her behave always like she is walking in thin ice. She got more confident than she already was, except when it came to Cordelia and Misty. She knew that she couldn’t have them back, as much as her love for them has reached its peak, so she prefered to have them as friends than not having them at all. It took her by surprise knowing that both still wanted her in their lives as more than ‘friends’ and Raleigh found herself trying to be the best for their sake. It becomes a hard task, but she promised herself that they were the only thing worth to not give up for.

Cordelia put the younglings at the Academy under Raleigh’s care as their History teacher, which helped her greatly to heal and come to terms with what she wanted now that she wasn’t going to leave. Raleigh also becomes a ‘teacher’ for the eldest members of the Coven (Misty, Zoe, Queenie, Mallory, Madison) under Cordelia’s supervision to help them develop their powers since Raleigh’s vast knowledge of magic comes in handy for it.

Cordelia also sends Raleigh to meet with possible witches outside of Louisiana, those which are more in trouble, to use her powers to help them get to the Academy. In one of these trips is when Raleigh meets Wilhemina, which with she has a relationship for almost a whole year before things got serious and the option was obvious: Wilhemina or Cordelia and Misty. With Wilhemina, Raleigh learnt that she deserved not only to be loved, but also respected and after all this time she decided for herself what was best. It all ended with Raleigh and Wilhemina leaving the main house, moving out to the second house the Coven bought to host more students, along with Queenie and Madison.

Raleigh also took a more ‘maternal’ feelings for Mallory, seeing her as the child she could have had with Cordelia and helping her to carry with the burden of the Apocalypse’s memories. Soon she realized that Mallory wasn’t their love child, but Misty and Cordelia’s; only to later see that Zoe, the only one that was there through thick and thin, was the real love child.

When she discovered that she had a half-brother, it made her rethink a lot of things, but in the end she only wanted to spend all the time they had left on that Earth with him, the only bit of family she had left and could fill for her years of void. 

Age: 18 (Academy Days, 1998), 33 (Coven, 2013), 35 (Hotel, 2015), 38 (post-Apocalypse, 2018)

Birthday: May 1st

Description: 5′11, dark auburn hair, shoulder length until 2018, then mid-back length; and brown-hazel eyes. Raleigh has a scar that goes from the left side of her forehead to the right corner of her lips, she also have a couple beauty marks in her right cheek along some other moles in her neck and chest area. When she arrived again to the Academy she was underweight for her height but it isn’t till 2018 that she has a stable weight. She has strong hands and usually a pensive expression, as if she isn’t really there thanks to her power. 

Relationships: Cordelia Goode (ex-lover, best friend), Misty Day (ex-lover, friend), Fiona Goode (frenemy, aunt), Zoe Benson (protégée, favourite student), Madison Montgomery (protégée, friend), Mallory Prince (protégée), Sally McKenna (best friend, lover in 2015), Wilhemina Venable (best friend, girlfriend since 2018, wife since 2032); Eric Ocean-Venable (son); Kaya (neé Ramírez) and Eric Ocean (parents); Rowan Ramírez (half-brother); Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt (friend, sister-in-law); Abigaíl Prince (aunt).

Powers: Elektrokinesis, Power Suppression, Telekinesis (unlocked in 2015), Destiny’s Touch (able to see and manipulate social links, unlocked in 2015), spellcraft (high ranked), Future Sight (triggered by Fiona Goode in 1997; locked in 2018 by Mallory and herself). 

Cold-hearted Severa (neé Selene Regnault)

Severa is part of Fräulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities, considered as part of the ‘staff’ most of the time but performing here and there thanks to her capuchin monkey, Mr. Mumbles, which knows how to juggle and mostly behave like a human being.

Knowing Elsa from a young age, Severa respect her the most even when she disapprove most of the time her bad behaviours. The older woman took her with her to the States with her, becoming one of her first ‘freaks’. Severa got caught in crossfire, not only mutilating and scarring her for life but also agravating her PTSD to the point of not remembering much before Massimo Dolcefino found her and made her his apprentice. 

Once in the States with Elsa, she learnt english to communicate if necessary but as time passed by she took a like to being in silence, so many think she is mute. Elsa took advantage of this and found her the monkey, becoming like that a mor active part of the show. Mr. Mumbles helped her get better with her PTSD somehow and most of the time she is in charge of the animals at the Freak Show, finding their presence more comfortable than people.

Jimmy and her developed somekind of sibling bond and he respect her highly, always trying to step up for her when in need. Evie and her started to be friend after having an act together, so it isn’t weird to find them together spending time over a cup of tea or a whiskey.

It isn’t till the Tattler twins arrived that Severa didn’t show more emotions, that behaviour earning Severa her nickname. She really is stunned by them and push herself out of her insecure shell to win them. However the twins doesn’t show much interest in her aside of becoming friend and Severa ressigned herself to that, becoming a fierce protector when it came to them.

She isn’t afraid to confront Dandy and over the events of Freak Show, she keeps proving to the twins that she is going to be by their side no matter what. That demeanor makes Bette fall for her eventually, but not Dot. When the show is sold to Chester, Severa refused to act and considered flying away; but she stayed when Dandy takes over in order to have an eye on him in case something happen.

After discovering Mr. Mumbles’ body along Eve’s, she ran to the twin’s tent to check on them. She gets to fight Dandy a bit before being shot too in front of them.

Age: 38/39 (Freak Show, 1952/53)

Birthday: April 1st

Description: 6′4, auburn hair with patches of white hair, waist length; and black eyes (only one). Severa has a scar that covers the right side of her face and goes all over her right shoulder; she doesn’t have any beauty mark now (she had one under her right eyelid) but she has vitiligo. She is tall and slim and her right arm is also missing. All her wounds/scars are from WW II, she was a collateral victim from crossfire. 

Relationships: Amazon Eve (best friend), Mr. Mumbles (best friend), Elsa Mars (saviour), Jimmy Darling (non-blood little brother), Bette Tattler (unrequited love at first, returned feelings at some point), Dot Tattler (unrequited love, friend). 

Adriana Girardi 

Adriana was afflicted by mistake at a party, condemning her to that life. At first she had a really hard time coming into terms with her immortality, but after a few years she decided to migrate from Italy to the States, wanting to start a new life away.

Cunning in all its meanings, Adriana used it to survive and then, through a fianceé she procured herself arrived to the Hotel Cortez. She met James and Elizabeth there, becoming friends pretty quickly with them. Discovering that Elizabeth was also an afflicted like her, Adriana found that maybe she could have a future.

Keeping in touch, even after James’ death, she learned how to find something to live for. Eventually she found someone and she moved in with her, considering in afflicting her too but the woman fell sick and died not long after. It took a toll on her, throwing her into a depressive episode and back at the Hotel Cortez till she got better.

Adriana spent the last decades of the century amassing money, focusing in finding someone that could make her feel whole again, but each year that it passed put her closer to giving up. 

She eventually did, coming back to Elizabeth one last time during the events of Hotel. The woman wanted to put an end to her life, but stayed around as support for her only friend and making some acquaintances with the guests. Meeting Alex Lowe after Elizabeth afflicted her, Adriana start to think of giving another chance to life since the woman looked almost exactly like her past lover and maybe, only maybe, she could get the life she dreamed of.

However it didn’t work at the end and Adriana ended up as the main investor of the Hotel to her dismay, trying to contain the ghosts from time to time, playing cards with James and sometimes getting some drinks with Sally. She also made friends with Queenie, at least in the erased timeline.

Liz will say that she is still around for a certain blonde that appear every Devil’s Night.

Age: 27 (afflicted, 1917), 125 (Hotel, 2015)

Birthday: March 31st

Description: 5′8, long brown hair, styled with californian wicks; and deep amber eyes. Adriana’s beauty mark is placed near the corner of her mouth and another one in her chin. She has a scar that cross her lips obliquely from right to left. Her natural tanned skin faded as the years passed and settled as an olive skin, showing the lack of sunlight. She always has a quick smile quirking her lips but her eyes show how empty she is, lacking any kind of emotion.

Relationships: The Countess (old friend), James March (friend), Sally McKenna (acquaintance), Alex Lowe (unrequited love), Liz Taylor (acquaintance), Queenie (acquaintance).

Dahlia Deen

An intern at ‘My Roanoke Nightmare’ production, Dahlia handled props and ran errands most of the time. She was just trying to pay her bills someway, not finding a job in her career path: biology. Dahlia is a happy-go-lucky woman most of the time, always finding a way to make the people around her smile just with the silliest thing and having an overall positive attitude.

While being there she started to listen voices and seeing ghosts again, her mental health getting worse but also her powers. Dahlia comes from a family known by having mediums but she didn’t want to be like them, like her cousin Dara. She just wants to live a normal life.

Sometimes she helped at the filming location with the actors, but other times she helped at the interview setting, where she met Shelby and became friends with her. Dahlia was always compliant with anything they asked her to do. Audrey and her became friends after the actress helped her through a panic attack, triggered by one of the ghosts there. Dahlia thinks that both Audrey and Shelby could be friends if both weren’t that self-centered, but she is happy that she can have them as her friends.

That was until Shelby played the affair card with Dominic and then she played it with Dahlia, however it seemed that being with her was more than a simple affair. Thanks to that they start this on and off relationship for a little while till she hear Shelby speaking with Sidney about the reboot. Both have a heated discussion in which the blonde woman tell her the truth: that she wanted to get back with Matt.

The only one Dahlia could turn to was Audrey. They got drunk and slept together out of spite, Audrey being in a really low point of her confidence just gave in. Both promissed not to tell anybody and keep their friendship, stronger than ever; even Dahlia attended Audrey and Rory’s wedding, dancing with the bride and all.

When both Shelby and Audrey decided to do ‘Return to Roanoke: Three Days in Hell’, turning a blind eye to Dahlia’s warnings of not going back because she knew something was off with the place; Dahlia called her cousin Dara and stayed with her for the week of preparation.

But when she received a message from a panicked Shelby, she set off as fast as she could to get there and pick her up. Dahlia do arrive on time and Audrey survived, only a gun shot in her arm from Lee. Shelby managed to make it alive too, but she lost a lot of blood and is really weakened. 

They three try to keep going, but obviously Shelby and Dahlia have a lot to talk too before being able to be in a healthy relationship. Eventually, they engaged a few years later and started to live together, moving to a better future for both now walking hand in hand.

Age: 28 (Roanoke, 2015), 29 (Roanoke, 2016), 33 (post Cult/Roanoke, 2020)

Birthday: May 5th

Description: 5′10, dark brown hair and brown eyes. Dahlia is of strong built thanks to her rutine. She needs glasses to see. She has a scar in the middle of her nose and another one in her jaw, both from an incident she had as a kid. She has a beauty mark under her lower lip and another one in the right side of her nose. Her dimples are her signature mark.

Relationships: Shelby Miller (fianceé), Audrey Tindall (best friend, sister-in-law), Dara Ann Lynch (cousin), Danna and Danielle Bishop (cousins), Damien Bishop (niece), Billie Dean Howard (sister-in-law), Ally Mayfair-Richards (sister-in-law), Oz Mayfair-Richards (nephew-in-law).

Powers: Mediumship of some short: Sixth Sense, Clairsentience (both suppressed by antidepressants) 

Gabrielle Summers

Coming from a big family, Gabrielle always felt like the outcast of it. 

Moving from that, dropping out of college made everything worse at home with her father: a heavily old-fashioned man that’s been controlling her life in ever possible aspect. Not only her suffer of this, but also her mother till the point in which she just flee letting the divorce papers over the kitchen table.

After this, everything got worse and worse and Gabrielle took all what she had and ran away from Phoenix to the only place she knew she would be completely safe: her great-aunt’s house in Michigan.

She always heard and knew stories about her, how she devoted to help the youth and how much of an outcast she was too; that’s why she dug up in her grandpa’s dresser to find whatever address he had of her before buying a plane ticket.

Gabrielle showed up in summer of 2016 at Karina’s doorstep. Karina knew every one of her brothers and sisters’ offsprings, so it took her by surprise to find the young woman in Michigan. Upon hearing about what Gabrielle left behind and why she was there, Karina took her in without much question. After that they both tried to sort some stuff out to help Gabrielle to start a new life there, Karina feeling like she was having another chance to help her family.

Soon the girl started to show her true colours, showing Karina that they both were pretty much alike but Gabrielle is much softer and gentle than her when she was young. Gabrielle also took interest in Karina’s life, more than before if possible, wanting to get closer to her in someway. Before the events of Cult, pretty much a few days after she arrived to Karina’s house, she met Winter Anderson at the hair salon and some kind of friendship started after having a one night stand.

Gabrielle met the Mayfair-Richards family when Karina babysat Oz, not liking them very much aside of their son, which she helped babysitting. However she starts thinking something is going on between Winter and Ivy after she found them in front of Winter’s house talking.

During the events of Cult, Winter and Gabrielle start to get closer more and more, making the former start to ‘protect’ her from the cult but as stubborn as Gabrielle is soon she picks up in her antics and tries to help her get out of there. At some point Gabrielle fight Ivy, not only because of Winter but also defending Ally (even when the woman is not her most liked person). 

Karina encourage Gabrielle to resume college and help her with it if she decide to do so, since she’s been reading a lot of books and decided she wanted to be a journalist/writer. When Karina offered Gabrielle to spend some time at Lana’s house with her in the end of Cult events, she decided to stay for Winter (her now girlfriend) and get her out of there together finally. 

The day Kai allegedly killed Winter, Gabrielle witnessed it since she went to the Andersons’ house in order to get her and flee. However, she finds that Winter is still breathing and beg to be the one carrying her out of the basement as a last favor. As the rest aren’t paying attention to her, Gabrielle takes advantage of that to escape with Winter and hide in Karina’s house.

Gabrielle and Winter move with Karina and Lana for sometime after that, helping Winter to recover from everything. At the time Ally calls Karina to help her with the campaign, both decide to went back to college and live together not going back to Michigan. They watched Ally’s speech together and when Kai died, both felt as if a huge weight was lifted from their chests.

Her story is somewhat similar to Karina’s but she did manage to save the person she loved in the end.

Age: 22/23/24 (Cult, 2016/2017/2018)

Birthday: May 28th

Description: 5′9, black hair (mid-back length before moving out of Phoenix, really short once in Michigan) and hazel eyes. Slim for her height, but she start to get stronger thanks to Karina’s excercise routine. She is always seen as someone slummy but with a soft smile on her lips, instead of a scowl. Her face features are a bit similar to Karina’s, luckily since they aren’t remotedly ‘blood’ related, but she only have a few of beauty marks instead of being freckled: one near her left eye corner, other under her brow and another in her jaw. Gabrielle has a a scar that mark her across her right eye since she was a child, her cello bow broke and hit her in the face, luckily not taking her eye and leaving only a scar.

Relationships: Karina Sväre (great-aunt), Lana Winters (acquaintance), Winter Anderson (fling to friend to girlfriend), Ivy Mayfair-Richards (dislike), Ally Mayfair-Richards (frenemy).

Rowan Ramírez

Rowan’s story is a bit detached from everyone else, to begin with. After Raleigh disappearance, Kaya tried to rebuild her life on her own and that eventually led to meet a man two years later, who seemed to love her. When she told him she was expecting a child, the man went away over night, leaving her alone.

Kaya found shelter in Abigaíl’s house, an old friend of her family, and there she’d spend the rest of her days. Once Rowan was born, Kaya’s Future’s Sight started to drift more and more, worsening her state as the years went by but the only constant that she didn’t seem to forget was the love for her children. As result of that, Rowan grew up knowing of his long-lost sister and at the same time made him grow up a bit faster than a kid should. But it didn’t make the happiness that he carried inside him go away, it only make it grow more and more, becoming Kaya’s only will to live in the end.

Around 2010, Kaya got completely lost in her power and passed away in her sleep due to a heart attack, leaving Rowan in Abigaíl’s care. Through his childhood, Rowan grew up with Mallory (Abigaíl’s grand-daughter) and the two consider each other cousins and best friends. 

Eventually Behold Chablis was called by Abigaíl herself, since he started to show up his magic abilities in a wider spectrum, and found himself at Hawthorne School for Exceptional Young Men, living among the warlocks as one more. In the beginning Rowan had a hard time adjusting, not having many friends around, but he made room for himself just by demonstrating his abilities. Behold, along John, kept an eye on him in case he developed a late stage of the Future’s Sight as his mother and sister, but both started to not worry when after a few years didn’t seem he was going to get it, trying to help him in improving the skills he already had.

When Michael Langdon arrived at Hawthorne, Rowan saw him as rival, without caring about whatever the rest could say about him. Even more when Michael, using his Clairvoyance powers, started to try and make him take his side by just trying to scare him with every single doubt he had in his mind. But as her mother, and sister, Rowan had a too strong sense of freedom and his own persona to actually fall for that. So the only thing he decided was to surpass him.

This would lead to try to stop Michael when the Hawthorne’s massacre happened. Michael considered in forgive his rival, let him live by his side to watch everything burn to ashes, but Rowan didn’t want to live nor be the companion of Satan’s son. Michael killed him with his own hands instead of his powers, giving him that last respect in his end.

After Mallory restored everything with Tempus Infinitum, Rowan kept honing his skills as warlock and Behold took him under his wing to make him a teacher at Hawthorne eventually. It wasn’t till 2022, when the Council payed the warlocks a visit, that he finally met Raleigh. He, that heard of his probably dead big sister for all his life, froze in the spot and Behold was the only one to act upon clearing his suspicions about the witch. He called Rowan to his office to talk with him about what he wanted to do and the, now, young man just burst into tears after twelve years of not shedding one, telling him that he really wanted to eventually search for her, having it promised over his mother’s grave, and just pull the pieces of what’s left of his family together.

As the years passed by, Rowan and Raleigh grew close to each other, which lead him to spend some months here and there learning from his own sister and he eventually developed a huge crush over Coco, that fortunately ended up in them starting a relationship.   

Age: 13 (Coven, 2013); 22 (post-Apocalypse, 2022)

Birthday: May 12th

Description:  5′10, dark auburn hair, mid-back length; and green-hazel eyes. Rowan shares the same tanned skin as his sister, Raleigh, but the only difference is that the only scar he has is in his left brow from where he hit himself with a stone window border when he was a kid. He’s a tall man, but his frame is narrower than his sister, making him thinner just by constitution. Rowan always carry a happy demeanor, soft smile always tugging at his lips. He also have freckles here and there, making up for all the moles Raleigh has but they have the same one up in their cheek.

Relationships: Kaya Ramírez (mother); unknown father; Raleigh Ocean (half-sister); Wilhemina Venable (sister-in-law); Eric Ocean-Venable (nephew); Coco St. Pierre Vandelbit (friend, girlfriend since 2027); Mallory Prince (cousin, best friend); Behold Chablis (teacher, guardian, colleague since 2022); John Henry Moore (teacher, colleague since 2022); Abigaíl Prince (guardian, aunt); Michael Langdon (rival).

Powers: Hydrokinesis, Atmokinesis, Telekinesis, Deflection (can deflect others powers, but not making them disappear), spellcraft (high ranked). 

Danna and Danielle Bishop

The story of these two is long in their own parted ways.

Born in a large loving family of ‘mediums’ as the oldest of the new generation, the twins grew up as pillars for their cousins, especially Dara and Dahlia, which respect them as much as they were their older sisters. 

Danna was always the happy-go-lucky one, mischievous, hot-headed at times and having a plan for everything except what she was going to do in the future. More like the party girl, the outgoing twin that was always ready for everything and nothing.

Danielle, in exchange, was the more down on Earth of both, her life goals clear and probably the overachiever of both twins. She was going to be a lawyer, she was class president, the whole nine of the studious one plus being the more maternal one of both.

Despite their differences, they were always side by side, even when they did argue (and still do) a lot. None loved Danielle as much as Danna does, and the feeling flows the other way too. But before they started college, they had a big argument and it made them split to follow what their hearts wanted.

For Danna, life took a chaotic spin that she took gladly and followed the path that revelead itself before her. She skipped college altogether but manage to get in a chef’s school somehow later than intended. She wasn’t the best at studying but her passion for food and enjoying herself made up for it, taking her to decide she was going to enjoy her life as much as she wanted. While she was at it, at some point, Danna met Audrey and had a brief relationship while the latter was trying to do castings and get big in the States. They met at New Years Eve of the first year of Audrey in the States, and they parted when the summer hit and Danna decided to start travel to keep honning her skills and because better offers were made to her. She kept travelling, living, enjoying herself until she fell ill and had to go under heart surgery, which brought the twins together again and promise each other they won’t ever part. Danielle and Danna kept in touch, she even visited her sister in Canada for some time, until Danna’s life took her to Michigan and met Ally there. Eventually, Danna and Ally became friends and one thing led to another and maybe the Senator taught the crazy twin that maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to finally settle.

For Danielle, every spin was carefully calculated and her attitude took her wherever she wanted. Fresh out from lawyer school, she landed a job in Canada and moved there to start a her new life. It was pretty normal though, she eventually got married to this other lawyer, their life going smoothly and soon finding herself about to have a baby that, after too many troubles, was born healthy. After that things started to went downhill for Danielle, which for her started with Danna’s heart problems not long after Damien was born and then went on and on for years until she divorced her husband. When that happened, Danielle took the best decision for her daughter and her, which was moving back to the States to be close to their family and start a new life. For her was easy to slip into ‘work mode’, which was the easiest way for her to not think about how she maybe wasted some of her younger years being too worried but she had the will to keep going on in the for Damien. So with all this turmoil, she packed up their stuff and flew home for Christmas with a broken heart and soon to be an annoyed teenage daughter.

That way, the twins reunited finally together not only both of them, but also with Dara and Dahlia, which were there with their arms open for her to fall and cuddle.

However, that same Christmas, Danielle met Audrey at the big family gathering and maybe they found in each other what they were truly looking for.

Age: 40 (Cult, 2018), 42 (Roanoke/Cult/Murder House, 2020)

Birthday: May 20th

Description: 6′, black hair + white hairs, past shoulders length (both); and light brown eyes; Danna and Danielle are quite similar, making difficult to tell who is who from a bit afar, but up close the differences are visible: Danna is a bit plumper, Danielle a bit bonier; Danna has always a permanent happy demeanour, Danielle gets a more serious one; the way both have moles here and there, but Danna has a specific one near her eyelid while Danielle have it almost in the tip of her nose; Danna has more ‘happy’ lines in her face while Danielle have the ‘stress’ lines; being quite tall, Danna always fight that she’s the tallest because she walks a bit more care-free than Danielle, but there’s barely any difference; and, of course, they are tanned like Dahlia and Dara, and pretty much everyone in their family. They also have their share of scars, but the important ones are: Danna has a big ass scar in the middle of her chest from heart surgery, while Danielle has a vertical c-section scar. They both have some similar traits, like having a good heart and being quite the jokesters, but as I said before they grew to be the balance of ‘happy go-lucky gentle woman’ and ‘serious yet tender woman’.

Relationships: Dara Ann Lynch (cousin), Dahlia Deen (cousin), Shelby Miller (sister-in-law), Billie Dean Howard (sister-in-law), Ally Mayfair-Richards (Danna’s girlfriend), Audrey Tindall (Danielle’s girlfriend, Danna’s past lover), Damien Bishop (Danielle’s daughter, Danna’s favourite niece).

Powers: both have some sort of Mediumship, mostly the Sixth Sense, but they aren’t bothered by this because it never got serious to them as with Dara or Dahlia. They feel the ‘bad jujus’ as Danna say, and she’s the only one of the two that actually think the ‘Mediumship’ in their family is real. Danielle just doesn’t vibe with it but she respect it.

Marvel

Astrid Winters

Growing up in Skagway, Alaska, Astrid lived a pretty normal life with her parents, Sven and Dinah, and her older brother, Isaiah. Most part of her childhood was spent running around the decks with Isaiah, always at his tail as if he was a comet, and being loved by their parents. It wasn’t until she was eleven that her mutation flourished completely, using her telekinesis to save Isaiah from falling into the ice cold water of the port.

At first she was confused about it, but after her brother’s mutation was presented as well as a control of psionic energy, they drew attention from the ‘Jean Grey School for Gifted Youngsters’. Their parents weren’t mutants so the shock came in pretty hard, however they were supportive of their children nonetheless. Isaiah, as they grew to control their powers under the institution, started to resent having them at all since he was old enough at the time to remember how their mother left them in the care of the Winters, quickly discerning that that was the true motive behind both being abandoned like that. Astrid tried to persuade her brother that now they had somewhere to fit and belong, but Isaiah only went on with it even when he excelled with her powers while Astrid only had trouble with hers.

It wasn’t until Isaiah was sent to a mission with some others for some time that Astrid managed to get a grip of her mutation…but discovering, along the way, her telepathic powers which were much stronger than those she thought were her primes. Ororo took her under her wing right away, being reminded of Jean’s powers and the shadow of her best friend still hunting her to this day, and started to train her so she didn’t end up like Jean.

However, Isaiah never came back from the mission and sent Astrid into a spiral that made her unable to control her powers at all. In that haze, messing even more with her weakened psique, she decided to escape the school, wanting nothing else but runaway from what took away her brother. She managed to go back to Skagway, into her childhood home, and was taken in with all the bad news, memories and grief. All of that was enough to block her powers, creating some sort of bubble surrounding them and locking them away for the years to come, greatly helped with antidepressants and other pills that muted the buzzing feeling of her powers trying to come up. None came looking for her, as if she just vanished even from the view of Cerebro, and that helped to her hiding a great deal.

Six years later she would met Bobbi, who was in an undercover mission for S.H.I.E.L.D in Alaska, and during the months she was stuck in Skagway they developed feelings for each other being just them, without telling the other their real truth. It wasn’t until Bobbi got discovered while being with her that Astrid’s powers didn’t flourish again, destroying a great part of the decks in the process as a result of bottling up everything for so long. That not only put Astrid in the position of telling Bobbi the truth, having Bobbi to do the same as well, but also put her under the X-Men’s radar again. Two days later of the incident, Storm arrives to Skagway to try and coax Astrid to go back with her to the school, which only prompts Astrid to follow Bobbi to the States.

Storm takes that as leaving her alone, but keeping an eye on her from time to time without interfering in her life. Astrid managed to lie low after that in her own, working through the first steps in her and Bobbi’s relationship, but always tries to stay as far away of Bobbi’s line of work as possible. When Bobbi told Astrid how S.H.I.E.L.D had gathered the Avengers, and was starting to be more proactive on searching people with special abilities, it only sent her in panic taking in count her own abilities which only made Bobbi promise to her that she wasn’t going to let them get near her.  

For a few years everything manage to go well, calm even, until the chaos after S.H.I.E.L.D being compromised ensues and, in between all the files that are put up for the world to see, Astrid’s information ends up visible for Coulson’s team. That information was gathered by HYDRA along the years, because they were the ones behind Isaiah’s disappearance and it also uncovered what happened not only to him but also with their biological mother: Emma Frost. 

Astrid was unaware of this, still caught up in the bliss of living a normal life as much as she could, until she got a panicked call from Bobbi telling her what was truly going on and that there were both S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA agents going her way, which only made Astrid to use again her powers in order to protect herself from the latter but she decides to be caught by the her girlfriend’s ‘comrades’ is way better than fall into the hands of God knows who they are. 

During the war between S.H.I.E.L.D’s factions, Astrid is kept as a ‘prisoner’ once Robert Gonzales discover the length of Astrid’s abilities and put her under severe vigilance. Astrid is dragged to the Inhuman’s front, trying to help as she can and only making her starting to understand why Isaiah didn’t want to have anything to do with being a mutant and also being very upfront when it comes to the relations between mutants and inhumans. 

Astrid has a major breakdown that make her unstable and Storm have to take her back against her own will back to the school in order for her to retake control of her powers, which went under a secondary mutation due to the trauma upon Bobbi’s kidnapping. There, Isaiah is waiting for her along with Emma, bonding and learning from both her brother and their mother for a few weeks. However she leaves once again everything behind and decides to stay with the team to take care of Bobbi. 

During this time is when Astrid and Bobbi’s first clashes happen, taking in count they spent much more time together and it makes them open up but at the same time let go all of Astrid’s fears. The bottling up only strains their relationship, which makes Astrid to grow more and more tired and hurt - since much of the Inhuman conflict is still affecting her - until she decides that she can’t do this in her current state and tells Bobbi that they need a break. She decides to go back to the school and stays there, honing her powers and finishing her training in order to live the ‘normal’ life she always wanted, as much as it pained Isaiah, Emma and Ororo.

Jemma calls Astrid to tell her what happened with Bobbi and Hunter in Siberia, which leads to Astrid going to get them, making that the point in which both women decide to rebuild their relationship while Astrid finish her own training.

After Astrid finish it, she and Bobbi take their lives to Europe as a married couple, settling there comfortably with some visits from Hunter here and there. Eventually Emma and Isaiah disappear fully, which leaves Astrid broken and confused, but focusing in her life with Bobbi is what helps her get through everything. 

In those years her powers seem to increase little by little until one day Esme, Phoebe and Sophie show up in her door, claiming not only who they were but also what had happened to Emma and Isaiah: both died trying to take down the facility that created the triplets. With the news at hand, Bobbi doesn’t trust them but knowing Astrid’s mental estate isn’t the best allows the triplets to move in with them, mostly in order to restore Astrid’s health and faith in everything.

Being around the triplets only made Astrid’s powers to grow even more, the influence and constant crash of their powers being the principal cause. Little by little, the triplets and Bobbi got along and that was what helped her the most in her recovering. 

When the snap happened, however, it took Bobbi and the triplets away from Astrid, leaving her in the house in a near shocked estate. It wasn’t until Natasha called to Bobbi’s phone, trying to contact any possible agent out there that was still there, that Astrid wasn’t pulled out of that. She went to the compound because she had nowhere to go and stayed there with Natasha until, after a year or two, she became close to Carol through visits and all and decided that there was nothing in Earth for her anymore, following Carol to space.

She found solace there, managed to finally unleash her true potential after being found by Jean in her Phoenix form and eventually the call from the Avengers came. Carol and Astrid went back immediately to help them, arriving in time, and among the million voices in the battlefield Astrid heard Bobbi and the triplets’ thoughts and went directly to them. At first they didn’t recognize Astrid but when her voice boomed in their heads, it was obvious.

After the battle, Astrid and Bobbi decided that this time was truly their time to settle once and for all. Declining Storm’s invitation for Astrid to teach at the School, the triplets go in her place, letting the couple finally go to live their lives back where they started.

Age: 23 (2006, X-Men new timeline); 29 (2012, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D S1); 31 (2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier); 35-40 (2018-2023, Endgame)

Birthday: May 13th

Description:  5′10, dark brown hair, mid-back length in waves; and ochre eyes. For a great part of her twenties she has her hair dyed white, roots showing, and her skin is tanned and freckled, except for some parts in her body that have some sort of discoloration. She always has an eternal soft smirk in her lips and most of the time Astrid keeps a natural upright position, as if it was engraved in her brain somehow, in comparison with her ways of talking, walking and dressing which are more relaxed. She has a distinctive beauty mark in her lower left eyelid and another in her left cheek.

Relationships: Emma Frost (biological mother); Isaiah (Winters) Frost (biological older brother); Esme, Phoebe and Sophie Frost (younger half-sisters); unknown biological father; Dinah and Sven Winters (foster parents); Ororo Munroe (mentor); Bobbi Morse (girlfriend/wife); Alphonso Mackenzie (friendly); Lance Hunter (dislike-friendly); Natasha Romanoff (acquaintance); Jemma Simmons (dislike-acquaintance-friend); Carol Danvers (best friend); Coulson’s team (acquaintances).

Powers: Telepathy (featuring most of her mother’s related powers), Telekinesis and Psionic abilities.

[kalimaruquin]

Since it crossed my mind...

Things in Endgame that I was okay with:

-Falcon getting the shield

-Carol Danvers repeatedly living up to the hype as she kicks the shit out of Thanos over and over

-Steve using Mjolnir

-Tony reacting to Steve like they’re ex-boyfriends while Tony somehow looks more like Jeff Goldblum in a Marvel movie than Jeff Goldblum looks like Jeff Goldblum in a Marvel movie. 

-That’s America’s Ass. / That Really Is America’s Ass.

-Tony meeting his dad in the past

-On Your Left

-New Asgard basically being ten feet to the left of where Odin said it could be

-Valkyrie, Korg, and Meek

Things I was not okay with in Endgame (in no particular order):

-She’s Got Help, because if you’re going to push one character super hard and do a super women group shot, don’t fucking yank the chain on it right when they’re about to accomplish the goal. Remember Infinity War? Remember how you managed to push all of the women into the same ditch for no reason? As fucked up as that scene was in terms of gender segregation, at least it ended with the goal being met. (The goal being ‘kill the woman here who matters the least to the marketing team’.) She’s Got Help just ended with all of the involved characters collectively failing to cut a straight line through enemy forces despite the fact that half of them could fly.

-Having the first openly gay character in a Marvel movie be some nameless, useless yabbo who brings it up during some fucked up survivors guilt sharing circle, and suddenly I feel like I’m watching the AIDs circle scenes from Rent as Steve ‘America’s Ass’ Rogers makes it about him waking up in the ice for the fiftieth time. 

“We have to move on”, he says, as I sit here knowing that this is a three hour long franchise movie set after they merced half of all life and ninety percent of the cast. 

And that most of them would be coming back.

-A rat in the impound is the thing that brought Antman back. Never mind that out of every piece of useless clutter in the movie, the only thing to get impounded is the minivan with a minimizer in it, but that a rat has to be there to confirm that out of four shrinker heroes with degrees, not one of them thought of a timed return feature.

-Actually, the fact that the van alone got impounded by anybody after half of all life got dusted is really bugging me now. Did the municipality of that town specifically just get avoided in the snap all together? That street? Was the guard for the impound a hoarder who stole it? He must be, because why would you pay someone to guard an impound for five years after the streets have become so abandoned that people don’t even bother removing bicycles anymore? 

-Who did the census poll of people who got dusted? How long did that poll take? How did Scott find the memorial park? Is there only one memorial park? Are there memorials in every city? Why did Scott go to a memorial park when he could/would have just gone home first? Nothing is explained by the first prolonged scene with Scott, and it is so slap-dashed together that things that should not be questions are popping up. 

-The fact that Natasha is now such a disaster that she makes a pb&j sandwich while in the middle of a hologram conference call while everyone else, including the talking space raccoon, has the wherewithal to stay standing and look presentable. Also, she is so far gone that she doesn’t know how to handle something like an underwater earthquake. You’re an Avenger, not a Rescue Ranger. Natural environmental hazards are not your problem.

Captain Ass then walks in again, talking about how ‘we’ don’t move on. Is this about SHIELD? Are you talking about SHIELD? Because if I remember correctly, that one was pretty explicitly your past coming back from the grave to bite your *American* ass. You didn’t bring it back with all your moping about WW2 pussy, it came for you with red lights on. Also, stop moping about WW2 pussy. You watched her punch a dude once, that is not grounds for a century long obsession with one woman who ended up not doing her job right because she ended up letting Super Nazis into SHIELD. If this isn’t about SHIELD, then stop going to weird ‘we don’t know how to stop putting ‘depressed masturbating’ on our resumes’ meet groups.

-Actually five years is a ludicrously long time for people to still not be picking up after themselves. It’s like the writers wanted everyone to be super depressed about the disaster, but they ignored the fact that the population explodes after shitty stuff happens. Touch of realism? Scott should have been wading through streets filled with toddlers and pregnant women. The kid on the bike? Should have had a baby seat on the back with the unfortunate implication that it was his kid. You want to make it funny as a man frantically searches for his daughter’s name in a strangely normally populated cemetery(which is clearly what they were going for with his line delivery)? Have him trying to do a superbowl shuffle through roaming packs of three-to-five year olds.

(Actually, would the snap have taken pregnant women? Snap, no baby, five years later, snap, back to being pregnant? Snap, no mom?! There’s got to be at least one chosen toddler out there with the doom world prophecy on her that since she was born from the ashes of her mother’s corpse, she is now destined to Flay The Bones of The Corpse Lord, Lord of Corpses, but her mom came back, so now it’s time for a Capri-Sun and a nap.)

-Tony’s whole... Look, it’s really hard to believe that Tony ‘Box of Scraps in a Cave’ Stark had multiple crashed spaceships, the ruins of a technologically advanced planet, an alien cyborg/gynoid woman with spacecraft engineering knowledge, and a nanotech Iron Man suit on his person and couldn’t manage to somehow become a planet-hopping rad dude living the space punk dream with his ‘robo-sister’. Honestly, Tony should have met Carol when he accidentally bumped into her at a party after they’d both just saved each half of the planet that they were partying on. Tony should have been wearing sunglasses that he’d made himself from two different colored pieces of space crystal, and Carol should have pointed out that he looked like he needed a burger. He asks where they could find such a thing (after doing that thing he does where he repeats the topic of conversation multiple times because he’s excited and trying to process what his brain is coming up with), and he flies his zero-G party barge after her and steps out to find his wife after five long painful lonely years on the road. Then he tearfully tells Carol that he’s going to have to cancel on that burger, and she’s like ‘no problem, Major Tom’, which is somehow the most dated thing Tony or Steve has ever heard.

I must emphasize though, Hetero-Chromatic Space Crystal Sunglasses. With a Stardust Iron Man suit.

-The fact that I’m supposed to believe that the Infinity Stones would allow themselves to be destroyed, and that Ant Man came back not so that he can find out that they were only shrunk to molecular size, but so that we can get some nonsense time travel plot instead. Seriously, Ant Man could have come back because the Space Stone slapped him in the dick and resized him and he didn’t know what it was. 

-The fact that time travel in Endgame works (pretty explicitly) on DBZ rules and not a more cinematically satisfying set of rules. (i.e. hey, there’s now a world timeline where the Avengers initiative failed spectacularly after the Battle of New York because Tony had a heart attack, Loki got away, the Tesseract and the Staff went missing at the same time, and Steve was found ass up after falling down about ten floors worth of glass and stairs after giving away that he was a Hydra agent(?!) but hey at least all of these stones are accounted for.)

-Steve creeping on Peggy. Just... Steve creeping on Peggy. Eugh.

-The fact that Nebula apparently has intergalactic/universal wifi coming out of her at all times, with an automatically updating memory bank that uploads all memories she has to a cloud storage that can then be accessed by anybody that plugs into her. Just have the time traveling version of her get found by scanners and get recalled the old(ish) fashion way. All you have to do is have Squidward-Frieza at the keyboard going “Oh my, it appears some naughty little monkey has stolen one of our computer units. Shall I have it brought back, my lord?” and then he sends a stall signal to Nebula’s systems and they just track her down. As it is, she could have just left if she hadn’t been sitting there watching her memories get rooted through. Hell, have that be the turn around, where she leaves, everything goes as planned, and suddenly Thanos and his BS is waiting for them when they go to put everything back.

-All of Thor. Just... all of Thor. The petty killing Thanos at the beginning, the ‘haha look he’s fat now’, the bullying kids on Fortnite, the utter bullshit of giving up on leading his people because ‘he has to be who he is and not who he’s trying to be’ like he didn’t explicitly save the Asgardians because he made do with what he was given during Ragnarok, the fact that he didn’t say one word to any of the Lokis in the movie but was a blubbering idiot over his mother. (Also, there is no good god damn way that Frigga saw fat busted old Thor and went “Yeah, I’m okay with dying and letting that happen.” So there’s a new timeline there.)

-The entire exchange between Clint and Natasha over the Soul Stone. Like, the whole thing is supposed to be a deep and meaningful conflict, but the problem with that is that the story of the movie hasn’t placed either of them in very high regard. Natasha’s a washed out wreck, apparently spending the last five years sitting in the Avengers compound and making crappy looking sandwiches while Clint went out and became an international murder spree. This isn’t them in their prime arguing over who’s taking the fall, it’s two people that we as the audience have had maybe an hour and a half to get to know. And less than half that time to like them. Hell, it’s pointed out in this movie that Natasha needs to grow a little since she can’t let go of the past and that she needs to be able to move forward through tragedy. Having to watch Clint sacrifice himself so that she might have a chance to save his family would have fit that arc. But no, we’re doing She’s Got Help later, so take the second longest running female character in the franchise and end her mid-movie so that we can re-enact the Soul Stone Man Pain scene.

(You guys,,,,have no idea,,,what it’s like,,,to be a grungey murder crime boy,,,,,and watch,,,,,as the hot girl dies,,,,,,because the writers are fucking hacks,,,,,,and are too busy reusing and recreating scenes from old movies to actually keep track of the characters in this one,,,) :,(

(I actually like Clint as a character in the movies, but the fact that he ends up being a parallel to T ‘MURDER MY OWN DAUGHTER FOR A ROCK’ HANOS is gut twisting.)

-The Bruce/Hulk offscreen nonsense. Could have made it that Hulk died in the snap and Banner got the body, could have made it that Bruce died and Hulk got the brains. Could have them become Joe Fixit, or the Professor, or Doc Green. Nope, just Bruce Banner as a giant green mascot character.

-The fact that the writers had no good idea on how to handle Tony if he was settled and happy, so they killed him off after kicking him in the teeth a few times

-The fact that the writers don’t have any idea who Captain America is beyond ‘man, he sure was in love with Peggy I guess’ and basically refused to do anything else with him.

Like, we could have had a movie where Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov didn’t let go of the past, but didn’t let it kill them either. Steve and Natasha could have restarted SHIELD. We could have had a parting shot of America’s Ass standing perk and just above center frame on the bridge of a brand new Stark Industries made heli-carrier as Natasha gives the orders for take off.

[theamazingsallyhogan]

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn goes way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo,Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

[videoreligion]

Dead Mate aka Grave Robbers (1988)

“The Bluebeard story is kind of like an OG slasher. If you're not familiar, it is an old ass folktale involving a wife-murdering rich guy with a blue-tinted beard (hence the title). The first version I ever read was in inside a collection of “Irish Ghost Stories” that I was gifted as a child (because I'm half Irish and mostly creepy). That particular anthology’s telling (as far as I remember) started with a mysterious man rolling up to a farm on a horse. The man is butt ugly, and he starts shoving money in the farmers face, talking about needing a wife to take back home. All of the farmer’s young daughters are pretty much like “fuck this”, and they refuse, but the man throws his weight around or offers to save the farm from debt (or some shit), which I guess is enough for the farmer to come around to the idea of pimping out his daughter. The enigmatic, rich, ugly dude and his “wife” ride back to his castle, and he gives her the master keys with a warning not to enter a certain mysterious door. There she lives out the lifestyles of the rich and awkward for a while, but sooner or later, curiosity gets the best of her, and she opens the door to discover a room full of chopped up ex-wives. He finds out that she knows about his dead wife storage and decides it's a good time for her to join the collection. There is a scuffle, somehow she gets the best of him, and I think she kills his crusty ass. I don't really remember the end. I do remember, at the time, I got hung up on the fresh knowledge that, at some point, people just went knocking on doors to ask strangers if they had an extra daughter lying around-- like someone asks for a cup of sugar ( I was very young yet to have a social studies class or see Conan the Barbarian).  The moral I took away from the whole thing was that no amount of money makes someone less creepy --and not to sell your kids, but I may have been missing the original point. To little RevTerry’s credit though, there is some debate on the true meaning of the story, as it has been told by numerous cultures and has survived for ages.  The versions can range drastically from things like elongated curiosity-killed-the-cat type yarns to fables predicting the dangers of fully trusting a spouse. There are recurring themes and the base of the tale stays the same, for the most part, but the takeaway can vary with each rehash. Of course, every person retold it according to their values, and with each modification the original message was lost. Like many other fables, it can serve as a pre-made recipe for several mediums, from the most famous and lasting version, Charles Perrault’s 1697 entry in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, to necrophilia themed, low budget movies like the one I’ll talk about today, Dead Mate (aka Grave Robbers 1988).” - RevTerry

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[okimargarvez]

ZOCCOLA / SHUT UP

Original title: Zoccola / Zitta.

Prompt: jealousy, sick love, attempted murder.  

Warning: slight A.U.

Genre: action, romantic, angst, friendship.

Charcters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, Sam, O.C. (Luke’s girlfriend), BAU team.

Pairing: Garvez (Sam x Penelope, Luke x O.C.).  

Note: oneshot.

Legend: 💏😘🎲🎈.

Song mentioned: none.

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES See the notes for more explanations.

ZOCCOLA \ SHUT UP

(Stay in silent is better than talking to get air to the mouth. But not always. Though, be ready to face the consequences)

 Unbeknownst to the other members of the BAU, Luke and Penelope have been engaged. Six years before he joined the unit. For about a month, during one of the long pauses between Garcia and Kevin. It didn't work, because they were too different, but most of all, lacked passion. The Canadian boyfriend exists. And Roxy is not the only "girl" which is part of the life of tall dark and bland-some .

Beware to cry wolf too much...

 ******************

 Six years ago

-I'm sorry, we can't go on. I don't feel that flame that wrap me, you know? I hope we can still be friends.- the woman had long observed her reflection in the mirror. -That's no good. I hate this cliché. But I haven't to make it so complicated. Even he doesn't feel anything too intense for me. He'll not suffer.- she was make up, dressed normally. When the phone had warned of a new message, she looked out the window and a smile had appeared on her lips. The antiquated car. The usual "I'm here. Get down."; she's going to miss all this a bit. But she didn't love him, she, who loved everyone, even strangers and criminals. She didn't love him in that way. Kevin was still too present; accept the invitation of the unknown, that had seen her in the parking lots of the Bureau in clear difficulty with Esther, his car just as antiquated and in bad condition, she didn't want to believe that it was been just a mistake.

She descended the stairs following a normal speed. Avoiding, as well as puddles, as always, a little for superstition, that step that she still saw soaked with her blood. Then he had opened the door and he had... had greeted her with a kiss. Yet, they had talked about the lack of a strong feeling among them. He said he was of the same opinion. So, why? Why he behaved in this way?

And when she was going to do it, he had suddenly burst into tears. And so, she had given up, postponed it. Once again. But then she couldn't take it anymore. She had done something even more shabby. She had broken up with him with a text.

 ******************

 Six months before

She knows it's coming. She had talked with him the night before. She had asked him something he had trouble accepting. -Please... you could pretend that we've never seen before? I don't want that someone can get strange ideas, knowing about us...-. Luke's reply was very sensible: -But it's been six years.- But in the end, he agreed. Because he loved her. As friends, they were very well together. But just as friends.

The doors open. From the elevator goes down him. It's a bit of time she doesn't seen him. He has always been a fascinating man, she has never doubted about this, but now he has something more. It'll be that beard or that he let his hair grow, that usually had short, in militaristic in style. In fact, the last time she had seen him, had been before he left for Iraq. She watches him shake hands with her colleagues. She feels all eyes on her at the time of their "presentation." She knows what they think. That Luke replaces Derek, so it'll be hard for her to accept him. And it's what she'll make them believe. -Penelope Garcia.- who knows if someone captures that slight flicker in the male gaze or falsity behind her sustained tone and distant.

-Nice to meet you. Luke.- and man barely struggles to prevent himself a wink to her.

 -We have to play even when we are alone?- this he had asked, calling her, just as she was reaching for Sam to going to bed. Her boyfriend, not at all Canadian, was greatly annoyed. Already he didn't like Luke, because although they had had a very short story, he was still an ex of Garcia. And he didn't like the fact that they talked quite regularly. But he trusted her, and he tried to leave her spaces. Knowing that they had become coworkers, and that they would have seen each other almost seven days a week... -Yes, it's better.- it was her answer. -We can't know what can happened, we should still stay in character.- she had whispered slower and he had realized that she didn't want to be heard by Sam. Now the latter and Penelope were together for four years and the "fault" or the merit, it was his, he introduced them... in fact, for a time Sam had been his best friend. And this is why he had presented her to him, when he was with Garcia. Then the blonde came back to Kevin and for a while he heard nothing more of her. And all of a sudden, she had text him to tell him that she saw again Sam and that she had noticed that... she was falling in love with him. Yet in the meantime, the friendship between the two men was now shattered.

-All right, I only do it for you. Good night, Pen.- his voice had proved extremely sweet. Every now and then he did had his moments. Rare.

-Good night.- she was limited to reciprocate, then she had ended the call and run by her boyfriend. But a little thought about Luke had not left her, in her own knowledge.

 ******************

 Today

-Mark and I are getting married.- that how they discovers that the heart of Agent Alvez isn't not engaged only by Roxy. Ever since she had made the announcement, Emily had changed. She was radiant, excited like a child, even careless. Nothing to do with the super woman who had become chief of the BAU with the abandonment of Hotch. And she wanted to know the exact number of guests who would come to the wedding.

The family Jareau-Lamontaigne complete, of course; Dave and his ex-wife; Penelope and Sam; Spencer and Tara without a partner; and Luke with such Narcisa.

And Garcia doesn't resist. She waits till she catches a moment when he is alone, to ask him. -You're engaged?- it's only her mania for gossip, talking. This she repeated to herself.

-Yes, from... about a month or so.- he says flatly. It's quite evident that the sentiment is still immature. However, she is happy the news because finally Sam will stop to think about a possible, however absurd, backfire. And in the evening, at home, she is looking a bit of information on the new conquest of Latin. Starting from the most mundane things: social networks.

Narcisa Gonzales. Even the name is too ordinary. As profile pictures she has a picture of herself with her nose against Roxy's. She likes dogs and that makes her immediately likeable, although she is a bit jealous (of the dog), because having not own pets, she has always considered Roxy a bit hers. She works as a saleswoman in a supermarket. She always smiles and writes sentences that are seen in whatever boring profile...

Then Penelope freezes, as she notices a strange post. Thank you, my love, for these wonderful days together. I love you. A month and already she was at that level? Even she, who was only too accustomed to call people with affectionate nicknames, had difficulty when it was time to say a true I love you... However, she decides to fly over. She picks up the phone and sends a message to Luke.

How about a nice double date tomorrow night? For a lot of time the Latin agent had acted as a third wheel between Garcia and Sam, with particular disappointment on his part. She couldn't understand his jealousy. It was only a few days. There was been just some kisses. You know, I told you everything. Yet he was not convinced. The fact that they regularly texting, that she went to his house, every so often, even though he knew very well that she did so to see Roxy, made him twitchy. It's one of my best friends. Along with Derek, Spencer, Rossi. Why you're not jealous of them? The reply to this question was fast: Because with them you never engaged. With him, yes. However, it was a bit that Sam didn't complain, and now would been even happier.

I don't know, I'll let you know tomorrow at work.

 So, as they had to deal with only some assessments, the next night they come together in a restaurant where Penelope and Luke had been already, when they were engaged. But this they don’t tell to their current partners. Garcia decided to wear something not too exaggerated, she realizes she wants to make a good impression on Narcisa. Sam is much more elegant. She meets soon the gaze of her colleague and friend. Luke wears a clear shirt and jeans. Beside him is a woman who looks like (strangely) to that she seen in the picture: very shapely, even more than her, despite the low heels and a mane of dark and curly hair. Overall, she seems pretty. In her heart she hoped that this is the right time; she is tired of having to bear the grievances of Sam on the fact that "agent Alvez ends up doing always the third wheel in their outputs (because in reality he is still interested in her)".

Why you don't want your colleagues know that you've been with Luke? She reminded one of the questions that her boyfriend had ask her six months ago. But the answer was the same that she had given to Luke. She backs to the present and approaching the other pair, the hand tight in that of Sam.

-Nice to meet you, I'm Penelope.- she smiles holding out her hand.

-Narcisa.- the other replies, squeezing it. She has a delicate touch and even her voice is very harmonious.

The evening passes serene in that way. And then, the verdict of the blonde annoys her companion. -She's nice, willing, she has a functioning head... is too much for Luke.- Sam glares at her and count to ten before speak.

-What do you mean? That she isn't up on your level? That should be you there, in her place?- nothing, every occasion is good for getting at there. The woman sighs and decides not to want to sleep. -But you don't has to go to work tomorrow?- she ignores him, she has always been far too capable to do so. -Suit yourself. Good night and try to dreaming of your Latin friend, please!- as soon as he slams the bedroom door, Penelope begins to cry, but it's a silent cry and he'll not notice. She loves him, of course she loves him, because otherwise they would be together? But lately he doesn't understand her, he has become indifferent to her crisis, he cares only about making love (if she can even call it that) and to persist with the story that in fact, she is in love with her colleague.

The only way she can let off steam is to write. Through the words that she types, come out also all the malaise, anxiety, pain and anger she felt over the course of the day. Yet it is a bit 'that she doesn't it, so she doubts for a moment to be still capable. The second before she is no longer able to stop herself, despite the warm weather and a desire to get up to get a glass of water and an open a little the window to change the air; she can't to block the flow that has enveloped her at the same instant in which she placed her fingers on the computer keyboard.

 After four years, he still doesn't trust the woman who claims to love. He accused her for things that don't exist, unhealthy ideas born of his mad mind and by keeping insist in this way, he has managed to penetrate the doubt in her. And if he's right? And this isn't the time to wondering questions like that, not now that he has another girlfriend. She had all the time she wanted to change her mind, go back, try again. Not that he (the other he) has given her many reasons (or opportunities) to do it.

He isn't in love with her. He loves her because they are friends. He is closest to her, he consoles her because if she's not thinking clearly, she can't do a good job and ther others are lost. It's important that she's fine. But she doesn't want to wonder if she was wrong, if she was to stay with the other man. There wasn't passion, there wasn't that magical spark. They hadn't even made love, because she didn't feel right; something told her not to, and fortunately, considering what happened.

But now she's tired of having to use a form in the third person in fear to express themselves. Sincerity always first of all, she told herself. Sitting in front of her computer, typing sentences without meaning, that perhaps will clear why not deemed worthy to exist and occupy megabytes on her hard drive... she wonders if this is really considerable love.

She takes off the mask and looking in the mirror. Below it, I appear.

 ****************** The next morning Penelope completely forgot those strange thoughts, which appeared to her deriving from another self, which she couldn't recognize. While she is arranging things before the meeting on the new case, the room door opens, and Luke appears. Without looking up from the folders, the computer technician turns to the newcomer -Not yet the moment, I'll call you.- noise of steps approaching, then an imposing shadow obscures the view. -Newbie?- she still occasionally call him in this way. -What's happening?- the man's face transmits sadness.

-Nothing, I can't wait to discuss the new case.- she raises an eyebrow.

-What do you think, I'm a stupid?- she approaches him and puts a hand on his shoulder. It's damn easy to forget how tall he is. -Come on, tell me. You certainly didn't come here to help me with these documents!- she also tries a joke that gets a little smile just mentioned from him.

-It's Narcisa... - he starts, without looking at her while he's talking. She thinks with a little complacency Trouble in Paradise? -Tonight, I wanted to go out with Phil, to remember a bit the old times, "boy's night"- he chuckles, but stops quickly -but she doesn't want, she says that I neglect her, that I don't love her because I don't want to spend every free moment with her...- Penelope remains dazed by this revelation. But if they saw each other yesterday! And then another thought that she isn't able enough to drive away And, you love her? But she doesn't ask it.

- You didn't tell me she had understand all the exits you had to do last month?- Luke nods.

-Yes, but last night, as soon as we said goodbye, she began to complain about the fact that we still don't live together, that I don't text her enough and then she had asked me what we would do tonight, I told her my plans and she was pissed.- the blonde, while listening, starts to sort things out, because in a moment the future bride and also the chief of the BAU will appear. But she doesn't know what to say to help him. And anyway, a second later Emily appears and shortly after also the others.

-We are ready to start?-

 The same evening, after waiting for the return of colleagues, Garcia goes back to home and wakes Sam. They make love, or something similar, but in the end the confusion in her head hasn't dissipated. This method also didn't work. And she doesn't even have the strength to write something.

 ****************** She didn't expect anyone to enter her bunker. She was turning off the system, because by now another case had been solved. She had lingered anyway so as not to have to go home too soon.

She looks up and sees Luke. -I can't do it anymore.- she stands up, inviting him to continue. "It's always Narcisa. Look at what she texts to me.- he hands her the cell phone. Penelope reads the message but accidentally pushes it forward and so she sees another part. I bet there was also your ex-zoccola with your friends. She gives him the appliance back and their hands touch each other. He understands something has happened, because she is bleached and no longer seems to be present. -Pen? Are you okay? - only when he caresses her cheek she is recovers.

-She's not referring to me, is she?- her voice is weak, incredulous, and her eyes are shining. Luke understands that she had also red the next text.

-I'm sorry, I didn't want... I'm sorry.- she suddenly feels she needs to get away. -Pen? Penelope?- she shakes her head.

- It's... it's all right. No problem. But now... Sam is waiting for me.- a lie. -I had to go.- she checks that everything is perfectly off, grabs the bag and runs out. But she hears his footsteps behind her.

-I can accompany you ..- she doesn't stop even to respond - We have to do the same way, so...- he stops her putting a hand on her shoulder.

-Do you want to really make her angry? I do not think so...- he re-start walking and decides to take the stairs, rather than stay closed with him in a space as tight as the elevator. Luke, however, keeps follow her.

-It's not like anyone'll know....- his tone seems too conspiratorial.

-I prefer to take the subway. I... need time to think. Alone.- she finally turns towards him. -We see you tomorrow morning, ok?- he nods and stays there watching her run away.

 She is angry. She feels an incredible hate. She wonders why she asked her for friendship. Why the woman puts hearts under the posts she writes. If she really thinks such thing about her. She wouldn't have known the meaning of that strange word, if only her Italian stallion hadn't explained it to her one day.

And yet she should have expected it. No one girlfriend had managed to easily accept the fact that before they boyfriends had been with her. She who wears the mask again, because she doesn't feel like facing reality in the first person.

Again, that woodworm that hammers her. And if he was right? And if they all were right?

Things don't go well with "original" him. Suspicion is now a certainty.

What she needs would be a period alone. A very long time.

 ****************** Incredibly, they spend three months in indifference. Sometimes Luke lets out some complaints, but mostly focus on solving cases and they don't talk about anything else. Sam always comes home after her. He smells strange. He doesn't look for her anymore. And this makes her life a lot easier.

Then the great day arrives. Emily is almost unrecognizable with the white dress. Penelope strives to the maximum to concentrate only on the main couple. To ignore those hands entwined in front of her. That give her absurdly annoyance. She is moved at the moment when the chief of the unit pronounces the word yes, but the arm that wraps her shoulders is only circumstance. A convention, not reality.

And what she would like to do is stand up and shout the truth to everyone. An extremely selfish gesture that fortunately she doesn't perform. But pretending this is nothing is getting harder and she feels that the explosion is near. She needs to talk about it with someone. At least with one person. And the choice is all too easy.

 -What did this bitch say? You're joking, right? I can't believe that Luke would ever put himself together with a... I'm struggling to see her as a person.- then all of a sudden the multi-mom blonde realizes the implications of what she has been revealed to her. -Wait a minute... but... you and Alvez have been together?- JJ smiles as she asks the rhetorical question.

-Yes, six years ago. During one of the "pause for reflection" with Kevin... but it wasn't anything important. Not a story of a night, don't misunderstand me... we were together... a month. But there was no passion, so we broke up. I still thought about Kevin all the time... We were friends, but he left for Iraq and we rest in touch occasionally with e-mails or messages. Then we met again when he joined the BAU, but I told him it was better to leave the past behind...- she hopes JJ hasn't noticed the fact that her cheeks have turned red.

-Penelope, it's... I have no words. From the beginning it seemed to me that there was something strange between you and Luke, I thought it didn't depend only on the departure of Morgan...- Garcia puts her head on the shoulder of her friend who hugs her. -Have you told it Sam?- she sighs and closes her eyes.

-Yes, and... nothing, he had remained indifferent. He didn't even try to defend me, he wasn't indignant... he is very happy to go out with a hija de puta.- JJ looks at her in amazement because she spoke in Spanish. -Luke taught me a bit. After we broke up, we managed to remain friends, just because ours was a very soft story.- she simply explains.

-So, you really pretended that you didn't like him as a person... but the matter was much more intricate than we thought...- the blonde with eyeglasses nods. -And now? You'll let it go?- it's clear that she's suggesting her do the opposite.

-No. I don't think I can do it. The problem is that I shouldn't know it, what she really thinks about me. And believe it or not, the thing that makes me angrier... is that she pretend sympathy and a positive interest in me. She took me for stupid?- the friend and colleague can't find an answer to this question and Penelope returns home with the same doubts as before, but the heart a little lighter.

 She can't take it anymore to have to always use this external shape. She is me and I'm confused, tired, emptied and if there was one thing I never wanted to become, it's really emptied. I live a useless relationship, made only of appearance. For fear of being alone. We can't continue this way.

And that girl. I can't help but think about her. I was with her boyfriend six years ago. We're friends and we see each other almost every day, but as far as she knows, I've been busy with another man for a very long time. I gave her no reason to be jealous. I don't even put "I like" to every post of him! (Maybe one day I'll be able to write that name, but not today).

Enough, I no longer even have the strength to write. Not even this help me.

 ******************

 Another month spends without any significant event. Then, one evening, she finds her in front of her. Together with everyone else. They are from O'Keef, the bar near the unit where they spend several moments after a bad case or to celebrate a successful one. There are the newlyweds, Emily and Mark, so they finally get to know him really. There's Will (the baby sitters do wonders) and there's also Sam. But Penelope struggles to tolerate that arm around her shoulders. She constantly glances at JJ, who tries not to stare at Narcisa. Even her name seems stupid.

At one point she can't take it anymore and decides to get up and go out for a breath of fresh air. She doesn't even notice that Luke has gone out because his cell phone has ring. But after a moment she hears him speak, she listens intently to his conversation and realizes that something serious has happened. Then his voice cracks and he burst into tears. She can't stay hidden and takes a step in his direction. She sees him with the phone in his hand and a fixed and distant expression, alienated. -Luke?- she whispers softly. The man sees her. -What... what happened?- another step.

-My mother...- he can only say. Penelope fears the worst. -...yesterday she had a heart attack, they took her to the hospital... we had that case and I didn't go. I was thinking of going tonight, but... Narcisa- he pronounces that name almost with hatred -she insisted on coming here, to "see your friends again ", I hoped... I thought I had time to visit her later...- before realizing what she is doing, she brushes his arm with her hand. -She's dead, Pen. Dead.- the tears begin to flow copiously along his face and he seeks comfort by embracing her friend. The latter continues to wonder why the first time she saw him cry didn't affect her, in fact, almost annoyed her and now she would do anything, would even give a part of her life, to make him feel better and see him smile. Maybe it's because she knew Luke's mother personally and loved her. Perhaps she has only matured.

As she strokes his back a bang rings around them and a flash lights them. A sudden storm decides to make an appearance. Penelope leaps for the scare and Luke feels the woman's heart beat wildly. Another flash and less than a second after the rumble. It also starts to rain very strongly, but neither seems to want to separate from the other and interrupt the contact. The raindrops match perfectly with Luke's tears, they are almost a caress, they wash him, purify him and it seems to him that even the sky is crying for his mourning. The blonde shudders, now completely soaked and he realizes it. Holding his arm around her shoulders, he leads her into the shelter of his car.

The shower is raging, the drops hit the windshield and the windows violently, but sitting next to him, Penelope feels a strange heat. She doesn’t know what to say, to help him, because nothing will ever be the right thing. She knows this perfectly because she has not yet passed her parents' death and almost thirty years have passed. But the Latin takes her hand, intertwines their fingers and looks at her, as if to say that her presence is enough for him, there is no need to do anything else. But Narcisa should be there, instead. She is his girlfriend, and this is one of those things that couples should face together. Not just think about holidays or put pictures full of little hearts on social media; or writing "I will marry my partner" via emoticons or coded sentences. These are the difficult moments that make the difference.

 She sent a message to Sam. She had kept the bag out with her when she left for get some air, not knowing why. Destiny, perhaps, had already chosen in her place. She didn’t need anything else. He too had typed a short, coincidental text message with which he ditched Narcisa. They have imagined them: angry as all hell, intent on making false assumptions. And they almost laughed. She had accompanied him to his parents' house. She had shaken hands with Luke's father, who had dragged her into a hug. She had also cried, but when no one could see her, or so at least she believed; in fact, the ex-ranger had heard those sobs and had refrained from showing himself. She had come out of the bathroom, her eyes still shining and her face a little red, but they both had pretended nothing had happened.

Luke's phone had received several messages and calls, all ignored. Garcia's was off. The last phone call she had made was directed to Prentiss; she had explained the situation to her and that Alvez and she would be absent for some time because of the mourning. She had to help him organize the various stages. The chief hadn't understood, because as far as she knew they almost couldn’t stand each other. Penelope had then suggested that was better if she talk to JJ, who would clarify her doubts.

Their fingers remained firmly intertwined both during the funeral home and during the rosary and the funeral. Their hands had never separated, except to make the sign of the cross. The Alvez family was very religious, Catholic, as could be expected from people of Latin descent. Garcia had managed to avoid wondering why that contact, that there had never been before, had seemed so natural, nor when they were together, or while they were simple friends. Although she was an expansive person, to put it mildly.

Her computer was missing. She had to write, she needed it to let off steam. So, she took a sheet and a ballpoint pen and had followed the old method.

 What's going on? Did he really need me right now? Coming here was a crazy idea. I'm just a friend. But in the eyes of his relatives the thing will have seemed very different. What was most important that he was fine. But at what price?

I'm still so confused, too. The only thing I'm sure of is that I have to be able to leave Sam. I don’t love him, no more. And he doesn’t love me.

I hear Luke snoring from the opposite side of the room. I'm writing with the moonlight coming through the window, so probably tomorrow or even in a few hours, I will be able to decipher just a few words. I hope not to disturb him. It has been a long day and seeing him finally resting, with a serene expression, looks like a miracle.

Tomorrow we will return in Quantico and the world will begin to flow again, even if it has never stopped, it’s we who have stopped or we have hoped to do so. We will have to face reality. Narcisa wants to kill me and maybe now she has some reason to do it. She certainly can’t understand that a man and a woman can be friends, that at that moment it was necessary to do what Luke needed. That there are no double ends behind it.

Now I should try to sleep too, probably.

I will not succeed.

 ******************

Things go exactly as she had expected. Garcia decides to explain the truth about her past with Luke. Everyone reacts with amazement, except JJ and Emily. The same evening, she also makes the decision to clear things up with Sam. She waits for him for a long time, when the door opens, and she jumps but sighs, because finally she’ll free herself of a weight. He sees her on the sofa and gives her a cold look. They haven’t spoken since that evening by O'Keef. She stands up -Sam ...- she says. In a flash the man reaches her and gives her a violent push.

-Bitch! Why did you bother to come back? Already tired of your caliente Latin?- his tone is pure evil. He terrifies her. She can’t even replicate anything. -Silence means consents. Narcisa was right about you. You're just zoccola.- after a moment of calm he gives her a very strong slap that makes her lip bleed. -You have always been in love with him and have never had the courage to tell me.- now she fears the worst, but fortunately Sam goes away and leaves the house, not before having whispered in her ear -You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you.-

There is only one possible number to do. The fingers move on their own. When Luke at three forty-seven at night sees the name of his friend and colleague on the display of his cell phone, he immediately thinks that something terrible has happened, but that doesn’t concern a new case. He feels it in his bones. And the confirmation comes to him through the broken, broken voice of Penelope. He rushes to her house, destroys any speed limit and opens the door wide open. She is there, curled up on the sofa, hugs her knees and looks like a child. She doesn’t even cry anymore. When he approaches her, he fatigues to remove her hands from her face and sees an easily recognizable red sign: five fingers, large, masculine. -Pen?- he says weakly, as if afraid of being able to do more harm, to hurt her. -What did he do to you?- he is afraid of her answer, but he has to face it, just like any other difficulty. She was there for him and he will be there for her now.

-I... I wanted to leave him... he... he told me that I'm... a bitch and zoccola .- the man tightens his eyelids, hearing her pronounce those vulgar words. -He said that Narcisa was right. And that I was not worth the effort.- he lets his breath go, he resumes breathing, understanding that at least that thing didn’t happen.

He squeezes her in his arms but when they separate he exclaims a phrase that manages to get Garcia out from the sort of stupor in which she fell after Sam left her alone. -Narcisa was really right.- she raises her eyes on him. She opens her mouth, eyes, and closes them. They become lucid again in a moment.

-You think I’m just zoccola ?- Luke shakes his head vigorously.

-No!- now he knows that he is obliged to tell her. -I’m still in love with you.-

And from here start various stages. Before, the shock for the whole sentence she heard, then, further awareness takes over. He said "again". It implies that he was even earlier.

-But ... but ... why you never told me... I thought...- now even his gaze is sad.

-I didn’t want to weigh, to put pressure to you. You didn’t feel the same things and I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried, however, to get rid of your thinking, to convince me that we could only be friends... I made fun of myself. Narcisa is just the last useless attempt I made.- before he can add details or she reply, the door opens again and the devil appears.

-Only a useless attempt?- the woman holds a gun in her hands and doesn’t seem at all uncertain. Surely, she knows how to handle and has already fired before. The tip towards Penelope. -A nice way to find out that I’m right. A rather poor satisfaction.- she seems almost ironic and wanting to joke. The hands of the two don’t separate. Narcisa pulls the trigger back.

-You don’t have to get mad at her. It’s not her fault. It's me who made fun of you, I deserve to die. Not her.- he doesn’t even try to negotiate and the blonde understands how deep is what Alvez feels towards her. -Let her go.- but it's all useless. Indeed, seeing how much he is willing to do for Penelope, makes her angry even more.

-Sam says that you’re not worth the effort. About this we disagree.- a moment before she shots her, Garcia understands something else. It was with this psychopath that Sam betrayed her. She doesn’t need any further proof, and nothing will be done anyway. She doesn’t even care how long it has been. She squeezes Luke's hand until she loses her sensibility in his fingers. But he releases her grip and pushes her away at last. She doesn’t have time to feel hurt, or betrayed. The bang deafens her and when she regains conscience of where she is, they are alone, and Luke's blood is soaking her sweater.

Once more fingers that move fast, they type, but this time not geeky thoughts that compose a sort of alternative diary. Few numbers, a call, desperate instructions. And then men in uniform, blinding lights, sirens, visits, no one who wants to give her the answers she pretends.

Until JJ enters. -Garcia ...- the blonde doesn’t pronounce the words she expects. -He's alive, he'll make it.- and hugs, other people, other visits. And finally, that sentence. -You can see him now.-

 They're both alone again.

She feared there would be a patina of embarrassment between them. Because the situation is strongly unbalanced. He had not openly declared himself but was willing to die for her. And Penelope, when she thought she could lose him, realized that she wouldn’t be able to accept it. He had been her best friend, in a similar way and at the same time different from her relationship with Morgan. With Derek she was joking, and even though for a while she had really been thinking about a relationship of another kind with her chocolate thunder, she had realized early enough that it would never happen. While she and Luke had a past, however short. That threshold was already crossed, it wasn’t a kind of taboo.

And in the end the doubt had hammered her for all the six years that had taken her from that rainy day in the car to another equally wet, sheltered in a hospital room. But she had always wanted to store them as crazy thoughts due to her too much spinning the wheels in her head. Although over time they had become more pressing, especially when they started pretending not to know each other after he was hired as a profiler.

But there is no need to rethink the past. Enough that unpleasant feeling, that heartache that she hasn't feel since Morgan was kidnapped, that she felt when her parents had that accident. The terror that he can definitely go away is much more intense than what a friend should feel.

She doesn’t even care that Narcisa and Sam are still at large, while the two of them are in hospital and Luke under the knife and when Emily, Tara and JJ tell her that they have taken "the sons of a bitch", she reacts to the announcement with shrug. The only thing that matters, for her, is behind that door.

 -Hey.- she tells him a little intimidated. He smiles at her; his eyes are a bit 'clouded.

-Hey.- he repeats. He moves the fingers of his left hand, resting on his chest, as if trying to squeeze something. The void is filled by those of her.

-You failed to get yourself killed this time.- she tries to joke. Then the voice cracks. -But you almost killed me.- and inside that sentence there is everything. There would almost be no need for Penelope to lean toward him and puts her lips against Luke's. The warm tears that bathe her face are both from joy and pain, they sound about the present and the past. -They had catch them.- she tells him, but neither is important for him at the moment. He only cares about the woman who cries and laughs at the same time, next to him.

 ******************

I’ll write again, but not now. Now Luke is sleeping and with one hand it’s not easy typing. If I try to detach my hand from his, he moans in his sleep. I’ll write again, but about other things. This demon has exhausted its power and there is no need to exorcise it anymore.

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Notes: Much of the things described here have really happened to me. I dedicate this story to that person who tried to make me feel wrong; the only differences between story and reality are that I'm still with my Sam, while her Luke wants to break up with her, but he has no courage to do it. I decided to keep the original epithet which was given me, zoccola (it means bitch, whore) because I believe that in the Latin world of Luke and his girlfriend it can be understood. This things have happened one year ago.