#i actually think they really fucked themselves over by putting only exclusive items in this calendar

[madegeeky]

BLOOD IT WILL TAKE BLOOD day 21: more skincare. >:/ Specifically lotion of some kind.

Not a fan of this for many reasons outside the fact that I'm annoyed to find yet more skincare in my makeup calendar. I hate the feel of this. It doesn't rub into my skin all the way so my skin ends up feeling tacky. It had a small subtle glitter to it which I don't really want all over my hands. It's such a small amount too! Like, the inside is much smaller than it looks.

The smell is... interesting. It took me a while to pin the base smell down which is vanilla cake. That aspect of it smells really well. Now, Mr. Geeky couldn't smell this, but for me there's a really astringent/medicinal smell underneath the cake smell that makes it a smell I just can't stand.

I dunno, it's just day 21, I have four days left and it's hard to be excited when I'm yet again getting skincare in my makeup advent calendar.

[luminari-mc]

(Mammon x MC/Reader)

Prompt: "She doesn't compare to you. No one does.”

Genre: Angst, hurt(emotional)/comfort.

Pairing: GN!MC/Reader x Mammon

Summary: You and Mammon finally get to enjoy a well-deserving shopping trip just between the two of you. Just as you are about to hit the next shop, your attention is caught by an image advertised in the street.

Warnings: N/A

A/N: I wanted to try my hands at a prompt that is tagged as "fluff", but of course I ended up turning it into something angsty instead. But I like sad stuff, so that still works for me.

-------------------------------------------

It wasn't often that you got to spend time with Mammon without having any of his brothers around to bother you. But you had made it very clear to them that these few hours after school would be spent with Mammon, and only him. And for today's trip, you two had decided to go shopping in one of the busiest streets in the Devildom.

Clothes and jewelry stores, malls- you had done them all. When most of this time had been spent doing window shopping, Mammon had still insisted on getting at least a few bags of purchased goods for each of you by the end of the day. After all, what was the point of going on a shopping trip, if you didn't end up emptying your bank account only to regret it later?

And so, thanks to the demon's wonderful influence, your arms had now several bags hanging off of them. There was a certain guilt still looming over your head as you realized way overboard you might have gotten with your purchases, but Mammon promised he would take care of any financial problems you could encounter in the near future because of that. You still wondered how he was going to manage it, him being Mammon and all...

"Damn, now THAT'S what I call a good haul! Look at ya!" The white-haired demon grinned as he watch you hop out of the store, the glass doors opening automatically at your presence to let you out. He placed his wrists on his hips as his own bags dangled in his hands. "What'cha got for yourself this time?"

"They actually had that jacket I saw in a magazine the other day!" The doors closed behind you as you showed the white bag which contained the jacket. "You were right, that store was amazing. I can't believe you never showed it to me before."

"Ha! Told ya the Great Mammon knew where the best treasures were! Consider it an exclusive info, because I ain't gonna share more if any of my brothers are around next time." Mammon turned around before flipping a few of his bags over his shoulder, as you instantly began to trot to get to his level.

"What? So all this time you knew about it and you didn't tell me? Just because Asmo comes with us sometimes?" You expressed shock, right before your eyebrows joined together. "Really, as if you couldn't have told me over text or something."

"And have you go without me?! Nah, ain't gonna happen- you'd just get lost and end up in the worst store possible." Mammon glanced your way, and you could only smirk at his poor excuse.

"Sure, you're right. I forgot that humans don't have the same flawless sense of orientation as demons do." Despite your obviously sarcastic tone, Mammon didn't seem to register it as he nodded at your words.

"Exactly! Even if I gave you the full address, who knows where you'd end up? I don't want ya to come and complain to me afterwards, so it's gotta be with me or nothin'."

Even as you rolled your eyes, you noticed Mammon's face slightly turning away from yours, probably to hide the extra shade of color that had appeared on his cheeks ever so discreetly. Even when he was in his usual tsundere mood, it was endearing to see how concerned he was for your safety. And just how badly he wanted to be alone with you.

"So, where to next?" You asked without really thinking, surprising yourself that even after your extensive purchasing, you still wanted to do more. Or maybe it was that you didn't want this date to end right away. The past few weeks had been nothing but the brothers interrupting each other when any of them found themselves alone with you, so getting to spend some alone time with one of them, especially with Mammon, deserved to be extended a bit more.

"Glad ya asked!" As if a battery had been plugged into him, the demon brandished his arm into the air, the bags swinging by his face and missing him by a few inches. "I got this whole place where they're sellin' tons of stuff for pretty cheap, but it's actually authentic branded things. See, they're actually sold to that one guy who then has to sell them to another guy, and..."

As you listened to Mammon explain how he was able to find "authentic stuff" (probably not that authentic, you were pretty sure about that) for less than a quarter of its original price, your eyes found themselves drifting to an impressive ad plastered on a building the two of you were walking by. Recognizing the habit of Majolish to put their models on display for everyone to see was pretty easy, but that wasn't what caught your eye in the moment.

What tuned Mammon down completely in your ears, were the models themselves. The second born, sitting on a stool with a ripped shirt and pants, a few accessories hanging off his neck and barely covering anything of his exposed chest. He looked serious, staring straight at the objective- and at you, while the light shined on him to completely capture his frame for the picture.

And sitting down in the middle of the shot, between his legs, was a female demon wearing a red leather dress, her head resting on top of Mammon's leg. The clawed hand dangling off his knee- covered in golden rings, seemed to taunt you, as well as the piercing yellow eyes she had. Saying she wasn't beautiful would be lying. In fact, she was absolutely stunning. A perfect model for a perfect shot. Just looking at her made you feel small, like a prey that was about to be devoured by a hungry beast, the longer you were looking at her.

But that's what demons were supposed to make you feel like, right?

"Hey!" Mammon called out from the distance he had put between the two of you since you had stopped walking beside him. "Yo, MC!"

Watching as you kept staring into nothing, Mammon rolled his shoulders with a furrowed brow before walking back toward you, his head tilting to the side as he noticed your dead expression.

"Huuh hello, Devildom to MC? In which realm did ya get lost this time?"

"They replaced it." The words that left your mouth were weak, almost too silent for him to hear. It's as if all of the energy you had had evaporated from your body in an instant.

"Huh?" Mammon grew a bit concerned at this sudden change. His eyes perked up at the ad you were looking at, as you continued.

"The shoot we did together." Finally, you spared yourself from the sight, your gaze dropping to the ground. "They already replaced it with another one."

As soon as Mammon understood why *this* ad in particular seemed to be upsetting you so much, his jaw was already clenching. He remembered the stars he had seen in your eyes the previous week when you saw yourself on the Majolish ad, posing beside him- a shoot opportunity you had gotten while accompanying him after RAD a few days prior. In the middle of his shoot, he practically didn't leave any choice to his agent and had insisted that you be included in the shots to promote one of the new pieces of jewelry the brand was planning to release in the upcoming months. Asmo, who was there to witness your reaction on that day the three of you went out, had even taken a hundred pictures or so of you posing in front of the ad.

Except that, the jewelry you had posed with, was now present on the new model posing alongside Mammon.

He had made sure to engrave that smile of yours in his head at the time, even going so far as to snap a picture of your face while you were too focused on Asmo to notice him. But now, there was absolutely no trace of that same happiness anymore.

"The fuck?" The snarl that left him shook the walls of his throat. "That wasn't supposed to be advertised before another month! Why'd they have to take ours so soon?!"

"It's okay, Mammon." The demon stopped growling as his eyes lowered on the hand that was clutching his arm. "I mean... I'm not a model. Figures they wouldn't put it up for long... I-I mean, look at me. Seriously, who would want to see my face being exposed for longer than they can bare? It's hard to imagine. I wouldn't probably have sold their product anyway, so... it's okay."

The look on your face was devastating. Despite trying your best to smile, the tears pricking in your eyes were threatening to roll down your cheeks at any second. Mammon felt his heart being stabbed with a thousand invisible daggers, he couldn't bear to watch you feeling insulted in such a way.

His bags were immediately dropped onto the floor, the demon no longer caring for any of the fragile items he may have bought. His hands swung forward to cup your cheeks, forcing your face up to look at him straight in the eyes.

"Hey hey, MC. C'mon, look at me."

You did your best not to let your vision turn blurry because of the upcoming tears, and stared back at Mammon, your bottom lip trembling weakly.

"I don't care what anyone, model agents or not, can say- you'd sell a thousand more times than any fuckin' models out there, okay? In fact, you're worth even more than their stupid jewelry!"

His thumb quickly brushed away a tear from the corner of your eye as his other hand came to rest on your temple.

"They just put that one up there because that model is famous. They don't care about what's really beautiful, they just want to boast their popularity to the rest of the world." The blue of his eyes seemed to radiate the closer he moved towards you. "But I know what's beautiful. And her? She doesn't compare to you. No one does."

You could only look down in shame as his hands never left you, closing your eyes shut to let a couple tears out before Mammon grabbed a tissue from his pocket to dry your face. He patiently waited a few seconds for you to calm down, soothing you with slow caresses of your hair until your shoulders stopped shaking.

"I'm sorry..." you muttered, sniffling as you passed a wrist over your eyes. "I don't know why that upset me so much..."

"Ya got nothing to be sorry about." Mammon retrieved his hands from your head, only to grab the bags that were hanging off of your arms. He somehow manages to hold them alongside his own behind him, before wrapping the other arm around your shoulder.

"Hey, I'd call this a day. How about I prepare ya a bath when we're home? Courtesy of the Great Mammon."

You nodded, your lips arching into a smile as you grabbed the hand hanging off your shoulder. The day was cut too short for your liking, but you didn't feel up for any additional purchases, or to properly enjoy your outing anymore.

"Will you wash my hair?" You entertwined your fingers with his as he gave them a gentle squeeze.

"Pah, of course! Who else but me could do that?" He huffed through his nose, shaking his head at such an obvious question. Your laugh ringing in his ears gave him a brief moment of respite.

But the demon furrowed his brows as he lead you into your walk back home, keeping you snuggled at his side. Holding the bags in his left hand, his white nails sharply digged into his palm the more steps he took alongside you.

Making them cry? Such a big, big mistake. One thing was sure, Mammon wasn't about to let that one pass.

"But before that..." The hiss that escaped his throat went unnoticed by the two of you as your head rested against his shoulder.

"I'll have a few calls to make."

[mack3030]

Types of Paywall Abuse --- A post...

I think it’s time to tackle a topic that might make a few simmers uncomfortable, but we need to talk about it, because in addition to seeing a lot of people complain about it in general, I’ve also been getting some anons in my inbox talking about it. So let’s discuss this. 

Now, first of all, I would like to clarify a couple of things: 

When I speak of PAYWALLS here, I am talking about custom content that can ONLY be accessed by paying, or viewing an ad through a virus filled ad shortener link (which is just as bad).  Pure early access content, where you pay for it and get it earlier than everyone else who gets it for free IS NOT PAYWALLED CONTENT. 

This is why it is called a pay “WALL” because the wall portion indicates that you cannot access it without paying a fee/toll. 

Second of all, I would like to remind the public at large that this is not hate, it is a critical commentary. I am not going to go for these creators personally, nor do I want to. I, as a member of the community who plays the sims 4, and downloads/uses CC, would like to simply hold some of these creators accountable for actions that are unethical and unsatisfactory to the community in which they serve. That is it. No more, no less. I simply believe they CAN do better and BE better than this. 

Now, let’s get into the meat of this. 

The main type of abuse that I have focused on has been what I call Permapaywalls. 

Permapaywalls:

Content that cannot be accessed ANY other way than either paying a certain amount via patreon or another service, OR viewing a link through a virus-filled ad that puts your computer at risk. 

There are many creators who are well known permapaywall creators, with at least 80% or more of their content being locked behind these permapaywalls. Sometimes they may release a few items for free, but this is very similar to being allowed to test drive a car before buying it. It’s to entice the user/viewer into liking the brand, and then buying in.

I’m not going to delve into this too much because I’ve already expounded on this topic a bit. So let’s go further. 

The next type of abuse is what I like to call “Exclusive Loopholes”. 

Exclusive Loopholes: Creators who try to “get around” EA’s early access policy by offering a majority of their content as early access, but holding back certain items only to those who “subscribe” to their “patreon exclusive” content. 

There are some who are okay with this, thinking of this as a neat “bonus” for those who subscribe and support. However, the sims team made it clear: 

Folks who have a Patreon page are welcome to provide folks with "early access" incentives for their content but it should be made available to the general public within 2-3 weeks of it being given to folks early.

- Simguru Drake, The Sims Forum

Notice nowhere in this answer does it say anything about BONUS CC incentives. Nowhere. This is just a method that certain creators try to use to keep people from decrying them as “big bad paywall creators”. This way they can say “oh look, we do early access, we’re following EA’s rules~!” while still holding content hostage. 

If you want to offer your patreons some exclusives, here’s some ideas:  * Share pictures of your process, or work in progress content coming up.  * Allow them to have input into your process via polls and questions.  * Have an exclusive discord community just for your patreons where they can talk to you easier and share excitement and input about your content with you and each other.  * Have exclusive streams where only you and your patreons have the link to see you go live making content.  * Host a workshop on how to make CC using your process. (I see all of you who steal meshes from other sites sweating over this. ;D)  * Pause billing for a month and say “you know what, since you guys have been loyal and supported me, have a month of patreon on me!”  * Anything that honestly doesn’t involve only giving those patreons CC and not releasing it to the public. 

Let’s talk about another type, and oh my lanta, this type has had some anons messaging me ALL up in arms. I like to call this type “The Donation Disaster”.

Donation Disaster: Someone who CONSTANTLY uses the “downs” in the up/downs of life as excuses to not release content on time, or delay it while still collecting payment from patreons. Bonus “you’re a jerk” points if they then try to use those misfortunate circumstances to beg for even more money from their patreons on multiple occasions. 

Look, we all have junk that goes on in our lives. But when that junk is used as an excuse for you continually delaying content while still charging your patreons (and not using the pause feature), it makes them feel cheated.  In addition, when you then ask for donations to help you during your difficult time, and turn to your patreons instead of the support networks that are around you (ex: friends, family, religious communities, etc.), that can be VERY off-putting. You might be able to get away with it once, maybe twice, without a large chunk of your community turning against you. But the more regular it becomes, and the more they hear about how strapped for cash you are and how you’re asking them to give more than their pledge, and you’ll soon find yourself being called a scammer. Regardless of your intent, or if your problems are reality, you’ll find people’s empathy for your situation will be lacking.

I’ve had a few anons in my inbox talking about different patreon creators that always seem to have an excuse for why updates aren’t coming just yet, or why x is broken, and with their excuse comes a plea for help with bills, and a link to a paypal or venmo. 

Everyone has junk, don’t get me wrong. And it sucks to go through the junk we have in life, but if you’re reaching out to random people on the internet as your first method of support, you might need to be looking someplace else for support first before you come to the people who are already paying you for content you make. A one time “hey I’m in a bind, I need some help” donation thing might not be a bad thing, but when it becomes a constant pattern on your patreon....people aren’t going to take it well...at all. 

And last, but not least, I’d like to talk about the last kind of patreon abuse, which frankly, is really upsetting to me. I don’t even really have a name for it, because it’s literally so much of a “what?” thing in my head. I don’t even understand why it goes on.  Now, this practice involves the black/POC community, and frankly, as a white girl, I don’t feel I should be speaking over the community and what they have to say. Thankfully @xmiramira​ spoke on it, all the way back in 2019. Here’s an excerpt from her fantastic POST:

Even new creators who JUST joined the community sliding up in TBS with locs and braids talking about Patreon only. GTFOH. I’m not okay with creators doing Patreon only CC PERIOD, but my main discussion is focused on NON BLACK simmers making CC catered to US, and making it PATREON EXCLUSIVE IN AN ATTEMPT TO FORCE US TO PLEDGE, and how people are ASSUMING that I’m OKAY WITH THIS, and ASSUMING that I’m letting it FLY in my community. Just because I don’t go off about shit as frequent as I used to doesn’t mean I cannot see and I am not doing what I can to keep the fuckery OUT.“Oh but your friend has a Patreon” I don’t have an issue with what @ebonixsims is doing because it’s all early release. It gets released to the public a few weeks later. It’s not being kept behind Patreon, forcing people to pledge to her. Despite this, she’s still doing really good with it. So don’t get it twisted, I’m not on social media arguing with folks so people just assumed I’m okay with this shit, I’m really not. I’m actually two seconds off dropping Patreon share folders. (That also have my shit in it) Supporting people is one thing, but a lot of these motherfuckers are becoming extremely exploitive, and it’s aggravating. It’s like you goofy motherfuckers sit in DMs like “yeah let’s make some CC for the negros and put it on Patreon” Fuck outta here. And it’s not even just hair, it’s skins and even CLOTHING STYLES. Y’all are really wilding the hell out. African necklaces, black girl magic chains, Juicy Couture sweatsuits. Who the fuck do you think you’re fooling? IM TIRED! Next time someone asks me where I got something and it’s Patreon exclusive I’m dropping a SFS link. FUCK OUTTA HERE!

Here’s the deal. The black community has been fighting for a while to be able to feel represented in this game. Here’s two articles (ONE, TWO) talking about this issue.  But the thing that has me upset is the fact that SO many creators of content that is AIMED at Black/POC simmers are locking that content (or a good majority of it) behind paywalls. And what’s even more shameful is some of those creators are POC themselves! They understand what it’s like to feel that they cannot make themselves or have sims that look like them in this game, yet they still lock their content away and expect people not just in the SIMS community, but in the POC community to pay through the nose for it.  The fact that this is STILL going on, two freaking years after she made this post, and that both NON POC creators and POC creators are engaging in this behavior is honestly disappointing and shameful. I believe black/POC creators should be supported, BUT they should be supported without depriving their OWN community of representation and access. And frankly, if you’re a NON POC creator and you’re specifically targeting this group to make money off of them with paywalls, I have only one thing to say to you:

I’d speak on it more, but frankly, I’d rather let the people who are actually in the black/POC community speak on it, so if any of you want to let loose in the comments about this problem, go wild. I’m happy to sit back and listen, and I suggest others do the same.

[ciggylungz]

Rivals

Summary: Y/n and Harry are both CEO’s of their parent’s companies since they inherited the businesses from them, they’ve been rivals since they were kids- now that they’re professional adults how will their rivalry affect them?   2.2k

 -

It’s no secret that growing up with a workaholic parent is hard for a kid, but for Y/n it was amplified due to the fact both her parents owned one of the most famous fashion companies in the world. This meant during most of her childhood she relied on nannies, private drivers, maids and child minders to care for her in absence of her busy working parents.

Of course having absent parents gave her some perks during her teen years, the ability to throw ragers in the absurdly large mansion they’d bought for the three of them –(well, they were hardly in it so mainly just their daughter)- not having to worry about getting caught when she decided to bring people over to get a quick shag in and the plus of having no one to bother her during her angsty middle school years. Those things were nice, yet you really can’t replace the role of your parents with teenage hookups and parties.

If there’s one thing that she absolutely hated about her parents work, it would be their former business partners cunt of a son. Harry Styles. Y/n had been forced to be in the twats life since they were 10 and his father joined stocks in her parents company before investing fully and becoming business partners. For Y/n that meant being forced to be around their son whenever their parents were too busy crushing numbers or out on boozy business trips clogging their noses with high end coke and buying out their competitors.

Harry was always a good-looking boy, and that only made things worse because he was a total prick. He was arrogant, annoying and always got away with being the biggest pain in the ass y/n has ever experienced in her life. He was insanely competitive, cocky and always found a way to weasel into Y/n’s business just to push her buttons. One’s he knew how to push perfectly to make her want to pound his head off a blacktop.

It was almost as if when it came to Y/n he never matured past being a 12-year-old boy, and now he’s a 23 year old powerful business man who still can’t manage to leave her alone.

Y/n had inherited her parents’ company when they decided to retire, two years before the retirement her parents and Harrys father had severed their ties and he’d gone back to his independent company. And just y/n’s luck, the man passed his roll as CEO down to his son, making the two young adults’ owners of two of the most famous fashion and beauty companies to ever exist.

Make no mistake, Y/n was a strong, independent and ruthless business woman so Harry’s subsequent inheritance didn’t threaten her in a business sense it more so made her worried for her blood pressure since the man couldn’t help but come bother her every chance he got. It didn’t help his dad had a single remaining stock left in the shoe portion of their clothing company giving Harry the perfect excuse to come barging into Y/n’s office to get on her nerves. To Y/n Harrys like a cold sore that won’t go away, just keeps coming back every time you think you’ve gotten rid of it.

___

Today was a busy day for Y/n, she had a meeting with her team that worked closely with her managing profit, stock, inventory, sales and all that stuff. Her team was large, with a company with over two thousand distributors worldwide and thirty-five exclusive stores scattered around the globe that’s to be expected. All in all, Y/n was responsible for making sure all one hundred and fifty thousand employees were running a smooth ship and every participating party was doing what they needed to do. It was a stressful job no doubt, but she never backed down from the challenge.

The meetings were always her least favorite part of her job. All the paper work that had to be read, numbers calculated, sales charted and any complaints or incident reports all had to be verbalized and talked about in detail with documentation of all the important things said as well as much more. Today the meeting took a grueling four and a half hours and the day was far from over.

Once she got out of her meeting it was nearing noon, she had to push her lunch off to phone the companies attorneys because one worker was trying to do a fake insurance claim. The man faked a work accident failing to remember every warehouse and factory was littered with security cameras that caught him in the act, so she had to inform them of the situation so they could sort it out. After that she got sucked into looking at new designs her design team had come up with for the next season, explaining that Chanel and Gucci both wanted to work with them to carry a few exclusive items only for that season.

Finally, at half passed two she made it back to her office, sitting down in her desk chair while taking her hair out of the headache inducing ponytail it had been in since she got there at five that morning. She opened her laptop, planning to send off some emails while she put in her order for lunch to her assistant, getting as much done as she could in the little bit of private time she was able to snag.

A knock sounded at the door, she knew it was Morgan coming in with the food she ordered so she didn’t bother to look up from what she was doing very drawn in to the email she was currently formatting. Only her attention was quickly severed when his voice rang out instead of the one she expected.

“I believe you ordered the chop salad, diet coke and fruit for lunch misses Yln.”

That annoying, cocky voice. You can hear his shit eating grin and teasing eyes simply in his tone, you don’t even have to look up at the jerk.

A prolonged sigh blew out of her lips, a grunt of annoyance following as she looked up at him. He looked nice, as always, she added bitterly in her own mind. She hated the fact someone so goddamn irritating was so undeniably attractive. He wore a dark blue suit, white button up with a black tie and yellow accent pocket square. Yet his fashion and handsomeness seemed a bit overshadowed by his personality that had the same affect on the woman as nails on a chalkboard.

“Harry, to what do I owe the displeasure?” Y/n reached her arm across the desk to snatch the paper bag from his ring clad hands, a sarcastic disapproving finger was pointed at her yet she didn’t take his bait opting to give him the death stare instead.

“Sassy today are we?” The man rested himself on the small leather loveseat that was in her office, propping his head on a throw pillow and putting his feet on the armrest. “You act like you’re not happy to see me, I know yeh missed me.” Y/n rolled her eyes, digging her fork into the salad aggressively. “I don’t think anyone’s ever been happy to see you, and I’m certain no one has ever missed your presence either.”

Harry chuckled slightly, loving how easily he could annoy the girl. Over the past thirteen years he’s learned just how to get under her skin, and he enjoyed doing so.

“Bit feisty today aren’t yeh Y/n? playing hard to get I see.” The man folded his hands on top of his chest, completely relaxing into the comfortable furniture, making himself comfortable for the undetermined amount of time he’d be spending there irritating his childhood ‘friend’.

The difference between Harry and Y/n’s perspectives on their rather odd ‘relationship’, if you could really call it that is Harry never hated Y/n. In fact he was always quite fond of her, he enjoys her company even when he’s forcing it on her and using the shared time to annoy the ever loving shit out of her. He and the woman have always been competitive growing up. In sports, card games, classes, and now business and Y/n took things a lot more seriously then he did. she was always wound a bit tight, she gets it from her mother.

Harry and Y/n had an interesting past. They have a love-hate relationship, seeing as even through the perpetual animosity they’ve carried since they were kids they did have their good moments too. And though Y/n would never admit it, there’s a part of her that does actually care about him even if she loathes that part of her deeply. In their teens they were at each other throats a lot, but in between that they would occasionally have their good days where they would refrain from getting into screaming matches and instead would be able to tolerate being together. Y/n chooses to describe it as tolerating him since she’d never admit she sometimes enjoys his company.

Through their formative years whenever Y/n was throwing a party, she wouldn’t protest when her friends would invite Harry as well. Pretending like she didn’t know he was coming and didn’t want him there when she saw him in the crowd, yet he always had a feeling she was anticipating and secretly wanted him to make an appearance. When he’d plan some sort of adventure with their friends he’d do the same, always slightly relieved when she’d show up but he’d put on the irritating act as soon as he got the chance which ruined her mood, every time. and well, it would be a lie to say the two never found themselves hate fucking each other after one of their parties, drunk and pissed at each other only to pretend like it had never happened.

To Harry, the animosity mixed with a hidden sense of fondness and maybe even a hint of attraction.

The woman ignored his comment, chewing her food before taking a swig of the soda looking back at him with a rather unamused expression. “What do you want Harry? And who the hell even let you in here?” she continued eating and wrapping up her email while he formed his reply. “Told Morgan I’d bring it up to yeh, she’s got a bit of a crush on me so she handed it over without much convincing.” Yet another eyeroll from Y/n was delivered. “She’s like 19, don’t manipulate her into worming into my office just because she can’t see that you’re a much bigger prick then the one in your pants will ever be.”

“First of all, 19 is legal so if she wants to eye fuck me I’ll allow it. Second, don’t be rude. This is a professional setting, do you think it’s appropriate to talk about my genitals in the work place? Might have to report you.”

Y/n couldn’t help the small snort she let out at his antics. As much as he annoyed her, sometimes she did find him a bit humorous. “and for the record, I’m very happy with my package and I don’t appreciate that comment.” He pointed a finger at her, a fake angry look on his face. “Just as much as I don’t appreciate you intruding on what was supposed to be my down time to eat, we’re even shrimp dick.”

Harry gasped at the insult, squinting at her slightly. While Harry was skilled in pressing her buttons, she could do it the same. Making comments on his dick size, sex skills, business deals or things of that nature always got him riled up. That 12-year-old boy mentality rearing it’s ugly head any time she makes a comment about his dick being small. Childish he was, absolutely childish.

“Don’t get smart with me, I’ll whip it out right here to prove my point.” His eyebrow raised and she could see him chewing on his cheek in annoyance. She truly found it funny how peeved she could make a grown man by making fun of his penis. He was ridiculous.

“I’d prefer if you didn’t, I didn’t bring my mental scrub brush to work with me today.” When she had finished speaking the woman tossed her now empty salad box into the trash, taking another sip of her drink and finally sending off the painfully long email.

Harry decided it was time for him to head back to his own office, which was right across the street much to Y/n’s displeasure but of course he couldn’t leave without a final childish jab at the woman.

“Just remember, I’ve had you bouncing on my dick more than once. Don’t hold yourself so high and mighty dear, because we both know I’ll have you like that again.”

And with that a Harry with a cheeky smirk on his face left the office, leaving a slightly stunned Y/n in his wake.

 (eek pt.1 lets see how this one goes.)

[angryschnauzer]

No Filter

Summary: After a mission goes wrong and you get hit with an electromagnetic shockwave, you discover you have lost your inner monolog... anything you think, you say. When the rest of the team head out for a night on the town, you stay behind, and you find yourself having a very honest conversation with Bucky

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Female Reader

Warnings: Smut, NSFW, 18+, Tropes, Friends to Lovers, Fingering, Oral Sex, Unprotected Sex, Bucky has a big dick, Spanking, Doggy Style.

I have decided to start posting oneshots on Tumblr as well as AO3 again. Anything more than 1 chapter will be an AO3 exclusive, as i now have too many stories to create a masterlist. If you are looking for past stories please check out my AO3 on THIS link, there are over 150 stories on there so there’s something for everyone. AO3 LINK.  I do not operate a tag list, but instead please follow @angryschnauzerwrites​ and put that blog onto notifications to be alerted when i post something new.

No Filter

Groaning as you dragged your weary body along the empty hallway to the kitchen, your head pounded, and you desperately needed a drink. Rounding the corner you groaned again when you saw the communal kitchen buzzing with familiar and friendly faces when all you wanted was peace and quiet.

“Heeyyy there she is!”

Sam smiled at you as he poured a cup of coffee and set it on the counter in front of you, wrapping his arm around your shoulders and pressing a friendly kiss to the top of your head;

“How are you feeling? Any of the treatments taken affect yet?”

 You shook your head;

 “Urgh, I feel like a racoon that has been hit by a semi-truck and left on the side of the road. We were in the lab until 3am doing tests but nothing seems to have taken. Plus, I haven’t pooped yet and I feel really bloated”

The room fell silent before a snort-come-laugh escaped from Steve’s lips;

 “So that’s a no then on the treatment then”

 Groaning you rested your head on the counter, embarrassment heating your skin as you realised what you’d said.

 You’d been on a mission with Clint and Natasha on the Russia Mongolia borderlands, intel had told you the assets were hidden in an ancient abandoned temple, but upon getting there you had discovered it was far from abandoned. The route through the building had been laced with booby traps and hidden dangers, and the Hydra team that had set the traps had been a lot more advanced than intel had told you so. So when you had been hit by a strange ultrasonic wave you had been temporarily rendered deaf and blind, Nat and Clint both having missed targeted ultrasonic waves and had dragged you to safety for an e-vac team to retrieve you.

 Once you had gotten back to the tower you’d been rushed to the med bay, the medical team working quickly and had discovered the ultrasonic had literally scrambled the neuro signals in your brain. It had taken some intrusive electro therapy but over the course of the following days your sight and hearing had returned.

 There had however been an unfortunate side affect; you’d lost your inner monolog. Anything your thought, you said. Your teammates were starting to get used to it, but it didn’t make it any less embarrassing to blurt out your inner most thoughts and had caused friction in some friendships. You’d ended up shutting yourself away in your room for your free time, only venturing out to go to the lab for more tests or to the kitchen.

 You went to leave before grabbing your coffee, only for Sam to catch your hand softly;

 “Look, if you’re backed up coffee won’t help. Here…” he grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and quickly loaded multiple pieces of fruit into a bowl for you; “... it can be a sign of dehydration. So, keep the water intake up and eat some fruit. Perhaps take a walk”

 Taking the items from him you kept your head down;

 “Thanks Sam”

 -

 Sitting in the roof garden you tossed the apple core into the composter, downing the last of the water and tossing the bottle into the plastic recycling. Deciding to wander around the roof garden one last time you were aimlessly walking beneath the vines that had climbed the steps that led down from the executive gym when you heard voices above you, looking up and seeing Steve and Bucky chatting post workout;

 “Listen Buck, the whole team is gonna be going out tonight, why don’t you come?”

 “Nah, I have some reading to do”

 “Why won’t you get out there? Find some girl, get laid?”

 Bucky laughed at Steve’s suggestion;

 “Listen Punk, my hand is just fine for my needs”

 Steve laughed and you shook your head, trying to throw any thoughts out of your head before you voiced them as the two men disappeared into the building and back to the living quarters.

 -

 Standing in the hallway as the team primped and preened their outfits, you pulled your robe tighter around your body and smiled. Natasha rested a hand on your arm;

 “Are you sure you won’t come?”

 “I’m sure. I don’t want to make an ass of myself in front of strangers. It’s bad enough doing it in front of you guys”

“Ok. But don’t stay up too late, you should get some rest, a night away from the lab will do you good”

 “Sure thing”

 Waving them off as they finally all had shrugged on jackets and grabbed their purses you shut the door behind them before making your way to the kitchen, finding Bucky standing at the stove.

 “Mmm that smells good”

 He turned and smiled;

 “You want some?”

 “Please, only if there’s enough”

 He grinned and pulled two plates from the cupboard, before serving up for the both of you;

 “Grab a fork and dig in Babe”

 Eating in silence at the breakfast bar it was comfortable, and you were thankful your mind had kept itself under control, that was until Bucky cleared his throat;

 “So, you feeling a bit better now?”

 “Yeah, my head still hurts from the electroshock treatment, but I don’t feel as bloated now as I popped this afternoon”

 The second the words had left your mouth you felt a lump in your throat and your cheeks heat from embarrassment, again;

 “Fuck. I fucking hate this”

 You felt a cool hand on your back, rubbing it softly;

 “Listen, Babe. It’s refreshing… hearing what someone is actually thinking rather than what they want you to hear… it’s the reason why I didn’t want to go out tonight with Sam and Steve��� they will listen to whatever girls will tell them, what they want to hear… I’d rather not have some girl tell me what I want to hear and instead be honest”

 “I heard your conversation earlier” you muttered from behind the hands you had clamped over your face

“My conversation?”

 “With Steve. On the roof”

 “Oh...and?”

 “Which hand do you use? FUCK, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that, but my brain…”

 “Which hand do I use… OH…”

 Bucky turned you on your bar stood until you were no longer leaning on your elbows, and instead looking at him;

 “Ok Babe, I’ll be honest with you, I use both”

 “Both? Like, alternate, or at the same time?”

 Cocking an eyebrow, he smirked;

 “Yeah, a bit of both… I mean I’m big enough to need two hands, but the feel of the metal hand is awesome, it doesn’t feel like it’s me doing it, whereas the flesh hand gives a skin on skin feel that is better than anything…”

 He rested his hands on your knees and you were speaking before you could realise;

 “Your hands are really big… so your dick must be huge”

 You could feel your throat go tight and your eyes were so wide they almost fell out of their sockets, but Bucky’s soft laugh and the way his hands were still on your knees keeping you in place;

 “I have the serum to thank for helping me along” he paused, a weighted silence before speaking again, his voice low; “Do you want me to kiss you?”

 “Yes”

 He leaned forwards and pressed a kiss to your lips. His touch was soft and as he pulled away you found yourself chasing after him. He rested his hand against your cheek, his skin soft against yours;

 “You said your head still hurts from the treatments. Endorphins help dull the electroshock side effects… when was the last time you had an orgasm?”

 “How do you…? Oh, from when Hydra… Sorry…”

 “Well?”

 “Well what?”

 “When was your last orgasm?”

 “Weeks ago, … I haven’t felt like doing anything… I didn’t realise it would help… I’m always just so tired and not in the mood”

 “Would you like some help?”

 “Yes. I want you to use your hands”

 Bucky slid of his bar stood and pulled you to your feet, taking your hand as he led you down the hallway to his bedroom;

 “I can use my hands, my tongue, my dick, whatever you like”

 “All three”

 Shutting the door behind you he grinned;

 “Yes Ma’am… coming right up”

 “I want you to fuck me bare. I want to feel your metal hand slapping my ass as you fuck me from behind”

 He was pulling your robe and pyjama’s off as he laughed at your requests;

 “Definitely. Would you like me to cum inside or pull out?”

 “I don’t care… no I do… I want to feel you cum inside me…”

 By then you were being pushed back onto his bed, magazines and books haphazardly being pushed aside as he pulled your panties off and looked down at you as he pushed his sweatpants and boxers down in one.

“Wow you weren’t lying… your dick would need both hands”

 “Yup, nice and thick” he lifted it in his hands and weighed it, slapping the palm of his hand against the heavy underside; “This is why I don’t want to date a girl that isn’t honest with me. Most just want me for this, they don’t care about anything else”

 “I’m not like that”

 He crawled onto the bed over you;

 “I know Babe, and that’s why I’m here, with you right now”

 “I’ve had the hots for you since you moved in”

 “You have?”

You nodded and he smiled as he lifted himself over you, his hard length settling between your folds as he kissed you. This time it was hard and fast, his tongue pushing against yours and you found your legs had wrapped themselves around his waist. When he pulled his lips away you whined at the loss, but quickly turned those whines into moans as he pressed kisses down your body and settled his face between your legs;

 “Now, time for some complimentary therapies after your treatments Ma’am”

 His tongue parted your folds as he dived in, his long stubble brushing against your inner thighs and sensitive folds, his hand curling beneath his chin to slide two metal fingers into your already soaked hole. When his fingers crooked just right inside and found that spongy spot while his lips sucked hard on your clit, you came with a scream, your hands curled into his long soft hair. 

 You lay limp on his bed, your eyes closed as the promised endorphins rushed through your bloodstream and did as promised, relieving the tension and pain in your head immediately;

 “You were right”

 You felt Bucky move up the bed and lay beside you, his metal hand trailing over your breasts, the cool metal making your nipples harden;

 “Told you so”

 “How did you used to do it after Hydra did the electro treatments?”

 “I’d do it on the way to the mission, or on the mission...” Turning you looked at him as he gazed up at the ceiling; “I’ve never actually told anyone this… but as you’re Miss No-Filter it feels ok… Because they’d wake me up with the electroshock treatments, so it’d be like starting every day with a hangover. The handlers were used to it, they didn’t say anything if I’d whip my dick out in the back of the vehicle… Sometimes I wouldn’t get chance and I’d be standing in position ready to strike and I’d be there with one hand on my rifle and the other on my dick… I remember one mission where I was sneaking up on one target and they surprised me just as I was cumming; sprayed them with cum just before I shot them”

 “That’s… that’s… wow, my mind is for once empty”

 Bucky grinned and turned to face you;

 “How are you feeling now?”

 “Good… my head feels a lot better”

 “That’s good”

 “But I’d still like you to fuck me”

 He laughed;

 “Absolutely, gotta give you some more of those endorphins”

 He moved until he was on his knees before helping to move you until you were prone before him, ass up and face down, your squeak of surprise as his flesh hand coming down on your ass partially muffled by the pillow;

 “The metal hand please Bucky”

 He chuckled behind you and you felt his hands on your hips, the warmth of his thick thighs against the back of yours;

 “Patience, just warming you up”

 He grasped his hard dick, swiping it up through your folds before you felt the thick head press against your soaked hole. He slowly pushed in, taking it an inch at a time and you felt yourself tense up;

 “Are you going to hurt me?”

 You winced at your words as Bucky stopped;

 “No Babe, I told you I’m big, but I’m gonna make sure your body adjusts to me before I start fucking you”

 He smoothed his warm hand over your back, and you felt your tension start to slip away. His metal hand he’d curled beneath you and the cool touch of that against your clit surprised you but was the touch you needed to zone out and enjoy how he was playing your body like a finely tuned instrument. 

 You hadn’t even been aware of his hips moving until he’d moved his hands back to your hips and praised you softly;

 “Such a good girl, taking me balls deep, I can feel you hugging me so tight… I’m gonna make you feel so good…”

 “Please Bucky… fuck me”

 “Shhh I will Babe”

 He did as promised, ploughing into you as your body adjusted to his size, and yet you could feel every bump ridge and vein on his impressive girth. With every pull the thick vein on the underside would run along your g-spot, with every push his heavy balls would slap against your clit sending shockwaves of pleasure through your body. 

 Soon you found your moans were continual, Bucky doing exactly as promised as he drove into you from behind. You could feel your orgasm approaching and you just needed that one last stimuli… and as if he could read your mind you felt the cooling sting of his metal hand coming down on the round globe of your asscheek, making your head spring up;

 “FUCK. Do it again!”

 SMACK, the other cheek received the same treatment. 

 “Once more, please!” you begged, and only happy to oblige Bucky brought his hand down one final time on your asscheek and you were cumming, your body squeezing his so tight he feared for a moment he wouldn’t be able to get his dick out, but it was the final trigger and with the deepest thrust he spurted this ropes of his release inside you, groaning at his own flood of endorphins hitting his brains receptors. 

 Your bodies slumped into a pile, he pulled you into his arms as you lay side by side, you the little spoon to his big one. That night was the first night in a long time that you fell straight to sleep, dreamless and settled.

 -

 Breezing into the communal kitchen early afternoon you were met by several your teammates slumped at the breakfast bar nursing strong coffees and dark circles under their eyes. 

 “Afternoon everyone!” You were perky and had a spring in your step, having just returned from a yoga class.

 You were met by a quiet chorus of mumbled hellos, and you smiled as you searched the cupboards for a clean mug. Finally resorting to the dishwasher, you bent over and selected a mug, hearing an intake of breath behind you;

 “Hunny, how did you get those marks on your ass?” Natasha asked as she saw your workout shorts ride up.

 Pouring a cup of coffee from the jug you smiled;

 “Oh, that’s where Bucky spanked me as he fucked me last night”

 Steve sprayed his coffee over the counter at your words, Clint paused mid banana and let out a quiet ‘huh’. Before you could say anything else Bucky breezed into the room, fresh from showering after his workout, wrapping his arm around your waist and pressing a kiss to your lips before he snuck your coffee out of your hand and took a deep gulp;

 “You busy this afternoon Babe?”

 “Nope, can we fuck?”

 Thankfully you could lipread Bucky’s answer, as the room erupted into groans and cries of ‘get a room’, and as you left with Bucky’s arm around your shoulder you grinned at him;

 “I like you like this, Miss No-Filter”

[nerd-takes-pony-town]

So... Dergun Town's gone, at last - Temp. Tester Rant.

To be frankly honest, I was waiting for it to end. I stopped playing after the weird ass Pet update and sudden, unnannounced Hair Change due to “legal reasons” because the game was just getting utterly confusing, a mess of minigames with clunky customization options and systems, and whatnot. Plus, my time as a tester was when I hit the breaks on the game and realized "man... they really are dicks".

I never ranted about it because I knew if I did, they'd definitely come for me and ban me from the game or from the server because "I shittalked about the game" or “I’m unveiling the tester server”, but now that it's over - it's time for a rant.

So, think it was around May 2020 that I decided to go for Tester to better prepare myself for the future updates, the chat itself was basically... like the lobby, just mainly memes and the Dev fanatics, who will defend them 24/7, chatting with the Devs.

One of the first few things that was asked for is the Timezones so that we could test the server together - the Timezones thing is literally thrown out the window after the very first test. From there on, what they would do is ping the Testers to announce an update - at the time, we had no changelog, no proper bug report channel, it was all crowded in one place, and because they disregarded the Timezones, imagine if you will the chat being both filled with players spamming the chat with all the new shit like some happy toddlers, and another half are people who are reporting to be in class, asleep, dinnering, ect.

A chaotic mess that makes it near impossible to actually report something. Eventually, they added a bug report but once again, no proper check list - if any, the changelog and the checklist only appeared around the Argoras or Minigame Update (June-July). And, as always, the checklist was never updated, so you'd be testing something that's already been checked and other listed things wouldn't be checked at all. Organization, which is something a Tester needs, was never a fucking thing in that horrid mess. They would occasionally do polls, one of which was if the Update should release now, nearly everyone said No - they released it anyway. :^)

Then, there would be some bugs where they’d blame us for it - the /hitme was a command that was restrictedly used in the test server because the Devs somehow don’t know how to add a small quantity of resources to all of us, so he instead made a command that gives, what? Over a million of each of the resources? We ALL made sure that wasn’t toggled on the “beta” server, and yet, somehow, it got released with the commad functioning, and instead of admitting their fault, they blamed the Testers for practically saying folks not to use it - one of the testers was literally STRIPPED OFF of their Gil and other resources, and mind you, they didn’t even used the command at all, all they did was accidentally say the command.

The Moderators would also be rather cruel, everyone likes memes, that's granted, but it shouldn't mean you can willingly change our nicknames like that. Imagine switching over to the chat only to find out your name, along with all the other testers, has been changed to "Todd Howard"; you rename it, and a couple of days later, they change it yet again without your permission or consent. This isn't fun, this is just annoying. I had to walk around with "Stop changin my name" on my nickname because of them.

And like how it has been told, these Devs cannot take criticism at all. The Argoras Update will haunt me down as the Update where I was literally fighting against other testers and the Devs over something that needed to be changed. In the Test Server, the Skill Points had a Clover table, meaning you used clovers for Skill Points, the thing is in Pony Town, the rewards are remain unlocked even if you go down the unlocking mark - Dergun Town does not. So players who are unaware of this would've wasted 1k Clovers and then realize that their prizes have been taken away because they're no longer above the unlocking mark. So as a Tester, it should be my duty to warn the Devs about it and come with suggestions.

I told them without mentioning Pony Town at all (because they have a stupid policy of “if it’s close to PT, we can’t do it”) about how the Clover option will result in players losing their reward if they go below 1k and 500 Clovers respectively, which is the equivalent to hundreds of players putting all those days collecting Clovers to waste. They would ABSOLUTELY rant  about it in Bugs or Help Desk. I suggested them to either:

Make the rewards unlocked still even if you left the mark.

Remove the Clover option

Add a warning when about to select Clover

Those are the ones on top of my head, what did they do?

Tom just kept ignoring what I said on the first suggestion and exclusively focusing on the second one, as if it was the only option available. Meanwhile, Q was guilt tripping me into bidding to their commands, "37,500 gil per skill if you the 50 points pure,," it's horrible, sure, but do you really want to deal with a hoard of players coming to the server to scream about how the Skill Point system stole their Clover rewards? And having to deal with a patch or two to make them happy, or worse, having to ban more players because they’re angry WITH REASON that their prizes were taken away because you idiots refuse to add something that allows the players to keep their rewards while below the mark?

You know they would do that, everyone knows they would do that. And worse is with exception of one or two Testers, the other users, specifically folks like J*y and D**r, just kept defending the Devs even though I was literally helping them prevent a future problem that everyone knew it would fucking happen. What's the point of testing a game if the Developers will fucking refuse to take your advices?

They did removed the Clovers from the options, but kept the Dandelions and the Bones, which, you guested it, STILL DIDN'T HAD THE PRIZE LOCKING! And the best part - NO WARNING REGARDING THE LOST OF THE PRIZES WAS ADDED EITHER! So players who had the Dandelion Rune and the ability to get the special items from the Bone would end up in losing them without them knowing - though it’s not as bad as the Clovers, a resource that restrictedly spawns in areas with Clovers as opposed to be map-wide and the last prize needs 1k of those, and the recent-ish Spring Update changed the green to a shade that blends with them.

I singlehandedly helped them avoid a hoard of angry players, and not a singular thank you was given.

The Quest Cap is also a thing, if the mobile users are in such a disadvantage with the Clovers being gone, then why are you adding the Cap anyway? Everyone knows that if a game is relying on the player to grind, it should not cap the Quests to a fucking T - only 20 Quests per hour?! And the NPC's Gil is both dependant on Bootleg Flight Rising Dominance... and dependant on a Clan that YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY CHANGE even if you request for such?! It's like if in Flight Rising, because Fiona has Light eyes, Light Flight would gain extra bonus treasure from here as if Dominance wasn't enough. "It's to balance the Economy", how is that going to balance, it just restricting the mobile users even further, as if the shitty battle controls on mobile that makes it impossible to battle wasn't enough.

The game was also just turning into a weird, funky, Flight Rising bootleg - fitting how the game that Q also worked on was a bootleg hybrid between Dragon Cave and Flight Rising - the release of pets with these genes and barely any use but to literally do the exact shit you do in FR. In FR, you exalt Dragons to gain a upper hand at Dominance, in DT, a rather recent-ish? Update allowed you to sell the Magikins (the gened pets, the other pets are literally useless) for Clan Tokens, giving you a boost to gain Dominance. It’s exactly like FR, I’m surprised no one ever bothered to contact the FR folks about this ripoff. The pets did had a use and it was to gain more gil but a nerf was done because, once again, they released an update were we made SURE that wasn’t happening, but somehow, it happened - the Pet-Gill Machine Glitch that allowed you to gain infinite Gil.

My pets got bugged because of it - the level got reset (it’d only reward 1-2 gil) but the price of the upgrade did not (750 gil) - I asked if that was a nerf or a bug, and as expected, they said it was nerf when it was clear as days it was a bug given how people had pets that requried 700+ gil and rewarded 30+ gil.

The game’s just a mess of minigames and FR Ripoff, I could go on and on with just how bad the game is, but the Devs are even worse.

It's really bad when they're once straight up muted someone for speaking their fucking opinion.

(You may need to zoom)

(From PMs)

This user would constantly bring the flaws in their shit without insulting, they'd argue with reason, give suggestions, everything, in hopes of improving the game. and they instead just argued back, if not, criticized them for even bringing an opinion and tried to justify themselves as to why they didn't need to change - and the users would absolutely defend the Devs like literal ass kissers, to the point of being happy they got muted.

As the user rightfully said in PMs:

I wanted to make contributions that could help improve it, but it seems like the staff just want people to do as they say without question instead of looking for ways to improve. And they desperately need to understand that the game is not just about what they want, what kinds of designs they think players should make. It should be encouraging players to try new designs and be creative, but all the devs want to do is shut that down.

I just wish they didn't have absolute power over the server. If they were accountable to their community in some way, it'd be possible to convince them to make changes when it's really necessary. Not all the time, just when their stubbornness is getting in the way of something that absolutely everybody except them wants.

The fun in these games has always been in the community. If you stifle that, you stifle the game. And unfortunately, I now can't say any of this. Making demon combat even harder for those without skill points was wholly unnecessary, too. I don't know what their obsession is with making the game so heavy on grinding.

Back when I first arrived, Dergun Town was mostly just Pony Town with more customization options, plus a few special prizes you could earn by gathering items. Nowadays it seems like the devs are more interested in forcing players to grind for literally everything than they are in adding new stuff everyone can enjoy and use.

But worse than that is how they always respond to criticism. The mini-events were the biggest example of that. Players didn't like being forced to spend all day on Dergun Town just for any chance to win an award in mini-events. It was damaging people's ability to have a life outside the game, and a lot of users complained. How did they respond? They basically threatened to remove the mini-events altogether and make all the items from them unobtainable, rather than improving on anything. This is how the staff responds to all complaints and suggestions. It's either the exact thing they want or nothing, and if they make a mistake big enough that everyone complains, rather than admitting fault, they basically punish the community for being unhappy. Their entire mentality is "play by my rules or I'm taking my toys and going home".

Reminder that when the garden update broke and erased a ton of players' houses and items, they blamed the players and said they had to do all the work to get everything that was lost back themselves.

I swear, all of this "you complained now you get nothing" and "we work hard, so be thankful to us even for terrible content" we hear in the user suggestions channel is just conditioning their player base to accept being taken for granted and mistreated. They're basically trying to induce Stockholm Syndrome.

Someone who’s also on Tumblr got banned for saying that the new design of the hairs made their characters look ugly - it was a change that was NEVER ANNOUNCED, specially considering it’s a change regarding “legal issues”, the playerbase should’ve been warned about this before they updated it. But instead, they got pissy that some people have complained about the drastically changed hairs and once again, shit down on them for complaining.

Dergun Town is an excellent example of how some people are not and never were meant to run a game - the guilt tripping, the “accept this or get lost” attitude, the behavior they had and occasionally have regarding Pony Town (search “Let’s Talk About Dergun Town” and you’ll get the document), to the point of banning the actual word “to avoid drama” aka keep folks from talking about their real fucking nature.

I am honestly happy that Dergun Town got shut down while Pony Town keeps improving and growing, karma was indeed well served.

[princessdevy03]

Tumblr Exclusive!!!!

Author’s Note: I’m a ho 🤷🏾‍♀️

Just Do It

“This can’t be happening,” Edd thought, but the way Kevin pulled him closer said that it was.

He was a trife upset that his polo shirt and jeans were getting wrinkled, but the way Kevin was kissing him made those thoughts very fleeting.

Then the redhead rolled over onto his back.

The position put Edd on top, which gave him more control of the situation. Kevin shoving Edd’s hands down his pants was a GIANT SIGN of where the redhead wanted the control to go.

And that was odd.

To Edd, anyways.

The back and forth flirting they had been doing since they met was mutual, of course. Every other time they ended up making out, Kevin seemed ok with being in charge.

There was no real Big or Little Spoon when they actually fell asleep in the same bed. Kevin liked sleeping on his back, where Edd liked sleeping on his stomach, so it made it easy to find a comfy spot next to the other and just drift off to Dreamland.

But now Edd’s completely in charge.

When he sat up, Kevin sat up a bit too, and Edd quickly fisted the comforter because the movement rubbed their groins together and even the most relaxed pair of jeans would be ripping at the seams right about now.

“S-Sorry, man,” Kevin groaned and those needy green eyes had Edd feeling some kind of way.

“Make it up to me,” Edd smirked as he tugged his shirt over his head and chucked it across the room.

His smirk was wiped completely off his face and he’s sure he’s ripped a hole in the comforter the way he had it balled up in his hand because Kevin jerked his hips up.

HARD.

“Kevin.”

A light snicker and hard ass smirk was his response and Edd rolled his eyes.

“C’mon, Baby. Do me,” Kevin whispered and Edd’s whole body is suddenly on fire.

“Wha?”

The shocked look in those baby blue eyes made him grin and Kevin knew they were going to have some fun.

Kevin grabs his hips as hard as he can and pulls Edd toward him quick. When they’re nose to nose, he whispers again, “Do me.”

It’s an order.

A needy ass order.

But Edd’s scared because he has never been this in charge before.

“I-I…”

“C’mon, Edd,” he whispers against his lips as his hands start to unbuckle Edd’s belt.

Edd was thisclose to coming alright.

“What’s the problem?” Kevin whined as he unbuttoned his jeans wanting nothing more than the dick inside them to fuck his insides out.

Show no fear.

It was something Eddy taught him when they were kids.

No one can scare you if you’re not scared. No one can doubt you if you’re not doubting yourself. There is no fear to be had if you’re not fearful.

But Kevin’s shown him how to be honest.

If something is wrong, fix it. If you have an issue with someone, talk it out. If you tell the truth, you have nothing to be afraid of because the truth harbors no lies.

Edd grabs his hands, sighs, looks him straight in the eyes and said, “I’ve never topped before.”

Kevin stared at him for a brief moment before exclaiming, “WHAT?! HOW?!”

Edd shrugged and Kevin...grinned.

“Oh, this is gonna be FUN.”

Edd’s brain shorted out for a second before firing back up on all cylinders.

“What!? You still want me to do it?!”

“Wouldn’t have you here if I didn’t!”

Instead of the smile his heart was trying to put on his face, Edd pouted as hard as he could.

“Really?”

“I think you know more than you know,” Kevin answered with a wink and Edd shoved him back into the bed.

But the former pitcher’s hands were still fast and he grabbed the other’s arms and pulled him in for a hug as he fell back into the bed.

Not a second later, he was thrusting his hips into Edd’s, whispering, “Do me, do me, do me,” as Edd wiggled away.

“Fine!” He laughed, throwing his hands up in defeat. “Where’s your stuff?”

Kevin shoved his jeans into the floor and skipped out of his briefs as he danced to his dresser, opened the third drawer, fished around in the back and pulled out a box of condoms and a tube of lube.

“Oooh, the Target kind,” Edd said as he caught the items Kevin tossed at him.

“It’s no KY, but -”

It was then they locked eyes again and three seconds later, Kevin’s flying back into the bed.

Kevin stacked his few pillows behind him to lean into while Edd got out of his pants.

“Just say the word and I’ll stop if it hurts, ok?” Edd said as he crawled back on the bed.

Kevin tossed himself back, spread eagle style, and said, “DO ME!”

A lubed finger slowly rubbing circles around his rectum shut his teasing mouth and Edd’s mouth was on his own as the finger pushed itself inside.

Kevin had one hand in his hair, the other on his own dick, while Edd’s finger toyed with more than his prostate.

This may have been Edd’s first rodeo on the giving end, but it wasn’t Kevin’s first time being a catcher.

He switch hit all through high school and college, but in the bedroom, things weren’t the same.

Guys would brush him off as a wanna be tough pansy, girls thought he was too much.

As he got older, it was more of the same.

And he was tired of the one night stands, the hiding behind being “just friends,” meeting the parents but quickly being dropped because he was too…

It was all too painful until he met Edd at a mutual friend’s birthday party.

He took things slow like Nazz suggested, let Edd lead when it seemed like he was comfortable doing so, compromised as needed.

But now, he’s feeling needy and Edd is catching what he’s putting down.

When Edd bottomed out, all he could think about was sucking his dick.

Jesus, it felt good.

“Please breathe, Kevin.”

He could barely open his eyes, but when he did, Edd was straining.

He was red all over, glistening with sweat, every muscle in his arms was popping out as he braced his fists into the comforter.

He was barely breathing himself and Kevin could almost make out the heartbeat in his chest.

Fuck, he was sexy.

“Fuck me,” he whispered as his eyes fell close again, hands reaching out for Edd’s hips to bring him closer, to make him move.

The fingertips touching him was like electricity, making him lean closer, to get more of the fiery touch. As he did so, the tightness around his cock gave way to smooth warmth and Kevin moaned.

“Please.”

Hands reached hips and Edd slammed into him, catching the next moan in his mouth.

And the next.

And the next.

And the next.

But his dick needed MOAR.

Sitting up, he scooped Kevin’s legs under his arms, and slammed into him again and again, making Kevin’s back arch off the bed, his jaw dropped opened in a silent scream.

His dick throbbed as it bounced on his stomach, leaking dribbles of cum, and Edd’s so turned on he may just burst into flames.

And as good as it all felt, everything in Kevin told him to do what he really wanted, his ankles be damned.

He reached out for Edd again, and when he leaned in, Kevin’s calves shot to his shoulders, forcing Edd on his knees. He then locked his ankles together, wrapped his arms around them, and screamed when Edd hit his prostate.

“Are you -?!”

“DON’T STOP.”

Edd knew the position well. But to be on the giving end of it had his brain melting.

No one lasted long here and now he knew why.

Everything was tight and hot and slick. He wanted nothing more than to give into it all, so he did.

As Kevin screamed his name, he growled as he chased his orgasm to the finish line.

Watching Kevin stroke himself off as he did so was by far the sexiest thing he’d probably ever see.

He didn’t know what to do to see it again, but damn he was going to give it his best shot.

Biting Kevin’s neck as he did him was a good start as the redhead pulled his hair and cheered him on.

When they both collapsed, Edd could only say, ‘You’re really flexible.”

“Thanks,” Kevin huffed with a grin. “I have a great yoga teacher.”

“I’m sending them an apple.”

“She prefers peaches.”

They both had a bit of a chuckle as they detangled themselves from each other. Edd was a bit surprised that he had enough energy to move, but he took it and ran. First to the linen closet for a towel to clean up, the kitchen for a drink, and then to the shower.

It was well after midnight when they collapsed back into the bed again.

“Kevin?”

“Mhm?”

“I have a yoga teacher, too.”

Kevin snorted, reached an arm around him to grab an ass cheek, and said, “We’ll see what you’ve learned in the morning.”

[refinedbuffoonery]

Riley + Sunglasses + Undercover (6)

masterlist.

Read it on AO3. 

*****

Mac fidgeted with the T.V. remote. Riley hadn’t returned yet. Bozer and Matty busied themselves with digging up intel on Petrov, and Desi sprawled across the couch. 

Which left Mac with nothing to do but think. 

Riley would be back any minute now, and Mac had no idea what to say to her. They needed to talk about the kiss. Dropping a “you’re my best friend and favorite coworker, but surprise, I’m in love with you” bomb on her in the middle of a mission seemed like a stupid idea, but ignoring what happened would make it even more awkward than it already was. Fuck. 

Mac snapped his head toward the door as the lock clicked. Riley slipped inside, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through. Her hair was a windswept, tangled mess, but other than that, she appeared to be fine. Tension eased in his chest that Mac hadn’t realized was there before. 

She still wore his jacket. 

Riley went right to his side, although she remained a respectful distance away instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder like usual. She looked almost...shy. Mac could see the hesitation in her eyes. He really fucked up. Now she wouldn’t even come near him. 

“Miss much?” she asked. 

“Nobody’s planning on killing us, yet.” 

“First time this week,” she retorted. Mac chuckled, earning a glare from Desi. 

Slowly, Mac closed the space between himself and Riley, so they could talk without being overheard. He gave her the opportunity to back away, but, to his surprise, she didn’t. “We need to talk,” he whispered. Riley paled. Shit, that was not the reaction he wanted. Not even close. 

“Mac, I...I understand.” Her eyes said it all. She looked disappointed. Embarrassed. Hurt. No no no no no no. Whatever she thought she understood, it was a far cry from what he was about to say. Did she really not know how he felt? He wanted to touch her. He wanted to pull her into his arms and show her all the things she didn’t understand. He wanted to tell her that his heart belonged to her, and he was committed to her for the long haul, although that may not be as long as they’d like since they both had a penchant for getting shot at. And then, after all that, he wanted to back her into a wall and tell her how sexy she looked in his jacket and learn exactly how to elicit those little noises again. 

He needed to stop thinking those things about her. Riley could read him like a book. 

Yet, she’d utterly failed to see what was right in front of her face. Maybe...maybe she misunderstood because he’d hid it so well. Too well, if the brokenness in her eyes was any indication. 

“Riles, no--” 

She shook her head. “Don’t ‘Riles’ me right now.” 

“Got him,” Bozer announced, leaving Mac with his jaw hung open. His unsaid words evaporated off his tongue. 

“Viktor Petrov,” Bozer read off the screen, “thirty four year old Bulgarian mob boss and rare art connoisseur.”

Riley moved to stand behind Bozer, reading over his shoulder. Mac studied her--feet shoulder-width apart, hands behind her back. He liked to think of it as her war-room stance. The woman could save the world while standing like that. “He’s on several intelligence agencies’ watch lists,” Riley said. “Looks like he’s never been arrested, but Petrov is a power player in the Eastern European black market.” 

Raising his eyebrows, Mac slid his gaze to Desi. “You sure do know how to pick ‘em.” 

“Don’t forget, I picked you too,” she shot back. Ouch. He probably deserved that. Bozer suddenly found the computer screen extra fascinating. 

“In her defense,” Riley said, “he is really hot.” The two women shared a conspiratorial glance. If they ever really became friends, all hell would break loose.  

Matty broke the ensuing awkward tension. “Get this. He’s part of a collective of shady powerful individuals that uses black market items, real or fake, to keep tabs on all the major power players of the world--major corporations, terrorist cells, and--wait for it--intelligence agencies.” 

“Like the CIA,” Riley muttered. 

“Exactly. Someone in the group puts an item on the market just to see who comes running,” Matty explained. 

“So he thought he was pulling a fast one on a wealthy American, but…” Bozer trailed off. 

Mac delivered the final blow. “We were made the moment he saw Desi.” 

*****

This mission seemed to be one cursed piece of bad news after the next, Bozer thought. 

Petrov was going to out them as spies to the whole European criminal underworld, thus preventing them from ever doing field work again on the whole continent. They’d never be safe with Petrov’s bounty on their heads. 

If that wasn’t enough trouble, there was something weird going on with Mac and Riley. Post-Codex, Mac almost exclusively called her “Riles.” But, ever since their weird little whisper session, Mac abandoned the nickname. Bozer had no idea why. 

As if it were trying to spite him, the computer made an error noise. Bozer sarcastically imitated the sound. He didn’t feel any better. 

*****

Desi hated playing bait. She’d much rather be the one waiting in the shadows, swooping in just in the nick of time to save whoever got stuck as bait. But, noooooooo. Here she was, leaning against a wall, trying to look bored and sexy at the same time. 

It had been Bozer’s idea to have her wear the last of Riley’s dresses. This one was a skimpy, silver-sequined dress that latched onto her body like a leech. The neckline plunged below her breasts, and if it was any shorter, it’d be a shirt. It fit her well enough, except for the top. Riley’s boobs were bigger than hers, and it had taken some creative safety-pinning on Riley’s part to make the dress fit. 

To top it all off, there wasn’t a chance in hell she could hide a gun under that thing. 

“Sitting around waiting to get kidnapped, again. Best. Day. Ever.” Desi didn’t shy from making quips over comms while she waited. No one indulged her. 

Petrov’s steady, confident footsteps were her only warning before he rounded the corner. He spotted her instantly, eyes glimmering like he was starving and she was a cheeseburger on a sparkling silver platter. 

“I should’ve known better than to leave you unsupervised.” His voice was a promise of a thousand mistakes to be made. “Hello, darling. Miss me?” 

“I did until you drugged me and tied me up.” 

“I seem to recall you like being tied up.” 

She smiled but laced her words with venom. “Not that kind. Besides, I’d much rather tie you up instead.” Desi practically heard the words behind his smirk. Whatever you say, darling. 

She fought back memories bubbling to the surface as he dragged his gaze up and down her body. “That is quite the dress.” She snorted. He knew her well enough to know she would never wear a dress this ridiculous of her own free will. “I see you’ve gotten more tattoos since we last...met,” he said, innuendo dripping off the last word. His eyes traced the new designs on her arms and thighs before turning inquisitive, as if imagining what new tattoos there were in places he couldn’t see. She thought about making a snarky comment but decided against it. 

Viktor finally met her eyes again, and Desi remembered what drew her to him in the first place. His striking blue eyes were nothing like Mac’s. While Mac’s were bright and curious, Viktor’s were dark, intense, and captivating. In another time and place, she could’ve lost herself counting the green flecks in them. 

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked, likely knowing the answer already. “I assume you didn’t get all dressed up for nothing.” 

“You, actually.” 

“Is that so?” He definitely knew. 

“Yes. I’m waiting for you to give me an apology.” 

He stepped closer. “The verbal kind? Or the other kind?” 

“Are you trying to seduce me?” Desi asked dryly. She had no intention of ever getting in bed with him again, but damn he was distracting. 

 “Why? Are you seducible?” Viktor grazed his fingers up her arms, sending a shiver down her spine. He growled, “What kind of apology do you want, Desiree?” 

Desi put on a show of thinking through her options. “Both.” 

“Greedy. Your room or mine?” 

“Mine.” She had him now. Desi pushed off the wall and looped her pinky finger around his. He dutifully walked behind her, like a dog called to heel. She led him to the elevator and the trap waiting above. Okay, Riley, she thought. Your turn. 

Desi stopped at the room next door to the suite the team was using as home base and made sure Viktor was paying close attention as she slid the room key from her bra. His eyes glazed a bit, still a sucker for little things like that. Desi opened the door and waved him through. “After you.” She gave him a wicked smile, the first genuine one of their encounter. 

Not suspecting a thing--What an idiot, Desi thought--Viktor Petrov strolled into the room and found himself face to face with a scarily cold and calculating Riley, who, as far as he knew, was American businesswoman and heiress Danika Jackson. He quickly hid his surprise beneath a mask of neutrality. Lounging in a chair, Riley looked infinitely, gloriously bored. 

“I see you’ve met my bodyguard,” Riley said cooly. 

Viktor didn’t miss a beat. “Bodyguard, you say? Seems like a boring job for someone of your--” he glanced at Desi “--background.” Desi kept her face blank. He was Riley’s problem now. 

Riley began, “Mr. Petrov, as a successful businessman, I’m sure you already know that eventually, people like us outgrow the people around us. So, we must continually surround ourselves with the very best.” Riley looked him dead in the eye, cold and unfeeling. “There’s no point in carrying dead weight to the top.” She gestured to Desi. “She is far from dead weight. Besides, the private sector pays better.” Viktor didn’t notice, but Desi saw how Riley pressed her heels firmer into the floor, steeling herself for the conversation ahead. The little movement was the only sign of the Riley she knew beneath the icy exterior. 

Viktor looked a little uneasy, but he definitely wasn’t scared of the woman before him. But, by the time Riley was done with him, he would be. Riley’s eyes ignited, recognizing the challenge. 

“Now, about your little locket chip scam.” 

*****

Mac and Bozer didn’t know where this cold, calculating, and slightly insane Riley came from. They rarely got glimpses of the business side to Artemis37, but here she was, in the flesh. Mac watched the scene unfold on the computer screen, equally in awe and terrified of her. 

A woman to be feared. 

She made Matty the Hun look like a kitten. If she could see this, Matty would be proud of her. 

There was no sign of their Riley behind that cold stare. Her fingers drummed the arm of her chair. To his credit, Petrov didn’t cower. In fact, he was starting to look a little too comfortable, which was about to be a problem. 

Perhaps he needed a...demonstration. Something to make him squirm a little. 

Mac’s idea was a terrible one, and Riley would probably shoot him for it later, but it was still an idea, and Mac was pretty sure it would work. Even if he damned himself in the process. 

He just hoped she’d sincerely meant it when she said the surprise closet kiss was okay. 

“Stay here,” he said, walking to the door. 

Bozer made a face. “Okay?” Mac didn’t say anything else as the door clicked behind him. 

If Petrov was half as smart as Desi made him out to be, then he’d be monitoring footsteps in the hallway. He’d immediately know it was a set-up if Mac walked straight next door to the room Riley and Desi had Petrov cornered in. Mac forced himself to walk past the room--past Riley--to the stairwell on the opposite end of the hall, taking his time descending to three floors below. He could hear Riley’s half of the conversation over comms, but Petrov wasn’t close enough to either woman for their comms to pick up his voice. 

Mac fixated on the cold arrogance in Riley’s tone as he strode for the elevator. There wasn’t a shred of the woman he’d come to know and love in it, like she’d turned her emotions off as easily as flicking a light switch. He shivered. 

The elevator took its sweet time arriving, and in the meantime, Riley had some choice words about Pierre. The doors opened, revealing a middle-aged couple already inside. They scowled when they noticed he pressed the button for just three floors above. Mac flashed them an innocent smile. 

Mac stepped out of the elevator onto his floor, bracing himself for what he was about to do. He took heavier steps than normal, ensuring Petrov wouldn’t recognize the same pattern from before. Riley confided, once, that as a kid she would learn the pattern of people’s footsteps so she was never caught unaware. By footsteps alone, she knew who was walking down the hall--her mom, Elwood, even Jack. The variations in their gaits, she’d said, said a lot about their current state. For example, her dad’s steps normally were unhurried, but when Elwood’s walk turned heavy and prowling, it was her first warning to find somewhere to hide. And cover her ears. 

Mac’s heart snapped when Riley confessed she still did it, mostly out of habit. He swore right then and there that his kids--and hers, for that matter--would never need to learn that skill, for any reason. 

Mac swiped his key card and walked right in, ignoring Desi standing by the door in her disco ball dress. Petrov stood in the middle of the room, a healthy distance away from both women, with his hands in his pockets. He had the casual posture of a man who was used to being the most powerful person in a room. The man exuded wealth, from his perfectly tailored suit to his immaculate leather shoes. 

And then Mac saw Riley. 

The video feed he’d been watching didn’t do her justice. She lounged in an antique chair like it was her throne, the hotel suite her court. Her navy blue gown pooled at her feet, and her black acrylic nails gave the illusion of claws or talons drumming the armrests, not human fingers. 

Mac dragged his gaze higher. 

Her hair tumbled down her bare shoulders, no longer wild and windswept. No, this Riley was a far cry from the woman who’d cackled while speeding down foreign streets in a stolen Lamborghini convertible. This Riley was polished, cold, and looked like she was debating skinning Petrov alive. 

Her dark eyes, usually so full of laughter and compassion, held the vast, black emptiness of the space between stars. They were black holes, consuming everything in their path. 

She was otherworldly, predatory, and very, very sexy. 

Mac started to banish the thought from his brain, but he reconsidered. He was here to play the role of scandalous boyfriend, after all. 

He let every more-than-friendly thought he’d ever had about Riley turn his expression ravenous. Musings and memories of her flashed in his mind. The way her laugh warmed him from the inside out. The way she sat too close and furrowed her brow while she thoroughly beat him at any and every video game. The way her ass looked in one of the bazillion pairs of skin-tight jeans she owned. 

He didn’t care if she saw the truth in his eyes. Didn’t care if she read his feelings like a book. 

Some part of him wanted her to see the truth of it all, glimmering just underneath the fake-boyfriend façade. 

Mac wanted her to see how he never wanted to be with anyone else when shit hit the fan. How their middle-of-the-night fridge meetings were the only thing holding him together sometimes. How he was brimming with pride every time she improvised, whether in the field or at home. How one of her smiles made all coherent thoughts vanish from his head. How he’d wanted to ravish her the moment she dragged him into that damn closet. How--

Petrov cleared his throat. 

Mac blinked slowly and slid his gaze to the mob boss, feigning surprise. “Oh! I didn’t realize you had company. My apologies.” Riley’s eyes glittered like she knew just how not-sorry Mac was. 

He changed his mind. They weren’t just pools of darkness between stars. Those eyes contained the whole fucking universe. Black holes, galaxies, supernovas, and everything in between. 

He stalked toward her, trying to convey his plan with just his eyes. For a brief second, understanding flashed in her eyes before a cruel smile curled her lips--practically the first time all night they were on the same page. Mac revealed his relief for only a split second. He mouthed, Can I kiss you? Riley tilted her jaw, baring her neck to him. She didn’t need to utter a single word for him to understand. Make Petrov squirm, but don’t ruin my lipstick this time. 

It killed Mac to do this to her twice, but he didn’t have a better plan. He hadn’t touched her at all since the closet, as if that would ever make up for what he did. Now here he was, silently begging her to re-enact the closet scene. He didn’t know what that made him. A douchebag, most likely. 

Playing like this was like dangling their real feelings over a blazing inferno, hoping they didn’t do any irreversible damage. At least this time, Mac had Riley’s consent. If she said no, he would’ve found some other way to get under Petrov’s skin. 

Bracing his hands on Riley’s forearms, Mac pressed featherlight kisses to her neck. His thumb brushed a thin scar he didn’t know she had. Lingering traces of her perfume filled his nose, his lungs. He trailed his lips across her skin, searching for her pulse. Upon finding it, he pressed his lips firmly against her neck, reveling in the sensation of her blood roaring beneath his mouth. 

His blood roared alongside hers. This is just a game, he reminded himself. A power play to disarm Petrov. He nipped her skin, then soothed the small hurt with his tongue. Her breath hitched. Mac’s self-control hung by a thread. Riley was intoxicating, and getting drunk on her and losing his head would only land them in even more trouble. 

He pulled back. “I’m going to take a shower. Feel free to join me when you’re done here.” Mac winked. 

“If you want me against a wall, Damon, I’d much rather it be somewhere you can fuck me hard enough to make the paintings fall off.” 

Riley wore a mask of quiet, glittering amusement, but it was all Mac could do not to combust on the spot. He couldn’t believe she said that. He’d started this little game, and she always played to win, but...shit. 

This woman was going to bring him to his fucking knees. 

With as much bravado as he could muster, he replied, “We can do both.” Mac pressed a chaste kiss to the back of her hand before walking into the bathroom, closing the door, and taking the coldest shower of his life. 

*****

Petrov squirmed like a worm on a hook while he was forced to watch her and Mac’s little show. The way Mac had practically fucked her with his eyes made Riley want to squirm too. But, like, good squirming. Maybe even the kind that ended with her head thrown back and sheets clenched between her fingers. 

But, Danika Jackson didn’t squirm. Her heart didn’t feel like it was about to explode. She didn’t have to memorize every press of her man’s lips against her neck, because for her, this moment was real and would happen again. She needed to be Danika, who was calm and cunning, not Riley, whose heart was breaking, because this was just a game, and Mac meant none of it. 

That quick kiss on her hand nearly undid her. Petrov, thankfully, had been too busy staring at the floor to catch the cracks in her façade. She focused back on Petrov, pretending her heart wasn’t pounding and her brain wasn’t short circuiting. 

Riley stared at him, putting on a show of contemplating throwing him out right then and there so she could join Mac in the shower. It wasn’t hard. She was definitely thinking about it. 

Finally, she got back to the matter at hand. “As I was saying, I don’t appreciate you kidnapping my employee or trying to pull a fast one on someone clearly smarter than you.” She paused. “Why.” It was a command, not a question. 

Petrov glanced at Desi. “What has she told you about me?” He almost sounded nervous. A bit of Riley’s terror eased, but only a bit. You’ve got this, she reminded herself. 

“Everything. I know about the career that makes you happy, the career that pays the bills, and I know about your little black market spy collective, although I was surprised to learn your products aren’t as high quality as advertised.” Riley sneered. This was a gamble, she knew, showing her hand like this. She really hoped it paid off. 

Petrov snapped his head to Desi, looking vaguely horrified. “You knew about that?” Desi gave him a not-so-innocent shrug. 

Before he could say anything else, Riley continued. “Why is your collective watching me and my company, Mr. Petrov?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to another, clearly debating something in his head. “I wasn’t actually watching you at all,” he conceded. “I believe there is a mole in my operation, a spy.” 

Riley arched an eyebrow. “Interesting.” Behind him, Desi narrowed her eyes. 

“I made sure knowledge of the sale fell on select ears and waited to see which agency made an appearance. And sure enough, none other than my favorite spy shows up.” He smirked at Desi. 

“Ex-spy,” Riley corrected. “Although, I have been known to use her skills when I need information, or something done under the radar, if you catch my drift.” She knew what he was doing. Petrov made a calculated risk in revealing his potential mole problem. One slip-up on her part and he could easily connect the dots between his CIA mole and them. The best she could do now was convince him that she--and Desi--were just as shady and well-connected as him. “I assume you are responsible for the building being on lockdown?” 

“Can’t have my customers running away without paying, now can I?” She’d caught him off guard before, but he was back on his game now. Dammit. 

“Here’s the deal. You will call off your dogs and let us and everyone else leave the hotel, and in exchange I will return your locket and won’t expose you as a fraud.” He scoffed. “I am a woman of my word, Mr. Petrov.” 

“And if I don’t agree?” 

Her response was out of her mouth before Riley even knew what she was saying. “Then I will use my recording of this conversation to clone your voice and command your men to stand down myself before throwing your useless body out the window and taking bets on which direction your blood will spray when you splatter on the pavement.” Riley stared him down, swallowing her horror at her gruesome threat. She was pretty sure she was going to puke the second he was out of the room. 

“Very well,” he agreed, taken aback. Petrov cast a nervous glance in Desi’s direction. There was no pity in her smoldering eyes. None. 

Riley pulled the locket out of her bra and dangled it from her hand, waiting. Petrov took the hint and quickly made a phone call. “I have the locket. Stand down.” Satisfied, Riley handed him the locket in dismissal. 

She wasn’t going to say anything more, but the entitled way he raked his gaze up Desi’s body on his way out the door had Riley opening her mouth one more time, just to piss him off. “Good luck with your mole problem, Viktor.” 

The door shut, and seconds later a nod from Desi confirmed he’d walked down the hall and was out of earshot. 

Walking in on Mac be damned, Riley sprinted into the bathroom and hurled her guts into the toilet. 

[lady-divine-writes]

Truth (Part 2 of 2)

Summary:

Anxiety causes Crowley to change into his demonic form. But when he can't remember how to change back, Aziraphale helps, fighting truth with truth.

(AO3)

“What time is our reservation again, my dear?” Aziraphale asks from outside Crowley’s locked office door. Aziraphale knows what time their reservation is. It’s 8:30. Crowley has reminded him numerous times, going so far as to leave a plethora of messages around his shop written in midnight black ink on red Post-It paper that not a single soul with working eyes could ignore. They’re stuck to his teapot, his chair, his curio cabinet; they’ve even made their way inside his books so that the few customers he’s had this past week have actually taken it upon themselves to remind him, too, as they paid for their purchases.

All very unnecessary seeing as demon and angel have started living together now.

One would be hard pressed to tell that seeing as Aziraphale’s presence in Crowley’s flat has been limited so far in its representation. But it’s there in subtle ways – a rare book here, a miniature oil painting there, a few tartan items on Crowley’s dresser in the bedroom, a bottle of his favorite spirits in the fridge, a box of biscuits in the cupboard, those sorts of things. The time they don’t spend in Crowley’s flat they spend together in Aziraphale’s bookshop, absolutely surrounded by those crimson Post-Its. So there’s no way Aziraphale could have forgotten.

But it seems Crowley has, making a beeline for his office the second they’d gotten in and locking the door. Aziraphale assumed he wanted to give his plants a decent misting before they went out, though that doesn’t explain his locking the door. But he’s been inside for hours, and Aziraphale can’t seem to get him out.

“Uh … 8:30,” Crowley replies, his voice muffled by the thick door between them. “Why?”

“Well, it’s 7:45 now, so I figure we should get a wiggle on? You know, to wherever it is you’re taking us? Though considering the way you drive, it will likely take us only three-and-a-half seconds to get there. But I would like to, just this once, go to dinner without putting the fear of God into anyone.”

That last comment is bait. Any other time it would succeed in luring his demon out of hiding so Crowley can inform him that he doesn’t put the fear of God into anyone, and that that saying is a side-effect of societal conditioning. Besides, if a life-or-death situation puts the fear of God into someone over the fear of Satan, then that should say a thing or two about God, shouldn’t it?

But Crowley doesn’t rise to the challenge, not even with so much as a huff.

“I’ll just be another moment,” Crowley says. “I’m wrapping up a few things.”

“Okay.” Aziraphale sighs and backs away from the door. “I’ll be in the kitchen having a brandy when you’re ready. Please, don’t take too long.”

Too long? It’s only been 6000 years! That’s not too long, is it? “I won’t, angel.”

Crowley stands by the door, listening to Aziraphale’s footsteps pad off down the hallway. He waits till he can no longer hear them, then sneaks out of his office and heads to the bedroom. He’s not dressed for dinner. Not an inch, but that’s not a concern. He doesn’t own a single outfit he can’t toss on in less than a second.

He’d gone to his office to prepare for tonight, to grab something important – no, something essential. But when he found it, it triggered a minor anxiety attack, which steadily became a major anxiety attack the longer he looked at it.

Now he’s trapped in the midst of a full blown existential crisis on what should be one of the most important nights of their lives.

He hurries through the bedroom and into the bathroom where his ensemble for the evening hangs on the back of the door, waiting for him to put it on. It took him over a week to pick it out - ludicrous since he doesn’t have much in the way of variety in his wardrobe. Black on black with a few articles of dark grey, some trimmed in red - that’s all he owns.

Shocking.

And for a demon about to propose to an angel, a creature of love and kindness and light, that’s pretty pathetic.

Aziraphale deserves beauty, Crowley thinks as he puts on his somber clothes. He deserves rainbows and sunshine and starlight.

Starlight.

Crowley could give him starlight at least … couldn’t he? He gave starlight to the world. He should be able to give it to Aziraphale.

He looks down at his hands, but he can’t bring himself to snap his fingers.

He can’t bring himself to try and fail.

No. He can’t give Aziraphale starlight. Not now. Not as a demon.

As an angel, he could, but as a demon, what can he do?

He can show him affection in the shallow way humans do, by showering him with lavish gifts. That would be easy for him, take no effort whatsoever. But Aziraphale isn’t impressed by those things. $18,000 watches, expensive cars and clothes don’t impress him. Everything Crowley owns has a designer label attached and Aziraphale has never once batted an eye.

He’s been wearing the exact same coat for over a hundred-and-eighty years, for Satan’s sake! His glasses might actually be older!

Even the restaurant Crowley is taking them to tonight – the finest new French restaurant he could find in London, with an exclusive guest list and lines around the corner – won’t likely impress him.

And if the crepes are crap, he’ll write it off completely, even if the flatware is gold-plated.

Aziraphale relishes the things that show Crowley cares, that he listens when he talks, that he pays attention to his tastes: old books, classical music, trips to the museum, food. He’s filled his bookshop with quaint personal touches – cherubs and teacups and snuff boxes collected throughout the centuries. He didn’t hunt them down and buy them in the present, shelling out hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for them. He bought them from the original artists and kept them safe. Some of the keepsakes in his shop are worth thousands; some are worth nothing. But they’re there because he loves them, and that makes them priceless.

Crowley’s flat is cold and impersonal in comparison, the few things he owns priceless in dollar value, but honestly, most of it means nothing to him.

It’s there for show.

He flips the collar of his shirt, changing it from red to tartan in Aziraphale’s own personal pattern. It’s a little thing, but Aziraphale would appreciate that … wouldn’t he?

Is it enough?

Crowley looks at himself in the mirror and grimaces. Yup. There he is, looking exactly the way he always fucking does - like a Goddamned serial killer, except now he has a plucky tartan collar.

“What the bloody fuck am I doing?” he growls at his reflection. “Aziraphale’s an angel! He’s handsome and smart and witty and fun! He inspires humanity to be better! Who am I compared to that? I’ll tell you who I am - I’m a bitter old snake who drives too fast and yells at plants! He deserves better than me!” Crowley shakes his head, sinking further and further with every turn of his cheek into the mire of his own self-hatred. “He doesn’t know what I am. Not really.”

But if Aziraphale did, he wouldn’t turn away. He wouldn’t leave. Crowley knows this. That’s not who Aziraphale is. He would stand beside Crowley to his own destruction. Marriage to Crowley could most definitely destroy him, if for no other reason that it would put a big, red bullseye on his back for every supernatural entity to see, good or evil.

They’ve managed to keep Heaven and Hell off their backs, but how long can that last?

Aziraphale would say forever, but Crowley doesn’t have much in the way of faith.

Crowley has been lying to everyone. He’s been lying to Hell about what he’s been doing, lying to himself that he’s worthy of his angel.

Lying to Aziraphale, which is the biggest sin of them all.

It’s not so much a lie, he assures himself, but an omission. It never came up, so he never told. Is that really the same thing?

He snarls at his face in the mirror.

Fuck! Is he really trying to loophole his way out of this one? To himself?

He chuckles humorlessly. Of course I am. I’m a demon. That’s what I do.

And because he’s so good at it, Aziraphale is lying, too.

Corruption. It’s contagious.

And regardless of the money he’s accumulated, the status he holds, the power he has, that’s all he can give his angel.

Corruption.

“He thinksss that, deep down, I’m a good perssson,” he hisses. “Becaussse he’sss never ssseen true Evil!” A flashback of Satan rising through the asphalt pops into his head as if in response to that remark. He shakes his head. “Not wearing the face of sssomeone he lovesss! He trusssts me too much! He’sss making a missstake! He doesssn’t believe I can be all that bad!” Crowley swallows hard, swallows down the power swelling within him, that’s called to the surface whenever he gets angry. “Well, if he refussses to believe, I’ll ssshow him! He’ll sssee!”

With a snap of his fingers, he transforms. Wings tear his shirt, ripping through it like paper. His skin goes grey, falls from his frame in chunks revealing maggots underneath. His fingernails grow and curve unto themselves, tips piercing his flesh. Muscles bulge unsightly, joints crack. Feathers fall from his wings till they’re skeletal, the graceful arches bending like wire. His face elongates, hollows at the cheeks, his eyes going black and sinking into their sockets.

The next time he dares look at his face, he’s unrecognizable.

He doesn’t change into this form often. He’s too fond of the human façade he’s created for himself. Every time he changes, he fears he won’t be able to go back. But this is him. And if Aziraphale is dead set and determined to convince himself that he’s in love with a demon, then he needs to see Crowley for who he is.

Crowley stares at himself in the mirror, takes a good long look so that he’ll stop forgetting, stop convincing himself he’s something he’s not.

He can only stand it for a second, then he turns away.

Yes, this demon is him, but it’s also not him. Not entirely. Not anymore. And not for a long time. He might hate that this is the real form of the demon Crowley, but he has to give himself credit for the good that he’s done, intentionally or otherwise. The good that he is.

The parts of him that Aziraphale loves, which seems to be all of him, good or bad.

He sighs, ragged breaths issuing from holes in his lungs and filling up his entire chest cavity, ringing through it like the wind howling through a dead wood log. He knows he has to tell Aziraphale, but not now. He can’t do it now. He doesn’t have the strength. He’s already tapping every inch of his energy to get through this proposal.

He doesn’t know how he could land two weights of equal mass on Aziraphale’s shoulders in one night and expect him to stick around.

Of course, he should probably drop this one on him first, but the demon in him consistently convinces him that’s a bad idea.

And the cowardice in his subconscious tends to agree.

“All right,” he says, his voice an octave lower, grinding in his throat as if drug over nails and rocks. “We’re done pitying ourselves for now. Let’s be done with this, and propose to our angel.”

He snaps his fingers again, picturing, as best he can, his human face in his head.

But nothing happens.

That’s not entirely true. He swears he sees a bright white light. It actually stops his heart for a second since he assumes Aziraphale has miracled his way in, but it’s not his angel. A glance around the room proves that he’s still alone.

And he’s still a mess.

He tries again. He snaps his fingers. No white light this time, so that must have been an illusion, but nothing else changes. Only now, the image of his face in his head has begun to fade.

He snaps and snaps until the skin on his fingers starts to peel away, but not a bit of him goes back to normal.

But what is normal? He’s having a difficult time remembering.

“Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit!” he mumbles, going about this a different way and attacking himself instead. He tugs at his wings, digs his nails into his arms, his face, trying to tear through the rotting flesh to the human skin he prays lies underneath.

But it doesn’t.

There’s not an inch of good or healthy or wholesome within him. It’s an illusion. All an illusion. An armor he uses to blend in, deceive. An armor he’s grown to rely on as much as he relies on Aziraphale.

And he doesn’t know how to get it back.

[sheepsandcattle]

Chapter 2

Jules once said that he chose to live with Oscar because he’s the only person he can tolerate for more than a few hours at a time, and that it’s mutual.

As irritating as Oscar may be, Curly can’t help but acknowledge the fact that Jules sees something in him that he can’t. They bicker and nag at each other when they think nobody is listening but the fights are never followed by apologies or hash-outs - doesn’t feel necessary. It feels like a brotherly bond.

Curly is reminded of his friends back home, of Brandon who he’s known since he was four but has barely spoken to since he’s moved away because he’s felt too shit to pick up his phone and dial.

When he left, Brandon was preparing himself for uni, something they were both always certain they’d never do. Except Brandon’s got three A-levels now because he stayed in college when Curly got sick of his course and dropped out to work at Costa instead.

Maybe he’ll text him when he gets in.

Now though, he and his new friends are crowded near Jeff and Dean’s window because they don’t like to smoke in the apartment but they’ve all had a bit to drink and so they’re making compromises. They’re sharing the last of a bottle of vodka and two spliffs between the five of them.

He learned that Oscar is only twenty when he’d brought up his own age - complained about how he only really got to enjoy a few months of legal drinking before he moved away.

Jules is twenty-one, but only just, and both Jeff and Dean are twenty-three. Curly knows there should be no room left for him, being so young and intruding on a group of two pairs, but there is, and he feels secure in the circle - even more so when they’re half-way through the bottle and a few joints into the night.

Regardless, his new friends are fascinating and he finds himself observing more than he engages on some nights. He decides it’s alright though because Jeff and Dean seem to do the same, both men often serving a silent but strong presence. Curly still gets them mixed up sometimes, but they swear they’re used to it.

Other things he’s learned are that Jules has shit music taste, Oscar watches rubbish telly, and Jeff wears exclusively black t-shirts (even when it’s cold) to show off his tattoos. Dean takes credit for most of them and Curly always catches himself staring.

“You got any tattoos, Curly?” It’s Dean that asks, when Jules and Oscar are bickering about a girl they ran into last night and how they met before but “no we haven’t, I’d remember.”

“No. I fancy one, though.”

***

He gets his first tattoo in April.

Brandon got his first one after they finished high school and Curly’s wanted one ever since. He was close to getting one that same day but decided he should probably butter his mum up first and just never quite got through to her. He’s his own person now though, so stuff her.

He has a rubbish job in that rubbish shop now but his manager is dead nice and doesn’t seem to give a toss that he’s not twenty-one yet because he gets 20% off everything including fags and booze. She probably only hired him because she pitied him with his drunken proposition and his two GCSEs, but he’ll take it; $6.40 an hour isn’t half bad.

He’s starting to feel a bit more anchored to his new home and, in February, his mum only went and got him a car. It’s nothing to brag about, just a third-hand thing, but he’s got his driving license sorted now as well and it does the job. Curly didn’t even know you could find Corsas in the states. He sent a few pictures to his dad and he’s chuffed about it n’all. Curly takes long drives when he’s feeling like he’s been stewing in the flat for too long and can’t remember how big the outside world actually is.

Oh yeah, the flat: he’s been living with Jules and Oscar for two weeks; his first time living away from his mum, but it’s alright. He’s always the first one up, which makes a change and means he gets the TV to himself for an hour or two rather than watching Oscar’s shit sitcoms. He smokes, watches TV, works a few hours, comes home, smokes some more, drinks, and he even tried some pills on his birthday with Jules that made his brain leave his body and his bones turn to dust.

Everything’s mint and one of the lads from the morning shift at work has started buying weed off him for more than he’s paying Jules for it. He’s basically living the dream - although he should probably buy himself a bed frame this week, and Shake’n’vac the living room before his mum gets her way and visits the apartment to give him a bollocking for being a scutter.

He’s just been so bloody busy though, with nights like tonight with all five of them hanging around in the living room whilst Jules and Oscar get beyond high and the rest of them chat among themselves.

“Hey man, I might need a favour tomorrow night.” Jules’ voice is as hazy as his eyes look, and he closes them as if he hears that thought, breathing deep at the other side of the room.

Curly is watching the needle pop his skin again, black ink leaving the thread and pooling around the puncture. Dean offered to bring his gun, but Curly likes how Jeff’s stick-n-poke tattoos look and has this theory that, if he can get through one of these, he’ll be hard enough to have any tattoo he ever wants in the future.

He winces at a particularly sensitive spot and raises his head to acknowledge his friend. “Yeah?”

The man hums, clears his throat and turns on the couch in one lazy flop to lay flat out on his back. He says, “just a pick-up. It’s kinda out of my way.”

Curly’s not sure what Jules is on, but his ability to carry a conversation, let alone hold a sentence, suggests that it’s not nearly as strong as whatever he was on last night when he was drooling into his own lap and demonstrating the linguistic skills of a zombie. Curls never really sees Jules in these kinds of states unless he’s testing a new batch of something.

Dean says, “Curls, keep still, bud,” as the grip on his arm tightens. The tattoo is coming together now.

“I wouldn’t usually ask, man. It’s just, if I get caught driving Tre’s car again, I’m done. Fuck knows how I blagged it last time.”

“No, I know. It’s.” Curly nods - to himself more than anyone else. “Yeah, it’s fine.” His car is the only one that any three of the roommates have at the minute. “Just this once, yeah?”

“You have my word.”

***

And Jules does keep his word; he doesn’t ask him again. He’s good like that, always has been according to Dean. Curly offers to take a detour on the way home from the pick-up though, to meet one of Jules’ clients (which he still thinks is such a pretentious thing to call the guy you’re selling coke to) just as an additional favour.

Jules is huddled over a lighter and spoon when Curly returns and Oscar is tightening a leather band around his bicep with his teeth.

Jules says, “Curly, you’re a saint,” as he injects his friend's arm, then digs through the items around him, speaking through the lighter held between his teeth as he adds, “here, try a hit on me.”

Oscar slumps back against the TV stand and it’s nothing Curly hasn’t seen before. Doesn’t quite sell him on the idea of heroin, honestly.

He’s been curious but never tempted by anything more than weed. The pill on his birthday (and last week) wasn’t anything more than what he’d done with Brandon in Reading last year. Festival drugs. Not a massive deal. Drugs like those are only ever good for loosening him up and making everything amplified. (At the time, Brandon had said “it’s like I’m operating on 150%” and Curly couldn’t have put it better himself.)

But Heroin? He’s seen the way Oscar reacts to the stuff; becoming lax and dormant; an empty vessel until life seems to return to him at the twenty-minute mark and he’s wandering about the place, half-functioning as the other half drags behind like a burden.

A free high though… One that Jules typically charges $50 for? One that Curly might never have tried otherwise?

“Yeah, go on then.” He nods, and he’s not even entirely sure until he says it. “I’ll give it a go.”

He doesn’t inject anything - asks not to. Instead, he snorts a white-brown powder off the coffee table and it brings him no more than to where he is five minutes later; a flash of nausea followed by a body made of nothing but hot air. It feels nothing like weed and, although he spends a good portion of his high staring at the ceiling and counting his breaths, Curly decides that it didn’t hurt to try it.

After that, he sticks to weed because he knows he likes it and Jules is happy to give it to him as payment for doing a few more of his runs. It works out well, really, because Curly’s always felt weird buying drugs from his mates, but now it just feels like mutual favours.

There is one night though, on Oscars birthday where they all overdo it a bit, but nobody more so than Curly - naturally. They’re meant to be going to some party at the other side of town but Curls can barely walk a straight line before they leave their apartment.

“Just do two and see how you feel,” Jules says as he cuts lines on the coffee table. He ignores Dean’s disapproving look and Jeff’s tutting as he says, “it’ll sober you up.”

It’s quite lovely, Curls thinks as he watches his mate roll up a fiver. It’s quite lovely that they all want him to make it to the party with them so badly. Even Oscar is eager for him to join them. He’s nicer these days.

Curly nods, takes the note without a second’s concern. He just wants to go to this bloody party - would be gutted if he’s got to stay here whilst them lot go without him. He snorts the first line quickly before he can give himself time to fuck it up halfway.

“Good, good,” Jules rushes, rubs between his shoulder blades as Curls stays doubled over the table, ready for the second line but pausing as he rubs his nose, sniffs, rubs again where it tickles and blinks it away.

“Maybe see how one feels first, Curls,” he hears Dean suggest, but he’s already snorting the next one because it’s eleven o’clock at night and he’s steaming and doesn’t give a shit and wanted to be at that house party like, an hour ago.

He hears Jeff mutter, “Jesus,” for some reason.

It works wonders, though. His face is numb and he’s about to try a third line when he realises that his brain is coming back to him.

They go to the party and it’s mint… He thinks. He can’t remember most of it.

***

Weed is still his best mate, even if he and Jules do do coke together a few more times. It’s only ever when they’re together and often when Jules gets a new batch in and uses ‘testing’ as an excuse for a bump.

Curly can probably count on one hand the number of times he’s done it, but likes that he knows more about how three of the many drugs he’s selling for Jules work now.

A few weeks into dealing Jules’ shit and he’s charging just a little bit more than he’s meant to and keeps the extra for himself - calls it a service charge (not that he makes it known) and it works out quite nicely.

Of course, when Jules is around (when they’re at parties or just in groups together) Curly doesn’t get a lot of luck.

Sometimes though, Jeff and Dean tell him about parties that Jules isn’t invited to. He never actually seems to see much of the duo at those events -too distracted from the second he steps through the door- but he goes to them all anyway, even if the late nights at parties always become late mornings and ultimately have him losing hours at work when he’s too drunk or hungover to get there on time or sometimes even turn in at all.

“You should really see a doctor,” his manager says one day when he comes in two hours late after ‘fighting off another migraine’ all morning.

“I’m alright, Em,” he smiles sleepily, squinting his eyes a little because the lights in the shop are so fucking bright, but it has more to do with a monster hangover than a migraine. “I’ll just buy some painkillers if that’s alright?”

“I won’t charge you. You look rough.”

He shouldn’t take advantage of Emily because the woman is too nice and way too trusting, but the lost hours that make a dent in his pay check also make up for it in drug money and painkillers.

He’s getting a taste for it - the business side of things, that is.

---

Translations (lol)

Skutter - slob

[kotolocke]

Entry #01: New Bark & Beyond.

God it really has been a week since I started this blog and I still haven’t updated it? Gotta stop being useless and post more regularly. I’ve made decent headway into the game so I have several posts I need to make about it. So let’s get started. I’ll save y’all from a long summary of the game events and stick with just mentioning important game-play stuff and how Lyra reacts to them.

First up: Elm’s request.

   This whole little introductory quest that Elm sends her on is actually kinda meaningful to her perception of herself as a trainer. In blog cannon, Lyra immediately goes to collect her starter from Elm after having a massive argument with her Mum about leaving home, which ended with her Mum basically pushing her out of the door and telling her she wouldn’t care if she came back. She would. She didn’t mean it, she was just lashing out. But Lyra didn’t know that and she ran most of the way to the lab choking back tears.

   So she takes a deep breath, calms herself down and as soon as she’s in the lab, Elm’s asking her to act as a representative of the lab and complete an important task for them. At this point, Lyra’s already been helping out around the lab for some time so this isn’t entirely out of the ordinary. But being asked to take care of a “real” “discovery” one of Elm’s peers has made whilst she’s still highly fraught from a fight but is pretending that she’s totally fine? This is the basis of the person she becomes. Someone who thinks of herself as a highly important “chosen person” who cannot express her real emotions or else she’ll won’t be taken seriously or allowed to follow her goals. Because something tells me Elm wouldn’t be too comfy sending a crying eleven year old off into the wild world of Pokemon after a big fight with her parents.

Next up: Lyra’s starter.

   Meet Cabbage!

   She’s an extremely sheltered Chikorita who honestly never thought she was actually going to end up travelling with a trainer. Surely she was just going to spend the rest of her life in the lab with the Professor? Lyra decided otherwise, and decided primarily because she was the only girl of the three Pokemon Elm was raising. Lyra was anticipating getting some flack for being a young girl on a Pokemon journey so she kinda projected some of this onto Cabbage. Moron boy trainers would probably turn their nose up a cute, female Pokemon so she should had to take Cabbage with her so she wouldn’t feel like she was anyone’s last choice.

   Cabbage would have been okay with that but unfortunately can’t tell Lyra how she feels. She’s just gotta learn to embrace all the terrifying Pokemon battles Lyra puts her through. Which happens surprisingly quickly; Lyra’s an impatient girl but she always gives her Pokemon the time they need to adjust. Speaking of adjust:

Cabbage is legitimately confused and slightly irritated about her nickname. It’s the first of many little annoyances that eventually lead to her becoming stubborn and standoffish towards Lyra as she grows more confident.

Next: Mr. Pokemon & Professor Oak.

   In terms of character development, this whole scenario kinda bolsters Lyra’s ego even more. But I want to single it out because it’s the start of one of her three major plot threads:

   This fckin’ egg. This egg is important and eventually hatches into one of Lyra’s core team members. This egg is also lowkey a symbol of everything early journey Lyra thinks about herself. She’s so unique and powerful and special, Elm can see she’s naturally good with Pokemon so he chose her to go on this dangerous quest to collect a mysterious egg! And better yet, during this quest the esteemed Professor Oak, advisory to the legendary Red, asks her if she can help him out with something too!

   He gives her a high-tech Pokedex, an item so exclusive that only a handful of trainers own one? Wow she must be the best trainer out there, she’s only just got her first Pokemon and everyone’s falling over themselves to get her to do trainer stuff for them. Clearly she’s hyper naturally talented and all the smart Pokemon experts know it! She’s a dumbass child. I love her.

   Anyway, why’s the egg important you ask? Oh—

—no reason.

And finally: Silver.

   Did you know: Lyra absolutely hates Silver’s guts pretty much until she sees he also hates Team Rocket? Because he kinda epitomises the older boys who would belittle her for being a girl who wanted to be a trainer?

   It’s pretty clear to Lyra that Silver kinda knows some shit about Pokemon training because she hears him muttering shit about Elm’s lab being “famous”. Bitch, the only people that Elm’s famous to are fringe nutcase trainers who breed for something they call IVs because he’s basically lord high king of egg knowledge or whatever. That makes it doubly annoying when Silver tries to kick her when she asks if he’s getting a Pokemon there too and twice as satisfying when she knocks him over with a retaliation kick and stamps off righteously. She’s especially glad that she chose Cabbage at this point; just thinking of what he might say about her makes Lyra fume. 

   More evidence that Silver is a bog-standard shitface sexist kid:

Whilst Silver would say this sort of crap to anyone, this hits a little too close to home for Lyra and she takes it as a misogynistic insult. Generally implying that she’s somehow not worthy of becoming a trainer is a surefire way to make Lyra go feral because she kinda thinks it’s the only thing she’s good at. And it’s just not true, look at what level Cabbage is at this point:

Three levels above where she started and only around 3-4 hours have passed since they first met. Lyra is insanely good at training Pokemon. She has great intuition when it comes to assessing individual Pokemon’s strengths and weaknesses and encourages them to fight in whatever way suits them best. She doesn’t always have great long-term strategy in battle, but she knows exactly what her Pokemon can and cannot take and dish out and this is what secures her most of her victories.

   Also Silver’s “someone weak” comment  is 100% self-projection, just so we’re clear.

   lyra vc: lmao yeah i am???

   lyra vc: lmao no!!!

   Queue Lyra getting Actually Mad™ because there is no way a dick like Silver could become a better trainer than her?? She’s gonna be the greatest, just you wait and see Tampon!!

   If you don’t think she was holding it in the air just out of his reach then you have fundamentally underestimated how much of a petty little shit my Lyra is.

   Regardless, Lyra then runs back to the lab to see exactly why Elm called her in such a panic.

In conclusion: All cops are bad.

   A kind of recurring theme in Lyra’s story is her distrust of traditional authority figures, and it all starts here.

   Okay, so obviously this exchange is so cartoonishly stupid that I cannot see it going down like this in blog cannon. But the cop that does come to investigate the lab in blog canon is pretty much as incompetent as this guy. Stealing a Pokemon is kind of not a big deal in Johto? Shit happens all the time, the cops are corrupt as fuck and they don’t care about doing their job. It’s the reason Rocket was able to regroup in Johto without anyone really making any attempt to stop them.

   So this guy is mad that he’s been taken really far out of his way to investigate some minor crime in a tiny town and now some brat kid is going on about how some other kid was rude to her? Yeah, he’s not happy and totally belittles her, calling her “girlie” and scoffing at the idea of her and her wimpy looking Pokemon could have defeated a criminal. It’s not until Lyra insists that it was the red haired boy Elm mentioned to the guy she battled that he starts listening to her, and even then he’s still extremely brusque with her. And Lyra cannot stand being talked down to so this drives her round the bend.

   A lot of terrifying things happen to Lyra during her journey, enough that she could easily qualify for police protection, but she never once asks for it throughout her journey. Because whenever she imagines walking into a police station, she imagines a bunch of wrinkly, balding, middle-aged men who will belittle and insult her the same way this cop did. And she’s not going to willingly suffer through that again.

[toasttz]

How to make games: RPGs

Hey! You like RPGs, right? If you don't I have to wonder how the hell you found FAN, given our two most-active subboards being vidya and tabletop RPGs, but, whatever! Let's, for the sake of argument, assume you like RPGs. If you don't, fuck off, Greg! ... I don't know anyone named Greg, I just wanted to see if I could screw with people named Greg. Anyways, RPGs, like the houses in Harry Potter, come in four distinct flavors: traditionalist, gonzo/comedy, h-game, and "Inspired by EarthBound/The Mother Trilogy". And much akin to Harry Potter, only two of these houses actually fucking matter and the other two are just hangers-on of different genres and ages. If you're going to waste the player's time by making your H-game an RPG, you are going about it entirely wrong. Please stop dumping this unabashed garbage-fire of a subgenre on Steam, the market is beyond saturation point and requires arm floaties to compensate. And for those of you who played/know of EarthBound and want to make a "spiritual successor"... just stop. Please for the love of God, stop. There never really was a demand for this kind of thing and EarthBound was not a commercial success, so just stop if you have any humanity left in you. I don't think I can stomach anymore fucking quirkiness after the last installment - anymore stuffed down my gullet and I'm gonna shit out a My Hero Academia OC next time my bowels move. So, in truth, you have two flavors of RPG: the traditionalist and the comedian routes and both can be equally terrible. Traditionalist RPGs range from the swords-n-sorcery setting found in Ultima, Dragon Quest, and good Final Fantasy installments to the sci-fi, cyberpunk, steampunk, and emo shit found in bad Final Fantasy installments - it's a wide gauntlet. The only prereq is that you take your own storytelling relatively seriously, with some level of gravity involved in the overall major story beats. Since traditionalist RPGs are made by people with crippling insecurities about change, and the game will largely succeed or fail on the quality of its characters, I'll go ahead and make your cast for you. I'll avoid giving them names so you can customize them: I mean, some people like their fantasy heroes to be named something like "Bulk McUlraeoth Sword Arm of Jupiter" and some people like their fantasy protags to be named "Jim". Who am I to judge your self-insert fanfiction? Sword McHero Man - The guy with short brown or black hair and a generic face done by a B-list manga-ka and, depending on if you want to make him a chillaxed everyman or an edgy edgelord, you can add or subtract belts, zippers, pouches, and black clothing items according to need. He'll almost always use a generic one-handed sword and have fairly short hair. If your game strongly favors an element system, he'll be either fire or light-affinity, but not have any actual strong convictions beyond the fact that he hates 'bad guys' and probably gets his head dunked in toilets by at least 3 NPCs in the starting town. Anything else about him is ultimately superfluous and interchangeable with the next Sword McHero Man over. Childhood McBestfriend - Oftentimes a female foil to the above, but not required by law to be so. Sometimes this doubles as Sword McHero Man's Suave Cool McLancer. They will usually fill a supplementary combat role in the party, either the thief or the healbot as the story requires. If they are the love interest, they are required to be Worst Waifu(TM) by law and be replaced as soon as a competent party member fills out the roster. Typically wind or water elemented in nature, they'll either help calm the hero-man down if he is the hotblooded sort, or cheer him up if he's currently got his head dunked in a toilet. Suave Cool McLancer - Either a rival or thematic foil of the hero and maybe a rival for Childhood McBestfriend's affections, depending on story necessity. He will be a more specialized unit, either the rogue, the heavy-armor knight, or the attack mage. If male, this character will be Best Hasbando and be incredibly pretty or horrifically scarred and/or disfigured with no potential in-betweens. If female, uncommon but not unheard-of, she'll be the team's big sis figure and likely the most powerful, physically speaking. Potential for Best Waifu(TM) is high, but can also potentially double as Back McStabberton. Back McStabberton - The dark, angsty, clearly-untrustworthy one who the player will see their betrayal coming from a mile off, but will completely blindside the naive heroes. Usually they'll have stats inconsistent with the party (being either over or under-powered depending on context) and clash with their bright, anime-esque color scheme by wearing blacks or dark purples. Either a thief or attack mage of some flavor. Almost universally a male or a "devilish handsome rogue" if they get redeemed at some point. If female, they will always be DOUBLE AGENTS acting with the hero's own good in mind and will promptly be forgiven. Usually dies before the game is out. Grandpa McTeacherperson - Some plot-pivotal character who exists to either give the party a special tool, weapon, or ability they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, or elsewise transfer their own talents to the party in some fashion. Virtually irrelevant as characters since these exist exclusively as jaded props to die off to make the villains' actions more personal. Please stop using this archetype or at least TRY to subvert it into something interesting, you talentless lazy fucks. Sexy McFaceTurn - Invariably one of the bad guy's hot ladies will see a boyish charm in the hero, even if the hero is supposed to be projected upon and therefore would actually have the social skills of a duck - or worse, me. What? I did that joke already? Fuck you, this joke's still more inspired than the Tales games RPGs. Anyways, upon getting wet for the hero, she will abandon her post and all its luxuries and join the party, clad in tight, black leather and probably using either knives or whips and will be your prereq dark-affinity character. She will be the sex appeal your game sells on, so be sure to slap her on all your promo materials even though she doesn't join until the mid-late game. Male versions of this idea die. I can't explain it - it's some straight-up Mr. Poofers dark magic, they just die. Annoying McMascot - Your game needs something bizarre to round the party out with. A talking dog is common. A fantasy creature with bright neon colors is also acceptable. Just make sure that players hate it with every fiber of their being. If the design alone isn't enough, give it an annoying speech habit - like a verbal tic or a lisp - and have it talk a lot and repeat the obvious a lot. It is by law that this must be implemented. However, unlike any of the above, this, coupled with the hero, cannot be killed off. And that should more or less do ya, unless you're the type who wanted to pour dozens upon dozens of dudes into your game. In which case, congrats, you understand that doing the absolute base minimum to be called a "game" isn't the bar you should be shooting for and therefore are already on your way to being better than Squeenix. Next, you need to get to codin'! So go on Steam and buy the latest RPG Maker software when it goes on sale. You won't need to wait long, between the Summer and Winter sales. Once you have that, you already have built-in art, music, and character makers. Fuck it - creativity is hard, so let the software tend to that itself. Make some characters and name some locations, jot up a map with some landmarks and treasure, then make a bad guy. Bad guy making is easy, they all wear black or dark reds and purples and tend to always call themselves "The [Whatever] Empire". You don't even need to be arsed to make a motivation for their evil schemes. Have you seen how much Fire Emblem Fates raked in just on the goodwill left over from Awakening? I'm surprised JRPGs aren't made by fucking algorithm these days! Anyways, that just about does it for the traditional RPG. Comedy RPGs aren't quite as bound to the above and are, in fact, encouraged to break the mold. If you need some ideas to get the creative juices flowin', there's a game you can try out, you might have heard about it since I haven't stopped fellating the damn thing since I did the LP back in 2013: Hourai High. Your plot doesn't need to make sense and is better off if any causality is merely coincidental. Your characters shouldn't really be trying to 'save the world', per se, but should do so by side-effect of their selfishness and/or incompetence. Your team should have robots, aliens, fucking CheetahMen, I don't fucking know, but take everything I said above this paragraph and throw it into a shredder, make it confetti, and wail on established convention! Sweet fucking mother - BE CREATIVE. I'm gonna temporarily break facade here for just a second and say this: you know how you bitched about Final Fantasy 15? How it's a fucking boyband music video with a fucking car commercial crammed in it?! How you hated the hallway simulator of FF13? How no one bought Bravely Second? How Dragon Quest keeps getting away with remaking the same fucking game?! Here's your chance. Flaunt on the establishment. Fuck what is "popular". Make something new. Don't try to be Shigesato Itoi. Do your own thing. Break the conditioning. Get out there and make a fucking game. Make it so when people say "RPG Maker Title" on Steam, they aren't saying it like it's a four-letter word. Put some God-damn soul into it, people! And now, off the soap box. Bonus points if you add a dating sim. Just saying. Rune Factory 5 just got announced. Now, get to work. Congrats. You now know how to be the most fucking boring milquetoast thing on the planet and how to avoid that ass-cancer and do something that actually expresses your individuality and possible talent. This is the one time I'm allowing these rants to be somewhat uplifting. You're welcome.

[lechevaliermalfet]

Pistols at Dawn: A Look at Doom and Marathon

In the mid-1990s, the first-person shooter genre was born with Doom. It wasn't the first game of its type.  Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold preceded it.  Catacomb 3D came before either of those.  And you can trace the lineage further back if you like.  But it was Doom that saw the kind of runaway success most development studios live and die without ever attaining.  That success spawned imitators.  It was the imitators and their imitations – some of them using the very same engine – that made it a genre.  It's how genres are born.

It was interesting to watch that happen in real time.

But that's the PC side of history.

If you were a Macintosh user, you were probably sick to death of your PC-owning friends crowing about Doom, all the more because it wasn't available for your system of choice. Doom would eventually make its way Mac-ward... after its own sequel was eventually released for the system first.  Absurd as this sounds, it didn’t really matter too much.  Story, and the importance of continuity between games, wasn't exactly a big concern in Doom.

But Mac users had little reason to despair.  Because although Doom was and is rightly remembered as a classic, Mac users were privy to a game nearly as good – probably even equal, maybe even better, depending on who you talk to.

That game was Marathon.

More below the cut.

It's hard trying to justify comparisons between Doom and Marathon, because despite their similarities, they aren't really in the same league.  It's hard to compare any game that became the jumping-off point for a whole genre to its contemporaries.  But as much as I lionize Doom, and as much as everyone else does the same, it's perhaps helpful to think that this is done with the benefit of hindsight.  Today, in 2018, we've had nearly two-and-a-half decades of Doom being available for almost every single thing that could conceivably run it.

Remembering Doom in its time, it would have been hard to predict that it would go on to achieve quite the level of adulation it's garnered over the years. It's not that Doom doesn't deserve it.  It's more that any game attaining this level of success both in its time and in the long term is basically impossible to predict.  Doom was much talked about, it was wildly popular, you heard rumors of whole IT departments losing days of productivity to it in network games, but...  Well, it was just one game.  Later two.  It was perfectly valid to suppose, in the mid-90s, that some developer would surely supplant it with something even better.  That's just the way things worked.  It's just that Doom was well-made enough, well-balanced enough, that "something even better" didn't come around for a long time.  

Still, the Macintosh is not where I would have expected to look for real competition for Doom.

The Mac wasn't actually a barren wasteland, game-wise.  It's just easy to remember it that way, especially if, like me, you grew up playing PC games.  Most of the games we think of as being influential in the realm of computer gaming tended not to come from that direction.  Mac users made up a smaller portion of overall computer users at that point.  PCs (still often referred to as "IBM/PC compatibles" at the time) being the larger market and thus a source of larger potential profits, that was where the majority of developers focused their attention.  The hassles of porting a game to Mac, whether handled by the original developer or farmed out to somebody else, were frequently judged not to be worth the potential profit.  At times, it was determined not to be profitable in the first place.

There were a few games – Myst comes immediately to mind – that bucked this trend, but most Mac games only became influential once they crossed over to PCs, like...  Well, like Myst did.  The Mac ecosystem just wasn't big enough for anything that happened in it exclusively to influence the wider world of PC gaming.  

Actually, let's go with that ecosystem analogy for a minute.  

Mac gaming in the early 90s was sort of like Australia.  It's a tiny system that only accounted for a small percentage of the biosphere. It had its own unique creatures, similar to animals occupying equivalent ecological niches elsewhere in the world.  But on closer inspection, these turned out to all be very different from their counterparts, often in fundamental ways.  And then you had some creatures with no real equivalents elsewhere.  There was a lot of parallel evolution.  

Case in point: Marathon.

Being released a scant eleven days after Doom, you definitely can't accuse it of being one of the imitators.  It didn't happen in a vacuum, though.

Its creators, Bungie, were a sort of oddball company whose founders openly admitted that they started off in the Macintosh market not because of any fervent belief in the superiority of the platform, but because it was far less competitive than the PC market at the time.

They started off with Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a multiplayer-only (more or less) first-person maze game, and followed it up with Pathways Into Darkness.

Pathways was meant to be a sequel to Minotaur at first, until it morphed into its own thing over the course of its development.  In genre terms, it's most like a first-person shooter.  Except there are heavy adventure game elements, nonlinearity, and multiple endings depending on decisions you make during the game, which are pretty foreign to the genre.  It also features a level of resource scarcity that wouldn't be at all out of place in a survival horror game.

Incidentally, I would love to see a source port of Pathways Into Darkness. It is its own weird, awkward beast of a game, and I would dearly love to be able to play it, after having seen only maybe ten minutes of gameplay at a friend's house one time when I was about twelve.

They followed this up with the original Marathon.

Doom is largely iterative.  It follows on from a tradition of older FPS games made by its developer, like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D. Like those predecessors, it relegates the little apparent story to pre-game and post-game text, and features a very video game-y structure that relies on discrete levels and fast, reflex-oriented play.  It adds complexity and sophistication to these elements as seen in previous games, introducing more enemies, more weapons, and more complex and varied environments, then layers all of this on top of an already proven, solid gameplay core.

Marathon, by contrast, simplified and distilled the elements of previous games by its developer.  It opts to be more clearly an FPS (as we understand it in modern terms) than any of its predecessors, shedding Pathways' adventure elements and non-linearity while increasing the player's arsenal.  However, it's still less straightforward than Doom's pure level-by-level structure.  Marathon presents itself as a series of objectives given to the player character (the Security Officer) by various other characters to be achieved within the level.  These can range from scouting out particular areas, to ferrying items around the level, to clearing out enemies, to rescuing friendly characters, and so on.

Marathon's story, unlike Doom's, is front and center.  Where Doom leaves the player to satisfy themselves that they are slowly progressing toward some ultimate enemy with every stage, Marathon gives the player concrete goals each step of the way, framing each objective as either a way to gain advantage over the enemy, or to recover from setbacks inflicted by them.  Doom's story is focused on the player character and their direct actions. For narrative purposes, anything happening beyond your ability to observe is irrelevant.  Marathon instead opts to give the player a feeling that although they are the one making crucial things happen in the story, they are not directing the action themselves.

Which brings me to something interesting about Marathon's story.

The player character, the Security Officer, has surprisingly little agency within the narrative.  At a guess, I'd say that's because it would be almost impossible to express his own thoughts and emotions with the way the plot is relayed.  It's true that most games -- especially in the FPS genre -- tell you what to do.  Rescue the princess.  Save the world.  Prevent nuclear catastrophe.  Etc.  Etc.  But this is normally done in an abstract sense, by presenting you a clear goal and some means to achieve it.  Even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have an overarching goal that you're meant to be slowly working your way toward.  

But while your actions in a given game are generally understood to be working toward the stated goal, the player is usually presented in the narrative as having a choice – or perhaps more accurately as having chosen prior to the beginning of the game proper – regarding whatever path the game puts them on.  Mario has chosen to go save Princess Toadstool.  Link has chosen to go find the pieces of the Triforce and save Princess Zelda.  Sonic has chosen to confront Doctor Robotnik.  Even the Doom Guy has chosen to fight the demons infesting the moons of Mars on his own rather than saying "fuck it" and running.  The reasons for these choices may in some cases be left up to the player to sort out or to apply their imagination, but the point remains.  These characters have chosen their destinies.

The Security Officer from the Marathon trilogy, by contrast, does not.  Throughout the games, he is presented as following orders.  "Install these three circuits in such-and-such locations".  "Scout out this area". "Clear the hostile aliens out of this section of the ship". And so on, and so forth.  Even in the backstory, found in the manual, the character is just doing his job, responding to a distress call before he fully realizes the sheer scale of the problem.  The player, as the Security Officer, is always moving from one objective to the next on the orders of different AI constructs who happen to be in control of him – more or less – at a given time.  The Security Officer is clearly a participant in events, but he lacks true agency.

In fairness, it must have been hard to figure out how to tell a compelling story within the context of a first-person shooter back in the early 90s, which is why so few people did it.  

I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to explain it well (understatement; I'm not any kind of programmer), but the basic gist of it is that games like Doom weren't technically in 3D.  The environments were rendered in such a way that they appeared in three dimensions from the player's perspective, but as earlier versions of source ports like ZDoom made clear, this was an illusion, one that was shattered the moment you enabled mouse aiming and observed the environments from any angle other than dead-ahead.  The enemies, meanwhile, were 2D sprites, which was common in video games of any type for the day.

This was how Marathon was set up as well.  It's how basically every first-person shooter worked until the release of Quake – and some after it.

The problem is that this doesn't lend itself very well to more cinematic storytelling.  Sprites tended not to be very expressive given the lower resolutions of the day.  At least, not sprites drawn to relatively realistic proportions like the ones in Doom and Marathon. So you couldn't really do cinematic storytelling sequences with them, and that left only a handful of other options for getting your story across.

You could do what I tend to think of as Dynamic Stills, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES.  At its best, it enables comic book-style storytelling, but that's about as far as it goes.

You can do FMV cutscenes, which at the time basically involved bad actors in cheap costumes filmed against green screens or really low-budget sets.  CG was relatively uncommon (and likely prohibitivesly expensive) even in the mid-90s.

You can do mostly text, interspersed throughout your game.

You can just not have much story at all.

Doom opted for option four.  John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in video games is like story in porn.  Everybody expects it to be there, but nobody really cares about it.  

I disagree with this sentiment pretty vehemently, as it happens.  There are some games that aren't well served by a large amount of plot, and Doom is definitely one of them.  But to state that this is or should be true for the medium as a whole is frankly ridiculous.

There's something refreshing, almost freeing, about a game that has less a story than a premise. Doom starts off on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has been invaded by demons from hell.  They've gained access by virtue of human scientists' experimentation with teleportation technology gone horribly, horribly wrong.  The second episode sees you teleported to Deimos, which as been entirely swallowed up by Hell, and which segues from the purely technological/military environments of Doom to more supernatural environs.  Episode 3 has you assaulting Hell proper.  Doom II's subtitle, Hell on Earth, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the setting and premise of the game.

That's it.  There are no characters to develop or worry about.  It's just you as the lone surviving marine, your improbably large arsenal, and all the demons Hell can throw at you.  Go nuts.

Bungie, meanwhile, took a different approach.  I can't seem to find out which of their founders said it, but they have been on record as basically being diametrically opposed to Id Software in their attitude about story.  "The purpose of games is to tell stories."  I wish I knew who at Bungie said that.

Marathon is very much a story-oriented game.  Of the aforementioned methods of storytelling, they opted for option three: text, and lots of it.

Marathon's story is complex and labyrinthine, especially as it continues through the sequels (Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity), and is open to interpretation at various points.  Much is left for the player to piece together themselves.  Aside from the player character, the story mainly centers on the actions of three AI constructs: Leela (briefly), Durandal, and Tycho.  Their actions, in the face of an invasion by a race of alien slavers called the Pfohr, drive the story.  

Their words and actions are relayed to the player by way of text at terminals scattered throughout the game's environments.  Some of these take the form of orders and objectives given by the AI to the player character, the Security Officer.  Some of these are more musings or rants (two out of the three AIs you work for over the course of the Marathon trilogy are not exactly all there), which serve to flesh out events happening beyond the player's observations, and help build the world.  Some of these are seemingly random bits of background information, presented as if they were being accessed by someone else (often an enemy) before they were distracted by something – usually you, shooting everything in sight.  

Design-wise, there are some interesting differences.

Doom is old-school from a time when that was the only school, with levels that strike a nice balance between video game-y and still giving at least a vague sense that they were built to be something other than deathtrap mazes.  But what makes them old-school, at this point, is the fact that they're levels, with discrete starting and ending points, where your goal is to move from the former to the latter and hit the button or throw the lever to end it and begin the next one.

There's no plot to lose the thread of, no series of objectives for you to lose track of if you put the game down for a week, or a month, or longer still.  It's extremely pick-up-and-play, equally well suited to killing twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, as you like.

The appeal (aesthetics aside) of Doom is also at least in part its accessibility.  It has a decently high skill ceiling (which is to say, the level of skill required to play at an expert level), but a surprisingly low skill floor (the level of skill required to play with basic proficiency), which has lent it a certain evergreen quality. And Id Software has been keen to capitalize on this.  Doom is one of a small number of PC games (Diablo II is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head; what is it with games that have you fighting demons from Hell?) that have been commercially viable and available basically from the day they were released.  In addition to DOS on PCs, Doom was rejiggered for Windows 95, and also (eventually) saw release for Mac.  Also, it's been sold for multiple consoles: the Super NES, the Sega 32X (regrettably), the Atari Jaguar (also regrettably), the PlayStation, the N64, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox One (the 360 version again, via backward compatibility).  And source ports have kept the PC version alive and kicking, adding now-standard features like mouse aiming, particle effects, and support for widescreen displays.

The result is a game that, if you don't mind pixelated graphics, is as ferociously playable today as it was twenty-four years ago (as of this writing), and has enjoyed a kind of longevity usually not seen outside the realm of first-party Nintendo classics.

Marathon by contrast is somewhat less inviting.  

From a technical standpoint, Marathon is more or less the equal of Doom. The environments throughout the series are rendered at a somewhat higher resolution, but the enemies are less well animated.  Marathon also introduced the idea of mouse aiming to the FPS genre, and allowed the player to use that to look (and aim) vertically, which hadn't been done before either.  Even Doom, though it also introduced more vertical gameplay, locked the player's movement to the strictly horizontal; vertical aiming was accounted for automatically, although source ports have modernized this. Marathon leans into its verticality a little more as a result, and level layouts are more complex, bordering on the impossiblely convoluted without the aid of your automap.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marathon would classify as a survival horror game, there are some elements of that genre in it.  This is almost certainly unintentional, and I'm identifying them as such retroactively (the genre hadn’t really arrived yet). Still, they exist.  Ammunition is more scarce than in Doom, forcing the player to lean on the lower end of their arsenal far later into the game than Doom does. Some weapons also feature alternate fire modes, which was a genre first.  

Health packs are nonexistent; instead, the player can recharge their health at terminals designed for this purpose, usually placed very sparingly.  Saving is also handled at dedicated terminals – a decision better befitting a console game, and somewhat curious here.  In addition to health, there is also an air gauge, which depletes gradually whenever the player is in vacuum or underwater, and which can be difficult to find refills for.

Marathon also marks the early appearance of weapon magazines in the first-person shooter genre.  Doom held to the old design established by Wolfenstein and older games that the player fires their weapons straight from the ammo reserves.  If you have a hundred shotgun rounds, then you can fire a hundred times, no reload necessary.  The reloading mechanic as we would most readily recognize it seems to have been added for the genre with Half-Life, for reasons of greater realism and introducing tension to the game.  

Marathon's version of this, as you might expect for a pioneering effort, is pretty rough.  There is no way to manually reload your weapons when you want.  Rather, the game will automatically cycle through the reload animation once you empty the magazine.  It does helpfully display how many rounds remain in the magazine at all times so you know how many you have left before a reload, and can plan accordingly. But it still exerts the familiar reload pressure, just in a different way.  Rather than asking yourself whether you have the spare seconds for a reload to top off your magazine, now you have to ask yourself whether it's wiser to just fire the last few rounds of the magazine to trigger the reload now, when it's safe, so that you have a full magazine ready to go for the next encounter.  Marathon's tendency to leave you feeling a little more ammo-starved than Doom makes this decision an agonizing one at times.  

Id's game is pretty sparing with the way it doles out rockets and energy cells for the most high-powered weapons, true.  But the real workhorse weapons, the shotgun and the chaingun, have ammo lying around in plenty.  Past a certain early point in any given episode of Doom or Doom II, as long as you diligently grab whatever ammo you come across and your aim is even halfway decent, you never have to worry about running out.  Marathon, by contrast, sees you relying on your pistol for a good long while. Compared to other weapons you find, it has a good balance of accuracy and availability of ammunition.  

The overall pacing and difficulty of both games is also somewhat different.  

Both games are hard, but in different ways.  Doom has enemies scattered throughout a level in ones and twos, but most of the major encounters feature combinations and larger numbers.  But the plentiful ammo drops and health packs mean the danger of these encounters tends to be relatively isolated, and encourages fast maneuvering and some risk-taking.  If you can make it through a given encounter, you usually have the opportunity to heal up and re-arm before the next one.  Doom is centered around its action.  It gives you the shotgun – which you’ll be using for most of the game, thanks to its power – as early as the first level if you’re on the lookout for secrets, and by the second level, you really can’t miss it.

Marathon, by contrast, paces itself (and the player) differently.  Ammo gets doled out more sparingly, and health recharge stations are likewise placed few and far between (rarely more than one or two in a stage, at least so far as I’ve played, and small enough that they can be easily overlooked).  Save points are likewise not always conveniently placed, and the fact that the game has save points means that you can’t savescum, and dying can result in a fair amount of lost progress.  The result is that, unless you’re closer to the skill ceiling, you tend to play more carefully and conservatively.  You learn to kite enemies, stringing them along to let you take on as few at a time as possible.

The tactics I developed to play games like Doom and later Quake didn’t always serve me very well when I first started playing Marathon. The main danger in Bungie’s game is the death of a thousand cuts. Where Doom attempts in most cases to destroy you in a single fell swoop, Marathon seeks to wear you down bit by bit until you have nothing left, and you’re jumping at shadows, knowing that the next blow to fall may be your last.  It encourages more long-term thinking.  Similar to a survival horror game, every clip spent and every hit taken has meaning, and can alter your approach to the scenario you find yoruself in.

In short, if Doom is paced like a series of sprints, Marathon is, well... a marathon.

Another interesting difference is how both games deal with their inherent violence.  

As games which feature future military men mowing down whole legions of enemies by the time the credits roll, violence is a matter of course. It becomes casual.  But both games confront it in different ways.

Doom was one of the games that helped stir up a moral panic in the U.S. in the early to mid-90s (alongside Mortal Kombat, most notably).  While I don't agree with it, it was hardly surprising.  Doom gloried in its violence.  Every enemy went down covered in blood (some of them came at you that way), some of them straight-up liquefying if caught too near an explosion.  This is to say nothing of all the hearts on altars or dead marines littering the landscape to provide the proper ambiance.

The idea was simple: You were surrounded by violent monsters, and the only way to overcome them was to become equally violent.  The game's fast pace and adrenaline-rushing gameplay only served to emphasize this.  Doom isn't a stupid game by any means – it requires a certain amount of cleverness and a good sense of direction in addition to good reflexes and decent aim to safely navigate its levels -- but the primary direction it makes you think in is how? How do I get through this barrier, how do I best navigate through these dark halls, how do I approach this room full of enemies that haven't seen me yet?

Marathon asks those questions as well, because any decent game is constantly asking you those questions, because they are all variations on the same basic question any game of any kind (video games, board games, whatever) is asking you: How do you overcome the challenges the game throws at you using the tools and abilities the game gives you?

The difference (well, the narrative difference, distinct from all the rest) is that Marathon also talks about the violence seemingly inherent in human nature as one of a variety of things in its narrative.  

To be fair, Marathon brings it up pretty briefly in its terminal text.  But one of the terminals highlights Durandal's musings on the Security Officer, and humankind in general.  

Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

Indeed, it may be seen as not just useful, but a necessary and essential component of humanity.  Certainly it's vital to the Security Officer's survival and ultimate victory in the story of the games.

And yet, on the whole, Marathon is a less violent game.  Or at least, it glories in its violence less.  Enemies still go down in a welter of their own blood, because that happens when you shoot a living creature full of bullet holes.  But it's less gory on the whole – bloody like a military movie, bloody as a matter of fact, in contrast to Doom's cartoonishly overwrought slasher-flick excess.

And yet it's Marathon that feels compelled to grapple with its violence, to ask what motivates it, not just in the moment, but wherever it appears in the nature and history of humankind.

On the whole, I think I come down on the side of Marathon, personally.  Its themes, its aesthetic, and its characters are more to my liking.  True, part of this is simply because Marathon has characters. Doom has the player character and a horde of enemies.  Even the final boss of each installment has no narrative impact to speak of.  They simply appear in order to be shot down.  They're presented as the forces behind the demonic invasion, but aside from being bigger and stronger than all the other demons you face, there's no real sense of presence, narratively.  And that's fine.  But on the balance, I tend to prefer story in my games, and Marathon delivers, even as it's sometimes a bit janky, even as I get the feeling that Bungie's reach exceeded their grasp with it.

I can recognize Doom as the game that's more accessible, and probably put together a little better, and of course infinitely more recognizable.  Id still sells it, and generally speaking, it's worth the five whole dollars (ten if you want Doom II as well) it'll cost you on PSN, or Xbox Live, or Steam.

Bungie, meanwhile, gave the Marathon trilogy away for free in the early 2000s.  It's how I finally managed to play it, despite never owning a Mac.  There are source ports that allow it to be played on PCs (or Linux, even).  About the only new development in the franchise was an HD remaster of Marathon 2: Durandal for the Xbox 360.  In the same vein as the remasters for Halo or Halo 2, this version changes nothing about the original except to update the graphics and adapt the control scheme for a 360 controller.

I'd love to see a remake of Marathon with modern technology, even though I know it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen.  Bungie's occupied with Destiny for the foreseeable future.  The most we've gotten in ages is a few Easter eggs.  343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo featured Durandal's symbol prominently on his mechanical eye, which fueled speculation for a little while that perhaps Halo took place in the same continuity.  There's another Easter egg in Destiny 2 that suggests two of its weapons, the MIDA Multi-tool and the MIDA Mini-tool, fell out of an alternate universe where Marathon's events occurred instead of Destiny's. But that's been it.

The tragedy of Marathon is that it wasn't in a position for its innovations to be felt industry-wide.

Doom had the better overall playability and greater accessibility.  If you were to ask where a lot of FPS genre innovations came from, the average gamer would probably not point to Marathon as the progenitor of those things.  Quake would probably get credit for adding mouse aiming (even though it wasn't a standard menu option, and had to be enabled with a console command), or else maybe Duke Nukem 3D. Unreal would most likely get credited as the genesis of alternate firing modes, while Half-Life is probably the one most people remember for introducing the notion of reloading weapons.  I'm not totally sure which other FPS would get the nod for mainstreaming the greater presence of story in the genre – probably Half-Life again.

But since it's free, I would strongly recommend giving the Marathon trilogy a spin.  It's a little rough around the edges even judged by the standards of its time, but still eminently playable, with a strong story told well. And if it seems at times like the FPS That History Forgot, well, that's because History was mostly looking the other way at the time. It's part of the appeal for me, too.  It feels at times like a "lost" game.

Let that add to its mystique.

[matt-skc-rp]

Something Wicked Comes (AU pt. 2) || Gabbie, Suzy and Matt

Matt was with Gabbie today while they went shopping for some winter clothes, since she had gained some weight and her clothes didn’t fit. It was a whole process of getting her to get out of the house and for him to reassure her that she and him were still talking baby steps, like some couples do. Matt couldn’t help in the back of his mind think about what Kristen had said when he begged her to come: “You can’t have a real relationship if it only works with other people around.” He had argued it wasn’t for him just in case he didn’t mess up, it was for Gabbie. From what he understood, she has strong feelings but isn’t comfortable with talking to him about the feelings. Her friends make her comfortable enough to get them out and for him to hear it. Kristen promptly suggested they tried an activity by themselves, and that she isn’t like that all the time. Just because she was heavily flirtatious and playing hard to get at first doesn’t mean she’s still that way.

“You think these jeans are cute?” She asked, pressing into his side and pointing to the rack, Matt’s arm slowly losing circulation. Matt nodded quietly and didn’t mean to give a lackluster response, straightening up and clearing his throat.

“I think you should try a light wash with that design, it’ll compliment your waist line,” he said.

“You don’t mean that ~ you’re just looking at my thighs and fat ass.. stop objectifying me!~” She giggled flirtatiously, trying to hold in that his compliment changed her cheeks to deep pink. “Objectifying my body is a one way ticket to-“

“I was just... answering your question, Gab. No need for the feminism lecture today. I have a sister and Kristen is my sister, she helped me understand fashion and your body shape...now I think I might actually be colorblind when it comes to fashion so I can’t help you there,” he cut her off gently.

Gabbie has been just so drunk lately when it came to Matt, so she let his explanation slide. Lockdown really softened her guard around him and liked that they had chances to understand where they were coming from to try and make it work. The man has also not shaved his beard in weeks and said that he was sponsored by this new beard company to try and grow his beard out using their care products. She has watched it grow in four months now and it just mesmerizes her to the point where she couldn’t hide how she felt and the products being vegan and all natural with strong herbs and oils didn’t help either. It was like catnip to her.

She struggled with his feelings for her because she couldn’t help but think he’s changed in a certain way since the lockdown started. He talks about Suzy being in the house due to the protocol and says that he’s been only hanging out with her. It just didn’t sit right. Kristen said that there wasn’t anything going on and that they have always had a fluid bond. Rosanna didn’t have much to say and could only say be careful to her. She was so suspicious after that. She couldn’t stand a cheater, and she knows that Kristen would back her up. As the trip went on, much like a very normal date they have, it bothered her so much that he might be doing something with Suzy and not telling her. Hell, they might actually be together or something and she’s the side chick! She couldn’t bring herself to be humiliated like that. They had been walking side by side through the mall sharing an AirPod each listening to a playlist that Matt made. She couldn’t Iie that she loved these little things that he’d do for them to make their time more special. Surely, that means he’s not cheating or anything. Are they even together? “Matthew?”

“Yeah babe?” He asked, looking down, “Where’d you wanna go next? Or did you wanna start heading home?”

“We could... probably start heading home.. but... I gotta ask. What do you do with Suzy?” She asked shyly as she sipped her pumpkin spice latte.

Matt was confused just as he heard him get a call on his phone from Suzy, “Sorry... Hey Suzy what’s up?”

Uhh... are you in the house right now?

“No I’m not, I went on that date with Gabbie, say hi Gabs!” He chirped, looking down and seeing the girl shaking her head, “Why not? You were just asking about her, so now you can ask the both of us!”

“I just- so are you sleeping with Matt or not, Suzy?” She spat, her tone changing quickly.

WHat?! N-no!.. I only called him to ask if he could help me with my shoot again. The proofs from the last one were so good I was gonna ask if he wanted to do it anytime I asked for a cut of the profit.. boring business stuff...b-but you guys are on a date! I-I’ll just catch him later ~!

“No! If you don’t mind I’d like to ask you a few questions if you have the time, because I’m curious what kind shoot it is,” she said, matching Matt’s energy, “Also what cut of these profits are you talking about?”

Uhh... O-o-ok~... it’s my OnlyFans and my Patreon. I got some exclusive items and sexy pinups that I release. Being in Theta, I just happened upon him in the laundry room and asked him, since I know he majors in camerawork I figured he wouldn’t mind helping me,” she explained, “I-Is there a problem?

“I think I got everything I needed to know. I was just curious because he had mentioned he was working with you and just wanted to check,” Gabbie said, looking at Matt.

“Uhh.. Suze I’ll call you about doing that later. My answer for right now is yes, alright? I’ll uhh- you know what? Just send me a contract and a schedule and we’ll work on it later...”

“Alright, later babe.”

“Babe?!... Are you kidding me?” Gabbie jumped.

“Gabbie she calls everybody babe, you’re not about to catch an attitude over a term of endearment, are you?” He said flatly while holding the door outside the mall for their ride.

“Don’t tell me what I am and am not allowed to catch, Matthew. You lied to me!” She said, “She knew we were on a date, she just wanted to ruin my time with you by asking when she’s gonna see you and the fact that you let it happen means you two do more than just those photo shoots!”

“You know how I am about my work, love-“

“And I know how you are right when you’re done too! You’re always too busy ‘putting your stuff away’ to talk to me when I know from the shoots you do for me you wait for your lights to cool down.”

“You don’t have an OnlyFans, Gabbie-“

“So you’re just gonna admit to it right here that you like her more than me?” She asked, her heart sinking into her stomach, her body heating up like crazy in the mountain cold.

“No! She’s like Kristen to me! A really good friend and I work with them a lot because they need good camerawork for their art-“

“Her body isn’t just ‘art’ to you!” She snapped, “Stop fucking lying to me, I’m not fucking stupid! You have a built in girlfriend at home and you take me out for show because you’re a damn dog!”

“Gabbie.” He straightens and picks up his AirPod that fell off of her and sticks them both in the case before shoving it into his pocket and following the girl who stormed off. The girl has been trying to compose herself and not make a scene but her head was going a mile a minute and she was just so embarrassed. She couldn’t believe he made her feel so stupid as to think she should have ignored the signs. She was in the middle of trying to find an Uber when Matt confronted her, “I’m not gonna touch you but our ride is almost here.”

“I’m not riding with you to do anything anywhere anymore!” She said, turning around and pointing into his chest.

“Gabbie can you calm down for me, please?” He pleaded, keeping his tone quiet and even, “I don’t like Suzy more than you because I spend more time with her because she lives in my house. That’s too easy, and I wouldn’t think you’d air me out and banish me because of something we can’t help-”

“It’s process of elimination, Matthew! Don’t fucking lie to me, I’m not fucking stupid!”

“Gabbie, I’m not lying to you-”

“Then why aren’t you friends with the guys?!”

“Most of the school’s males hate me-”

“That sounds like a personal problem-”

“No the FUCK it’s not! It wasn’t fair, and you know why it wasn’t fair! Did I not make sure to show you every way possible that you have priority in my life? How is it fair that I get accused because you don’t like how something seems?”

“Well it isn’t fair to me that you just take me out for show, while she’s the live-in girl who gets whatever the fuck she wants from you! She clearly has priority over me, and I am not going to be dogged!” she pointed into his chest, turning away and folding her arms.

“Gabbie...” Matt said quietly, trying to get her to calm down, but picked up the AirPod off the ground and put them both in the case in his pocket. He sighed and blinked slowly, sticking his tongue in his cheek and nodding slowly. He stood off to the side and started flipping through his phone, texting Kristen about their ordeal at the mall. Gabbie tried not to look at him from where she was standing as he lit up a cigarette and wanted to ask him for it. She wanted to kiss the beard he was growing to make it grow more. She loved her nails sailing through his beard and the way he idly held her while she did it. It pained her that she had jumped up once again to ruin something that wasn’t necessarily an issue in the first place. Her train of thought is broken when she noticed him looking at her, but she turned away because she couldn’t take her humiliation. She knows that if he didn’t care he would have walked off and left her or worse. She was standing as close to herself as she could, cursing her attire being out of season and the denim jacket not being enough. Matt saw, sighing and taking off his larger outer jacket, thinking that she still isn’t used to dressing for the mountain air with a bite. He gently draped it over her and went back over to his spot as Gabbie still stood away from him. “Are you going to cancel your Uber?” he asked nicely.

“No, but thanks for the jacket, though,” she said, but didn’t mean to say. She couldn’t just concede because he was being nice right now..or the whole trip. He’s just trying to get her back on his side. 

“Then I’ll hold my ride and wait until your ride comes.”

“No, you’re not. I don’t need you to wait with me I can just go back into the mall-”

“No you can't, actually. The vestibule for the mall closes in 15 minutes because the mall closes in 30. If your ride isn’t even located then you’ll be out here for another half an hour at the least. Also, there’s woods behind us, there’s still tons of mall and store employees that are in there and I wouldn’t want to find out that they got to you.”

“Oh well-”

“Ga- fine. If you think you can tough it out there’s a pocket knife in my jacket- inside left breast pocket,” he said finally, walking back to the ride share location and calling Suzy back to have their business call, figuring it will take his mind off of things. Gabbie was intensely better, warming up now that his jacket was around her. She was getting lost in the smells: his cologne, his sweat, his beard product, hair product when his hair got too long. The cigarettes he usually smokes. It all felt like she had made a mistake. Why couldn’t she ever just drop it for a second to get exactly what she wanted? She was trying her best to ignore him standing there as he spoke casually about business to Suzy. Now he's all gone and chalked up their date as a bad date because she decided to pry.

 "So...we should address that... thing that we did-" Suzy started.

"I've decided it's not happening again, and I'll put her on FaceTime just to make sure I don't lapse again, especially now that you're trying to pay me, honey. I wouldn't mince a business opportunity like that," he said as his cigarette finished.

"Matt, what about other times? What about if we're just.... nevermind~"

"No not nevermind, what's up?" He asked, pulling out his vape, not realizing that their little trade off the last time had caused her to get more ideas, "I thought we agreed it's a one time thing. You weren't exactly sure when it happened the first time, so I figured it wouldn't matter."

Suzy bit her lip even though he couldn't see and paused at his words. She didn't know if it was the cabin fever or what but she did know she wanted more. It had all came down that Gabbie might have been right: she did call him on purpose. She only remembered the date because he reminded her, and he'd reminded her a lot. The pulling away, the lingering stares, his way of being as respectful as possible.. why did she want him like this? Was it because she's been having to hear his frustrations with whether he and Gabbie are going to work and she can feel that he's lonely? "Well, let's be honest. It takes two to tango and what Gabbie doesn't know wouldn't hurt her, right? You guys are still figuring it out... she didn't really have to come at you like that when I even remember watching her ignore you at a party and you were supposed to be with her that night. Maybe you should..uhh.."

"You're right, Suzy, but here's the thing. She asked that I give her that patience because she had been hurt before and has had a history of people... just not giving her a chance.. I'll finish that sentence for you, too- you want me to sit her down and let her know I'm still exploring my options and she shouldn't jump to any conclusions given the situation. However, I don't really remember you and I having a conversation about being serious.. so are just asking for a fuck buddy or.. like a no strings attached deal until quarantine lifts?" He said as he took a drag.

"I guess? But..I dunno~" she said, "Depends on how you feel. You did say you had some feelings for me-"

"Yeah back when I was alone, drunk, and burying myself in my work and you bought into the idea that I was a creep, I feel like you like me because Gabbie likes me but it's taking too long and so now because I got you off you're catching some feelings," he explained.

"Laws of attraction, I guess," she said, almost defeated.

"Look, that's why I said what I said then before we even got into anything..so how about this?.. I'll work for you, and then I'll give you access to hang out with the connotation that we are trying to build something. If it's not real, then it'll fizzle out after January or until I say that I'd rather be with Gabs. Now, I will ask you just like I will ask her, would you like anyone to know about this interaction, including her?" He asked.

Suzy didn't exactly know what to say. She just wanted the fun without the whole idea that they were committed, but she wasn't sure why he was so sure about having the both of them not attached to him, but she thinks that comes from him knowing he doesn't want to deny his feelings between them and instead of acting like it has to be hard, he's making it easier said and letting them prove if it's easier done as well. "Uhm... well, what if I don't want that?" She prodded, "What if... she finds out and addresses me?"

"That's why I asked if you wanted to discuss disclosure. Right now I'm being fair because I had a very similar conversation with Gabbie, and we're doing exactly what she wants, even though today she overstepped a boundary. That's not your business, just like I told her it's not hers to ask those types of questions since she agreed to keeping things fairly platonic until she was able to open up to me. It's not perfect but this is the only way I see this working unless you two wanna tali about it, but I can't have any input I can just be present for the talks... Otherwise I'm looking forward to doing business with you, and we can keep talking about it when I drop off Gabbie at Alpha," he said as he paced lightly to keep himself warm.

"Back up... Did you tell her.. what we did?" She asked, getting the thought.

"Not at all, she just had a really good hunch. Probably something she's cooking up to do but her condition or treatment isn't allowing her to outright say anything," he said with a smirk, watching the car come up, "My ride's here, and Kristen has been blowing my phone up so I'll talk to you later."

Gabbie jogged to the open door as she saw the car pull up and got in with Matt. The girl had been sitting there overthinking about how she had really messed things up and embarrassed herself. She had gotten a bunch of texts and voice messages from Kristen, mostly making sure that the girl was okay and offers to be on the phone with her until her ride arrived. She cleared and ignored them as she canceled her ride sitting as far away from Matt as possible. He looked at her, moving closer but careful not to touch her. "Gabbie?" He asked quietly, only to be met with a heavy sigh, "I'm sorry that Suzy interrupted our date, and that I invalidated you and your feelings. I couldn't see the fact that you were trying very hard today. Now that I recognize it, what would you like for me to do?"

The girl felt like her neck would snap off if she looked at him, but she made the risk even though her eyes shot daggers. She didn't want to be mad, but she just didn't know how to not be.. at least not yet. She looked down at the coat, not hearing everything he had said and thought he was asking for the jacket back. She didn't move because part of her knew it wasn't about the jacket. The girl felt his lips on her cheek and his beard smell flooding her nose, the hairs gently brushing against her skin, "M-matt~ that tickles~!" She blushed harder, so hard she thought he could feel the heat as he pulled away. She felt his smirk and the breath pushing against her neck, making her shudder, and finally reaching her hand up to clutch the hair under his chin. He slid his hands under the shell of his jacket to pull her close. "So what's the deal?" She asked, throwing her legs over his as his thumb rubbed the small of her back and his face buried in her neck, her hand idly scraping and turning some of his curled soft hair, "Do you hate me? Did i ruin your business deal?.. Also this needs to be cut down or brushed and combed more. It's rougher like right here."

"Everything is fine. And no I don't hate you, you know that," he cooed to her, living in one of his favorite places with her, especially in the dull him of the open road and the warm car, "I'm making fifteen percent profit for every session for the month... I get to FaceTime you the whole time I'm there just in case."

"Oh baby, I just...I didn't mea~mmmh, you... you don't have to do that for me~" he ate up the noise she made, making two noise back quickly to negate her statement as he pulled back after she failed to push him.

"I want to, baby... you deserve to know my integrity... also I miss you while I work, that's why I offered it to her, she didn't have an issue either way as long she got her good proof," he shifted and rested comfortably with her there.

"Proof of what?" She asked innocently, "That she's a girl gamer?"

Matt chucked, "No.. that's what the photos are called before they're touched up and printed-"

"Like Photoshop touch up?... How much work does she need on her pictures?" She asked, turning her head towards him, her voice perking up excitedly.

"The time of day when you take a picture can lower the quality or the lighting can be too strong or there might be little imperfections that need touching up like flyaways and smudged makeup or the prop isn't good quality.." he said staring at her lips, squeezing her gently, taking to her softly, "Remember when I did Kristen's shoot and it took me a few days to get the photos out?.. That's why."

Gabbie made a soft noise as she played in his facial hair before pulling him in for a soft secret kiss, Matt following up with several more. "Can I just... like wear your clothes until the end of winter?.."

"You can wear all of my tops but only my sweats probably..." he said sitting up a little.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

To Be or not to Be

It’s the weirdest thing when you meet your former best friend, and you have nothing in common any more.

Bonnie was at the shopping mall to grab a new book. She loved spending her weekends curled up in a blanket, reading a good story while drinking a hot tea, only stopping for the occasional food, bathroom, or vinyl break.

Her professor had left early today because she had been having a migraine attack, which left the afternoon of most English Literature students at the university, including Bonnie, wide open.

Her mind occupied with what book to buy and what ice cream to complement it with, Bonnie didn’t even see the young man who had stepped in her way until she almost ran into him.

“Got any change?” he asked.

Without looking at him, Bonnie replied, “Not really. I prefer spending the little money I have via credit card. It seems counterintuitive, but it somehow works for me. I spend less when I’m not sure how much I have left.”

“He didn’t ask for spending tips, he just asked for a little change.”

The voice seemed strangely familiar.

“Well, I don’t have any, okay?”

The face looked familiar, too. So much so that Bonnie said, “Belinda, is that you? I didn’t recognise you with that green hair and your, ahem, new look.”

“Belinda? Who calls you Belinda these days? This is Bindy. And she’s a proud fuck up, just like we all are,” the man in Bonnie’s way howled.

“Don’t scare her like that, Buck. Bonnie is a delicate soul.”

“Bonnie. Another potential B for our exclusive club. Wanna join the ‘Five B’s’, make it the ‘Six B’s’ instead? Bindy has been lonely lately, and you’re kinda her type. For some reason, she likes bookworms.”

“Shut up, Buck. Don’t listen to him, Bonnie. He’s just trying to get a reaction out of you. Besides, I’m not even looking for someone new. I’m perfectly fine on my own.”

Belinda paused for a moment before she smiled and added, “But Buck is right about one thing. This will be a pretty lonesome weekend for me. Alone in the woods with two couples. We’re going on a little trip, you know. A weekend getaway in the hinterland. Billy knows the owner of what he calls an oasis in the mountain woods. Don’t try to explain to him that an oasis is always situated in a desert. He’s hell-bent on using the phrase.”

“It sounds cool,” said a small guy with a half shaved head. He was sitting next to a lanky man with long bleached hair who said, “It fucking does, babe.”

They were both wearing skinny jeans with holes at the knees and a The Clash T-shirt. That generally seemed to be the uniform look of the group.

Bonnie looked at the ground as she said, “An oasis in the forest is indeed an oxymoron. Unless, of course, he’s referring to the secondary meaning of the word ‘oasis’ as a refuge. Then it’s perfectly fitting. Either way, I wasn’t gonna say anything.”

“Of course not. You never wanted to hurt anybody’s feelings. So I’m sure you won’t hurt mine when I ask you now if you’d join us on our little trip?” asked Belinda with a slightly shy yet beaming smile.

Bonnie looked back down at the floor as she answered, “I already have plans for the weekend.”

“Do they involve other people, or will you be alone in your apartment watching sad movies all day long?” said the young man called Buck, who was still standing much too close for Bonnie’s comfort.

“Not sad movies but a good book will be my companion this weekend,” she replied, looking up defiantly. “Plus, I have a paper to finish. I’d rather stay in.”

“Oh, come on, Bonnie, live a little,” said Belinda. “How often have you stayed in a mansion? And the two of us will have a lot of time to catch up while these four keep each other company.”

“Keep each other company? We’ll fuck each other’s brains out. At least Billy and I will. I don’t know about these two prudes,” said the tall guy with the bleached hair while pressing his boyfriend’s hand.

“Who are you calling a prude?” The girl with the pink short hair grabbed the buttocks of Buck, who grunted with what seemed delight.

“Stop your squabbling,��� said Belinda, “you’re scaring my friend off. Please, come with us, Bonnie. I promise you they’ll behave. It’ll just be like old times, when we were the Two B’s, just that it’s now the Six B’s.”

Bonnie smiled while her thoughts were racing. It would indeed be nice to spend some time with Belinda, Bonnie had missed her quite a lot over the years. And her story-filled mind craved an actual adventure in real life. But she also really needed a quiet weekend alone, it had been a stressful week.

Plus, her feelings were a little hurt. Back in the day, the Two B’s had only been the two of them, Belinda and Bonnie, nobody else was allowed in the club. That had been the rule.

Apparently, that wasn’t true any more.

Bonnie felt hurt on a deep, personal level. It even went so far, that it ruined the treasured memory of something she had never shared with anyone, not even Belinda.

Because Bonnie had always thought of the Two B’s as the “To Be's”, a reference to Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be”. Every time they had called themselves by their club’s nickname, Bonnie couldn’t help but think of that famous line: to be, or not to be, that is the question.

She cynically thought that in terms of their friendship being unique, the answer had to be a “not to be” after all. That realisation made Bonnie pretty sad and stung quite a bit, but then, to her surprise, her thoughts turned somewhat angry.

Billy, Bobby, and Becky weren’t even names that started with a B, there were just nicknames that started with a B. Those certainly weren’t their birth names. Unlike Belinda and Bonnie, those were proper B-names. And Buck, what kind of name was that? Was that even his given name or just some random word he called himself?

Bonnie didn’t care to find out. The more she thought about it, the more she was looking forward to her time on the sofa with a good book in one hand a an ice cream cone in the other.

* * *

Three hours later, Bonnie got out of the one car they had all shared, thinking that she really needed to work on her ability to say “no”. She had been cooped up in the middle seat in the back of the car with Belinda to her right and Buck and Becky to her left.

Those two had been sharing a seat and had been furiously making out for the whole drive. Sitting next to them had been uncomfortable to say the least.

After everyone had stepped out of the car, the others walked over to the lawn. It was lined with a row of greyish white stones of all different shapes and sizes. The five youths lifted various of the little rocks and put them down again, getting more and more frustrated with every stone.

“Are you sure that’s our way in, jackass?” said Bobby.

“Yeah, blockhead. It has to be under one of these stones. The stone’s fist-sized, that’s all I know, ahem, I mean, remember,” replied Buck with a sideways glance at Bonnie.

“Good thing you brought me with you then because I just found it.” Becky put down a small rock and handed the key over to Buck.

“Everything’s better with you around, baby. Who would I screw if you weren’t here?”

“Yourself,” interjected Bobby, which made everybody laugh. Even Bonnie couldn’t stifle a chuckle.

Bonnie entered the house last. Its big, impressive entrance hall had a marble floor, and two wide hallways branched off to either side. But what really caught Bonnie’s eye was a long polished wooden display table with beautiful stone sculptures on top. All three of them were about the size of a wine bottle and depicted dancing fairies. The car keys were hanging from the forearm of the middle one, and it almost looked like the keys were a part of the sculpture’s attire. Behind the table, a broad, polished wooden flight of stairs went up to the upper floor.

Becky and Buck were already stumbling up the stairs. They were half tripping, half making out, as they moved towards what was probably the bedrooms, scattering the house key and several items of clothing all over the steps.

From her left, Bonnie heard Bobby howl, “Jackpot. There’s a lot of expensive-looking booze in the liquor cabinet.”

“Then let’s get shit-faced. There’s not even any reception out here, so we’ve got nothing better to do anyway,” was Billy’s answer. It was coming from the same direction.

Bonnie went the other way, down the hall to the right. There was a door not far down the corridor labelled “Guest Bathroom”. From there, the hallway continued around a corner to the left. Bonnie turned the corner and suddenly stood in a wide kitchen.

It had a country-style wooden look, and a long row of windows straight ahead directed the view to a huge and well-kept garden.

There was also a row of smaller windows to Bonnie’s right, where the stove and sink were located right next to the fridge. The refrigerator was currently open and half of Belinda’s body seemed to be lost in the vast space it opened up into. Bonnie had never seen a fridge this huge in all her life.

Belinda had a disappointed look on her face when she closed the large silver door.

“It’s turned off. There’s nothing in there.”

“Well, there’s always the cupboards,” said Bonnie with a smile.

Half an hour later, the house was filled with the lovely smell of a hearty home-cooked meal that mostly consisted of canned food. Bonnie and Belinda had both always had a knack for cooking and used to cook together quite often, so they managed to create a rather delicious meal even though they had no fresh ingredients at hand.

Becky put the first two plates of noodles with “tomato sauce à la surprise” on the long wooden table. It had eight chairs to go with it and was clearly meant to host rather big and fancy dinners, which made it perfect for their party of six.

Buck and Becky entered the room and joined Billy and Bobby on the white sofa that was standing not far from the kitchen counter, which served as a room divider.

Buck sneered at Bonnie as he said, “We wanna eat our lunch over here, sweet Miss Proper.”

“If you make breaking conventions a rule, it becomes just another convention. But have it your way, Mister Rule Breaker,” said Belinda while bringing two plates over to the group situated around the coffee table.

Bonnie followed Belinda’s example and took the two plates she had just put down on the big table with her when she joined the others. There was hardly any room for the plates since there were already a half-empty bottle of expensive vodka and six shot glasses on the coffee table, but they managed to make it work somehow.

They sat around the small glass table, most of them sitting on the floor and putting their food and drink on the couch, ground, or their laps.

The lovely alcove by the windows looked like a mess after they had finished their meal. Becky had managed to spill tomato sauce on the delicate white fabric of the sofa, but no one seemed to care. Buck just flipped the cushion over, and that was that.

Bonnie was piling all the plates and cutlery into a tower of dirty dishes and was about to carry them to the kitchen, when Buck insisted on everyone sharing a toast. He was smoking a cigarette, using a gorgeous small ceramic bowl that had been sitting on the windowsill behind him as an improvised ashtray.

“But I don’t drink. I’ll just wash the dishes while you guys go ahead,” said Bonnie.

“What’s one drink, dear Miss Proper? I’m sure you can handle that much,” roared Buck.

“It’s not that I can’t handle it. I just don’t like the taste of alcohol.”

“Just one shot. It’s over quickly, and then you can wash it down with a tea or whatever it is that you do enjoy the taste of.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you a chicken or what? One shot won’t even make you drunk. And I will be offended if you say no and that goes for the others too.”

They all seemed to agree, judging by the chorus of voices that followed. Bonnie was fed up with being treated like a child by most of these people, most of all Buck. So she took the shot glass he handed her and emptied it in one big gulp. She didn’t cough and didn’t even bat en eye as she put the glass back down on the table.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to wash the dishes. I don’t like living in my own filth.”

“Damn, woman. Maybe you have a backbone after all,” said Buck as Bonnie was already walking over to the sink, balancing the tower of dishes in her hands.

After Bonnie had put the dirty dishes in the sink, she noticed Belinda behind her, bringing over the shot glasses and the defiled ceramic bowl. In the background, the others were climbing out the window behind the sofa they had just sat on, trampling all over the couch while making their way to the lovely garden, completely ignoring the big slide door only a few paces away from them.

“They’re nice people once they warm up to you. It just takes them a while to let someone new in,” said Belinda while putting the glasses and bowl into the kitchen sink.

While Bonnie was still thinking about how to respond, Becky shouted from the garden, “Are you coming, Bindy? You can bring your friend.”

“Scratch that. Let little Miss Proper wash the dishes. She can join us once she’s done,” added Buck.

“Real nice people. I’m sure you’re right about that,” said Bonnie. “But I actually agree with Buck here. I prefer doing the work before play. So you guys go ahead, I’ll catch up with you later.”

“You sure? Thanks. Honestly, I’ve been dying to explore the garden. There’s this ominous slope and I want to see where it leads.”

“You go have fun, Belinda. But be careful.”

Belinda rolled her eyes and smiled as she squeezed Bonnie’s hand. Then she walked over to the sofa and climbed out the window.

Bonnie could see the others through the kitchen window while she was washing the dishes. They were standing over by the drop, looking down towards the unknown. Buck put his hands on Billy’s shoulders, pushing him forward as if he was trying to shove him over the edge, but then pulling him back. This earned him a not so soft punch in the stomach by Bobby, whose long blonde hair was blowing in the wind.

Bonnie focused on the dishes again and was a little startled when there was a soft knock on the window in front of her. Belinda smiled at her through the glass and beckoned Bonnie to follow her as she passed through to the right, following the others to a covered veranda. Bonnie couldn’t see what was over to that side because there was a waist-high wooden fence obstructing her view.

She could only see rays of golden late-afternoon light passing through the narrow slits in the fence and shadows dancing in those beams as the others moved behind it.

Being done with the dishes anyway, Bonnie decided that it was time for the fun part to begin, so she went over to the sofa, sighed at the bootprints on it and climbed out the window, too. She walked over to the wooden veranda through an open door in the fence, joining Belinda who was standing in front of a metal cage.

Belinda was staring intently at whatever was in there while grabbing Bonnie’s hand. Bonnie squeezed her friend’s hand as well and turned to see what was in the cage.

At first, she thought it was a big dog that seemed to be hiding in the shadow of the fence. But as her eyes adjusted to the darker environment of the cage, she saw that it wasn’t. The creature was much more humanoid and seemed to be squatting while its hands touched the ground. It looked completely dishevelled and seemed to be wearing scraps. In fact, the more she looked at it, the more Bonnie realised that “it” was the wrong pronoun to use. This was a woman, hiding in the shadow of the calf-covered cage. The scraps she was wearing barely covered the most delicate parts of her body.

Her face seemed to be scarred, like someone had cut her mouth open towards her ears and left a thick brownish-pink scar.

“Is that …? Is she …? Where are the others?”

Instead of saying anything, Belinda pointed her free hand at a little shack in the big cage. There were muffled noises coming form that direction, but Bonnie had almost no time to notice them because the dirt-covered woman started crawling towards them. She was moving in a strange way that didn’t seem human and was weirdly choppy.

“Are you okay, Miss? Do you need help?”

Belinda squeezed Bonnie’s hand and shushed her. The woman in the cage was still moving slowly towards them, demanding all their attention with her strange not-quite-human looks and movements, when the others suddenly burst out of the shack and came running towards the cage’s door, which had been ajar the whole time, unbeknownst to Bonnie. The terror in their eyes sent shivers down Bonnie’s spine, who took a step back, ready to run. But Belinda was still clutching Bonnie’s hand, and as Bonnie tried to pull her back and away from the cage, Belinda was frozen in place, staring at the woman crawling in the cage.

Bonnie’s gaze followed that of Belinda, and she froze as well. As the woman slowly opened her mouth for an unnatural hiss, not only her lips parted but the scar tissue also gave way to reveal an unusually long row of pointy teeth.

Bonnie stood there mesmerised, and she barely noticed how Belinda let go of her hand, screamed, and stared running, calling for Bonnie to follow.

The others had reached the cell’s door and pushed it open, so that it slammed against the metal frame of the cage, startling Bonnie into action.

She ran off the veranda and onto the lawn, perceiving that the others had already gained a lot of ground and were running towards the slope that was the natural border of the property.

“The drop is too steep,” screamed Belinda while considerably slowing down her pace.

“I’d rather take my chances crossing the river down in the valley than staying here with the family’s freaky pets,” shouted Bobby.

“Me too, babe,” were Billy’s words as he ran over the edge and disappeared quickly.

Becky fell onto the lawn and gave a little scream, which made Buck turn around and help her up before he dragged her behind him towards the edge. They had almost left Bonnie’s field of vision, holding hands, running as fast as they could, when two shadows showed up behind them, seemingly out of nowhere, and threw them to the ground.

Two monsters looking similar to the woman with the scarred cheeks except that they were apparently male, loomed over the two lovers on the ground and howled in a way that made Bonnie’s blood freeze. She had come to a standstill next to Belinda, staring helplessly at the scene.

As the two monsters lowered their huge mouths towards their victims and ran their claws into the lover’s backs, another shadow ran past them and down the slope in fast pursuit of the two young men.

Bonnie, suddenly aware of her situation, tore her gaze from the ghastly scene in front of her, and pulled Belinda towards the window of the villa.

“Come on, Belinda, we’ve gotta get to the mansion and barricade ourselves in there. It’s our only chance. We can call the police in there. There must be a land-line phone somewhere.”

Her words actually reached Belinda despite her frozen state, but they had the opposite effect of what Bonnie had intended.

Belinda suddenly turned on her heel, violently broke free of Bonnie’s grip, and started running towards the slope, following the others to what could only be seen as certain doom. With her friend out of reach, Bonnie screamed at the top of her lungs, “Belinda, what the fuck! It’s this way!”

As if shocked by Bonnie’s sudden out-of-character profanity, Belinda actually turned around and started to move towards the villa instead.

Bonnie had already reached the window and was climbing in when the unnatural hiss from before came from the veranda. She turned her head just in time to catch a glimpse of the woman who had mesmerised both her and Belinda, before Bonnie slipped through the open window and into the parlour.

Standing on the sofa, Bonnie was holding the window open, ready to slam it shut as soon as Belinda joined her.

Bonnie watched her childhood friend run towards her, with the two dead bodies lying on the ground behind her. The monsters that had been feasting on them had finally let off and were now heading for the slope instead, joining the chase of the boys whose screams were echoing in the vale.

Belinda was getting closer to the window, and Bonnie felt a wild, almost fiery hope growing in her chest. But then she noticed the two lovers in the background getting up from the ground.

Those two looked at each other with animal-like eyes, and their faces moved in towards each other as if they were about to kiss. But instead, they sank their teeth in each others flesh, biting the others neck with animalistic delight and ripping out pieces of muscle with long, pointy teeth. As they slowly ate each other with pleasure, their mouths tore open all the way to their ears, showing an unnaturally long row of teeth ready to devour each other as well as anyone else.

Bonnie screamed a very high-pitched, long cry as she saw that carnal display of consuming love, which drew the attention of everyone around. Belinda turned her head mid-run, which made her lose her balance and stumble, and the monsters that had been Becky and Buck only mere moments ago looked up from their bloody embrace.

They looked at Bonnie for a moment and then focused their attention on Belinda. Their desire for prey must have beaten their lust for each other because they both stood up in almost perfect synchronisation, moving in a strangely choppy way.

Belinda, who had fallen onto the ground, shrieked at the sight of them and then started crawling towards Bonnie and the safety of the mansion. As their eyes met again, both young women saw a terror in the other’s gaze that was beyond anything they had ever seen before.

Bonnie waved her left hand in a frantic motion and yelled, “They’re gaining on you, Belinda! You won’t make it in time crawling. Get up and run!”

Stumbling to her feet, Belinda accelerated her run while the monsters got closer to her as well as the window, making Bonnie’s heart pound faster and faster with every step they drew nearer.

With their inhuman speed, the two monsters had almost reached her when Belinda made it to the window. Bonnie wrapped her right hand tightly around Belinda’s forearm, ready to pull her in when the look on her friend’s face suddenly made her stop.

Belinda’s eyes went from alight with hope and adrenaline to black with despair and pain in an instant. She looked down at her own belly and tears ran down her cheeks while she tried to suppress a groan.

Bonnie’s eyes followed those of Belinda and arrived at her belly, where she saw a thin red line form from Belinda’s chest to her navel. It erupted into a gaping hole, spilling blood and little bits onto the windowsill and all over the white couch. Little droplets got sprayed all over Bonnie’s blouse, face, neck, and forearms, making her feel strangely wet and warm.

Looking into her friend’s terrified eyes, Bonnie saw the monsters bloody faces coming ever closer and their clawed hands gripping Belinda’s torso.

Without a conscious thought, the hand that had been ready to pull her friend to safety now pushed her away instead when Bonnie drove Belinda into the two monsters while she slammed the window shut with her other hand.

The expression in Belinda’s eyes went from sheer terror to utter disbelief as she realised what had just happened. Bonnie had slammed the window shut before the three outside hit the ground, and she was already on her way to the kitchen when the two monsters started feasting on her childhood friend.

When Bonnie arrived at the entrance hall, she could hear claws scratching against the front door. Panicked, she looked around and saw the key still lying on the stairs. She grabbed it as fast as she could and ran to the door, practically throwing herself against it as the doorknob started turning.

The sudden impact must have startled the monster, giving Bonnie enough time to shove the key into the hole and lock the door. She silently cursed the fact that she couldn’t just walk out the front door and drive off back to civilisation to get away from this nightmare and maybe even get help for the others. Perhaps there was a way to reverse this transformation. With science and medicine being as advanced as they were nowadays, there was still some hope, wasn’t there?

The scratching at the door started again and was followed by loud banging noises. Horrified, Becky ran over to the display table and took the car keys from the arm of the dancing fairy. Then she walked past the sculptures and took a running start, so that she ascended the stairs two steps at a time.

While running upstairs, Bonnie couldn’t help but notice that whenever someone went upstairs in a horror story, they usually ended up being the next victim. But she obviously had no other choice. Bonnie suddenly knew what it was like to be the character the reader or movie-goer cursed at for doing the stupid thing.

At the top of the stairs was a big open space filled with many beautiful works of art: more sculptures, several old as well as modern paintings, and even the furniture clearly consisted of artisan pieces. There were several doors, and on instinct, Bonnie opened the one that was straight ahead.

She entered the master bedroom. Sweeping the room with her gaze for a way out, she couldn’t completely ignore its beauty. The wide open space of the gabled bedroom held a gorgeous light-coloured wooden desk and chair, and a big closet to go with it.

There was a canopy bed with untidy bedclothes – this was most likely courtesy of Becky and Buck – and behind it, the room opened up to a balcony that went along the whole length of the room, overlooking the garden. Bonnie recognised the balcony as a possible way out, but then again, the garden wasn’t at all where she wanted to be.

A little door to the left caught Bonnie’s eye when she was scanning the room. She went over there and opened it, which was how she found herself in the master bathroom. She hardly noticed the bathtub, toilet, and towel racks, but instead focussed her attention to the dormer window next to the washbasin.

Following her instincts once more, Bonnie climbed out the window and onto the roof. The sun was slowly setting behind the gable as she started her ascend. The tiles were easier to navigate than she thought, so that she reached and straddled the house’s topmost point in no time.

Now, all Bonnie had to do was to climb down the other side of the roof and find a way down the facade of the building on the other side to get to the car. She figured that that shouldn’t be too hard because from up here, she could overlook nearly everything.

Scanning the area, Bonnie’s heart sank, and her newfound enthusiasm went as quickly as it had come. Even though they hadn’t spotted her yet, she could see the monsters everywhere. There were several in the garden, two of which looked like Bobby and Billy, who must have been caught down the slope and came back up to join the others.

Other monsters, some of the original cage dwellers by the looks of it, were circling the premises. Even up on the roof, Bonnie could still hear someone banging against the entrance door, making it infinitely harder to reach the car.

Yet that was still her best bet. If she could divert their attention somehow – maybe by throwing a roof tile to lure them away from the door and the car – she might be able to escape. Feeling hope’s spark kindled once again in her chest, Bonnie made her way down the other side of the roof.

She had only swung her leg off the gable to begin her descend when she heard a scratching noise behind her. She froze mid-motion and then slowly turned her head towards the noise. Even in her despair, Bonnie had to smile. It was always the harmless-looking ones.

The woman from the cage lifted herself up the edge of the roof as if it was no feat at all, and then pulled up Belinda in one smooth, sweeping motion. Both of them stared at Bonnie with eyes filled with hunger.

Slowly but surely, and with her gaze fixed on the approaching monsters with their long rows of teeth glistening in the setting sun, Bonnie started climbing down the roof towards the car and towards freedom.

To be, or not to be, that is the question that would be answered for Bonnie shortly.

—Submitted by Lone-Eyed

[elijahmillenniummikaelson]

✩ for Sienna x Elijah!

Send ‘✩’ for the following:Disagreements:

Who is more likely to raise their voice? Probably Sienna since Elijah has an intermediate step in which he initially lowers his voice to a sharp, threatening warning when he is disagreeing with someone. Who threatens to leave but never actually does? Sienna. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t absolutely succeeds in riling him up every time. Who actually keeps their word and leaves? Elijah. Mostly because in spite of everything he does he still has an obsession with technically keeping his word. Emphasis on technically. Mostly he just exits the room so the warning is fulfilled and immediately after returns with a vengeance like a drama king. Who trashes the house? If things escalate to that level I suspect Sienna would take advantage of at least one of Elijah’s unique items collections in order to force him into playing juggler for a moment. Do either of them get physical? Sure…In the sense that their disagreements religiously end when one of them begins to passionately kiss the other as if there was no tomorrow. How often do they argue/disagree? Surprisingly next to never from what we have seen until now. They playfully tease and taunt each other constantly but In spite of their tempers they seem to be too fervently attracted to the other’s supposedly worst qualities to actually have a classical fight. Who is the first to apologize? Both Sienna and Elijah: “…What the hell is an apology?”

Sex:Who is on top? Elijah has a predilection for utterly overwhelming her with pleasure and discover what kinds of pleading and raging moans he can find in the process so his first instinct is towards an active position but I suspect the reverse also occurs pretty often.Who is on the bottom? I don’t think anyone is “on the bottom” from their perspective. They are either taking and consuming the other in satisfaction or receiving the thrilling, passionate bliss they obviously deserve.   Who has the strangest desires?…Define strangeAny kinks? Who? Them? No! I think it is obvious these two, morally sound citizens are pretty vanilla. XDWho’s dominant in bed? “Elijah has a predilection for utterly overwhelming her with pleasure and discover what kinds of pleading and raging moans he can find…”Is head ever in the equation? Is it ever not?If so, who is better at performing it?…Let’s not make those two compete with each other. Ever had sex in public? Well….Considering the level of hiding involved in their connection and how impatient they can get….One could assume…Who moans the most? “Elijah has a predilection for utterly overwhelming her with pleasure and discover what kinds of pleading and raging moans he can find…”Who leaves the most marks? Tsk tsk…What did we just say about competitions? We are adding fuel to the fire.Who screams the loudest? “Elijah has a predilection for utterly overwhelming her with pleasure and discover what kinds of pleading and raging moans he can find…”Who is the more experienced of the two? Probably Elijah by merit of age.Do they ‘fuck’ or ‘make love’? Hmm…Elijah would diplomatically quote “To define is to limit”Rough or soft? Fervidly intense, lustful and steamy as a general rule. Sometimes surprisingly soft and caring. Neither of them mention the implications of the second kind too much.How long do they usually last? Hours if they are supposed to have only twenty minutes together. Twenty minutes if they are supposed to have hours. Then they can go for a whole packet of rounds.Is protection used? YesDoes it ever get boring? Ha-HaWhere is the strangest place they’d have sex? Now these questions are challenging them? What little common sense!

Family:Do your muses plan on having children/or have children? Their current relationship goals include not dying for Elijah and not initiating a mob war for Sienna.  If so, how many children do your muses want/have? I think I need to give an answer for the next few questions to make sense so on the top of my head lets say…A girl and a boy? The girl could have been spoiled beyond measure and in consequence be even more entitled, arrogant and adorably egocentric than the two of them combined and just for the fun and potential hilarious situations I would say the boy actually seems to be a genuinely noble, kind and compassionate person. No one knows how it happened. No one knows what to do with him. Sienna can choose the names if she wants. lolWho is the favorite parent? For the girl whoever is pampering her more that week. For the boy…Sienna.  Who is the authoritative parent? Elijah.Who is more likely to allow the children to have a day off school? Both under the right strategy. With Sienna they can explain they meet this really interesting boy/girl or that they have to show the bossy teacher he can’t control them. With Elijah they can tell him they have a clever seven step plan that includes manipulation, deceit and betrayal in order to become head cheerleader/ school council president and it is really important for them to be away so no one suspects they are responsible for what they put into motion. Who lets the children indulge in sweets and junk food when the other isn’t around? That’s not how it works. The rules say 20% of the sweets they bring home automatically go to the parents who also reserve the right to indiscriminately take more of it if they are eating them in public.  Who turns up to extra curricular activities to support their children? SiennaWho goes to parent teacher interviews? Either of them. Both if Sienna is in the mood to watch how Elijah sometimes not so subtlety informs the teacher it is in his best interest to ignore those silly rumors about their daughter being a “manipulative and snobby brat who thinks she rules the school” Who gets up in the middle of the night to feed the baby? Elijah’s job sometimes make him arrive late so he is more naturally active during those hours.    Who spends the most time with the children? Sienna for a slight difference. But they do try to do things all together. Who packs their lunch boxes? They actually tried to make the kids their lunch boxes together once…It ended up as a mixture of lobster tartlets, lollipops, strawberry juice and a double cheese hamburger. They were incredibly proud of themselves. Both of the kids asked for lunch money from that day onward.Who gives their children ‘the talk’? The school if they have any luck. Who cleans up after the kids? The same service that cleans up after the parents.Who worries the most? Elijah worries about the boy and how little he seems to be made for the family business quite frequently. Sienna is the only one with enough influence over the two of them as to make them see more or less eye to eye sometimes. Who are the children more likely to learn their first swear word from? Sienna.

Affection:Who likes to cuddle? Cuddling just…Sort of…Happens. It is not to be questioned.Who is the little spoon? Sienna.Who gets naughty in the most inappropriate of places? Most places are inappropriate for them. Sienna appears to have a certain tendency towards that behavior and making him go crazy with it but Elijah isn’t precisely innocent either. Who struggles to keep their hands to themself? Both How long can they cuddle until one becomes uncomfortable? Not-To-Be-Questioned.What is their favourite non-sexual activity? I believe they would greatly enjoy travelling together if they were under different circumstancesWhere is their favourite place to cuddle? Apparently “Inappropriate places”Who is more likely to playfully grope the other? 49% Elijah 51% SiennaHow often do they get time to themselves? As often as they sneakily create it.

Sleeping:Who snores? No one. The closest is Sienna softly breathing from her nose while she is sleeping sometimes which Elijah finds mutely charmingIf both do, who snores the loudest? -Do they share a bed or sleep separately? They sleep on the same bed when they can be certain they can get away with it. If they sleep together, do they cozy up together or lay far apart? Again with the closeness questions…Cozy positions just happen sometimes. No need to over-analyzeWho talks in their sleep? Sienna. Elijah listens intently if he is awake as if she were reciting the most fascinating novel. What do they wear to bed? Whatever little remains of what they were wearing before the wild inferno of a night together occurred.Are either of your muses insomniacs? Elijah has some trouble sleeping but he never recognizes it out loud. Can sleeping pills be found by the bedside? No.Do they wrap their limbs around each other or just lay side by side? ….Repeat after me meme: Proximity. Just. Happens. It is like magic. Who wakes up with bed hair? If they don’t have it when they wake up they can still win it by their way of awakening the other.  Who wakes up first? It varies. Who prepares breakfast in bed for the other? If Elijah can’t sleep he might try to improvise making something edible for her. Who hogs the sheets? Sienna. Elijah freely allows her to win that battle but still tease her about it. Do they set an alarm each night? Only if they have anything to do the next day.Can a television be found in their bedroom? YesWho has nightmares? Both of them occasionally.Who has ridiculous dreams? Sienna. Elijah listens to every single one of them intently and suggests meanings for them with interest as if they were the best stories he ever heard.Who sprawls out and takes up most of the bed? Sienna.Who makes the bed? Depends on whose bed it is.What time is bed time? There is no bed time. Only chaos.Who’s the grumpiest when they wake up? Elijah the days he doesn’t sleep.

Work:Who is the busiest? ElijahWho rakes in the highest income? Exclusively out of working? Elijah. I don’t quite know who has more money between Sienna’s family and Elijah. I usually try to write her father as a mafia boss currently above him in status and position so the danger of them getting discovered is real but by a minimal difference.Are any of your muses unemployed?….Technically speaking and as far as the law is concerned.Who takes the most sick days? If they don’t want to do something they don’t do it. No sick day status necessary. Who is more likely to turn up late to work? Elijah but only if Sienna is involved.Who sucks up to their boss? Neither.What are their jobs? Who is asking?Who stresses the most? Elijah sees it all as a big game he will eventually be the conquering winner of and reading her bio again Sienna only helps with her family’s business in innocent things like the books if she feeling like it so…Neither. Do your muses enjoy or despise their careers/occupations? Elijah enjoys it immensely. Sienna does as she wants so I assume she likes it too.Are your muses financially stable? Legally speaking? They are poor souls barely making it. Extra-officially? Have a bag of cash and don’t ask questions.

Home:Who does the washing? These are if they lived together right? It doesn’t make much sense otherwise. The staff.Who takes out the trash? Unless we are talking about a mafia “taking out the trash” expression…The staff.Who does the ironing? Staff.Who does the cooking? If he is in a specially good mood Elijah will try to cook pasta for her. Mainly as a private joke related to her Italian mafia lineage stereotype but he actually puts incredible amounts of never admitted effort into improving it each time it happens.Who is more likely to burn the house down just trying? The two of them together. They have a lot more fun but are also considerably more destructive when they try to act as normal people together. Who is messier? Elijah is better at pretending he isn’t but they are probably at the same level. Who leaves their dirty clothes on the floor? A bad job from the staff.Who is the prankster around the house? Sienna starts the prank wars but Elijah hasn’t been a pacifist about it once. Who loses the car keys when it comes time to go somewhere? Sienna pretended to lose them once and challenged Elijah to quickly get them a new vehicle without calling any of his employees. They still have an extra car the previous owner never dared to report stolen after Elijah nonchalantly stopped him to have a chat that day.Who answers the telephone? Staff. Unless Elijah is waiting for something important work-relatedWho does the vacuuming? S-T-A-F-FWho takes the longest to shower? The one who enters the shower first that day. They tend to share them.

Miscellaneous:Is money a problem? Yes! They have too much for the world to be safeHow many cars do they own? At least two based on the last section…Probably more.Do they own their home or do they rent? They don’t currently live together.Do they live near the coast or deep in the countryside? If they lived together…They would probably have several properties.Do they live in the city or in the country? Several properties. City as the main oneDo they enjoy their surroundings? If they don’t they go to another of their properties. Come on. Catch up with me test. Where did they first meet? Hmm…Based on the first starter I ever replied to I believe you wrote Sienna knew him since she was young so…Perhaps at some fancy party while Elijah was still only an aspiring mob boss working under someone else that gallantly called Sienna the princess of the celebration when they were introduced to score some points with her father? Does that sound good?How did they first meet? Test…We just discussed this. Pay attention!Who spends the most money when out shopping? Sienna. Any mental issues? I mean…There must be something but…They are only a danger to others and not themselves. XDWho’s terrified of bugs? Terrified?…Neither probably. You would have to confirm Sienna’s position.  Who kills the spiders around the house? Elijah making a big white knight protecting his lady performance out of it. Who pays the bills? ElijahDo they have any fears for their future? Wise precaution and implemented strategy but not fear. Who’s more likely to surprise the other with a fancy dinner? ElijahWho uses up all of the hot water? Most showers are together as previously stated. If not…Both of themWho’s the tallest? ElijahWho’s more likely to just randomly hop into the shower with the other? Test…Are you mocking me?Who wanders around in their underwear? Sienna to Elijah’s eternal provocation and delight.  Who sings the loudest when singing along to the radio? Sienna. Elijah finds it enthralling beyond belief and weirdly adorable.What do they tease each other about? Each and every single subject under the face of the earthWho is more likely to cringe at the other’s fashion sense at times?…Neither?  I think. If Sienna hates any of his suits this is her time to speak.Do they have mutual friends? Elijah doesn’t really have friends as much as pawns. But he makes a conscious effort to be gentle with someone if Sienna introduces them as her friend.  Who crushed first? …I don’t really know. Again I am in need of Sienna’s perspective. Any alcohol or substance related problems? It isn’t a problem.Who is more likely to stumble home, drunk, at 3am?…Equal opportunity and chances for a duo performance sometimes. Who swears the most? Sienna.