#how many immortal cell lines are there

[kosheeka]

Immortal Cell Line

Although cell lines are easy to work with, the physiological relevance of those studies might not be high. They do not show resemblance to human body metabolism and physiology, or even morphology. The immortalization and serial passaging cause several variations in genotype and phenotype of these cells. Due to the lack of morphological or functional features, cell lines might not be able to induce relevant biomarkers. Therefore, it is always better to validate cell lines before use to make sure they are not misidentified or contaminated.

For more info on advantages and disadvantages of primary cells in culture, read here.

[addrianastarflower]

Do y’all ever think about how there’s a very real possibility that Atsushi is immortal? He’s so quick to heal, and the strength of said healing has also likely increased over the years. Will there ever come a point where he can never die? Will he stop aging, the tiger replacing his cells faster than they die?

If that’s true, then what about Akutagawa? He’ll certainly outlive his partner, regardless of whether he’s immortal or not.

Will he distance himself from his partner, knowing that they’ll be separated by the line between life and death sooner than either of them would have liked? Will he stay put, watching his partner die in his arms for the second time? Will he stay through all the years and the hardship because he refuses to give up on his partner?

Will he forget his partner one day, memories not standing up to the test of time?

Will he hold tight onto every single thing that reminds him of the man that once helped him find himself, the partner that made him happy? Will he try his best to save every single life, no matter how long it has left, because he misses and remembers his partner who never got enough time?

Will he have to say goodbye?

Will he leave the agency, knowing that all his friends will age and die without him? What will someone so true to themselves yet undoubtably dependent on external validation do when that validation slowly goes away? Would he stay in the agency, slowly taking over old roles and training in new members year after year as everyone else ages and moves on?

Will he stay 18 forever, never getting to see himself older?

And perhaps most importantly, how many years until the president dies? How many years until Atsushi can no longer control the tiger? How many years until he gives into the violence and cruelty inherent in the beast simply because he has no other option? How many years until he is more beast than man because the tiger never really was on his side?

[kaimukiwahine]

Just gonna type my thoughts out based on my notes I wrote while playing the To the Moon Beach Episode. So spoilers/long ramble.

Short things:

They brought back many minor characters from Finding Paradise, thought that was very cute

References: The "Are you winning, son?" in the airport was charming but I did not expect to get a full FNAF section

I love the use of previous games OST: updated versions and the lo-fi versions

Animations were very charming and expressive; they even joke about it ("didn't have a budget for it. The dance lessons")

That inverted/hanging jellyfish planter. I need it. I need it now.

Rob learning what people are up to on the internet these days only to instantly regret it

Willis and Taima still going at it. They are lifelong couple goals: keeping the flame alive while dropping wisdom

I need that soundtrack.

Bigger things:

Johnny and River addressing what most players/general audience found concerning about the original game and overall premise of the series: Altering and overwriting of memories or basically the reality of the dying. While jokingly Johnny says he could never see himself using their services, both conclude it's their choice and they just need to accept it

This was slightly touched on in the Minisode but for it to be brought into attention by the original characters that kicked off this series, it's something.

The three books at the beginning already set forth what this game is gonna be all about: grieving and acceptance of the passing of a loved one. The first run through, Eva completely numbed her memories to enjoy the beach and time with Neil. But there was always something.

Second run, she "confronts" as Faye states the truth: Neil is dead.

It was hinted that Eva started drinking (in the store) and has been repeatedly using the machine Neil left behind that Neil becomes concerned for her. (Similar to Collin in Finding Paradise.) While she wants to stay on the beach and relive the same day over and over, it's not possible.

There was a brief mention of immortality. One being a jellyfish that reverts back to infancy as it reaches the end of their lifespan and questioning if it's still the same jellyfish or not. Then compared to humans how we regenerate new cells except the brain and heart.

Roxie finds it romantic, Eva wishes that those also gets replaced with every pass.

Neil's death was either sudden or his condition was kept secret from Eva? Eva mentioned he didn't give her enough time to prepare and Neil didn't know what to do and I think he said he made the machine just so he just doesn't disappear and to leave something behind for her.

*Edit* I completely forgot about Paper Memories. I'm guessing the phone call Eva got from Roxie was that Neil passed away (given how distressed Roxie was in that one panel). It is possible that that portion was in the machine and that Rob and Roxie were aware. That whole portion is basically like this Beach Episode.

Edit2: thinking again, the call could be him in critical condition since in the comic Neil mentions making that garden. Eva not replying to Neil on how he died makes it sound like it was traumatic. She mentioned something about a surgery when talking to Lynri and Quincy and asking how he is when he visits them but not sure if that's involved or just a throwaway line.

Neil lives on with regrets; mostly wishing Eva was his girlfriend and more. Though he isn't real in the game, he still carries the memories he had. He built her "a garden" (comic reference) but she started spending too much time. And she can't fully enjoy it because he continues to keep her at arms length.

Neil locked himself in his room, much like he did in many instances throughout the series and now canonically, all throughout the life Eva and Neil has been together. Thinking he's doing what's best for her when all she wanted is him to be "here'

He regrets those decisions but it's understandable on why he did it. In Impostor Factory, Lynri's condition was hereditary and is in Neil. Seeing Quincy's face of absolute loneliness knowing he's about to lose his wife and eventually his son, it would devastate anyone. Neil making a machine to make it so that Eva would never have to go through that, while admirable, changed nothing. If not, made things worse.

How they close the game was brutal: The world Neil created for Eva to never be alone after he has passed slowly fading away, concluding with Eva being alone, crying, as she turns the machine off.

You couldn't just leave it like this for them. Together alone on the beach.

No. It's just Eva. Alone.

[exo-raskreia]

hi my dear, i have to say i love your blog and how you get over those pitiful ichihime statements

i want to know how will you explain or if you have another post that explains... how time doesn't interfere between ichigo and rukia

bc i always see how ichihime fans say how fucked up their ship is just bc of their age. i mean, we understand that time goes different between both worlds, but it's like they just refuse to understand it

also how it is not so much about age but connection, understanding and equal interests, they also seem to forget isshin and masaki

i'd be glad if you can answer, thank you much for all your posts 😭 it makes it easier to like ichiruki, sometimes ichihime fans just make it so hard, like you're committing a crime

Oh, thank you! ☺️

Antis really think an unrealistic age gap is a problem in a FANTASY or SUPERNATURAL setting? Especially in the Bl3ach universe, where there's already a canon couple with that trope? Doesn't it sound silly?

They act as if Mortal X Immortal ships don't exist, as if they aren't a popular trope/dynamic in many forms of media. They call IR problematic because of it, but turn around & ship pairings like Yato & Hiyori (Noragami), Inuyasha & Kagome, Tomoe & Nanami (Kamisama Kiss), etc. Yet, they cross the line at IR?

They conveniently forget or ignore the fact Ichigo is a product of Isshin & Masaki, a canon couple that the antis support & like to use as "parallels" with their mid ship (even though those of us who can read know IM parallels IR). Isshin was probably way older than Masaki, older than Rukia even, yet once again, the antis cross the line at IR?

Hypocrisy, much? They only bring up the age gap when it's convenient for them. When they want to grasp at straws to invalidate IR. But all their arguments have a counter-argument to them 🤷‍♀️. IR is just that powerful 😌.

Ichigo & Rukia vibed so well right off the bat, getting on a first name basis early on, & often seemed to share the same brain cell 🤣.

Souls in Soul Society age much slower & differently than living humans. Rukia was the equivalent of Ichigo's age, so she was "15" in SS terms when they first met. Antis like to act as if she's some ancient hag or s*x goddess who's going to corrupt poor innocent Ichigo, yet Rukia showed to be quite innocent in many matters, not to mention, she thought kisses were only for greetings in one of the early chapters 💀. Out of the two, I'm pretty sure Ichigo would know more than her in these matters...

(I've also seen this stupid argument against HitsuKarin. They be calling Hitsugaya an "old man"!! Like, seriously?! How is he gonna "corrupt" Karin—by giving her a large stack of paperwork?! He's about 10-11 years old in SS terms, the equivalent of Karin's age, who was 11!! Then they both conveniently aged up to 12-13 after the 17-month timeskip... Just what was Kub0 getting at?!🤦‍♀️)

Not to mention, Ichigo felt very at home in Soul Society & got along so well with all the "ancient geezers & hags" there, even going as far as calling some of them by first name & hanging out with them like old buds (such as Renji). No wonder Ichigo didn't feel like he belonged in the Living World much; he really was born in the wrong generation (or world), lol... 🤪 He always showed to be more in touch with his shinigami side... (no wonder he chose that out of all his hybrid sides in TYBW, & yet... 😮‍💨)

Anyway, don't engage with the antis. Ignore/block/mute them. Follow the age-old fandom rule: just ship & let ship. Don't let the antis ruin your fun. There's so much IR content out there 😄.

[see-arcane]

I think the issue with Renfield is that Dracula primarily hunts for young blood. Every single older person, like Mr Swales or [redacted] and [redacted] he simply murders conventionally.

I'd say he does prefer young blood as a matter of either taste and/or preference in collection, but Renfield's situation--specifically wanting to join Dracula in his condition with all its promise of immortality and power--probably rubs the Count's hackles the wrong way for a more specific reason.

We've seen him inhale a ship's crew without any mind games reserved for anyone but the final unlucky survivors, the First Mate and the Captain. However old or young the sailors were, they all got slaughtered. The First Mate may have been intended as a conscripted party; just for the pleasure of inflicting the condition on a victim who knows and fears exactly what that state entails. Hence the First Mate committing suicide by the sea rather than risk Dracula's 'welcome.' We never learn the First Mate's age; only that he chose death rather than risk whatever Dracula intended for him.

We've also seen him work with willing laborers in the form of the men who came to fill and move the earth boxes at the castle. Be it for pay, or under duress, or both, these hired men did the work the Count asked of them and laughed at the sight of a victim of their employer begging for help. However happily or grudgingly, these guys were on the Count's team. Dracula can function in a symbiotic relationship with others when he needs/wishes to...

...but none of those men were vampires. Which brings us back to Renfield.

Renfield is a middle-aged man bound to an asylum cell who promises fealty to the Count as his master in exchange for Dracula's accepting/turning him. As yet, there's no immediate benefit to be gained by acknowledging him. Certainly none to be gained by turning him. Specifically because Renfield wants it.

How old is Dracula? How many times do you think he's encountered those like Renfield, pulling at his cloak like a child at mother's aprons strings, begging for a share of his power without realizing the tradeoff? Or worse, knowing and not caring?

We're going to see exactly what Dracula's version of vampirism does to a turned victim in this book. It's not pretty. It is, as some folks have suggested, a turning up of impulse and id to the highest power, with all the violent carelessness that entails. It turns good, virtuous, self-sacrificing souls into vicious funhouse mirror versions of themselves, enslaved to Dracula, but ultimately as blithely focused on What I Want Right Now as the Brides were in the castle.

Now consider what would happen if Dracula went around turning, say, business moguls. Hedonistic aristos. Gluttons. Cutthroats. Individuals hungry for power at the cost of others' lives, regardless of species. Renfield is thankfully not striking too high on the food chain as of yet.

But Dracula can scent what Renfield has the potential for as surely as Renfield detected his arrival. He will never risk turning said potential into its worst possible form by way of vampirism. If he did, his little binge on the Demeter would look like a mere cheat day compared to what a full-blown vampiric Renfield would do to an entire dock's worth of bodies.

We've seen already that Dracula has a hell of a time just keeping the Weird Sisters in line, and those are just three girls who we can assume he's had a hold of for potentially centuries. Regardless of any oaths of loyalty from the living man, Renfield would be a bottomless pit the moment he turned, taking up all of Dracula's focus in trying to stop him from devouring the countryside in a spree.

And that would just be Renfield. What would he do with a whole colony made from the foundation of less-than-sterling individuals? Even as the biggest fish in the pond, Dracula's would-be conquest would turn into a massacre of merely non-saintly parties turned into outright demons.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying Dracula is choosy over more than youth, pretty faces, and the fun of a good mind game. He has to be choosy about a prospective new vampire's spiritual status too.

If Jonathan had just been some asshole, or even just a flatly ordinary man, not only would he not have lasted the two months in the castle, he'd never have been targeted for turning. If Lucy was just some snobbish beauty with a lucrative medical condition, she'd have been dead the first night Dracula called her to him. But they were and are good people; and they were and are afraid of him, consciously or subconsciously. They do not want what he means to give them.

And for cruelty, coveting, conquest, and caution's sake, that's exactly why Dracula forces it on them.

[karistiltskin]

i don’t care that the lakes is only now getting its recognition i just care that it’s about MERLIN and ARTHUR.

little teeny tiny analysis incoming:

“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me

I’m not cut out for all these cynical clones

These hunters with cell phones”

First of all, this is set in Merlin’s POV. The first line talks about Merlin becoming a myth and how he’s praised as the most powerful wizard alive. He is a staple as the start of “magic” and “wizardry” after his legacy is passed on. The use of the term “romantic” seems sarcastic as if he’s saying “isn’t it romantic that after my kind was hunted down and killed for believing to be evil, now I’m the optimum of good? Shouldn’t i be over the moon from this appreciation?”

Moving on to the second and third verse, “cynical clones” and “hunters with cell phones” refers to modern time. These people have twisted Merlin’s story, didn’t get it right, missed out on details, and changed him. Because his history is not correct he feels uncomfortable but is also placed in a position where he cannot clarify or speak out on it because he’s supposed to be, well, dead. People are using his story for fame and no one is receiving the truth. It’s just been turned into a myth to be broken apart, analyzed, and criticized.

“Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

I don’t belong, and my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I’m setting off, but not without my muse”

(only doing the chorus once)

if the first line doesn’t speak for itself I don’t know what does. Merlin is a poet!! He is. A quick google search for the definition of poet reads: “a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.” hello??? We all knew he was good with words whether it came from enchantments, comforting words to his friends, his followers, or when speaking about himself. “special powers”—he is magic. “imagination”—he creates, he is creation.

He is the original poet who went to the lakes, not necessarily to die, but the other half of his soul was taken from him there.

Now, Merlin of course believes Arthur was not meant to die. He doesn’t belong there. He belongs at Merlin’s side. The lakes = Avalon and Merlin did not ever want to go there in the situation that Arthur may die. The both of them weren’t meant to wait for their purpose to begin again at Avalon when “Camelot needed Arthur most.” They were supposed to stay together in the time of a human life span and their story was supposed to continue.

“Windermere peaks.” I’m not gonna dive too much into this so here’s one word: England

The last line is that Merlin could not have stayed at the lake forever. I mean he could’ve but, I don’t think he would. So he lives his life in the most physical sense he can. He does go to visit Avalon tho and his life, his soul, doesn’t restart until Arthur’s does. He carries Arthur with him everywhere at all times, and he doesn’t forget that as he leaves Avalon and he never forgets the reason why as he also goes BACK to Avalon. Also, Arthur being Merlin’s muse>>> I mean, the whole “my magic. i use it for you. it was supposed to be yours.” EVERYTHING Merlin did was for Arthur.

“What should be burrowed under my skin

In heart-stopping waves of hurt

I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze

Tell me what are my words worth”

The first two lines refer to his early life in Camelot. Moving there, making friends, growing in his magic, Arthur, trust, betrayal, his lessons. He thinks because so much time has passed (he’s immortal) he should at least be over it or it should stop hurting but it doesn’t. It stays with him. It’s a part of him and who he is.

Now for the next two lines. Although the past will linger in him, he does grow and become wiser over the years. He has so many experiences and has lived through so many lifetimes and is still finding the strength to continue. But he’s had to watch people get his life absolutely wrong, the narratives of his friends and enemies, his character, etc. I like to think Merlin dropped some real pieces of evidence of the truth in a manuscript or a symbol or anything but the ones who found it, abused it. Instead of appreciating art and life they looked for the income and how to profit off it.

“I want auroras and sad prose

I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet

‘Cause I haven’t moved in years

And I want you right here”

Merlin finds memories in the hurt. He finds comfort in it. He wants to stay in the past because as much as it pains him, it was a time where he was the most happy.

Wisteria = a plant that can live for centuries (symbolism: resilience and longevity)

“help i’m still at the restaurant.” is Merlin. He has not moved on at all, that poor soul. He wants Arthur forever but also ALIVE and physically, mentally, emotionally with him.

“A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground

With no one around to tweet it

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief”

Merlin has a shield around him. Actually, plural, shields. His pain, anger, and hurt made him become this shell. But the red rose, his love, it’s still there. Always there. His love for Arthur and his narrative is still ongoing and no one knows. It’s his to keep.

His “calamitous love” and insurmountable grief” although sounds horrid are both stemmed from the purest thing he has. His love. It’s so passionate because he feels and cares so much. So his love is used as a metaphor with cliffside pools and the water in it because it (his love) overflows and spills over (i think? do cliffside pools do that?)

OKAY I’M DONE. mostly cause im tired, it’s 3:26 am, and im fried. the keyboard has been smashed quite enough and this makes one lengthy tumblr post (i can write more). i don’t even know if most of it makes sense i just wanted to get it out there.

also don’t take this too literally of course there are a million interpretations to this song, i associate it far more than just an immortal warlock and a dead king, as well as my opinions. I just wanted to share a little bit of where my mind was going. just a little.

props to you if you read this, thank you, and thank you bbc merlin

[practically-an-x-man]

41 for Rick and Eris?

Thank you so much!!!

41. ghost/living person au Send Me a Ship and a Number and I'll Write a Short Fic

This one's... a little angsty. Or a lot angsty. Have fun.

____ This Phantom Life

Word Count: 2.6k Content Warnings: heavy angst, major character death, wrongful imprisonment, uncertain/open ending, emotional hurt/comfort (if you can really call it that)

Crossposted on AO3

____

Eris scratched another tally into the stone wall of their cell. By now they lined the walls, rows and rows of pale scars carved into the bricks. Seven hundred and fifty-six days in Arkham Asylum. Over two years now, with no end to come any time soon. Some would say she deserved it. Sometimes Eris wondered if he did.

It wasn't the time that got to her. Two years was nothing against the immortal stretch of her lifespan. They'd outlive Arkham and whatever came after it.

It wasn't the isolation either. So much of their life had been spent in isolation, just by the nature of that same immortality. This was no more a prison than the simple facts of her existence.

It wasn't the way they treated him like a monster. On the best of days, he was deemed vile and criminally insane. On the worst of days, he amounted to nothing more than an animal in their eyes.

What had tormented Eris for seven hundred and fifty-six days now wasn't Arkham. It was what had led to Arkham.

Everyone thought she'd done it. That was the worst part. It didn't matter how much he'd pled his case, how he'd walked through every detail in his memory from the start of the mission to the moment he'd woken up, in burnt and half-healed agony, in the blackened ruins of the lab. It didn't matter that they had witnesses, alibis, dozens on the Squad who insisted that despite her affinity for violence, she'd never have laid a hand on him.

Because when the only two left alive at the scene were an international war god and an international war hero, of course she was given all the blame.

Seven hundred and fifty-six days in Arkham Asylum. Seven hundred and seventy-one since he'd been charged with crimes against humanity and the murder of one Colonel Richard Flag, Jr.

He'd been so shattered by grief that he hadn't even tried to fight when they came to take him away. The anger came days later, on the stand, seeing Him all steady and composed at the witness stand, acting as if he hadn't done what he'd done. He was a hero, of course. Everyone knew he was a hero.

They just... attacked. It was like something snapped. I'd never have expected them to go after Rick, of all people - I thought if anyone was safe, it would be him, but I guess I was wrong. And as soon as he was gone, I mean, there was nothing to hold them back. Before I knew it, the whole place had gone up in flames. I barely made it out of there with my life.

Before she knew it, she'd snapped her cuffs and leapt over the bench. She was unarmed and weakened by her injuries but still managed to draw blood before the darts sank into her flesh and everything went dark. The guards knew how to deal with metahumans. They'd been expecting him to snap from the moment they dragged him up to the stand. He'd been determined not to give them what they wanted, but...

But Rick was dead. And everyone believed it was their fault. Eris had nothing left. The world had gone gray and shapeless.

Seven hundred and fifty-six days in the same desolate cell. And it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

Eris squeezed the sharp pebble, the stone they'd used to carve so many tallies into the wall, until the edge bit into their palm and crimson dripped onto the floor of their cell. The blood continued to fall for a long time. The cell was lined with power-dampening tech, but the fight had gone out of them either way. The pain meant nothing against the torture of the last two years.

Cold wind swept in, and Eris raised a hand to the barred window of the cell. Warm. Summer in Gotham City- or the closest to summer it ever came. But the cold kept spiraling around them, kicking up dust with a ghoulish gray light. Eris tucked his legs to his chest against the sudden cold, smearing half-clotted blood from his palm across his jumpsuit.

"It wasn't me." they mumbled, though they weren't sure why, "I'm sure I deserve my sentence, but not for what they claim I've done. You were my heart. I didn't kill you."

Perhaps he'd gone mad. That was what Arkham did, after all. Those that weren't mad when they entered were mad when they left, and those that were already mad quickly sunk to lower depths. Eris wasn't sure what he weighed on that scale. Surely nothing close to sane, not in his life and not in his grief.

But the thin mattress sank at her feet, as if a weight had settled onto it, and a palm - cold on the surface but somehow warmer within, like the touch brushed a nerve beneath her skin - settled heavy on her knee.

"I know, wartime."

She couldn't see him but she could. Eris' eyes processed nothing more than the same damp gray walls, scarred with two years of even marks, yet in some deeper way they could see his face twisted into a sad half-smile at the other end of the bed. Behind the eyes, they thought, like a memory. They'd seen that smile a million times. They'd never see that smile again.

He was the half-dried ink of a handwritten letter, sharp words smudged by careless fingers. He was the glint of light off the blade of a knife. He was perfectly clear yet painfully indistinct, somehow both real and not.

"They called him a hero," Eris muttered, picking at the tattered sheets that lay crumpled across the bed, "He killed you and locked me away and they called him a hero for it. Everyone thinks he captured the beast that killed Rick Flag, but the blood is on his hands and no-one will see it."

"I'm still here." His voice was the only clear thing about him. It was a balm over their frayed nerves, as warm as it had always been in life, yet Eris shook their head.

"You're not." he whispered, "Or you'd have been here sooner."

"It's a long way from NOLA to Gotham, hon." Rick's voice said, the same cold-hot-soft touch skirting over their knee, "I did the best I could."

Eris was silent for a long time. In the back of her mind, she saw Rick tilt his head, concern falling across his face like a curtain. Springs creaked in the mattress, that bodiless weight sliding closer across the cot. Eris ducked their head but still saw him, like a dream they couldn't purge from their mind. He was here on the cot and he was there, a ragged cut across his throat like a crimson smile.

He'd used a kukri blade. Eris hated kukri blades. Too imprecise, and the harsh bend in the blade made it hard to maneuver. He preferred smaller, sleeker poignards, perhaps a cat's-claw sgian-dubh, or the pugio blade he'd worn at his hip since he left Themyscira. DuBois had tried to tell them that, up on the stand. It didn't seem to matter. A weapon was a weapon.

"I think I've finally lost my mind, Rick," she said, her voice swallowed by the cold stone walls around her, "It's all trickled away like blood in water. I have nothing left. My body lives but the rest has died. Maybe it's been dead for a long time."

Ghostly touch, the same electric jolt across exposed nerves, brushed overgrown curls of hair back from his face. Or it was the wind. Or he'd done it himself. But he leaned into the touch and thought he felt resistance, something sturdy and physical taking up space beside him.

Or they'd become just like any other prisoner of Arkham, whispering with ghosts and stumbling through rippling tides of their own mind.

A cackling shriek tore through the halls, sudden enough to make Eris' muscles tense. He saw the echo of Rick flinch too, fingers curling like he was resisting the urge to reach for a weapon.

"Forgot how bad this place was," he said, or seemed to say, "Makes Belle Reve seem like Disneyland. Surprised you haven't busted outta here yet."

Eris couldn't respond. He should have already broken free. Or perhaps he'd never break free. He didn't know how he could face a world without Rick in it. She didn't know how she could face a world that believed she'd murdered the one thing she truly loved. Grief was a vice clamped tight around her ribs.

Fingertips traced their cheek, callused but gentle as they'd always been. Eris jerked away from the touch.

"Stop this. Please." they mumbled, "I watched you bleed. I watched you die. I found your bones in the ashes. I know you can't be here."

"How do you know that?"

"Because... I know."

Because death was final. Because it had to be. Because his return was as painful as no return at all, or even more.

And because it was easier just to believe she'd gone mad.

But behind her eyes, that afterimage reached for something around his neck, and warmth bloomed as he set it around hers instead. Eris lifted his hand and found weight, two plates of cool slim metal on a beaded cord. His fingers traced the small, stamped words. He knew what they said without even needing to look.

No. Eris had found those with the bones. They'd been buried with what remained of his body. They were six feet under, encased in soil and concrete in the Louisiana National Cemetery. The plot was next to his father's. Eris knew all this from DuBois - she hadn't even been given the courtesy to attend the service.

"Believe me now?"

Against all his deepest wishes, he did. The dog tags were solid between his fingers and they caught flashes of sunlight from the window, visible not only to his mind but to his eyes. He could deny the rest as madness, but he couldn't bring himself to deny this.

"You told me you would die when it was your time. You told me you'd be nothing more than human. This..." Eris muttered, fumbling for words, "This is much more than human."

"And you told me I was yours to the end," he said, "This ain't the end. Not just yet."

"And why isn't it?"

" 'Cause I don't want it to be. Isn't that enough?"

Her strength gave out all at once. They crumpled forward, expecting to keep falling until they hit the cot but instead meeting warm resistance just in front of them. His arms came up around them, the same way he'd always done, enveloping them in warmth and the indescribable feeling of home.

Eris pressed his face to Rick's chest, the space where his heart should have been, but heard no steady beat like he should have. His chest did not rise or fall, but something about it was there and kept her from breaking apart. Tears crept down her cheeks and spilled into her lap. Would it have been easier if they'd met resistance? If they'd soaked into cloth she could feel but that wasn't truly there?

If her tears fell to the cot below her, so should she. If she did not fall, neither should have those treacherous droplets. So much of this defied logic, defied reason, and he couldn't bring himself to care.

"I miss you," she gasped, suffocating in the echo of those loving arms, "I miss you holding me in the night. I miss your chicken pot pie and the way you hum to yourself when you're at the stove. I miss fighting by your side and knowing I could turn my back when you were behind me. I miss... the way you put my spear on the highest rack so you'd always have to grab it for me, and the smell of you on the sheets when you brought me to your bed, and-"

"Ssh," his voice murmured from above them, "I know, baby."

The words dissolved into terrible, choking sobs, the sound of them ricocheting down the hall and mingling with the shrieks of other prisoners. Eris couldn't remember the last time he'd cried like this. Even witnessing the death, even being brought to the stand and accused for it, hadn't been enough to draw tears from him.

They felt weak and helpless, sick with grief, and somehow they didn't care. They were no longer a warrior, no longer a god. They were just another prisoner, driven to insanity amidst the walls of Arkham. They had no honor left to preserve.

"I've got something else for you."

Something was pressed into their hands, small and cool and familiar. Eris recognized it by feel alone - their sgian-dubh, the smallest of their many blades, encased in a worn leather sheathe.

It was in the same place as the dog tags. It should've been. Yet here it was in her hands.

"DuBois said you'd want a piece of you to stay with me," said that echo, "But I think you should hold onto this one for a while."

"I'll kill him," Eris promised, closing their fingers tight around the knife, "I'll avenge your death."

"You know that won't fix anything," Rick murmured, calm and strangely solemn. She supposed it was death that had done that. A shapeless touch passed over her hair once again, comforting like it had always been comforting, and she heard him speak again. "But I want you to get out of this place. You don't belong here."

Resolve settled heavy into his chest. Yes, he'd get out of here. And he'd murder that so-called hero with his own kukri blade. It wouldn't wash away the blood that had been spilled. It wouldn't repair Eris' broken heart.

But he couldn't let that beast survive in a world that still deemed him a hero.

If the world thought Eris was a monster, let her be a monster. It wouldn't be the first time.

The dreamlike afterimage of Rick pulled back, and his eyes looked her up and down with that familiar mask of concern.

"You look tired."

"Prison will do that."

In the back of his mind, that frown deepened.

"How long has it been since you've slept?"

Every time they shut their eyes, they saw the same crimson smile. They saw Rick's bewildered expression, eyes wide and lips working for words that would never come. They saw him collapse, dead before he hit the ground, and then scorched bones and dog tags in the aftermath.

And he was exhausted. He was tired of this memory, tired of this cell, tired of this life. Eris sighed, and sank again into that shapeless touch.

"Too long."

Without so much as a word, gentle hands eased them into bed like a sick child, tucked the sheets around them and stroked their hair until they fell into a tumultuous sleep.

When Eris woke, the cell was dim and empty around him. He wondered if it had all just been a dream, some facsimile cooked up by his battered mind in the isolation. Rick was gone, and would never return. He'd never hold her again. Perhaps he'd never held her at all.

Then she shifted, and felt the hilt of a tiny cat's-claw dagger clutched between her fingers.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

"come from the same egg and they will split into two separate zygotes within the first thirteen days of conception. It is one person split in two." So personhood comes after conception not at it? Are all cases of something splitting off from a person now considered people in their own right? Are immortalised cell lines people? They're human organisms split off from people.

Why are you coming into my inbox and asking me to defend someone else's words? If you want my opinion on this topic, which I have to assume you do since you're in my inbox about this, I wouldn't have worded this part of the response exactly like this. I've been asked this before, and I've explained it, but I'll do it again just for you, anon.

There is no such thing as "personhood". You're either a human being, or you're not. There's no magical line of development or autonomy that some non-human organism has to pass in order to become human. A human is human from conception. It doesn't matter how many times an egg splits, all of those individual humans are human from conception. Immortalized cell lines aren't human organisms. They can never be a human being no matter how much they replicate. If you people weren't so desperate to find ways to justify child murder, you'd be able to easily figure this shit out on your own.

[ladylilithprime]

Day 28: Graves

(Set in the werewolf!Sam'verse, after Day 9 but before Day 19.)

IF SOMEONE HAD told teenaged Sam Winchester that not only would he be free of his father's iron handed rule but that Dean would choose him over their father, he wouldn't have believed it. If that person had also said that Dean would let a monster live, actively protecting it and putting that monster's life and safety over everything he'd been taught growing up? Sam would have laughed until he cried, but he might have believed it if the monster was him.

Because it was, but not the way John Winchester had always feared, muttering drunkenly under his breath while probably - hopefully - thinking that Sam couldn't hear him. Whatever the thing that had killed his and Dean's mom had done to Sam, it hadn't withstood what had happened to him after the blowout fight that sent Sam running to California and Stanford with barely a duffle bag and the clothes on his back.

Those three weeks it took him to make his way out to California had been tense and fraught with mingled uncertainty and elation of being completely on his own with no fear of being hauled in as a runaway because he was over eighteen even if his face still didn't look it. The youthful features had come in handy when his money had run out and he had needed to trade favors for bus fare the last leg of the journey, and his fighting skills kept off the one guy who hadn't been willing to take "no glove, no love" as a hard limit.

And then things took a sharp detour when his last customer turned out to have been a werewolf two days before the full moon.

Turns out, STDs weren't the only thing Sam had to worry about from a broken condom, especially when his own perfunctory prep had resulted in minor internal tearing that caused blood and semen to mix and catch in a way he hadn't known was possible. Sam had been incredibly lucky - or unlucky, depending on your view - that the werewolf had been damn near immortal, one of the earliest turned by the Alpha werewolf, the Firstborn, and had been willing to stick around and help Sam when he realized what had happened. He'd paid the motel room fees for the two days it took Sam to ride out his body rewriting itself cell by cell, and cleaning up the mess when Sam threw up something black as pitch that smelled like blood and sulfur midway through the second day. Actually experiencing the full transformation the second night had been a revelation in more than one way, though thankfully for Sam's peace of mind they had stayed locked in the hotel room the whole night.

The third day, they had gotten into Dmitri's car and headed for a werewolf commune in Napa Valley where Sam could stay and catch his breath and learn how to handle his new species change before checking in at Stanford. Admitting that his name was Sam Winchester had... not gone over well, to say the least. None of the wolves had been any happier when he'd assured them that John and Dean wouldn't be following him since John had told him if he left for college he wasn't welcome back, but it had quieted the ones who had suggested just killing him to protect the pack. Many had been mollified when Sam had confessed that he had hated being a hunter, that what he really wanted was to learn and to help and protect people, human or otherwise.

And learn Sam did. From the history and lore that surrounded the Firstborn and his children and turned vassals, to the differences between types of werewolves and where and why those differences had split from the pure line. He learned that the branch which hunters had known of, the ones who ate hearts, were descended from one unfortunately prolific wolf whom Aphrodite had cursed with madness after he had killed and eaten the heart of his lover in a bid to grow stronger. He learned that Dmitri was of an entirely different branch than even most of the commune, known as Luna's Shepherds for the Greek legend of Endymion and Selene's daughters who married the sons of the Firstborn, many of whom had chosen to live solely as wolves so as not to be persecuted for their changing and then hunted as wolves by fearful humans anyway. He learned meditation and, when his emotions could not fully be quieted to let him achieve inner peace, he had been convinced to attend couseling sessions with a nearby therapist who knew about the supernatural, and who had gotten him in touch with the Stanford campus Wicca group and the real, natural witches there when it had been discovered that he had powers of his own, awoken and unbound with his change but, he was repeatedly assured, wholly natural and belonging solely to him.

He met Jessica Moore, a feisty blonde with green eyes and the same birthday as Dean, who adopted him as her big brother and promptly warded his pack-funded apartment even more than it already was.

"I get that you're your own guard dog," she had joked while painting a tiny line of runes along the base of the door frame, nearly invisible for their small size, "but you should still make sure to lock your door against the creepy crawlies anyway."

"What would I do without you?"

"Crash and burn?"

Jess had been in his apartment, sleeping off the alcohol she'd had at the Halloween party she had dragged him to when Dean had broken in like a damn thief in the night, calling him "Sammy" and claiming to be looking for a beer with the stench of a lie. She'd come out to join Sam and leaned into him like a girlfriend when Dean made a crass comment about her sleep shirt and how she was out of Sam's league. And she had held Sam's hand in quiet support when Dean finally let the lies drop and admitted that their father was missing on a hunt and hadn't answered any calls in days, and that Dean wanted Sam's help to find him.

"Dean... I can't go with you, not if you're going after Dad. It's not safe."

"Sammy, c'mon... it's Dad!"

"And he was the one to tell me if I walked out then I should stay gone. These days, it's better than even odds he'd pull a gun on me if we were in the same room!"

"Dad wouldn't do that to you!"

"Maybe not tonight, no... but what about in two weeks on the full moon? You think it'll matter to Dad that I've never killed anyone since getting away from him if he finds out I'm not human? Or are you gonna save him the trouble and kill me now?"

To Sam's surprise and Dean's credit, he had hesitated. When he had reached for his gun, he had done so slowly and then set it on the floor and shoved it away. He'd done the same with his knives while Sam and Jess watched his every move. And then, when he'd disarmed himself and sat down on the floor, he had quietly asked - asked! - for Sam to explain. And he had listened as Sam gave that explanation, about Dmitri and the pack that had helped him without naming names or locations, about the manifestation of his powers in the form of visions of the future and telekinesis and how he could always tell when someone was lying and not just by scent. Jess had chimed in about being a natural witch and the wards on the apartment that worked to keep threats out as much as keep a transformed Sam contained once a month so he wouldn't get spotted by animal control or worse.

Not that he could open the doorknobs without hands, but that was besides the point.

"So... is that the only thing keeping you from coming with...?"

"It's not exactly a small thing, Dean... and I have an interview for Stanford's law school on Monday."

"So just come with me for, like, a couple days, just to check out what was going on in Jericho? I'll have you back here in time for your interview, and I won't let Dad or anyone else go after you."

"I'll apartment-sit for you," Jess had offered. "Just call to let me know what's going on."

JERICHO HAD BEEN a bust, but the wall Sam had built between himself and his old hunting life had still come crashing down. The ghost of Constance coming after him had been completely nonsensical.

"I can't be unfaithful, I'm not even dating anyone!"

Dean had been just as confused by that as Sam, and the drive back to Stanford with nothing to show for the trip but another arrest on Dean's record and John's abandoned journal had been tense. The scent of sulfur on the air as Sam had stepped out of the Impala in front of his apartment had him growling low in his chest, and having Dean at his back with a drawn gun was more of a comfort than he had expected. Certainly he was glad to have Dean with him to help when they came upon a badly wounded Jess facing off against a black-eyed possessed Tyson Brady. The fire and collapsing ceiling had nearly trapped them before Sam was shifting, nudging Jess up onto his back, and diving through the flames out the window to the quad where Dean met them with a blanket to hide Sam changing back under the guise of putting out lingering flames on their clothes.

Jess had lived, but it was entirely too clear that the demons that stalked the edges of Stanford were definitely targeting Sam.

"So...." Dean had said slowly as they drove away from Palo Alto, a brand new ceramic warding pendant on an adjustable braided cord around Sam's neck and his fresh acceptance to Stanford's online law school courses tucked away with his laptop in the back seat. "The wolf form thing isn't just for the full moon?"

"Any time I want, not that I want to do it where people are watching if it's not an emergency," Sam shrugged, looking out the window to avoid looking at Dean. His brother had been putting off some odd scent combinations that he needed to think about before trying to talk to Dean about them, but at least Dean didn't smell afraid of him. "Full moon is the only time the change is completely involuntary starting at moonrise and with no ability to change back to human until moonset."

Dean was silent for a long moment, taking that in, and then: "Gonna be a lot easier to do salt and burns with you around to dig up the bones from the graves, bitch."

"You are such a jerk," Sam huffed with a roll of his eyes, but he wasn't able to keep from smiling, relieved. Maybe this could work out after all, if Dean was serious about helping him keep his secret and stay safe while staying ahead of the demons and their plans.

He supposed that only time would tell.

[shadowisles-writes]

Peer Pressure (Part 1) [Elucien]

I don’t usually give into peer pressure

But I’ll give into yours

A/N: Here is my contribution to the first part of the third writing circle. A massive thank you to everyone participating, this is the biggest one yet and we have more ships than ever. You can find everyone’s work in this masterlist, make sure to go show some love!

Big thank you to @headcanonheadcase for listening to all my thoughts and for the beta on this <3

Word count: 3117

Read on AO3

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Elain sprayed 70% ethanol into her biosafety hood and wiped it clean from right to left. No one had used it since she did earlier this morning, but you could never clean too much in a cell culture room. The air flow had been on for over five minutes, progressively filtering the air inside the hood so that she could start working without risking contaminating her cultures.

A water bath set to 37°C warmed her solutions while she began filling the hood with material. Pipettes, tips and petri dishes all got sprayed with ethanol before finding their place on the metal. Elain hummed to herself as she worked, she’d done this a hundred times and barely needed to think.

Clean to the right, dirty to the left. It was the policy in her university’s lab. Technically, everyone cleaned the hood before and after using it, but in the interest of sanity (nothing made Elain more crazy than someone’s sloppy work resulting in contamination in her experiments) they all placed their clean material to the right, and anything that was used and to be discarded moved to the left.

Human cells were kept at 37°C in the incubator to her right. The HeLa cell line came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, someone Elain made sure her interns remembered as she never got the credit she deserved. After being diagnosed with cancer in the 1950s, the immortal cells from Henrietta’s tumor were taken and kept by researchers, without her knowledge or consent of course.

It had been legal at the time, but Elain—and every biologist she knew—still thought it was awful. Yet, they had been used over and over in medical research, and after so many years Elain had no better model for her experiments than this immortal cell line.

They required a bit of maintenance, but after a year of working with them Elain could practically do that in her sleep. She ran through the motions of a passage in no time and placed her new petri dishes on her shelf in the incubator.

Everything that was single use and had touched cells under the hood got discarded in the autoclave bag, and Elain quickly finished cleaning up after herself. Out of the room and with her gloves off, she finally got the chance to check the time on her phone.

It was still the middle of the afternoon, but there was only so much work she could do in the lab. This had been the last task Elain could think of before she was forced to get back to the small office she shared with a couple of other students to sit in front of her laptop. Now, she had no other choice but to work on analyzing her data.

The office was exceedingly gray apart from a few pictures she and the other girls had stuck on the wall in front of their desks. It was no surprise they would rather sit anywhere else on campus, and usually Elain did too, but this time she couldn’t afford a distraction.

It took all of her focus and three youtube videos for her to give up on statistics and bury her face in her hands. Why in the world had she avoided statistics after the second year of her undergrad? She remembered next to nothing about basic statistics, and what she could recall wasn’t even relevant to what she had to do for her current dataset. She was going to have to teach herself how to do this, and it was going to be painful.

Elain could always, of course, ask her supervisor. She just didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of announcing she wasn’t capable of doing her own statistics because she’d been too lazy to take an advanced class during her undergrad.

The two girls she shared the office with would be no help, one was in the last year of her PhD and always hiding in the library to finish writing her thesis while the other was in her third year and always running around the lab to run as many experiments as she could. Neither had time to help her, or even liked statistics to begin with. No one became a biologist to analyze data, it was all about the lab work.

It was only then that it struck her. Some insane people did become biologists for the data, and she knew of exactly one in this department. While everyone else spent the majority of their time in the lab and made plans to hang out while they were there, Lucien Vanserra was somewhat excluded as he analyzed metaproteomics data.

He wasn’t the friendliest man Elain had ever met, he had his own office and was always hiding in there, but he’d been kind the few times they had interacted. He was the only person who might have the time and skill to help her.

Closing her laptop, Elain pushed her chair back and made her way down the corridor to find him. Lucien’s office was a mirror of hers a few doors down. The only reason he didn’t have to share it was that no one else became a biologist to spend the five years of their PhD running numbers.

“Hi,” she popped her head in after knocking. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sure,” Lucien pushed his chair back slightly to angle himself towards her and hid the tabs he was working on.

Somehow, Elain was too stuck remembering how handsome he was to get inside and speak. His office was just as gray and sad as hers, but his red hair was so pretty it filled the room with color. Russet eyes remained trained on her, just a shade lighter than his brown, flawless skin. His cheekbones were defined without making his face angular, though his jawline was something straight out of a magazine.

Elain was staring at his full, perfect lips when he awkwardly cleared his throat and she remembered what she was here for.

“Right,” she stepped in to let the door fall shut and helped herself to one of the free chairs to sit beside him. “I’m just starting to analyze some of my data, and I was hoping you could give me a hand with statistics, if you have the time.”

“Well, I don’t know how much data you have but I can probably help.” Lucien moved his keyboard to the side and pushed his monitor back slightly to make space for her laptop.

“Thank you so much. I guess it’s not much compared to what you’re used to,” Elain typed in her password and let him look at her excel file. “But I’ve never had to do this before, so I’m lost.”

He hummed to acknowledge he heard her, but his eyes were already scanning the numbers, figuring out how she built her table and how many variables she had before he looked at her again. “What am I looking at exactly?”

“That’s the data from my immunofluorescence,” Elain let him scroll through the rest of the table. “Basically, I did different treatments on my cells, then I fixed them on a slide and added a primary antibody to detect the protein I’m interested in. My secondary antibody is fluorescent, it detects the primary, so the intensity of the fluorescence detected by the microscope correlates to the concentration of my target protein.”

“Alright, so that’s your intensity,” he used the mousepad to point to some numbers. “And that’s your treatments? And you’ve already built some graphs?” He switched between the pages to look at them.

“Yeah, I know which treatment increases the protein concentration the most,” Elain had made the graphs pretty, adjusting the colors so that they’d fit the theme of the poster she was meant to present at a conference in just a few weeks. “But I don’t know if any of it is significant.”

“Right. So you need me to tell you which tests to run?”

Lucien looked at her like it was obvious—which it probably was to him. Her cheeks flushed, though she at least knew the answer to that after her reading and the videos she’d watched.

“No, I read up on that, tried to revive some memories from second year biostatistics. What I’m struggling with is R.” Just speaking the name of the program was enough to make her cringe. R was the most widely used program for statistics, and yet she had no idea how to do anything with it.

It was all it took for Lucien to pinpoint her problem. “You can’t code.”

“I can’t code.” Elain confirmed. “I’d really appreciate it if you could show me just for one dataset, and then I’ll use that as a template for the rest by myself.”

“It shouldn’t be too long, we could do it now,” Lucien agreed, emailing himself her file so that he could open it on his own computer. “You’ve used R before, right?”

“I used SPSS,” Elain made a face that told Lucien everything else he needed to know.

A class on R was enough to know how to run basic tests, it introduced just enough coding for it to make sense, but SPSS didn’t make you code for anything. If that was all she had ever used, she wouldn’t even know how to import her data into R.

“Alright, it might take longer than I thought,” Lucien said. “Maybe we can take some time tomorrow? I have a meeting in the morning and I need to finish a quick presentation for it. I could help you after lunch, if that works for you.”

“Yes, of course, whatever’s best for you.” Elain promptly nodded and reached for her laptop to get out of his hair. “Thank you so much Lucien.”

“Happy to help.”

.

Lucien took the next afternoon to help her, and the next, and the next. By Thursday, Elain’s brain had melted into a pile of goo and she was sure Lucien had to be sick of her. On top of everything he had shown her, she had spent her mornings trying to understand the next steps by herself only to find herself inevitably stuck.

“Fuck this,” Elain swore, dropping her head to her desk. She let out a loud groan to calm down, then straightened her back, took a deep breath and went back to staring at her screen. She deflated like a balloon on her exhale, the jumble of lines of codes making no more sense to her than it had in the past hour.

A knock came on her door, and Elain prayed it was someone coming to crash in her office to procrastinate so she could use it as an excuse to stop working. Lucien opened the door instead, an easy smile on his face.

“Hey, do you need me today?”

“Yes please,” Elain didn’t hesitate to say. He walked right in and stole a chair to sit beside her. “You’re an angel.”

“It’s no big deal,” Lucien ducked his head, a couple of strands of hair falling in his face. The rest was held back by a claw clip, and Elain thought of how unfair it was that every style suited him so well when she typically hated men with hair this long. “It’s this one, isn’t it?” Lucien pointed to one of the lines he had added to her code yesterday.

“Yes,” Elain sighed and tore her eyes away from him to focus. “I’ve been losing my mind for an hour, I think.”

“When we’re done you need to go get fresh air or do something fun, no one learning how to do this can do it all at once,” Lucien reached for the laptop, and Elain pushed it toward him.

“Well lucky for me there’s a party downstairs tonight with some dangerously cheap tequila.”

On campus parties organized by the science departments were very… unique. The space they had for it was large, but there were never enough students to fill it, which always made things awkward. Pair that with a student’s spotify staying open on a laptop for anyone to add songs to as the main source of music and it wasn’t hard to imagine how much anyone would cringe on a night like this.

Luckily, undergrads were just there to fill the space and grad students stuck together to drink and forget their work without having to go through the effort of dragging themselves to a bar or club. Elain had been roped in at the start of her first year, and she rarely missed those occasions anymore.

“Ah, sounds fun.” Lucien’s voice came out flat, his lie obvious.

“Are you coming?” Elain tried anyway. She’d been wrong in thinking he wasn’t friendly before she asked him for help, Lucien was lovely and easy to be around, and she was sure the only reason he was always working by himself was that no one else ever remembered to invite him.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Elain pressed, pushing her laptop back so he couldn’t use it as a crutch? “You should,”

Lucien sighed and looked at her. “There’s always a weird theme, I’m not dressed for it.” The sanitized excuse would have worked on anyone else, but she wasn’t ready to give up.

“Neither am I, for now.” Elain was in a plain pastel pink t-shirt and light blue jeans. Nothing about it screamed themed party, but she’d make it work. “I brought accessories, and you don’t need to fit the theme to come.”

Surely he knew that last part. Except… maybe he didn’t, and Elain gasped before she spoke again. “Lucien. Have you never been to any of these?”

“Guess not,”

“You’re in your third year!” She exclaimed. “How is that even possible?”

A shrug, then a helpless look towards Elain’s laptop as if the lines of code on the screen could save him. “I’m not that close with everyone else in the labs.”

“Well, neither was I until my first campus party.” Elain reasoned, toning her excitement down to plead with him. “Please come, I’ll be there, and it’ll be fun.”

Lucien, like the responsible man he was, pulled her work back within comfortable reach so they could get to the end of it. “We can finish this, and then I’ll think about it.”

“How much thinking will you need?”

“You’re not going to focus until I say yes, are you?” Lucien gave her a look, his head tilted as he read the expressions on her face. Elain kept her mouth shut and bit back a smile, her eyes full of hope. “Fine,” he caved too easily. “What’s the theme this time?”

“Tropical. I have hair pins with seashells on them and I bought this coconut shaped cup,” Elain opened one of her drawers. “Lucky for you, it came with a matching pineapple.”

“Of course it did.”

.

A very unproductive work session later, Lucien had fully given in for the party and Elain was rummaging through her things to accessorize them both. In an effort to get in the mood, Lucien was already sipping water from his pineapple and he’d stuck one of the seashell bobby pins in his hair.

“We can do better than that,” Elain’s curls had been pulled back slightly, uncovering her face, and it was now time for her to focus on Lucien’s hair. “Can I braid your hair?”

“Does it look like I know how to say no to you?” He lifted his pineapple and earned a grin.

“I’ll be quick.” Elain promised as she took the claw clip out of his hair.

Long strands of red hair cascaded down his back. What she guessed was usually straight, maybe slightly wavy, was now stuck in the shape it’d be held in all day. She brushed it gently, but it was barely tangled. Whatever products he used on his hair, they were perfect for him.

“Tell me if I pull too hard,” Elain parted a few strands near his temple and made quick work of braiding toward the back of his head.

Lucien didn’t say a word as she worked, closing his eyes and letting her use hair ties and pins until she was satisfied. Her fingers were used to the motions, she had grown up with two sisters and while they weren’t close anymore, there was a time when the three of them would spend the entire afternoon braiding each other’s hair in complicated updos.

“There,” Elain tucked the last strand away with her last seashell pin. “No more excuses, you fit the theme now.”

“Thank you,” Lucien opened his phone’s camera to check her work, and he could find no flaw in it.

He would have never done something like this himself—the style was more feminine than what he was used to—but it looked beautiful.

“Where are the girls from your office?”

“They’re not coming,” Elain applied a quick layer of pink lip gloss. “Emily is too busy finishing her thesis, and Mara is always with her boyfriend when she’s not in the lab.”

“Do you have one?” Lucien asked, making her frown.

“One what?”

“Boyfriend—or girlfriend, I guess,” he got up from his chair and busied himself with twirling the straw of his pineapple cup.

The coconut looked ridiculous in Elain’s hands, it was too big for her to comfortably hold in one hand, and the pineapple was a little bigger. Somehow, Lucien’s hands still dwarfed it.

“No,” Elain looked away from his hands and shrugged. “What about you?” She added innocently, as if she wasn’t burning to know if he had a girlfriend. It also wouldn’t shock her if Lucien was far too handsome and smart to be straight.

“No girlfriend,” he provided simply before he switched the subject. “Where’s everyone else?”

“They went out to get food. You’d know if you ever checked the group,” Elain waved the messenger chat in front of him. “You’ve been in it for ages, you know?”

“I might have muted that,” Lucien looked almost apologetic. Truth was he didn’t feel included whenever they invited everyone for plans and the more he waited to show up, the less welcome he felt.

“Fair enough, it gets annoying.” She moved on to grab her office keys, slipped her phone in her back pocket and grabbed her coconut. “Ready? There should be enough people now that it won’t be awkward,”

“Isn’t awkward the point of this whole thing?”

“Just be patient, it’ll be great when the alcohol kicks in.” Elain seemed to be buzzing now, the excitement of the party starting to show.

“This is going to be a disaster,” Lucien stepped out of the office first.

Elain only grinned. “Exactly.”

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Please reblog and let me know your thoughts &lt;3

[fox-stuck]

I'm sooo interested in Riker's comments at the end of Schisms (6x05) re: the invasive and violent operations being proof that this group of aliens was, and he says this in a harsh and resentful tone - "more than curious." Because whoa, what a line to end this episode on!!! Obviously completely fair but also what a pointed reflection on contemporary scientific practices and mindset?

Human methods of scientific study (although I recognize we are several centuries behind tng) have been are brutal and cruel. Even if we ignore (which is a bold choice) the dehumanization we weaponize to perform procedures, testing, and experiments that are eugenic in nature on actual human beings, we are also horrid to creatures and things we do not view as having a worthwhile life or consciousness.

Like... scientific studies are notoriously cruel to jellyfish. Which I know may be a weird hill to die on but I will die on it. (sidenote: it's not actually a weird hill because we should treat every thing better regardless of internal structures and consciousness.) A short and simplified jellyfish brief, if you don't know, when jellyfish die their bodies age backwards and sink to the seafloor; growing into a polyp which will sprout numerous more jellies. This earned them a bit of a reputation for being immortal even though that's not really what's happening. In reality when they endure an intense enough amount of trauma to disrupt their body or its functions they regress, sink, and start the life cycle anew. As a result the methods by which we study jellyfish are violent.

“Scientists who study the regeneration of the immortal jellyfish know this well, and have developed a roster of abuses to “induce rejuvenation,” as one study calls it. One standard method of traumatizing the jellyfish is to place the creature in a solution of cesium chloride, a colorless salt. An alternative, called the needle treatment, asks you to pierce the gooey umbrella with a stainless-steel needle. Some scientists drag the needle through the creature’s body in a scribble, removing the needle as burst cells coagulate like cumulus. Others stab repeatedly, up to fifty times per jellyfish. You can also heat shock the jellyfish, raising the temperature of the surrounding water to nearly 100 degrees. Or you can simply starve it. If you do not give the jellyfish more than it can handle, it will not begin to regrow. If there is not enough cesium chloride in the petri dish, if there are not enough needles or there is too little heat, the jellyfish will remain adult, alive. So you have to ensure there is enough stress, enough trauma." (chapter: Us Everlasting, How Far The Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler, 2022)

Our methods of research almost always emphasize getting information as quickly as possible; explaining away our egregious violations of autonomy as necessary. Something about that has always felt really cruel to me and its part of the reason I pivoted from the specific career in biology I had wanted. I know it's "just a jellyfish" but it's also not? They are an important part of an ecosystem and landscape that we have chosen to define as a nuisance. Targets of aggression and anger in the wild fishermen often choose to destroy their bodies unknowingly creating hundreds if not thousands more. Our violent actions against them manifest worse conditions for ourselves and the ocean's ecosystem - it's a nauseating cycle.

I often end up thinking about jellyfish when I watch Star Trek: TNG. So many of the people flying through space "to explore strange new worlds" get so hung up on a being's experiences of consciousness if they don't explicitly mirror their own. I cannot get over everything that happens in Schism being such an interesting thought experiment on autonomy? Like the same episode where Data reads "Ode to Spot" and everyone sort of fails to recognize the beauty in his poetry, is also the episode where the crew is being kidnapped for experiments and reflecting on it, is also the same episode where Dr. Crusher (in a rare case!) doesn't do the extra tests right away and sends Riker home with hot milk before bed as a treatment, is also the episode where in the end Riker has resentment for being experimented on and the loss of a life... I just don't even know if they meant there to be this much thought about autonomy to be honest.

None of this is an in-universe criticism about the crew because I think having these kind of hiccups and topics in character development are interesting! I just think it's almost comical when the era a science-fiction show is written in rips through it's world building so hard it just sort of stares at you. Which is a great method of reflecting on our current times but it also a little funny in a show universe that claims to have moved past inequality when it's like, "ah yes but do you experience your emotions and consciousness like I, a human federation officer, no? then how do you know you even have them?!"

[blackjackkent]

Past Cazador's prison cells and through a door labeled "Crypt Gate", we find... this.

"Holy hells," Hector mumbles as they proceed down the enormous stairway leading through the crypt. The room is enormous, a giant cavern of a place, full of hanging cages and ornate gilded stonework. It would have taken decades, centuries, to build such a place. And to make use of all these cages...

At the middle of the room, suspended with abyss both above and below, stands an equally enormous platform. Seven alcoves marked with obsidian columns line its edges; six of them are filled, each with a vampire spawn suspended in midair. Several of the same werewolf creatures they fought in the ballroom pace the platform with agitation...

...and Cazador stands at the center of it all.

Hector feels a strange sort of cold hate prickle through him. Everything about this situation is terrible, particularly the tangled, twisted complexities surrounding the fate of the spawn in those jail cells. But Cazador's fate is the sharp clear line that he can follow with ease. Whatever else will happen, that man cannot be allowed to live. That, at least, is certainty.

He looks back towards Astarion, gestures the other man to walk forward with him.

Cazador rounds on them as they approach. He completely ignores Hector, his eyes locking onto Astarion at once with a hunger that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with power.

"Who stands before us?" he cries. His voice is high, keening, like a wolf's howl. "Is this truly our prodigal son."

Astarion is looking at him with abject hatred - but involuntarily, from habit or from fear, his shoulders hunch up, his head ducking so he is looking up at the vampire lord from under hooded brows. Hector remembers him taking the same involuntary stance before Oblodra back at Moonrise Towers - the automatic submission born of centuries of torment.

Cazador recognizes it too, and smirks. "Do not slouch before me, boy!" he snaps mockingly. "Have you no respect for yourself?"

His fingers tap restlessly along the shaft of the ornate staff he holds in one hand. "Look at you," he goes on, disdainful. "Crawling back after abandoning your family. You should be begging our forgiveness."

The cold cruelty inherent in these words - when Cazador is responsible for all the misery Astarion and so many others have gone through - stings Hector like a slap. How dare you, he thinks with disgust.

But he remains still. As with so many other confrontations that he has witnessed in their journeys... this is not his fight to direct. And this is, perhaps, more important than it was with any of the others, even Shadowheart -- because Astarion has been taught for so long that he had no control. For Hector to deny him that now would be the height of hypocrisy.

Keep back. Do not intervene.

"Forgiveness?" Astarion cries. "You've never forgiven anything. Every mistake, every slip, was punished!"

"I strove for perfection in all things," Cazador returns primly. "Even those as imperfect as you. A pity you amounted to so little, despite my efforts."

"No." Astarion's voice goes hard. His fists are clenched and his eyes unblinking. "No. Fuck you. And fuck everything you've ever done to me."

Damn right, Hector thinks. Slowly, casually, he shifts his weight onto the balls of his feet. It's only a matter of time before this comes to violence.

Say nothing.

Cazador laughs sharply. "I suspected you would return to me changed," he taunts. "Never did I imagine you would be so wretched." He takes a step towards Astarion, spreading his arms in a mocking welcome. "Oh, thankless child. Did I not bless you with our immortal gift? Did I not make you what you are?!"

Every word is stabbing into Astarion like a knife, and the rage is building in him until finally it can't be contained. "You son of a bitch!" he howls, and hurls himself at Cazador, one fist coming up, ready to strike--

Red light bursts from the base of Cazador's staff, enveloping the two of them, and Astarion cries out as he is frozen into place, his movement arrested into stillness in the space of a blink.

"You truly forgot my power." Cazador clicks his tongue scornfully. "You truly thought our bond as creator and creation was all that stopped you from killing me!" He steps closer, his face only a few inches from Astarion's. "You are weak, my child. You are a small, pathetic little boy who never amounted to anything!"

Astarion whimpers with pain and fury. Cazador ignores him, jerks the staff in a sudden wide arc. "But today, you will finally do something worthwhile. You will burn, and I will ascend!"

Instantly, Astarion is lifted into the air and hurled bodily across the platform and into the last remaining niche waiting for him. A blaze of blood and magical energy bursts around him, shattering his equipment aside and leaving him bare-chested and bathed in red. A deeply scored and elaborate scar on his back begins to glow as if flame is bursting from within his skin.

"NO!" Astarion screams, and there is nothing left of his usual confidence-- the word is heavy with terror. "STOP HIM! AND GET ME OUT OF THIS!"

Hector is already moving, his fists coming up, ready to strike-- but Cazador shows no fear, just a gleeful, triumphant grin. He raises his arms, crying out to the heavens, to whatever dark god he serves.

"Witness the birth of the Vampire Ascendant!" he bellows. "ECCE DOMINUS!"

[dr-whoopsie-daisy]

I started reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks months ago and had to step away for a while because someone I know was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

I picked up the book again today. I got to chapter 27 where a German virologist discovered the cause of cervical cancer was HPV-18 and HPV-16 (90% of cases) and how studying Henrietta Lacks' cells lead to the HPV vaccine.

I just received my last HPV vaccine (it's a 3 injection series over 6ish month) a few days ago.

It feels very strange to be so connected to this book. I'm a patient actively benefiting from research done on her cell line. I'm also a doctor who had informed consent drilled into my brain from day one. Not just informed consent but making sure the patient *understands* their rights to information, the diagnosis, treatment options, the ability to refuse any and all treatments, the right to a second opinion. On and on.

Page after page of this book is laying out patient privacy violations, broken ethics, a lack of record keeping, and complete disregard for the next of kin. That's the point though, all of this was legal from the beginning until the 80's and 90's in America.

It's a lot to grapple with. Research doctors injecting patients with cancer cells, taking blood from the Lacks family but never bothering to tell them why. The millions of dollars made from cultivating her cells.

I don't understand why this wasn't required reading for any of my classes for my biology degree, my medical ethics minor, or at any point in my doctoral program.

Informed consent was taught as the forgone conclusion but in reality had only been enforced federally for medicine and research for 30-40 years before I started my doctorate.

Many of my professors were old enough to have been in research programs before these laws were written.

[thehylianidiot]

TheHylianIdiot's Assortment of Brain Worms

Was tagged by both @bumblebeehug and @kiliinstinct for this one, so let's do this.

rules: share the first line (or two or more!) of every current wip you have (that you feel comfortable sharing) and tag some writer friends! feel free to add the titles of your documents if you see fit

Oops We Kidnapped the Emperor (Title WIP) (Fairy Tail)

The mission to rescue Makarov had a few hiccups.

The first of which being despite traveling across the ocean to the heart of the Alvarez Empire, storming its castle ready to get back their captive guildmaster, the designated High-Collateral Rescue Squad did not bring back their Sixth-But-Soon-To-Be-Eighth-Guildmaster. 

And as for the second well…

Erza explained it to the rest of the guild best. “We kidnapped the emperor.” 

The Other Four Idiots, Plus A Cat (Chapter 22) (Fairy Tail)

“How many people have you interacted with in your life?”

“Umm… well… I don’t have a lot of practice with people. Most are either dead or fled in the first twenty four hours.” Mavis chuckled a bit, because keeping bright and cheerful normally made things happier and not a constant reminder that the majority of her prior interactions involved the other party trying to… well… increase their kill count by one. 

Given the lady slapping her palms to her face, maybe that wasn’t the best way to put it. 

“Oh gods he befriended a psychopath,” Ultear not-so-quietly muttered into her hands.

Lost My Cap (I swear I will write this someday) (Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap)

"I thought I heard something" 

Yes. It was a frog. How that buffoon of a guard could mistake a frog for him, Vaati wasn't sure. And of course the dimwit just had to pitter patter up above like some lost pet. 

On and on he heard the aimless clank of too heavy boots. Surely the guards could find something more interesting. There were monsters flooding every inch of their precious kingdom! Didn't they have something better to do than hunt the one who opened that damned box? Like perhaps stepping away from the sewage gate? 

He breathed in a quarter second too long and nearly gagged at the overwhelming stench. Don't you dare, he told himself. No way was he embarrassing himself further today by getting caught. 

To Slay A Demon (Part 2) (Fairy Tail)

Maybe some naively optimistic part of Gray hoped Zeref was a glass canon. That after cult after cult of worshippers and thousands of demons at his command, their ringleader would be too dependent on them. 

That optimism was crushed between a fraction of a second.

And death magic flowed around like a tidal wave of sand, flinging haphazardly in a nonexistent hurricane, crashing against ice-made shield. One trickle past Gray’s defenses, and he’d lose everything.

The Little Raindrop of Magnologia (Fairy Tail)

Drip drip drop. 

Little Juvia stood alone in the pouring rain. 

Drip drip drop. 

Everyone else had long since fled indoors. After all, it was the easiest way to escape the rain creating waterfalls from roofs and rivers from sidewalks. 

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t afford that luxury. 

These Are Not the Reincarnated Immortals You're Looking For (Title WIP) (Fairy Tail)

Alios would say the evening was going surprisingly normal until the chloroform. 

But no matter how many preparations he made so he could have a decent time (for once) at his favorite author's award ceremony—working overtime that week to make enough space in his schedule and spending the better part of an hour beforehand figuring out how to wear a modern suit along with how a gods-forsaken tie worked—Alios couldn't stop his weekly kidnapping from literally any random cult in Fiore falling on that exact date.

So as the last shreds of haziness finally faded away and Alios found himself tied to a chair in a pitch black cell, his first thought was, at least they gave it a cushion this time. 

Death Swap (Title WIP) (Fairy Tail)

It started with a passing rumor. 

A local tale shrouding its details with pottery gilded in mysticism and silken rarities tailored to lure passing travelers with enough coin in their pockets and a passing interest with the morbid to pay for a souvenir. Yuri knew he shouldn’t keep his hopes up. 

Knew it was going on two years already. Knew he should be getting back home, call it a night after making sure Warrod had kept a good eye on Makarov this time and the guildhall wasn’t turned into an artistic rendering of spinach inside a blender. 

As Precht said, they were never going to find her. 

Then again, Precht spent most of his time nowadays wallowing in the never-ending stream of newfound council regulations that kept multiplying like rabbits every few weeks until he couldn’t look at a stack of paper without sweating, so what did he know? 

Tagging @classysassy9791, @xfangheartx, @pencilofawesomeness

Feel free to ignore me, nobody is under any pressure to share if they don't want to.

[nights-nonsensical-ramblings]

In a way Knuckles had it worse than people in solitary confinement. At least people in solitary confinement: 1) Know why they're there 2)Know when they're going to be released into society 3) were grown adults at the time of confinement and have socialized in society before being confined 4) Convicted of a crime . Knuckles had none of those things . Knuckles is only 16, so if he hadn't met Sonic+Eggy by chance, he could spend up to a century alone (or even longer depending on Echidna lifespan)

You could even make it angstier with the idea that the m.e made it's guardian immortal and he's already been up there or will be up there for hundreds or even thousands of years.

(I Don't really know the details of what goes on in solitary, so I have no clue if they're told when they're getting released.)

But Yeah, Knuckles has experienced an unimaginable amount of solitude. Like, sixteen years. every single moment of his life up to a point alone. He spent the entirety of his developmental years alone. He can't have been left unaffected by that.

Perhaps he wouldn't have even understood what the problem was. He never knew anyone, would he even be able to understand what he's missing when he's never had it?

There's also his karma line the the frontiers prologue which make it seem concerningly like he wonders if he was chosen as the guardian as punishment for his ancestors actions. A crime that he had zero role in. (Some nice angst to explore there)

But it's not all bad, doom and gloom. In other ways he has it better. The environment he was in was far better than the small windowless cells of solitary confinement.

He lives in the wild, on a floating island in the sky, pretty much entirely inaccessible to dangers. He has fresh air, sunlight, space to run around, earth beneath his feet.

There's also a giant magical rock there that depending on how much it intervened could have perfectly customised the environment for a growing echidna puggle. A magic rock isn't a living breathing parent but i like to think it did it's best to raise it's guardian. Perhaps even influencing things to guide some friends to the island

There's also canonically a chao colony up there. He was able to have contact with living beings at least, and if patting a cat helps with loneliness I'm sure a similar thing happens with chao. They're clearly fond of him, they grew up around him, and he grew up around him. (makes me wonder if baby knux mimicked chao noises)

Knux also had things to occupy himself with. Angel Island is covered in ruins with mural and stories. He had so many things to do and learn, I like to think he's extremely knowledgeable on things like handicrafts. He had nothing but time to master them.

And didn't have his food just brought to him. He had to forage, farm and prepare it.

So If there was anywhere to be completely isolated from society Angel Island is probably the best place.

[ashacadence]

Finally decided to write a tiny snippet of vivienne and Naiovhe first entering a new world together just after they are paired up to learn from one another. I’m mostly going to be doing stuff like this when the mind decides to dabble and write. There won’t be any long chapter stories and what not. Probably down the lines I’d maybe pair it all up together as a multi chapter but each not connected and out of order.

Overall situation is vivienne finally meets a clan/hive/conclave/group/whatever after so many years of traveling alone, immortal and seeking answers if she’d ever find any while struggling to find any sort of peace yet fearful of void beasts. Turns out the ones that caused the calamity of her world/dimension are infected void beasts that became unstable or due to some virus that even the normal and unaffected ones are trying to find the source. Kind of like white blood cells. Anyways they are fascinated with vivienne in terms of what she is and how she survived while simultaneously also infected. They want to study and see if she’s any risk or worth keeping around so as part of naiovhe’s first assignment of independence and leaving the nest he will be watching over her while simultaneously learning from her as well. Course viv isn’t too thrilled because he’s a void beast and she’s dealing with them or it’s a life or death or imprisonment she goes with it. So it’s rocky from the get go yet Naiovhe is still a kid and will do kid things that may test her patience on occasion but ultimately she finally has company on her journey. She won’t be alone.