#house of change

[spookyspaghettisundae]

All the King’s Horsepower

Not real.

He had to keep telling himself this wasn’t real. None of it was real.

Claws scratched the scarred floors. It neared. It followed.

Not real. Not real. Yet Jericho Kane froze. As if it helped him stay hidden from the creature.

The tall, gaunt pursuer crept around the corner. It stopped in the shadows. When a long fluorescent tube in the corridor flickered with life, the overhead light revealed a skin as crimson as fresh blood, taut over long, thin bones. The light made its smile shine, baring bright white teeth, like those of a sadistic man. That grin—that hideous grin—underlined its eyeless face.

Not real.

Jericho blinked and his vision blurred. The creature vanished.

The next blink brought it back. Ten steps closer. Ten steps away from reaching out with long, spindly fingers, and sinking pointy claws into his flesh. Grin gone, its mouth agape, only a raspy sigh escaped the void between those straight, perfect teeth.

Not real.

Jericho shot it. Again and again. Every bright flash of the revolver’s blasts blinded him, every thunderclap left a ringing in his ears, and the gun smoke stung his nostrils. Every shot sent the hideous figure stumbling backwards, step by step, buying more time.

The moment the pistol stopped spitting bullets, clicking empty, he ran. Ran like a bat out of hell.

Not real.

He ran, stealing little more than a panicked glance over his shoulder. Feeding his own dread with the image of the creature, staggering, but not falling. Wobbling, hurt, but not dead.

Splaying its claws, it screeched, and chased him.

Slender feet slapped against linoleum floors, all splattered with dried blood. Whose blood?

Not real.

Slap-tap-slap-slap-tap-tap—like bags filled with raw meat slapping the floors.

It grinned again. Spiting the holes in its body as they wept with tar-like fluid, it grinned.

Why was he running?

The fog of not-real-not-real-not-real thickened, clouding all sensible answers.

He would not be able to run like this for long. It felt like hours, or days, or forever. And the longer he ran, rounding one corner, then the next, ducking through broken doorways, sprinting across decrepit rooms, the more Jericho’s lungs screamed for pause and air as they squeezed out tortured, wheezing gasps.

Every time he hoped to hide behind debris, or collapsed walls in the ruin, or to find shadows to hide in, the creature caught up. Grinning its hideous grin. Then hissing at him.

Screeching.

Cackling, scratching walls, slicing floors with its clicking long claws when it hunched over like a feral beast. Cackling, screeching.

Jericho ran.

Not real!

Real hands seized him by the arm and collar. Yanked him aside. Pain exploded from his shoulder and ribs where he crashed, and when the stars had cleared from his vision, Jericho glimpsed Karma.

She kicked the door shut.

Karma.

Real?

The force of a freight train crashed into the door, nearly shoving her away from it where she braced to hold it shut. Struggling, pushing, pushing back against the creature on the other side, allowing a glimpse of the monster through the crack.

Just wide enough for Jericho to glimpse those teeth again. That grin. That eyeless face, with claws curling, yearning to carve the flesh from his bones.

Not real!

“Not real!” Jericho shouted, his voice cracking with despair.

The young woman checked the door with her shoulder, bashing it shut again. Then the creature slammed against it from the opposite side. Again, and again, back and forth. The grinning ghost hammered the door with unnatural strength.

“Shut the fuck up and help me keep this closed,” Karma growled through gritted teeth.

Between banging blows from the other side of the door, grit and splinters crunched underneath her sneakers whenever she slipped, straining to maintain her footing, putting all leg strength and her back into bracing against the door.

“Come the fuck on!” she yelled.

Jericho finally broke free from his paralysis. Together, they jammed an old wooden chair up against the door, and scrambled to find anything else to barricade the entrance.

BAM-BAM-SLAM—

Filthy windows only allowed diffuse light to enter, leaving the room in a gloomy fog. All other furniture lay rotten or broken, left to decay for decades of disrepair, and the only other thing of note in the room was an old television set and video recorder, encircled by a collection of VHS cassette tapes arranged in a symmetrical shape around the TV.

Almost like a ritual circle.

BAM-SLAM-BAM—

The door’s wood bent to every blow, and the growing cracks along its surface coughed out dust and splinters.

Wood groaned when Karma started dragging a broken cabinet along the wall, pushing it closer towards the door. Then it got stuck—lodged in a crack in the floorboards, snagged against rusty nails in the wall. Her face twisted with strain and turned beet-red. Every time she pushed at the cabinet with fury, it refused to budge while threatening to break apart.

She yelled, “Fucking help me, you lazy fuck!”

Jericho snapped out of it again, ripping his gaze off the ritual circle of tapes.

SLAM-SLAM-BAM—

A tiny hole exploded in the door.

A toothy grin shone through. It screeched at him. Taunting him to open up.

Not—

Real.

Jericho remembered what Klemens had given him. Braving the fog in his mind, clarity rose to the surface.

Strength. The clockwork Klemens had given him. It lent him incredible strength.

This… this is real.

Jericho clenched his jaw and charged at the side of the cabinet. Half the sideboard burst apart, showering the floor with another cloud of dust.

The pain of splinters in his knuckles set in with delay, the realization he had punched the piece of ruined furniture with all his might and wrath. A pile of debris now firmly blocked the door where the cabinet’s skeletal remains collapsed.

The hole was blocked. That hideous grin concealed.

The banging stopped soon after, and Karma tilted her head. The quizzical look on her face spoke volumes of disbelief, riddled with surprise over Jericho’s sudden burst of strength.

Shoulders heaving, they caught their breath. Through the rushing of blood and the pounding pulse of his heartbeat, all sounds of scraping claws and slapping slender feet gained distance, retreating from the door.

Karma and Jericho exchanged incredulous glances, expecting another violent tantrum of the creature to lash out against the barrier between them. Persistent in hunting them as it had been.

But it was gone.

Karma crept closer to the door, holding her breath to listen.

Gone.

Real?

“What the fuck is that thing?” she asked. “This place makes no sense.”

A look out the dirt-stained window punctuated her statement.

There was nothing outside the window. Not in a natural sense. The world outside that window looked like a sunless, cloudy sky. No earth in sight—nothing but sky, up and down. A house hanging in the middle of nothing.

Not in Vegas anymore. Not even on Planet fucking Earth.

Jericho sighed before he replied. “Actually, this place makes way too much sense. I don’t know what exactly they are, but I’ve seen them before. He told me those things are like… you.”

“Oh, sure, thanks. Asshole.”

“No, I mean—not you, you, but manifestations of us, of our psyche. Parts of you or me given form. Things to confront you with yourself. Dark mirrors. Fuck, I don’t fuckin’ know.”

“Who the fuck is ‘he’?”

Jericho squinted as he stared out the window, then swivelled to study the circle of VHS tapes again.

“I, uh… he…”

The more his stammering petered out, the sharper the headache spiked its way into his skull.

Like his brain was refusing to dredge up the memories.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’ve seen that thing in a nightmare before. That’s what this place does to you. It shows you all this shit, kinda like a test. Testing you.”

Karma’s question oozed with sarcasm. “Oh, is that why it’s called…?”

The House of Change.

Neither of them uttered its name. As if that helped make it less real.

Jericho blurted out a string of incoherent expletives. Under other circumstances, it may have made Karma laugh.

But not today.

The explosion of unbridled anger must have turned Jericho into a more fearsome sight than usual. Karma stood stunned, frozen like an ice statue, watching him wide-eyed until he calmed down again.

Everything caught up to him with tremendous delay.

He had smashed the old TV set in his fit of rage. The haze of madness dissipated like heat from his body, and the act of destruction felt unreal. He took stock of what he had wrought. Just like the drops of blood escaping his knuckles, dripping to the floor to join dust and mold.

Karma arched a brow, expecting an answer.

He raised a fist. Shook it. “Look, I’ve had enough of this place showing me fucking television sets, okay?”

Jericho kicked away some cassettes, disrupting the ritual circle.

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you think we might be seeing different things?”

“Fuck if I know. Why? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve seen that thing out there in my nightmares too.”

“No shit? Tall, red, gangly motherfucker with teeth you’d rather smash out before they bite you, and claws like stiletto knives?”

Karma grunted to confirm, nodding along to the description.

He sighed. “Well, fuck me. I don’t know what’s more fucked up. If I’m so fucked up that I dream the same shit as you, or that that… thing might be haunting everybody’s dreams.”

Electricity hummed. A naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling buzzed with it, and flared up with a dim halo of light.

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Jericho muttered at the bulb. Directing it at the House.

“All I give a shit about is getting out of here,” Karma said. “You’ve been here before, right? How the fuck did you get back out of it?”

Jericho picked up one of the cassette tapes and flipped it over. Nondescript, dusty, unlabelled.

“I didn’t.”

“What? The fuck is that supposed to mean? You’re telling me you aren’t a real boy after all?”

Jericho groaned.

“It means I didn’t come out myself. The House won. The House always wins. Once you’re in it like we are, you don’t just walk out of it the same person.”

“Again—what the fuck is that supposed to mean? You’re telling me you used to be a different person? Was there a Jericho Kane who didn’t suck balls?”

Jericho tossed the tape onto a pile of debris and flipped her the bird.

“I don’t know what to fucking tell you. I’m not the studious type like the boss-man, nor am I some mysteriously all-knowing asshole like Michael. I don’t understand how, I—I don’t know the first shit about shit. All I know is, I came outta this place with vague memories of my past, and I know I used to be different, but that didn’t matter. Because I walked out of here… changed.”

“Well,” Karma mumbled, gazing out the window into infinity, “Doesn’t look like we’re walking out anywhere, because the only door in and out of this room is now blocked.”

Jericho turned and thumbed over his shoulder at another door in the room.

It was tall and painted pitch-black.

“What about that one?”

Karma’s face contorted with confusion and… something he had never read on her before.

Fear.

“That door wasn’t there just before,” she muttered. Her eyes sparkled with unprecedented caution.

“Might as well take it before it vanishes,” he said, shrugging. “This place can change whenever you aren’t looking.”

“No, wait—”

He had already twisted the knob. Black-painted brass squeaked and the door opened to—

“Oh, fuck me running.”

A place that did not belong.

The therapist’s waiting room. Doctor Wolff’s waiting room.

Potted plants, leather chairs, a nice carpet, all expensive and matching each other in decor. The extravagant furnishings and the air of refinement reminded Jericho of everything he hated about other occultists. It still reeked of Old World. Old blood.

They had come full circle again. For the third time.

Unlike last time, he no longer felt fear upon revisiting this room in the House of Change. Instead, his belly region churned with a toxic cocktail of anger and frustration.

He stormed towards the next door and opened it with enough force to vent a fraction of that budding fury. Karma followed right behind him this time.

“Motherfucker, I’m gonna—"

He had no words. Jericho and Karma looked around, dumbfounded.

He had expected to meet Simon Wolff again, returned from the dead, all smug and condescending and superior as he always was.

Instead, it was just Doctor Wolff’s practice. The only living people inside were Karma and Jericho.

Beneath the high ceilings with their ornate crown molding, and the large Gothic windows, and the modern gray wallpaper—the three corpses remained.

Jolena Ford still lay there, with part of her skull missing, and brain matter sprayed all over the floor. The lifeless body of Tommy Wu rested in a pool of dried blood, having bled out from dozens of stab wounds, with the fountain pen still lodged in his neck. And Simon Wolff—what was left of the doctor of psychology, mostly from the waist down—still splayed out on the ground after a shotgun blast had torn him apart.

The once orderly and oppressive office had been left a slaughterhouse. A testament to Karma’s rampage.

She bit her lip, then asked, “Did you—did you think they’d—"

“Yeah. Yeah, I kinda expected those assholes to be back up to harass us. I’m… starting to wonder if this isn’t way, way worse.”

“Well, maybe if you stop smashing every TV set we come across, we might learn of some way to get out of this shithole. Because I was keeping track, and we for sure were not going in circles. Yet here we fucking are again.”

“Well, maybe if you hadn’t killed these assholes, we wouldn’t be fucking stuck in here,” Jericho grumbled. “Though I’m also kinda surprised it hasn’t separated us yet. I got separated last time. I… I remember…”

His words trailed off like his thoughts. He vaguely remembered them. The people he had been separated from. Mired in the same fog as his memories of the past.

Where did they go?

Like someone had rooted around in his brains and cut key information, leaving behind only a nonsensical mess of feelings without context, he only found questions.

Were they still in here? Trapped in this awful place? For how long? How long had it been?

Years?

Not real. But real.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

The two of them rifled through the sprawling room, searching for clues. Or weapons. Or just another way out.

Something clicked and Karma stepped away from one of the bookshelves on the far end, set up between busts of ancient Greek philosophers. Mechanical parts whirred and buzzed and a set of three shelves retracted, slotting deeper into the wall, until disappearing between wooden panels.

In their place, a sleek black TV screen slid down to fill the vacant space. Impossibly thin for a television screen, and yet—

White noise and visual static filled its surface as the device winked on with life.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, not again,” Jericho groaned.

“It keeps showing us Michael,” Karma said. “Is it trying to fuck with us? What is this supposed to mean?”

But the screen did not show them Michael.

Jericho squinted, unsure of what he was witnessing. A slender figure in a suit walked. It did not look like Michael even in the slightest. Instead, the suit framed a feminine form. The TV screen robbed its images of color and replaced them with obscuring grain.

Even so, the short crop of red hair—

“That’s not—”

Not Michael.

It was that FBI agent. Parker.

Karma asked, “Is it trying to show us the fed we were lookin’ for? Is this thing trying to tell us something?”

The whole room quaked, causing Jericho’s stomach to lurch with another shot of dread. Dust rained from the ceiling, prompting him and Karma to exchange shocked glances.

The House had spoken. In its own way.

She clicked her tongue and he hastily pawed around the edges of the screen, looking for a way to adjust the image.

Parker crossed a parking lot. Lined with barbed wire, tall metal fences surrounded the grounds.

The building she approached looked like an old castle, with all its windows barred.

A prison.

And something utterly wrong about the picture started scratching at the back of Jericho’s mind. Like those spindly claws, scratching at a door, begging for admission.

Let me in.

Jericho shook his head, as if that might shake off the whispering intrusion.

Listen… Jack… let me in.

Oblivious to something mimicking his own voice in his head, Jericho ignored the Whisper.

Something about the image bothered him so much that the world around him turned soft and quiet. For a moment, he forgot where he was. Leaned closer to the screen, scanning it, yearning to grasp what was so off-putting about the moving image.

Jack… is that right?

It looked like a normal prison. Jericho had no clue where it was. Parker crossed the parking lot—

Hah. Parker, get it? Jack.

Then it hit him.

The shadow her body was casting.

All wrong.

Let me in.

All the other shadows the sun cast on the parking lot—they leaned one way.

Parker’s shadow leaned the other. It roiled and teemed with a cloudy life of its own.

Through the grainy image, two dots formed upon that Shadow.

Eyes.

Staring back at Jericho through the screen. The Shadow grew, extending farther behind Parker, almost as if creeping towards the screen.

Towards them.

The House rumbled again. Objects on the desk and shelves clattered, potted plants hopped in place. Window panes rattled in their Gothic frames.

Let me in, Jack.

No longer a single Whisper. The chorus of Whispers transformed into a discordant symphony of growls.

LET ME IN.

Demanding. Commanding.

Hungry.

JACK.

Nausea gripped Jericho’s entire body. Twisting his stomach. Avalanches of chills ran down his spine.

LET ME IN.

He no longer ignored the voices. They grew to a violent and malevolent volume.

Many tiny dots of light formed eyes upon the body of the Shadow, stretching from the black void of the entrance through which Parker disappeared inside the penitentiary.

Where the Shadow kissed the edge of the screen, the glass surface began to bubble and bulge outwards.

Whatever was forming, it started out at the size of a pinhead. Shiny, inky-black, and oozing, it grew in size. Tiny tendrils splayed outwards from it like malformed legs on a beetle, squirming like microscopic worms.

The room of the House rumbled again, and tremors traveled from feet to head until they shook Jericho’s body to its core. The lights in the room flickered as the quake erupted with waves of even greater violence, and the screen’s image flickered in unison, allowing the black dot to grow with greater definition against the static.

And the darkness inside that white noise squirmed. Writhed. Like maggots. Forming an apocalyptic image. The herald of a migraine. Always eluding his mind before he could understand its shape.

LET ME IN, JACK.

LET ME IN.

Rumbling, the room quaked again.

A jolt of electricity rocked his spine and he jerked back from the screen. Karma, as mesmerized as he had just been, had extended her arm—her index finger—only inches away, poised to touch that tiny, slimy, pulsating—

Jericho grabbed her wrist and yanked her back.

“S-stop!” he yelled at her, taking another step back and dragging her along. “Stay the fuck away from that!”

This broke whatever spell the darkness had held over Karma. She blinked in confusion. Her face, normally a mask of equilibrium or an expression of sadism, now mirrored the terror taking root in Jericho’s heart.

Let me in, the Whispers continued.

“Way King!” Jericho yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice breaking like the name breaking through his reluctance. “You gotta get us the fuck outta of here!”

The white noise on the screen had swallowed the image of the prison entrance. The black dot on the screen had grown to the size of beetle. Heavy and thick, its fluid dripped to the floor, and the Shadow infected the fibers of Wolff’s expensive Afghan rug.

Let me in.

Jericho screamed, “Fuck you!”

LET ME IN!

All lights in the room flared up like supernovas. Electricity buzzed as violently as the room quaked in response, in sync, responding to the power in his spine. The mechanical spider in his body whirred and clicked into place, and channeled all his might into one fearsome blow.

It discharged through his fist, shattering the TV, and fizzling with static—from the broken electronics behind the exploding glass that cut the skin of his knuckles, and from the bursting light bulbs in the lamps overhead, all showering them with sparks as the image died entirely.

A spiderweb of gaping cracks had formed where Jericho punched the hidden TV screen—extending outwards, covering the surrounding shelves and even the walls. His blow had blown away all the potted plants and busts of Greek philosophers, now strewn about in a perfect pattern of explosive power, all orbiting the epicenter of destruction where his fist had obliterated the TV.

The carpet had absorbed that drop of dark ooze—that liquid Shadow, no longer writhing and wriggling—and the rumbling and quaking subsided. Busted lights flashed without rhythm, spraying more sparks from the fixtures, vomiting out more sparks with each fizzling spasm, leaving them covered in gloom between repeated flares of electric luminescence.

The voices were gone. The Whispers had fallen silent.

“Ho-ly shit,” Karma said behind him. “What the…”

Jericho took a deep breath.

Power.

“Could you—could you have done that all along? What the fuck?”

Jericho offered no answer. He had no idea just how powerful the Klemens’ clockwork spider was. Its mandibles pinched his nerves as if to remind him of its presence in his body.

He had never felt so physically powerful in his life.

Karma asked, “That level of fuck-off power is positively unnatural. Can you use that to—I don’t know—punch walls through dimensions? Can we somehow use that to get out of here?”

“I… I don’t know. That sounds… positively stupid, though.”

Electricity buzzed.

“How the fuck do we get out of here?” he asked, directing it at Karma, and the House, and anybody else who would listen. “Way King! How the fuck do we get out of here? Help!”

The Way King could not hear them here.

The House yielded no answer.

The House never released the people who entered it.

It would only release the people it had changed.

And not even all the King’s horsepower could force it.

[ivyvenus333]

thinking about fuck buddy!choso who you’ve been hooking up with for the past couple months… but only ever in his car. and yeah, it makes you feel like shit about yourself, but his dick is just too fucking good to give up.

when he finally invites you over to his place, your pussy aches at the thought of having the room for all the godforsaken positions that are impossible in the backseat.

so you’re surprised when he fucks you in missionary the entire night.

his hard, aggressive, and erratic thrusts replaced by deep, tender strokes. the hand that’s normally tightly wrapped around your throat softly caressing your cheek instead. the obscenities, grunting, and dirty talk replaced by him whimpering “baby” and “my pretty girl” repeatedly into the crook of your neck.

and when you realize it’s the first time he’s making love to you, you couldn’t possibly deny his begging to “pleasepleaseplease” let him cum inside your pretty pussy!!

[lovelenivy]

mouse bites™

[kimdokjas]

though the movie might be cancelled, yuri on ice will live forever in our hearts. thank you yoi fandom, it's been real ♡

[keplerspacecraftofficial]

electing to believe this is what griddlehark looks like to everyone else

[astraystayyh]

They have since left four premature babies to decompose on their beds. They have since kidnapped, stripped, tortured civilians and tried to frame them as Hamas fighters for their propaganda. They have since shot people at refugee camps execution style. They have since targeted academics and poets and directors. They have since killed 86 journalists. Still no ceasefire.

psa: i know that many of us did NOT doubt this for a second, neither did i. this is targeted at the people who educated themselves for the first time about this genocide and discovered the absolute horrific things that Israel is capable of doing to Palestinians, with the unwavering support of its allies.

[sennamaticart]

Well it was working fine for him!

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

The final part for The House of Glass! Everyone has a lot to figure out, but progress takes time. Follows from this. This was my first ever complete comic from start to finish, I hope you guys enjoyed the journey!

If you've enjoyed this comic, please consider donating to Aya Yasser, a 19 year old university student from the University of Palestine. She had to pause her studies due to attacks on Gaza. Her 55 year old father is ill and she is trying to evacuate him and her brothers.

You can find her blog @samaagaza

It's like two in the morning right now so I might be a bit incoherent, cw for discussions of racism, homophobia, biphobia, sinophobia and classism

I've really wanted to write Chang as someone who's made to be a perpetual outsider. As a Chinese person born in the UK I've always been made to feel like a foreigner no matter where I go - obviously I am a foreigner abroad but I'm also treated as such in the very country I was born and raised in. I think a lot of east Asian people can relate to being treated as a strange exotic foreigner first and a person second.

As a working class orphan he would probably have been treated as disposable by society at large too. As soon as he's rescued by Tintin in the Blue Lotus he immediately asks why Tintin bothered saving him, and in his letter to Tintin in Tintin in Tibet he writes that he's unworthy of his uncle's hopsitality. We don't get much from Chang as he doesn't make many appearances but it seems he's internalised strong feelings of a lack of self worth. Tintin may have been the first person to recognise his humanity since Chang's birth family passed.

Being queer is also very isolating at first. You're not born into a culture you can reference or make sense of your experiences initially, it's something you have to seek out. I wanted to explore learning to love yourself through others. We're all weird to some degree, we're all in this together!

I genuinely have no clue how I'd follow this up, I have ideas for future stories but I'm not sure what would follow directly from here!

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new regulation to limit bank overdraft fees. The CFPB pointed out that the average overdraft fee is $35 even though majority of overdrafts are under $26 and paid back with-in 3 days. The new regulation will push overdraft fees down to as little as $3 and not more than $14, saving the American public collectively 3.5 billion dollars a year.

The Environmental Protection Agency put forward a regulation to fine oil and gas companies for emitting methane. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas, after CO2 and is responsible for 30% of the rise of global temperatures. This represents the first time the federal government has taxed a greenhouse gas. The EPA believes this rule will help reduce methane emissions by 80%

The Energy Department has awarded $104 million in grants to support clean energy projects at federal buildings, including solar panels at the Pentagon. The federal government is the biggest consumer of energy in the nation. The project is part Biden's goal of reducing the federal government's greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030. The Energy Department estimates it'll save taxpayers $29 million in the first year alone and will have the same impact on emissions as taking over 23,000 gas powered cars off the road.

The Education Department has cancelled 5 billion more dollars of student loan debt. This will effect 74,000 more borrowers, this brings the total number of people who've had their student loan debt forgiven under Biden through different programs to 3.7 Million

U.S. Agency for International Development has launched a program to combat lead exposure in developing countries like South Africa and India. Lead kills 1.6 million people every year, more than malaria and AIDS put together.

Congressional Democrats have reached a deal with their Republican counter parts to revive the expanded the Child Tax Credit. The bill will benefit 16 million children in its first year and is expected to lift 400,000 children out of poverty in its first year. The proposed deal also has a housing provision that could see 200,000 new affordable rental units

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I love tornado survival guides. "Shelter in a basement or interior room without any windows. But if you're in a mobile home, just fucking die I guess lol"

[ronanlynchbf]

tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

[asurrogateblog]

my favorite part of beach boys lore is that the beatles are the villains

[t0bey]

new game ➕!

[mari-lair]

"I will protect you" local low defense low HP savior promises.

[starry-bi-sky]

don't you want to be a cult leader? - danyal al ghul au

this is mostly a joke post but i thought it was funny and had to share so--

his first mistake was, obviously, inheriting his father's inability to see an injustice and stand still. -- actually, danyal's first mistake was his lair being so big. a mountainous island with a large temple in the center resembling his old home in Nanda Parbat? With sprawling foliage and rivers and streams and waterfalls galore? What was he going to do with all that space? Let it go to waste? He had plants there! Native trees of the ghost zone growing from the soil! He couldn't let it all be left unchecked!

So naturally after helping a fellow teenage assassin ghost -- who he later learns is named Akihiko, -- from Walker of all people, he sent them over to hang low at his lair until it was safe enough for them to wander around the Zone. Walker couldn't get through Danyal's astrofield if his life depended on it, and trust him -- he's tried. Danny was clearing out debris from his stupid transport vans for weeks.

Honestly it wasn't so bad, he and Aki really quickly became fast friends and Danny loves having a sparring partner close to his level again -- he hasn't had this much fun fighting since he left the League. Aki was very dedicated and levelheaded, the both of them clicked really well because of it.

Nonono, the real trouble began after Danyal met some long-passed League members and allowed them to come join his island as well. Apparently they had made a few enemies of the zone, and maybe Danyal still felt some loyalty to the League. He couldn't just let them be left to rot. Their zealotry could be overlooked so long as they kept it contained and helped him take care of his island.

And it.. snowballs from there? He meets a teen squire aptly calling himself Ambroise -- whether that was his living name or not is yet to be seen -- who died during feudal france, who is just about as dramatic and passionate as every french stereotype makes them out to be. He calls Danyal "my moon and great muse" -- which is both flattering and little uncomfortable, but Danyal's grown up in the League as the Grandson of the Demon Head, he is used to mild worship. he passes it off as nothing more, nothing less. -- and while his energy is overwhelming on the worst of days, he helps Danny draw out of his shell more in ways that Sam and Tucker still struggle with.

Him and Aki butt heads a lot, but the two seem to hold the other in at least some positive regard, so Danny doesn't worry too much about them fighting while he's gone. It only becomes a mild issue when Aki also begins calling Danny "my moon". It's a little sweet, so Danyal brushes it off.

Then he takes in a troupe of ghosts some time after he defeats Pariah Dark and they begin calling him "great one" just as the yetis do in the far frozen. This is where he meets the twins -- a pair of sibling ghosts who call themselves Trixie and Missy (short for Trick and Mislead) -- who aren't quite as passionate as Ambroise but more energetic than Aki. Eventually they also start calling Danyal "my moon" and attach themselves to his hip, even within the living. They like to hide in his shadow and cause trouble for the rest of the students. He makes sure they don't hurt anyone.

He's pretty sure Aki is jealous, same with Ambroise, but he can't be too certain other than the fact that they become much more lingering (re: clingy) whenever he visits the island.. Something he's trying to do much more often these days due to the increasing amount of people living there now. Since when did he become so popular?

Then there's Pēnelópeia from the Greater Athens, who ran away from home and joined his Island after he ran into her while she was being chased by Skulker -- and he's pretty sure the reason was because of her chimeric appearance. Her strange eyes and mismatched wings and lion's tail and talons. She assimilates into his friend group very easily, she gets along well with Ambroise and Trixie and Danny usually finds the three of them climbing the trees to pluck the most fruit from the top. They can fly and he knows it, but they prefer to climb.

Then finally there's silent poet Akkara who comes from ancient mesopotamia, who gets along most with Aki -- which is no surprise there considering their similar personality dispositions. he watches Aki and Danyal fight each other and leaves comments on this or that that he notices. He writes Danyal poems on clay tablets and leaves them by his room.

They're one big mismatched group of outcasts, and Danny's got the other ghosts on his island to tend to, because they're living on his island and he wants to be hospitable even if he struggles with that. But he spends the most of his time with them.

Sam and Tucker are making fun of him. Tucker jokingly tells him 'careful Danny, at this rate you're gonna start a cult'. Danny really wishes he had taken that joke more seriously.

He just. keeps. collecting people. Wayward souls lost in the zone, looking for shelter or refuge from something or other -- whether that be another hostile ghost, or a past afterlife, or just a purpose. Danyal finds them, he takes them in, offers them a place on his island until they are ready to leave. Many seldom do. He's not complaining -- he has the space, and it feels like it's only ever growing.

His close friends, his "inner circle" as he's heard the others call them, keep insistently calling him "my moon". He starts calling them his stars, because then it only feels fair. They're his stars, this is his constellation. It becomes a thing; little star halos begin forming behind their heads, picking them out from the rest. He loves them so much, it's hard to place. Sam and Tucker are also his stars, but they reside in the living realm, they're his tie to Life. Meanwhile, his friends here know what it's like to be dead, and sometimes its nice to relate.

Those living on his island keep calling him "Great One" and he's beginning to notice zealotry in their care for his island. He really, deeply appreciates it. His close friends gain nicknames -- as his stars, it's only natural for him to pick them out from the cluster in the skies. Akihiko, his Sirius and bright star. Trix and Missy, Castor and Pollux, the twins and troublemakers. Ambroise, his zealous Antares and close friend. Penelopeia, chimeric and loyal Vega. And Akkara, his Arcturus and strength.

It's ridiculous how long it takes for him to notice; he is, of course, a deadly trained assassin. He is meant to be observant -- and normally he is! But somehow this becomes a blind spot. One that becomes too big to be dealt with by the time he realizes it.

He should've noticed when Aki, his Sirius, stood beside him one day while Danyal looked over his island and saw the sprawling spirits carrying on about their afterlife and bowing to him as they saw him, and said: "I looked down into the depths when I met you; I couldn't measure it." They aren't one for flowing prose, it took him so off guard he was silent for over a minute before he finally spoke.

Danyal should've recognized devotion for what it is, and yet he didn't. He should've recognized it when Antares began spouting praises about him, crowing about his radiance and resplendence to the heavens. He just brushed it off as Ambroise being Ambroise. He should've recognized it when Trix and Missy nearly broke Dash's leg after he knocked Danyal's books out of his hands, he excused it as them being protective. Of them coming from times where such violence may have been customary -- after all, that's what he used to be like. What he was still like, sometimes, when his emotions nearly got the better of him.

He should've noticed it when the people living on his island followed his word like gospel, looked at him like he hung the stars in the sky. When his friends gifted him a shawl with the moon phases delicately embroidered into it, with silver, shimmering thread and moving stars lovingly stitched into it. Their constellations seen clear as day in the dark fabric. When he found small shrines dedicated to him -- but they lacked any image of him beyond stones carved to look like moons, so he ignored it. When the religious imagery began popping up.

He really, really should've noticed it when a bunch of cultists accidentally summoned Antares, and Antares had turned to him when he arrived and called them heretics. But he was so centered on the fact that they had kidnapped one of his stars, that he hadn't paid much attention to what Ambroise had said.

Sages say that faith is blind, they should also say faith in you is even blinder.

It really only hits him one afternoon while he's sitting in Sam's room studying with Tucker, Missy and Trixie lounging at his feet, Aki sat on his right, Penelopeia braiding his hair, Ambroise draped against him, and Akkara lurking over him. Its one of the rare few times they're all in one room together.

It hits him like a bolt of lightning. He looks up from his textbook. "Oh Ancients," he says in no amounting shock. Everyone looks up to him.

"I've become my grandfather."

[rileyclaw]

bunch of silly doodles of these guys from the past week or so