#i could go on and on about Foul Legacy habits

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

can foul legacy see or does he use heat to sense things?? or is it something else??

mothman can see!!!!! to be fair, he can't see very well, only having one eye messes up his depth perception a bit, but he can still see!! he does see better in the dark (better than normal humans, actually) plus his pretty eye actually glows in dim lighting, which is equally cool and terrifying if you're confronted with it in the middle of the night... it's happened before and you shriek every single time (Legacy apologizes with soft nudges and snuggles to keep you safe from anything that lurks in the dark)

but while he can see to some extent, Foul Legacy does also use scent as a guiding factor. his sense of smell is considerably better than his eyesight, so he's easily able to identify if someone is a stranger or a friend even if he can't fully see them. his favorite scent is definitely yours- you smell like a warm, comforting home, with flowers on the windowsill and pillows on the couch. it's why he loves burying his face into your neck, to be surrounded by that comfort. of course, you also smell slightly like him, like ocean mist and stars, because people have to know that you're his and he's yours!!

[nocturnaltokyoiii]

The Official NGE Character Ranking

It’s finally time for the official ranking of Neon Genesis Evangelion characters, as proclaimed by me. While there are a lot of characters to examine, I’d like to focus on the main characters of the original TV series, End of Evangelion, and Death & Rebirth.

WORST OF THE WORST

Gendo Ikari

The story's villain, it's only appropriate to set him dead last. A grieving man turns to putting 14-year-old kids into mecha robots powered by souls. From parental neglect to his agenda to end the world and start the Third Impact, Gendo Ikari can only receive small sympathy points.

Kozo Fuyutsuki

As Gendo's sidekick, I can't let Fuyutsuki off the hook for aiding and abetting. While he does show more compassion towards Shinji Ikari for the identity crisis every other episode than Gendo ever cared to, helping your former college students end the world doesn't look good on a resume.

No Harm No Foul

Kensuke Aida

Kensuke is a little military nerd who just dreams of piloting an EVA. He likes learning about all the actions of NERV or the UN - but also has the horned-up aspect of being a 14-year-old boy who carries around a camera. While it's nice to allow Shinji to have some friends and a form of escapism through his brief stay with Kensuke after running away (again). there isn't much that we know about Kensuke.

Toji Suzuhara

The other half of Kensuke, Toji is the more outwardly expressive and even passive-aggressive. We're introduced to him through his anger at Shinji for Toji's sister after she is severely injured from an EVA/Angel attack. He's the stereotypical "delinquent" who attacks Shinji as payback for his sister's injury, but he turns a more empathetic leaf after witnessing the mental suffering Shinji faces while piloting the EVA. When Toji is selected as the Fourth Child, everything takes a turn for the worse and we never see him again after that fiasco.

Complicit?

Ritsuko Akagi

Ritsuko lives in the shadow of her mother who created the MAGI System, the living, breathing programming holding NERV together. She's the only other person aside from Gendo and Fuyutsuki who knows the true intentions of NERV and SEELE, and for that, points off as being a piece of the end of the world. Ritsuko is still an interesting character as she internalizes and intellectualizes everything until her breaking point in destroying all the Rei copies. I feel bad for her in the cycle of abuse her mother and then her goes through under Gendo's romantic relationships with both of them.

Yui Ikari

This poor woman died and her husband decided it was time to end the world. Had she not passed during the Project E experiment, Shinji would have been a functioning and less traumatized boy. She is such a kind-hearted person who had a positive impact on those around her, and it's sad to see what her legacy turned into through Gendo's distortion.

Misato Katsuragi

Misato always has me going back and forth on my opinions, but I do admittedly love her as a character. Her hotheadedness and drinking habits make her a piece of emotional release from all the environmental stress. Her traumatic past explains the present, and her motherly care for the pilots stands in direct opposition to Ritsuko's risk of the pilots for the sake of destroying the angels. She is largely unaware of NERV's true intentions until the untimely end.

Ryoji Kaji

Kaji is somehow a triple agent working for the Japanese Ministry against both Gendo and SEELE, really just looking to find the truth of it all. He's an admirable character whose only real flaw is being so goddamn horny for all his female characters - except Asuka so I guess there are some moral boundaries. He knew that his life was constantly at risk by working behind everyone's backs, but he's still a positive role model to Shinji, almost showcasing what the positive outcome could be.

The Children

Kaworu Nagisa

We're introduced to Kaworu as the Fifth Child following Asuka's synchronization levels dipping to unprecedented levels. He's a poetic character who quickly befriends Shinji and shows his affection toward him in unexpected manners. As it turns out, Kaworu is actually the seventeenth angel, Tabris. His interest in humankind and otherwise odd behaviors goes seemingly unnoticed by NERV. Kaworu's goal is to reconnect with Adam, but instead, he finds Lilith, rendering his mission a failure thus allowing Shinji to kill him.

Kaworu is one of the only people that shows real love towards Shinji, and that cannot go unappreciated.

Shinji Ikari

Love him or hate him, Shinji is still one of the most interesting case studies of the human mind. A traumatized 14-year-old boy who has never felt real familiar affection since his mother's passing. Abandoned by everyone but commanded to not run away too. He's just looking for some kind of approval. I believe Ritsuko summed up Shinji's character the best by equating him to the "Hedgehog's Dilemma", in which hedgehogs need warmth in the winter so they huddle together, but just end up pricking each other and causing more harm. Shinji cannot be intimate with another character without some outcome of mutual harm.

BEST GIRLS

The lifelong battle, who is the best girl of Evangelion?

The truth is, there is no real answer. They're both amazing.

Rei Ayanami

Rei I - The child we're introduced to is snarky towards Ritsuko's mother as seen in a flashback - calling her an old hag. This Rei is a product of what Gendo really says in private, and thus is killed by Naoko Akagi for repeating the words said behind her back.

Rei II - This iteration of Rei is who we're most familiar with throughout most of the series, socially withdrawn and living in admiration of Gendo for the majority of her lifespan. In her interactions with the other children, she learns to be happy and to cry. She knows she is easily replaceable to NERV's mission. In being the recreation of Yui, she exists as how Gendo saw Yui. This version of Rei passes in sacrifice to destroy an angel.

Rei III - This is the final iteration of Rei seen in the series and End of Evangelion - and is the most expressive one yet. She knows what happened to the previous incarnations, but didn't live it herself. She's angry at the world, angry at Gendo, angry at Shinji, at everyone. She knows she's replaceable, but can't do anything about it but become indifferent to the changing environment.

Asuka Langley Sohryu

I take Asuka as my favorite for her relatability. She says what we're all thinking; and just like Shinji, she's just looking for affection. The main difference is that she refuses to admit that she needs help, for people to look at her, for people to appreciate everything she's sacrificed to get into her position. She holds herself to a standard of pride, never taking out the Interface Headset clips in her hair. She thinks she's grown up, but it's all the trauma that's forced her to become so mature against all odds.

Asuka holds a special place in my heart for some unexplainable reason, so I have to place her in the top position.

Anyways, that's my ranking of the main characters of Neon Genesis Evangelion. lol.

[zhongyeet-me-to-the-moon]

Till we meet again part 5

Previous part here.

Till we meet again Masterlist.

Pairing: childe/foul legacy x reader

Type: story, slow burn rekindling

Warnings: dunken arguments, is sexual tension a thing to warn people about?

You squeaked in shock as Ajax grabbed you from behind while you were cooking. Laughing as he spun you around the kitchen in excitement.

"Stop you almost made me spill the pot you dummy!"

"I can't help it! I missed you so much!" He spun you around so he could pepper kisses all over your face. Hands resting on your waist perfectly like they always belonged there since birth. "Sorry I'm late honey."

"Ajax what if my parents walked in! You know how I feel out pda."

"You said they're working late tonight right? So whats the harm?" You rolled your eyes at his comment. Wrapping your arms around his shoulders, you took note of all his freckles that lit up in the setting sun through the window, his pretty blue eyes that showed a hint of tiredness due to work that still beamed at you like you were the only two left in the world. The few moments they didn't seem void of any feeling at all.

Hopefully no one will be walking in when I find a place for us. You thought.

.......

It had been a week since you took this job and a steady routine was set in place for you and Childe. The conversations were more lively, he responded to what he could. He took up the painting, though he wasn't good even if his handling skills woth the paint and charcoal wasn't impaired. You helped out more and more at the funeral parlor, you were never good at comforting people so you definitely had to learn a thing or two before Hu Tao let you take the reins in the comforting part of the meetings.

All in all it was going a lot better, you were settling in more or less.

The main problem now was you were beginning to get too comfortable with childe. Old habits started to rise even if he was in the form that he was in.

You used to always make coffee for him when he was home, he wasn't a morning person as much as his job forced it at times. Plenty of times now you walked in on him still sleeping and having to wake him to the promise of a cup of coffee and creamer. He was still against you touching him though. You had to catch yourself a number of times shaking him awake, or just petting him in general.

Since you gave him something that wasn't Liyue food, he always wants at least one of his meals to be something from home each day.

Those meals are always a lot more quiet than the rest you noted.

You were starting to get a hang on the voice patterns of his speech. The more Sassier squawks and clicks coming out as time went on. He even got out of bed more to move around, cought him trying to play that lute you impulsively bought a few time even.

At some point a proper armchair was ordered for his room so you can properly relax while visiting. Last night you found yourself dozing off with a book in it. It was only for a couple minutes, if childe noticed he didn't acknowledge it, preoccupied with a book in hand himself.

You coughed to remind him of your presence. "I'll see you at dinner time Childe. I got a few more errands to run for Hu tao before the day ends." You had to catch the step you were about to make towards childe rather than out the door. What were you gonna do over at childes bed? Kiss him goodbye like you used to? Hug him? Absolutely not.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

You needed a drink, it just dawned on you you haven't drank a drop since you got here. Does Liyue even have bars? This place seems too fancy to have one, or at least not a noticeable one since every building was so meticulously sculpted. It was definetly a social drinking type of city.. You missed the dawn winery, and the loud unorganized singing the patrons did when it started getting rowdy.

Missed going back to a hotel with a warm body next to you.

Fuck. Your on a job y/n! Get your mind out of the gutter.

......fuck it.

You eventually did find a local bar near the outskirts, still just as fancy exterior wise like you guessed, but the inside was a lot for relaxed to your liking. You ordered whatever was the cheapest and took a seat on the stool up front.

"You just get into town?" The bar tender started after a couple drinks in.

"Uh no I've been here a while now, just haven't had much free time since I suppose due to my job."

"Oh really? What job is that now?"

"Im interning at Wangsheng Funeral Parlor. Lot of hours, lot of things to learn apperently." You laugh, its a good thing you were trained to lie well even tipsy.

"Lot of things to learn at a funeral parlor? Isn't it just signing paperwork and arranging funerals?"

"Isnt bartending up mixing a few liquids together and making small talk?" You countered, he jokingly raised his hands in defeat. "I'm y/n by the way."

"Wang Ming. Its a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully you get more free time to stop by." You giggle at the obvious inclination, he was attractive to say the least, curly black hair and cute round glasses. "Or if you'd like, my shift ends in about 10 minutes. Maybe we could continue this conversation outside the bar?"

Shit that sounded nice. You looked out the window though, becoming aware the sun set a while ago. Aw fuck, you're late for dinner.

"As lovely as that sounds duty calls early in the morning tomorrow."

"You must really take your, interning seriously."

"Well you know what they say, experience looks real good on resumes. A rain check though, for sure" you downed the last of your drink, paying in mora as not to get that bill questioned by the business, and slowly making your back. Trying hard to get your footing even, grabbing take on your way back, and spraying a bit of perfume on before entering the building.

Luckily Hu Tao and miss Ferry lady had a job tonight so no one was in. When did stairs get do hard? You didn't drink that much did you? They were a lot more expensive then in Mondstadh, you just figured everything was more priced here though, maybe it was more quality than you thought.

You knocked on the door as you usually did, this time though the door swung open before you had a chance to do it yourself. "I know I know I'm late, I got take out though if that helps." You smile, maybe a bit wider than you usually do for it to be convincing cause he did not look happy. Still, he let you in in a huff.

They were out drinking. He noticed, even with the perfume his heightened sense of smell gave away the alcohol lingering behind. He sat on the bed in a huff.

"Whats you're problem? I was only a little late. I said I was sorry didn't i?"

He didn't make eye contact.

"Fine, don't speak." You threw the take out bag on his bed and began preparing the folding tables as you always did. "Not like you didn't come home late all the time before." You mumbled

He squawked at that last statement, you either weren't as quiet as you thought or he had super hearing.

"What? You think I wasnt pissed when you were hours late coming back to me? Almost every time?! Had me worried sick you were dead Ajax!" You were too drunk to notice you used his real name for the first time since coming here. "But I put on a brave face as always, smiled like it didn't matter i had to reheat the food for the third time!"

He stood up, a number of chirps and caws coming at your direction. All of it was giving you a migraine. Childe stopped two inches from your face, his chest was puffed out, fur sticking on end as he kept his literal hooting and hollaring.

You didn't think I couldn't tell the food was cold? That it was ridiculous you made it seem like you were just cooking that late an hour? I tried ok?! I tried so fucking hard for you y/n! I had a job to do, I vowed my life to the Tarista, I COULDNT HELP IT.

"Gods stop! I CANT FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU ALRIGHT?!" He slammed his fist down on the folding table in frustration, causing it to collapse. "Oh your so lucky that things meant to do that." You spat.

There was a pause to catch each others breath, staring each other down like prey.

I still came back didn't I? Even when you weren't there. Doesn't that count for something? Anything?

You weren't right on this..you weren't. You had friends to keep you company, family. He has no one at this moment. You weren't being fair! He moved to sit down at the edge of his bed, after a while you followed to stand in front of him.

"What do you want me to say ajax?" Your voice was quieter now, a whisper, you tried hard not to make it sound like you were pleading. "You want me to smile like you always used to? Want me to say 'I'm sorry I'm late honey' and hug you and hope its all gonna be ok? Even though we both knew It wasn't."

Childe didn't look at you, he just stared at the table and take out on the floor. You sighed, you weren't sober enough for this. You grabbed his hand in both of yours, too drunk to notice the flinch that followed but he made no move to pull away. You put on the best smile you could, pulling the hand close to your heart and willed the tears down like you always did when you looked him straight in the eyes before.

"Im sorry I was late honey," you repeated, "won't happen again. I promise."

I mean it. You thought.

He didn't pull away, you made no move to drop his hand either. Without realizing it you were both slowly inching closer than should be allowed by both of you.

Then a knock came on the door.

Zhongli walked in for the first time in a week.

[kelberytwt]

chaeya hcs bc I said so.

I have a brainrot over them all day everyday, hence my username.

- definitely a enemies to lovers type of romance.

- like they both 100% went from calling eachother names and joking flirting to all of a sudden being really affectionate and having their hands on each other all the time.

- childe 'serenades kaeya at stupid hours in the morning so that he can battle with him despite knowing damn well they both have to work the next morning.

- they're a 50/50 kind of couple where no one has a set role or job or has to do anything since they both swap between each role and never stay doing one thing for the other. it's mostly so that they both get looked after an equal amount.

- sometimes they take items such as each others gloves and wear them around for a day or 2 and see how long it takes other people to realise.

- they have tiny kisses it turns to two to three to oh no they’re making out someone stop them.

- childe dislikes getting called ajax but when kaeya calls him it, it makes him oddly mushy and happy.

- kaeya often finds small letters hidden around his office or home hidden by childe because childe is always working, letters are his best communication.

- kaeya used to HATE people holding his hands because people always said they were too cold but since childe likes them despite them being cold he doesn't mind it.

- lots and lots of face holding.

- kaeya and childe’s favorite kisses to share are nose kisses. they often find themselves greeting the other in bed with a nose kiss for good morning

- near the start of their relationship he tried to use childe for information on the harbingers but he could barely bring himself to after he realised how much childe loved him.

- childe has a. not so great habit of looking at kaeya's chest so his new catchphrase is " childe, my eyes are up here. " in the most annoyed voice.

- they love to dance with each other. sometimes they’ll just randomly waltz or something it’s just <333333#*,÷*×&×*@;×£×*×£

- “do the thing” “im not doing the thing” “please 🥺“ “...fine” *foul legacy transformation*

- “ur so pretty” “ur prettier” “no u” “no U” “NO U-“

- they're competitive about literally anything and everything, who can get up quicker, brush their teeth faster etc.

- childes siblings ADORE kaeya and enjoy playing with his hair.

- they're so touch st_rved PLEASE. they always want to hold onto each other and kiss each others faces.

- whenever chaeya go on dates they sometimes bring klee and teucer so they can hangout like a lil family picnic.

- diluc never gets a break bc of them. they daily go to the winery, rarely drink, they only want to annoy diluc with their presence alone. also they were like making "haha what if we were dating" jokes one day and one of them actually confessed and thats how everything started.

- childe braids kaeya's hair in the mornings.

- kaeya is around 5'8"-5'10" and childe is around 6'2" so despite not being that much taller than him, childe constantly teases kaeya for being ' small '.

- sometimes kaeya would go into the golden house not to fight childe but to check up on him to make sure he isn’t hurt.

- sharing scarves sharing scarves sharing scarves-

- their love language is just being mean with words but gentle and affectionate with touches and gestures.

- kaeya has a ginger cat named jax (definitely named after ajax) that he got bc he gets lonely when childes away for fatui shit.

[squid-rp]

So... remember when I said I wanted to make playlists for my characters while stuck at work? WELL... today is the day of results, staring with Cora. See cut below for playlist and a few drabbles that are inspired but may yet change as more info about the world comes out.

TW: Language... both in the playlist and out of it. I'm not kidding when I said Cora needs a swear jar, and some of her song choices definitely uh... reflect that.

DRABBLES:

Cora might not have been a proper witch or warlock, but she knew full and well what storms were, because she saw them in people. She saw it in her mother’s eyes when her parents thought she had been asleep -- the woman’s lips turning to a snarl as she deftly dodged another bottle thrown at her head and the sloppy slur of a yell to get out. Cora knew that sometimes storms collided and one usually gave way to another. Her mother gave way to her father and fled into the night, leaving her alone with a bitter man festering in all of his losses and resentful of what he felt he deserved but could not have. Had it not been for her grandmother, Cora knew she would have felt that wrath turned on herself more severely than sour glances and whiskey touched words. Lavinia Carrington was a storm of her own. She lacked the wild snarl and harsh words that her daughter used so frequently, but her eyes were fixed and focused like the rumble of thunder on the horizon. Steven Mills could barely look up from his kingdom of half-drunken bottles to acknowledge the woman on his doorstep. He did blink lamely at the statuesque woman in his living room who deigned to stand above his recliner like some sort of fairytale queen. She wore a tailored dress, but no crown, although her fading red hair was enough to tell him exactly who she was. “Fuck you want?” Steven managed, but he knew, and although she didn’t know what exactly, Cora knew too. Later, she would ruefully recall that nobody had asked her, but why would they? She was just a slip of a thing hiding against a door frame back then -- eager for a peak of something strange but terrified of being caught. “I refuse to let my legacy nourish itself on whiskey and regrets. That child is mine and she will be great, or she will be nothing at all.” There was no room for argument.

---

Cora had always been a girl who liked to know things. Her mother was a faint shadow in her memories, but sometimes she would recall her mother telling her stories at night -- stories of little girls and the wolves that gobbled them up for their curiosity. Curiosity, her grandmother said, was a useful tool. Curiosity was usually the first step towards folly and the lesson of hurting, which would give away to the much more useful trait of ambition. Cora no longer spent nights being lulled to sleep by scary stories of wolves gobbling up girls. Those weren’t useful tales anymore, especially since nobody was coming to save her. Cora hadn’t exactly shaken curiosity, but she tempered it with caution, and her only ambition was to stay one step ahead of her grandmother -- to learn to be more powerful if only to save herself and others who might be in the bitter hag’s way. But the lesson of hurting had turned to a lesson of haunting, and the most haunting thing Cora learned was that she would never stop looking over her shoulder, even in the crowds of New York.

---

If there was one thing Cora learned since running away, it was that she was always going to be underestimated by people who didn’t know what the hell she was. That was fine on most days. It was easier to traipse around on the sly and have a semblance of a life if people just saw her at face value: small, petite, porcelain skin, a light dusting of freckles, doll eyes, clothes that barely fit. A fragile thing with such a foul mouth. And sometimes it was that mouth that got her into trouble, and the invitation to “fuck around and find out” resulted in a right hook that was far meaner than it had any right to be. Sometimes meanness wasn’t enough, though. There were times Cora limped along home, ribs aching, teeth stained with blood and eyes bruised purple, but she’d be damned if she saw something that bothered her without speaking up. She didn’t run away to hold anything in anymore.

---

It didn’t matter how well she hid: eventually one of her grandmother’s followers would find her. It didn’t matter if she washed her hair out so that it lost its coppery sheen or crafted an identity that was the greatest great or the lowest of the low. Someone always found her, and how could they not? She was an unbound Ephemeral, and a grasping threat to boot, even if she claimed to just want to live. She ran first. Cora ran from jobs. She left homes with nothing but the clothes on her back. She lost her pursuers in subway trains or by dodging into an Uber and -- once -- jumping off a bridge into a freezing river that had her shivering for what felt like weeks. She finally dug her heels in and fought back in Arizona, and when her pursuer was flat on his back in the sand, Cora stood over him while a dust devil raged through the desert. She thought of her grandmother. She thought of those sharp blue eyes, the steel in the woman’s demeanor, and everything she had taken and would continue to take. It would have been easy to kill the man in the dirt. It would have been easy to kill him and leave him to rot in the desert for the coyotes to pick his bones clean. It would have sent a clear message, and it would have been a warning for those who would come after. But it would have been something she would have done, and more than anything, Cora did not want to be her. So she knocked the man out and left him in the desert to make his way to safety once he woke up. By then, she’d be on the way to elsewhere to try and make her way on her own terms. Despite how she had been raised, and despite all of her grooming, Cora was not her, and she never would be. Not if she had anything to say about it.

---

It could not be said that Cora was skilled in Origami as she only knew how to make one shape. She tried to learn others over the years -- the owl, the fan, the boat, the flower -- but her fingers fell into the familiar habits of the crane as if she were being guided along on a string right on back to home. Cora had so few memories of her mother. She had no pictures -- they had been burned at her grandmother’s behest -- and no mementos or trinkets to remind her of the woman who had given her life and then had abandoned her. She remembered stories told in the dark, but the years had distorted the voice that told them. The memories of a face -- the cut of a nose, and the curl of a lip -- had blurred to a void that could have been everything and nothing all at once. What Cora couldn’t forget was muscle memory, and her fingers gracefully folded smooth paper to form a head and wings until another colorful paper crane joined the small army threatening to burst out of her shoebox apartment. “One thousand gets a wish,” the woman murmured as she set the newest crane atop the bundle of blankets that comprised her bed and looked out the window towards the looming city and all its lights. She doubted she would ever get what she wanted. After all, other people wanted, and when it came to her, they only wanted what she could do and who she could be. They never really wanted her for her. It didn’t stop her from reaching for another sheaf of paper and trying again.

TLDR: Pretty sure Cora's grandma (who in my head is super old and reeks of sandalwood and dismissiveness) is the head of a Gramarye coven elsewhere. Cora was meant to take up the mantle or... something else more nefarious but yeeted instead and is hiding out in New York until she can figure out wtf to do. AGAIN, this could change depending on revealed site lore and also the fact that I might see another bright and shiny idea and go crow.

[hollywoodcannon]

Anonymous asked: Congrats on finding someone to put up with you, Pillman! I'm sure you'll manage to keep them tucked away nice and safe. - A.A.

An old fossil was what Stunning Steve Austin had called him once. When the Hollywood Blonds were the best damn tag team to ever grace the cameras of WCW, when Flair and his has-been best friend Anderson were yesterday’s news. Sure, Brian and Steve were the guests of honor on that Piper’s Pit ripoff show. But it was also they who came out as the bigger stars. A Flair for the Old was gone as fast as it had premiered. Dust in the wind as was always said, and without a second thought did Brian debate that it was because the Blonds had left. They made the program - they were the drawing factor. Quoted until he couldn’t take it anymore, as he heard time and time again thereafter, nothing gold could stay. Not that ridiculous television fiasco. Not his team with Austin - he had the broken trust and bruised ribcage to prove it. Certainly not his hold on sanity. Perhaps the Loose Cannon had always been ill-fated. 

Double A had said that he needed him. That their differences could be sorted and battered pride could be put to the sidelines - Arn wanted his old pal Ric back. Brotherly fights had hurt them both, but everyone around knew one thing clearly: the Four Horsemen were forever. Brian wasn’t Blanchard. He didn’t try to trade places with Ole. But he had the skills to outwork them both. Was wild enough to go the distance for those who earned his loyalty, a lost soul who wasn’t stupid and understood the importance of numbers. Nobody had been there for Brian. Keeping an eye out for him and taking the shots - he was alone, and if he wanted to survive another second longer among wolves, he had to turn to the enemy. The enemy of an enemy was definitely a friend. And though he had spent the good portion of a year decrying the legacy of Anderson, Brian couldn’t help but respect him. 

Respect him still though he was severely beaten. Slapped across the face in front of millions, humiliated further once he got to the dressing room in the back. Flair would say nothing as he watched from the comforts of his leather seat. Sipping the finest in chilled liquor and laughing every few degrading words from Anderson, Benoit was like a statue as he locked eyes on the scene, almost hidden in the corner of the room himself. Arn was a dog gone rabbid as he nearly foamed at the lips in anger. A hand wrapped around Brian’s throat, where there was once a slap would soon come a fist. A punishment in tough love for whatever it was the brave member of the Horsemen dared to shout. Wasn’t as though Brian could’ve restrained himself. Quick on the tongue and stubborn in the eyes - it was a callback to the football years that hadn’t faded, a bad habit to go with the tackles and fouls. Only trying to do what was best for the faction, efforts were shown as much gratitude as should’ve been expected from the start. 

One more red mark to his cheek, black splotches patterned over the spine - the Four Horsemen were as good as dead. Gunslingers that didn’t deserve what it was that Brian had to offer, peace was found when the Loose Cannon turned rogue. Fired because puppets loved having their strings pulled, Bischoff wasn’t the only person who was happy that the crazed former champion was leaving. Pillman had had enough.  

Frankly, Brian hadn’t ever been so joyful to pack his bags. Frankly, he hadn’t ever been so pissed off to hear a familiar voice. 

He hissed, teeth bared, “you can bet your fat ass I will, Anderson. You ever think about changing that, and I’ll make that small dick of yours even smaller.”

“Stay the fuck away from them. Or you may end up in a situation you’d rather not be in.”

[popculturebuffet]

Excalibur #1: “The Accolade of Betsy Braddock”

As the magic of Krakoa seeps into Otherworld and puts Morgan Le Fay in a genocidal mood, Betsy Braddock tries to find her place in the new world while also dealing with her idiot brother.. but you know instead of Paul Rudd she has a reality warping man child with mental instablity. Meanwhile Apocalypse adopts an unprouncable name and a new misson statment as a wizard man, Gambit suppresses the urge to kill him and Goldballs tries a new somehow even worse name out.

Welcome back. Due to yesterday being kinda nuts, and the last review being more taxing than planned, this one is kinda late. But better late than never as dawn of X continues it’s win streak with Excalibur, back and better than ever. And thankfully this time, the exposition is all really easy to bake in as we go compared to my last few reviews, so without any delay, it’s time to forge the sword once again. This is Tini Howard and Marcus To’s Excalibur.

We open on a long info page revealing that when Xavier gave his big “While you Slept the world changed” or, to put it more acuratley “All I wanted was to love you , to help you to save your asses and all you did was either try to kill us, look away while others did, or make a token effort at best to help. Fuck you, we’re taking what’s ours bitches. “ speech, Apocalypse gave his own, in a sense telling Humankind “Magic is ours to take back now.... “

We cut to the present where Morgan Le Fay is in Otherworld, basically the court of king arthur, the source of Captain Britan’s power, and a realm created by the british public’s collective subconscious. I don’t get it either. But Morgan Le Fay, Arthur’s evil sister and long time pain in the ass of the Avengers in the 616, has taken over in his absence and nearly drowns one of her minons upon finding something in her well.. a weed affecting it.. and since the x-men have a plant motif and apocalypse made a big MINE NOW speech to the rest of the world.. it’s easy to see Krakoa’s involved. Nice work Apocalypse, your on Krakoa one week and you’ve already pissed off the neighbors.

After the opening titles, we cut to Braddock Academy, basically the british version of Xavier’s and Avengers Academy and unsurprisingly a pet project of Brian’s. Since the school is also the Braddock ancestral home, Betsy’s been crashing here while sorting things out after getting her original body back. Yeah for those of you not that familiar with Psylocke, which I am not but know at least this much, was body swapped with the Assian Kwannon. That was reversed shortly before Dawn of X, which in order to help smooth the transition has given each their own starring roll. And really it is an intresting thing to explore: Betsy spent 5 or 6 years in a body that was not her own, living her life, loving, and doing bloody awful things in the name of the greater good. So it’s no suprise being put back in her old body after all this time and the implications of having basically lived her life in someoen elses skin with the other person now having it back and being understandably pissed about it, having only not gotten it back sooner due to dying of the Legacy Virus. Thankfully this issue dives deep into it and we’ll explore it more as we go.

The child loudly complaning is Margaret, Brian and Meggan’s daughter. Margret is one of the few things Mark Guggenheim’s run on X-Men did that was all that intresting as, probably thanks to a combination of her dad’s magical man juice and her mom’s already shifting genetics, can already talk in full sentences and comprehend stuff at the tender age of 1. Betsy is of course heading to Krakoa but much like Kitty last week, she’s unsure. But it still works: Kitty was unsure because Krakoa, for whatever reason, basically rejected her and staying would just make her a ghost again. For Betsy, she’s gone from living in a stranger’s body and back again and is understandably frazzled and unsure of tommorow.

But as Brian escorts her to the portal on his property, a touch I like as Meggan is a mutant herself and Brian is a longtime ally so it makes perfect sense to put a portal down there both for his mutant students to depart and for Meggan to visit without having to leave her husband behind, he encourages her. This is something I love about the issue: most x-runs I see betsy in kinda forget she has a brother and Uncanny X-Force turned him into an asshole. Here, their close bond and past, she was a supporting character in his book first after all, is shown beautifully as Brian , while happy to have her back, wants her to move on with her life and knows she’ll do great. 

As also seen above Betsy wishes their brother could join them though Brian isn’t so sure. I didn’t really get into Jamie in the other review, and i’m pleased as punch to get here there. Jamie is their older brother.. and also has schizophrenia and the power of god, two tastes that instead create a rancid punch that threatns all life as Jamie dosen’t think anything else is real. Despite this, Betsy wishes he’d be there to see it and hopes it’d make him better. After all if Apocalypse can find a new start here why not him? They literally have worse people on the island.

Speaking of the devil, after Betsy makes her awkward entrance, we cut to Apocalypse who’s of course standing out a window watching everything meancingly, because even when he’s on the good guy side and no longer plotting horribly Darwinian crimes.. he’s still a super villian deep down and old habits die hard. He’s visited by Trinary, a fairly new x-character introduced in X-Men Red, she’s a technopath, as well as one of the brain trust running Krakoa’s computer network. Also as you can see apocapse want’s to be called by his weird Krakoan name.. i’m just going to stick with Apocalypse as I assume it’s the same thing and even Tini Howard herself has flat out admitted she dosen’t have a translation for it and just scripts him as Apocalypse still. He also gets dagger eyes from everyone’s faviorite Cajun as he makes his villianous rant.

Remy does however have more reason than most to hate the man: He was one of Apocalypse’s horseman once: he attempted to go under cover, but underestimated how good the horseman process was and would up having to go to Mr.Sinister of all people to get himself back to normal. So yeah, having the guy who turned you into a monster that tried to kill your future wife, KINDA makes you not willing to have a ham sammich with the guy.  Trinary came to fetch Apocalypse to check out a new gate that opened.. to otherworld.. the problem is Morgan sealed it, and thus Apocalypse , not being a moron, decides they need “a champion” to break it. And since Hercules is on a three month no pants cruise of the bahamas right now, he’s going to have to be less literal about it.  Meanwhile MOrrigan is an asshole to a coven of sorcerers decreeing that they failed her by.. letting mutants exist. Yeah the one weakspot I have with the book thus far is the opening villianess: Morgan Le Fay simply isn’t that intresting and while she’s had a good storyline or too here she’s pissy because.. mutants found magic again. It isn’ t a terrible motive but her steroptical villaness “take my anger out out my minons” stuff is just tiresome and not at all entertaining. She’s the right level of threat for this book, just not fleshed out about enough and is the one real dry spot in this issue. 

Back on Krakoa, Betsy runs into Kwannon and it’s.. about as awkard as you’d expect as you can see.. and really isn’t helping Betsy’s unease. And I actually, despite not having read a ton of comics with Betsy in them get why she’s so uneasy besides the obvious problems of having the woman whose face you stole around all the time: she has no idea what to do. Everyone else on Krakoa, for the most part at least, is fully on board with the new plan, rairing to go. Sure some understandably object to their old foes being there… but theirs a sense of optimism and wonder and happy.. that just dosen’t go with someone who has so much blood on her hands she looks like she took a guys heart out with her bear hands, is in a body that hasn’t been home in years, and has to look the person who’s body she stole, intentional or not, and didn’t put any effort into bringing back from the dead or once she was back giving her her body back in the face. She’s just not in a great place. Thankfully even if her old pal Jubilee dosen’t pick up on this she does get Betsy could probably use some booze. Unfortunatley pressing matters keep her from finding out if krakoa can pour mimosa’s directily into her mouth via some kind of hose bush:

It’s your pal and mine goldballs, one of the five mutants able to raise the dead (but the car is fine). Or Egg I guess but I’m not calling him that. For one goldballs is a far better name just for the ridiculous factor. For another, just call yourself goldeggs. It’s still dumb but egg is somehow dumber. Even add a Z if you want no one cares. Your one of Krakoa’s own personal jesus’. You could rip a person’s throat out and no one would care… though granted that’s also because death is now meaningless for mutants. But yeah as you can see he has a problem and it’s Jamie.

And yup Jamie is back, alive and while not trying to kill everyone, is still kind of a weird asshole. Also I do not want to know what he did in there but I presume he fucked at least one person. Maybe he made them out of thin air, maybe they just came in. Maybe Sinister decided why not. Either way he’s fouling up the pods, and soon puts his foot in his mouth by saying Betsy’s classic look reminds him of better times right after their parents died. However in a nice little character bit he quickly apologizes, showing he has genuinely changed thanks to his resurrection on some level, and admits that the real reason is because they were all together then and all happy. As for why he’s a nusiance, it’s simple: while ressurectees DO need time to recover from you know, the whole being dead thing, it usually takes about ten minutes for the shock to wear off. And while there’s clearly no shock left Jamie is just farting around. Betsy’s response is to treat him like a ten year old. 

It..actually works.. but unfortunately Jamie has about as much intrest in seeing Brian as Brian does in seeing him. And I see why: before he went insane, Jamie was still a supervillian and still hunted brian out of jealousy, while Jamie.. is just kind of a dick. He’s like Krakoa’s own discord: he’s not an apocalyptic godlike threat to the world any more but he will fuck with you just for cheap laughs. Betsy tries using her telepathy to force him to go but Fabio stops her, as it upsets the eggs apparently and decides to drag Brian here, something even Jamie can see as a bad idea. And when the naked man whose been back for all of 5 minutes can see the holes in your plan, maybe you rethink things. But I also get why Betsy is trying so hard at this: She has almost no stablity left and Brian has been her rock, past and present. But Jamie is still her brother and now has the potetinal to do good and while still a loon, is no longer a genocidal madman and is stubbornly refusing to reconcile because he’s decided to swear off humanity. She just wants her family whole and her brothers not trying to kill each other, but is in too bad a state to recognize they need time and may NEVER get along. it’s how it is with family. Dosen’t mean she has to choose one or the other. Brian wouldn’t make her and frankly Jamie isn’t dumb enough to try that.  Thankfully apocalypse interupts Betsy’s extrodinarly bad plan to ask her about the gate.. and point out that Brian himself would be the best way and that, even as a half human, he’d be welcome here in this crisis. He probably get some leeway since apparently the captain britan thing makes him half otherworlder and he is a cosmic champion versus just some joe who wants to enjoy a paradise he hasn’t earned thorugh hard work or nearly dying a bunch. 

Betsy heads to Braddock Manor where Brian is already planning on going to Otherworld to fix this and is naturally not all that inclined to listen to Apocalypse. So as seen above Betsy goes with plan B: She’s going with him even if it’s a trap because fighting alongside her brother doing the right thing is better than moping around an island trying to dodge Kwannon. This also gives me a nice opprotunity to bring up Betsy’s approach to their former enemies. She’s far more accepting than the rest, even Logan outright objected, but I also easily get why: She’s former black ops, having served on one version of X-Force and lead the one right after it. She understands the need for pragmatism and is a pragmatic person. It’s probably why she’s so willing to forgive Jamie: yeah he did terrible things, but at his worst he was mentally ill, and as established by X-Men #1, Krakoa has terrific healthcare and telepaths and empaths to help him work through his issues. He may not WANT to of course, but he’s more likely to and him slowly improving in paradise is better than her brother just being dead to her as a genocidal mad man.  They encounter Morgan who, being basically a 50′s disney villian, expects Brian as otherworld’s champion to start drowning his own sister.. because fuck subtley. 

Back on Krakoa we meet up with Rouge and Gambit. As a tiny bit of exposition for you lapsed ex fans the two are now married. The two reconciled in the excellent Rouge and Gambit mini series, hashing out their long and messy history. Then X-Men gold happened.. see there was SUPPOSED to be a wedding of Colosus and Kitty.. but their reconcilation was so terribly forced no one wanted the wedding and editoral had gambit, of course, steal The Wedding. So the two are in a happy place, though Rouge dosen’t want to use her power dampener on paradise, understandable as said dampener is a repurposed anti-mutant thing and it’d be like brining a pile of nazi gold as your present to a jewish wedding. Rouge then decides , as shown above ot bring up the idea of having kids but before Gambit can say “of course”, Trinary summons them for apocalypse. Apocalypse needs Rouge as he figures her absoprtion power might allow her to serve as a gateway, and a way to retrieve Betsy. Remy, Understandably, dosen’t want her to do this But Rogue is willing to take the risk to save her friend. Remy , now tenativley on board, suggestings bringing in Jubes since she was the last one to talk to Betsy, but A-Train is way ahead of them. 

Naturally, having talked to her all of one sentence, she has nothing. Also curiously apparently Apocalypse wanted Jubes to bring her son, adopted if you didn’t knokw about him, Shogo with her but shockingly she didn’t want to bring her son to see the scary blue man who had no trouble trying to do a murder on a child when she was younger. However Apocalypse really needs her as a bridge between minds: Rouge will touch the portal to break through it and Gambit will keep watch and is all too happy to. As a side note i’d lvoe to see apocalypse babysit “So you see small infant, after that I cleaved the flesh off his skull and put said skull on a pile as a warning to my enimies. You always want to get the flesh nice and clean off.. .the bits create more of a smell and you need to think of the smell. Speaking of the smell I think someone needs a changie!” 

I would too, but i’m pretty sure Remy would be a ground smear, but I think Apocaypse does respect his willingess to try anyway even if he dosen’t take gambit serious as a threat. 

Back in crazy magic lady town Morgan is slowly corrupting Brian, and despite Betsy’s best attempts to stop it, is quickly turned into a warped dark knight who’s trying to shove the amulet of right in her face for some reason.

But with Apocalypse plan in motion, she figures out what’s going on and destroys the portal.. unfortuantley for Rogue this causes to feel weird and then well.. this is the end result.

What exactly the fuck dosen’t even begin to describe this.

Back in King Arthur’s House, Trinary’s words not mine, Betsy tries to kick Morgan’s ass but Dark Brian blocks her… before the above happens.. and it’s clear WHY he was cramming the amulet down her throat... Morrigan has full control of him, he can’t do anything to stop her.. but he can pass it on so she can hopefully stop her or , if he can’t be freed, destroy him before he harms anyone else. He sends her back to the real world as Betsy wails> This scene is damn powerful, as we’ve seen before Brian was one of the few people who understood she was going through some shit and offered her his full support... and now he’s gone, no idea how to rescue him, leaving a wife and daughter behind. 

Back on Krakoa things arne’t much better wirth Rouge int he flower cocoon I showed earlier and Gambit ready to blow Apocalypse’s head off.. and as you can see Apocalypse is like “Fine i’ll come  back from it stronger, but can you please wait? We’ve got a lot of shit going down. But before Apocalypse can pound Remy into a Cajun Corpse, the assembled group is distracted by a returning Betsy. 

And so we end on Betsy, now fully crowned once again as Captain Britain, wondering what the fuck is up with Rogue. We get a quick Epilogue where one of the covern from earlier joins a cult based on the same one related to apocayplypse and we’re out. ‘Final Thoughts: Excalibur #1 is a good start. While some things don’t quite gel, Otherworld isn’t explained at all for those who have never heard of it (raises hand), it feels fresh and makes me invested in Betsy’s struggle, the tragedy Brian goes through, Remy’s fury and Apocalypse, who for once gets to serve as a wise sage instead of a warrior and it’s an intresting role for him, as well as him clearly being set up to mentor Betsy as she rises higher than ever before with her new role. It makes you want to see what comes next and the only real drawback is that Jubilee is basically a tagalong while Rictor is entirely absent, but both I suspect will be fixed with time. As fhte first part of a story, and the first Dawn of X Comic to be part of an arc since the two mini series that launched it, it works well setting things up. As I said the comic suffers from a lack of exposition on Otherworld and from a weak villain, but it’s not enough to distract from this fun, well crafted fantasy and I can’t wait to see what comes next. Until next time, hail to the queen baby.  

[youngster-monster]

Aloth didn’t expect to find himself back in Defiance Bay so soon, but the city is like a whirlpool, impossible to escape on your way from one side of the Dyrwood to the other. He usually does his best to not overstay his welcome: fifteen years have not yet managed to erase the chaos Waidwen’s Legacy wracked on the city, and the fall of the Wheel has not helped the situation.

But, if not monitored, the city’s conflicts might fester into the kind of instability where the Leaden Key would thrive, and it has become Aloth’s life work to avoid just that. So he found some kind of compromise between his duty and his personal reluctance in the form of a large network of spies and informants. They send him updates on a monthly basis, describing in excruciating detail the political and social happenings of the largest city in the Dyrwood. The heavily encrypted letters are usually as long as a small novel and take him sometimes an entire day just to skim through, which he takes as a collective effort from his contacts to make his life a living Hel.

Or maybe it’s an underhanded way to force him to come see things for himself, if a deeply unsuccessful one: each unnecessarily wordy missive about trade agreements going awry only adds to his reasons to never step foot in the city himself.

But Anathema, his contact inside the rebuilt Sanitarium, has sent him an uncharacteristically terse letter. Its content could be boiled down to ‘newcomer animancer is likely to be a member of the Leaden Key’, without much more context or details. He took it as the urgent warning it is and immediately packed his bag and set for Defiance Bay.

Most cities in the Dyrwood and Deadfire Archipelago make him feel nostalgic, but none evokes such a gnawing sense of longing for the past as the Dyrwoodan capital. They’ve spent weeks here, running around as Renard—

Well. As he did what he did best: tried to save the world, one person at a time, and ended up falling into schemes of increasing scale and importance as a result.

He hasn’t seen his friend (yar sweetheart, lad, Iselmyr corrects, but he steadfastly ignores her) since they parted ways in the Deadfire, Aloth chasing after the Leaden Key and Renard setting sail for gods-know-where. Not a whisper of his name in a decade was odd for such an infamous and influential man, and he still occasionally worried that his friend had found his end while stumbling into another plot to end the world. But he always refused to dwell on the possibility. Renard had survived worse: neither a two thousand year old evil mastermind nor death nor a literal god could stop him, so it’s more likely he went hiding into the most remote place of Eora, hoping to escape the expectations people always seem to put on him.

And anyway his duty is too important for him to be distracted by thoughts of the man he loved (still love, his own treacherous mind says, Iselmyr cackling in the distance). It was important enough then for him to let go—

It still is, he assures himself, forcing doubts and regrets down to focus on the task at end. No point in dwelling on what could have been.

-

Because Anathema is a cruel, cruel orlan who loves to have company in her misery, she makes him go down into the catacombs and has the audacity to arrive an hour late.

Aloth doesn’t have many good experiences with catacombs, tunnels, sewers and other underground labyrinth. Especially not those catacombs. And sure, there are fewer cultists and necromancers this time around, but it’s still as cramped and utterly disgusting as ever — he knows, by experience, that he’ll be better off burning those clothes than trying to get the foul smell out of them.

Going by previous reports, this is where she spends most of her time, using the expensive network of tunnels and sewers to go around the city, but that’s not an excuse for insisting this be their meeting place. There are many dark alleys and dirty inns on the surface, where no one asks question and there aren’t skeletons slowly decaying into dust just feet away. Knowing her, the real reason is that she wants to get revenge for the mandatory monthly report so much that she’d subject herself to this place just so he has to be here too.

It’s not even a meeting, really: Anathema is notorious for disliking kith contact, hence why he believes she might actually have chosen to live in the catacombs. Instead she makes him wait for almost an hour in what used to be the necromancer’s hideout, drops a pile of loose sheets of paper in his arms and disappear the way she came, leaving no trace of her passage as she slips back into the shadows.

He stands there for a moment, clutching the pages against his chest, before Iselmyr takes the helm and lets out an impressive string of curse. He swears he hears her laugh somewhere down the dark passages. Once Iselmyr lets him have the control of his body back he stuffs the stack of paper in his bag and strides off, quietly fuming.

It’s when he reaches Copperlane that he realizes he doesn’t actually know where he’s staying the night. He’s not overly fond of taverns: he’s broken into enough of them to know exactly what their security standards are. But it’s not like he has anywhere else to stay. At this point he would even be glad for a break-in: he feels like burning something, and a robber might do the trick.

After quick deliberations he makes his way toward Ondra’s Gift. The district has made an art out of minding your own business, and its criminality rate is high enough that shady characters such as him — working against the Leaden Key gave him reflexes and habits rarely seen in good upstanding members of society and Iselmyr really doesn’t help him stay inconspicuous — slip right out of people’s minds as long as they don’t start shit. It’s enough advantages that he’s ready to put up with the brothel for one night.

He pushes the door of The Salty Mast and is immediately assaulted by the warm air, smelling like incense, cheap ale and sweat. It’s summer, but the air inside is still hotter than the already sweltering heat outside, and Aloth briefly reconsiders his decision. He could walk to The Goose and Fox before nightfall and get a bed there, or just a spot in their backroom if all the rooms are already taken. It wouldn’t be that much effort. But he’s been on the road for a week straight, he’s dirty and tired, and unlike most other taverns The Salty Mast doesn’t make you pay extra for a bath.

Inhaling one last breath of fresh air, Aloth steps into the brothel.

Maea is still there, nodding in his direction when she notices him, but she’s older. Wearier, like most inhabitants of the city are, nowadays. She doesn’t recognize him, of course: fifteen years is a long time, and he was only a face in the crowd even then. Renard she could recognize. His face is hard to forget.

He pays for a room and drags himself to the most isolated table he finds, keeping his back to the wall and his traits hidden under the shadow of his hood. He would look out of place in most brothels, but Defiance Bay’s standards are… lower than most, and the presence of so many mercenaries and adventurers in the city means there are far shadier people than a simple hooded traveler seeking a meal and company. Such as the group of armed kiths on the other side of the main room, laughing uproariously as they  drink. They alone look boisterous and dangerous enough that all attention is kept well away from Aloth.

It’s not the best of situations, but it’s good enough that he feels safe dumping his newly-acquired reading material on the table to flip through it while he eats through the last of his food supplies. He rarely risks the food in public places: it is frighteningly easy to poison someone, and people will do anything for a handful of coins.

The stack turns out to be quite tidy, separate into smaller stacks attached together with pieces of strings. The first one is the report he originally expected from Anathema this month. It’s boring and predictable enough that he allows himself to skim it without paying too much attention to it. He knows that the matter must be urgent or she wouldn’t have called him there, but at the moment he is by far too tired to read anything important and still and remember it clearly tomorrow.

Still, it’s work, and by trying to commit the details to memory he ends up falling into the half-dozing tunnel vision he often experiences when he’s trying to work through his exhaustion. He’s so engrossed in his attempt at understanding — it doesn’t help that Anathema’s handwriting is as illegible as ever — that he actually jumps when a hand slams on his table.

He looks up sharply, glaring at the interloper who happens to be one of the adventurer he saw earlier. The man is easily a good head taller than him, with a heavy plate armor that just screams ‘I was kicked out of the Crucible Knights and they preferred to let me keep the armor than touch something that I wore on my body for more than a day’, which is a worryingly common archetype for mercenaries in the city. The Knights’ standards are higher nowadays than they used to be, at least hygiene-wise.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he says, probably going for a seductive purr and only sounding like a deranged crow cursed with speech. “You come here often?”

“No.”

“Really? Shame. What if I gave you a good reason to come back, hm?”

“I highly doubt your ability to do that,” Aloth replies, rolls his eyes and looks back to his reports, already dismissing the man. He clicks his tongue in annoyance when he notices the hand still resting upon the pile of paper.

His annoyance turns to anger when his other hand comes to rest on his cheek, the press of cold metal forcing him to raise his face toward the stranger again. “Come on, sugar, that’s rude.”

Aloth can feel Iselmyr clawing at his mind, rising to the surface in her urge to make him swallow back his words with a well-placed fireball — she’s been getting the hang of his magic lately. He doesn’t fight her, letting go of the control of his body altogether.

She shrugs his body on like a coat, settling into limbs so familiar yet so different, throwing their shoulders back and making sure to look the strangers in the eyes as she glares. He chuckles, delighted.

“Feisty, aren’t you?” He gets even closer to them. His breath stinks of the place’s cheap ale, and if it were Aloth in control, he would probably gag at the sensation of it brushing against his skin. “I like that.”

“I’d have a goat’s jig with a pig before I looked at yer stick, ye wagtail toss pot!”

And then she spits on his face.

Aloth has a brief moment of clarity as she withdraws in which he suddenly remembers why he usually never let Iselmyr do the talking when he’s not actively looking for a fight.

“Why, you little bitch—” The mercenary’s hand lets go of his face, for which he’s glad until he sees him raises it in a fist that is, without a doubt, about to collide with his face.

That’s when he’s struck with probably the strongest sense of déjà-vu he’s ever felt. He’s tired and dirty, present here only because of his work concerning the Leaden Key, and Iselmyr’s foul mouth and hot temper just got him into a fight he’s unlikely to get out of unhurt. It’s Gilded Vale all over again. Although this time, Renard won’t be coming to his rescue—

A hand wraps itself around the mercenary’s wrist. The man tugs, frowning, but his expression turns into bewilderment when, instead of freeing his hand, he is sent stumbling backward. The movement reveals the disheveled figure of another man holding him back, traits hard to distinguish in the shadows of the poorly-lit tavern. The mercenary’s face twists in a pained grimace as the grip on his wrist tightens and the newcomer leans toward him, muttering, “Cut it out, asshole, or I’m going to cut you.”

The words are slightly slurred, the tone similar to that of a drunk throwing exaggerated threats around to start a brawl, but the glint of a knife close to the mercenary’s navel suggests this man is being perfectly serious.

The first man wrenches his hand free and stalks out without a word, although he can be heard swearing under his breath. He sulks back to his table where his companions welcome him with mocking laughter.

Aloth turns to his impromptu savior, thanks on the tip of his tongue, but freezes before he can speak. His movements have brought the man back into the flickering light of the dim lantern resting on the table, and it takes Aloth a long moment to first recognize his face and then to realize he is not dreaming.

“Renard?”

Renard blinks, distracted from glaring at the retreating mercenary’s back, and looks down at him. “Huh. Knew I recognized that voice.” Something odd passes over his face — a flash of conflicting emotions in his eyes before they darken into a sort of resignation — and he lets himself drop into the neared chair, sprawling over the table. With one hand he gestures to Maea for a drink. “Didn’t ‘xpect t’see you here.”

“It has been quite some time, yes,” Aloth replies, unsure what else to say to a man he professed his love to before disappearing for ten years.

He should have sent a letter.

They don’t look at each other and stay in that awkward silence until Maea drops two full tankards in front of them, glancing meaningfully to Aloth. He’ll need it. To Renard, she says, “You’re not on shift tonight.”

Renard salutes her with his newly-acquired drink. “I’m here for your delightful company, of course,” he says, remarkably articulated for someone who looks and smells like he’s been sleeping in a brewery for the last decade. He takes a gulp of the shitty ale without the slightest reaction at the foul taste. “Sure as hell ain’t the quality of the drinks bringing me back.”

She whacks him on the head. “If you wanted better alcohol you’d do a better job.”

He grumbles and waves her away, so she whacks him a second time for good measure before striding off to her next client.

Turns out silence is just as awkward with drinks, at least to Aloth. Renard seems content enough drinking the swill they dare to call ale, but Aloth barely sips it in the hope of diminishing the aftertaste while he stares at his old friend in open curiosity.

He’s— changed. He thought the same when they met again in the wake of Eothas’ destructive journey through the Deadfire, but he sees now that the five years after confronting Thaos were nothing next to the change a decade in the chaos of post-Wheel Eora put Renard through. He looked tired then, mere hours after watching a god bring the cycle of reincarnation to its end, and the dark circles have only gotten worse since then, as if he didn’t get a single night of sleep in the decade they spent apart.

His knuckles are still bloody like he’s been in a fight recently and his swollen eye and the rest of the bruises and scrapes on his face are half-covered by the limp strands of his hair that aren’t caught in a sloppy ponytail. He is nothing like the Renard who never got into a fight if he could avoid it, the one who spent hours washing the blood and salt out of his hair and styling it. There’s still dirt or dried blood stuck under his bitten-short nails.

“What happened to you?” He finally says, aghast.

Renard lifts his head just enough to reveal a wry grin. “Ten years is a long time.”

[cassandra-bites]

the third issue of DIE was ... a lot. I’m only beginning to understand it, and only very imperfectly. But I keep coming back to it, and have now collected myself enough to think aloud. Spoilers beneath the cut.

DIE makes use of poetic structures from the very first issue. There are rhymes everywhere - die, lie, cry, deny, defy, dry, spy, eye. Sol wearing a die in each eye is as poetic as it is logical. 

I thought I was reaching really badly, thinking of DIE in poetic terms, and gave up thinking about it. This issue makes me want to keep thinking. It’s set up as a chiasmus of sorts: it begins with dungeons and dragons and ends with a (dead) dragon and a (march into a) dungeon, and in the process the meaning of dungeon and the meaning of dragon are both radically changed.

Between the appearance of the dragon and its death, Ash ends up in a hole. It is, to cite Tolkien and his reference character in the comic, a “nasty, dirty, wet hole” -- a trench that Stephanie Hans makes immediately evocative of WWI and the trench fever the historical person named Tolkien caught there. In this fictional trench, Ash encounters four hobbit-sized soldiers: a dead ringer for Frodo who proudly displays the wedding ring that weighs on him and is never invisible, his brave Samwise-equivalent who dearly wishes to see elves and whose eyes have melted out, a dead (halved - the pun was a little gruesome) halfling named “Mister P”, and another dead, unnamed fourth friend (Merry is not a word to be applied here). After the Frodo character dictates a letter to Luthi, the wife who references the name Tolkien associated with his own wife, it becomes clear there will be no “there and back again” for him either. His death is punctuated by the appearance of an officer who wears Tolkien’s face and cites his pipe-smoking habit. He does some interesting editing work on a passage from The Hobbit, switching what was nice to what is nasty, replacing life with death:

“In a hole in the ground there lived died a hobbit an Englander. Not a nasty, dirty, wet nice hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort., but a nasty, dirty, wet hole, a charnel hole ...” (the bold bit is added in the comic; the final bit is, however,  not wholly new, but a reversal of the order in which those words were originally used)

Ash recognizes the reference and the person for whom the officer stands, deconstructs the whole down to its seemingly simple, idealized, dismissible parts, recognizing that she is seeing fictional references in context - in context that is at once fictional, trope-y, and reflective of real facts of Tolkien’s biography, of the real sacrifices and horrors of war - and struggles to come to terms with the hurt she feels. The Die-representative of Tolkien responds with another transformative line:  “Allegories are ugly. But poetry? Poetry is poetry, and war poetry most of all.”

This line arrested me when I first saw it, mostly because of the quadruple repetition of the word poetry in a context defined by fours: Ash has the D4 in her chest, plus there are the four dead hobbits (and four that will replace them in the closing sequence, walking into the dungeon in another flip, this time of “one does not simply walk into Mordor”). But I had zero inkling of what it could mean until I found the citation it reframes. In response to readers who insisted on reducing his books to allegories for historical events or ideas, to fixed, defined, unchanging, top-down issued references, Tolkien wrote:

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” -- foreword to Fellowship of the Ring

Gillen thus replaces “history” with “poetry” and “war poetry” (a potential label for the issue itself), but keeps the opposition to allegories that dictate how a story should be read and interpreted. 

The ending of the issue seems to reflect that desire to privilege readerly liberty, to open up a singular set of references to a question that concerns all readers - world war. (The closing image does this too, putting the reader right behind the four soldiers, as though to say - will you follow?) “Where would we have been if we were sixteen in 1914?” asks Matt. “Who volunteers to come to a dungeon?” Ash asks, concluding: “Better people than us”. The line calls back to how, in the eyes of the Frodo stand-in, she stood for the “high folks”, in contrast to the “low” “likes of us” used as cannon-fodder for "wizards and their schemes”. The final image has four Prussian hobbits, indistinguishable from the four who just died, killing the eagle sent to deliver the message for Luthi. Their officer (is he a reference too?) reads the letter, a letter any one of them would have wanted to send in the same situation, tells them they have stopped propaganda from being sent (a lie), burns the letter much like the dragon burned and gassed the four Englanders, then coolly sends them into the dungeon that is the war front, leaving the reader to reflect on ... a lot. 

Like - how much of this specific situation was caused by Angela’s rush for Fair Gold to power her suit? Did the four dead ringers die because the dragon was brought out to stop her and the party? Or - what are the conditions under which fantasy and poetry are produced and consumed in the first place, and what are the costs? What is its legacy, and what of it does it choose to hide or reveal?

The repetitions of “foul” come to mind here. In this issue, foul is used first by the Frodo character as he tries to determine Ash’s allegiance (“fair or foul?”). Ash then silently characterizes herself, in her Bard/Dictator role, as foul to most people. Having dismissed elves as “dumb and obvious” in the past issue, only for the elf queen to transform into a murderous orc, Ash takes a more measured position on Tolkien here by recognizing the value of hobbits. As a result, the Master Who Looks and Talks Like Tolkien concludes she is not “entirely foul”. However one interprets this, it seems plausible that “fair and foul” could to be a question for the entire comic - two opposites held together and impossible to rend apart.

(What is fair, what is foul about the emotional manipulation the comic itself produces through Ash’s reaction, Matt’s reaction, and in the reader? Notice how the comic, by virtue of its having pages, puts the reader through the motions of closing the page on the four as they "simply walk" into Mordor, thereby putting the reader on the same side as the party on the question "who volunteers".  Then there are metaphorical levels - what is foul about Angela going for FAIR gold? how shall the fair "alabaster princess" Ash reconcile herself to also being ash, ready to crumble under dragons’ breath, to the foul words that created the fouling corpse of a former lover who fairly? cursed her back? etc etc)

It looks like the next stop in the story is going to be the space of Brontë sister gaming, (a stop in a town invented by the mothers of gaming as this war-torn realm was regulated by the father of fantasy?), which starts up even more questions. But I’ve gone on long enough; looking forward to seeing how it all develops, textually and visually -

[omgnsfwisnsfw-blog]

The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning: Second Chapter Prologue

It was nighttime, and the waning moon was, for some reason, vividly bright. Mike McGuire was laying in the middle of the ring in their backyard, staring up through the branches. The leaves had yet to sprout, but the buds were set to start opening up anytime. Same could be said for the young plants newly set in the soil near the back porch- a small plot of land freshly tilled up, planted with varying marigolds, daffodils, impatiens, and centered in it all, a rosebush received for Valentine’s. It was nice and neat, every plant perfectly arranged. The same could not be said for the garage.

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

It had all began not even a few days ago. A few days ago after losing their beloved tag team championship belts at the biggest show of the year. They had spoken little. They showered, dressed, went to the hotel, slept, got on the plane the next morning. And somewhere over the ocean, John had turned to Mike, and in a rare initiation of conversation…

“Mike.”

John was looking out the window, like he did with every trip, and there was a quiet mesmerization about it. Mike startled a bit. He didn’t usually initiate conversation. Sometimes early on they wouldn’t speak for hours, and when Mike asked why he wasn’t talking to them he simply replied ‘you didn’t say anything.’ Him breaking his ‘speak when spoken to’ habit usually indicated he had something important on his mind, so they’d shifted and given him their full attention. “Yeah, bud?”

“I turned 42 two weeks ago.”

He didn’t sound overtly happy about it. John’s emotional inflection was a subtle, nuanced thing, but by now Mike had become very attuned to picking it out. Still, they offered him a wavery little smile, probably in an attempt to cheer the both of them up. “You shoulda told me that. Woulda made you a cake.”

John shrugged.

“Better stuff to celebrate.”

His hand touched the window briefly.

“Like us.”

He turned to Mike in his chair and spoke low.

“But what I mean is that … maybe I can continue to do this. Maybe my body holds up a little longer. But I’ve come to realization that I don’t want to.” They sat up bolt upright, their head tilting to the side. For a moment they resembled an Irish Setter who just heard a far-off dog whistle and was trying to process what in the world that sound was. “You wanna stop? Like… this minute?” It wasn’t accusatory- more like confirming that the sounds coming out of his mouth were forming words that they were understanding the meaning of.

“Yes.” “You sure?” “Yes.” They sat back in their seat, expression a little dazed, as if showing mild signs of shock. Then they closed their eyes, inhaled, exhaled. Managed a smile, wobbly for a different reason than their previous one, and reached over, giving his wrist a squeeze. “...okay.”

The declaration had caught Mike completely off guard. In a way, they thought, they should’ve seen it coming at some point- he’d made some remarks about the ugliness of the business, beginning to think past it. But they hadn’t thought it would happen so suddenly. It was like driving at 60 MPH and then suddenly slamming on the brakes, the sudden jettisoning into the seatbelt knocking out all your breath and leaving your insides hurting. They went home. He planted his garden, seeming serene and perfectly content. Mike gave Alundra a once-over- they’d had her painted in their absence, the vivid yellow and red flame paintjob traded for an emerald green with orange flame one. The new vanity plates installed- NSFW 1. Something stabbed inside them. The next day. Grocery shopping. Mike going over their particulars. So much had been provided for them that had to be taken into account now. Health insurance- the extended coverage wouldn’t last forever, and though they could easily afford it, plans for two people in their shape wasn’t going to come easily. Something pricked at their eyes. Mike kept staring at their phone. It would ring eventually, they just knew it, a gruff voice on the other end demanding what in the blue hell they thought they were doing, is this what I wasted my time on you for, pulling yourself out of obscurity and stumbling into the perfect partner just to vanish like a fart in the wind? They weren’t sure the old man would say that. But what would they think, when they heard? How would they explain ‘he wanted out and I couldn’t deny him that and I can’t keep going in good fucking conscience without him’? And so on till today. This evening. Just now. Mike found themselves in the garage. They looked around. A small box was on the table- a prototype of a new piece of merch. A snowglobe. Little figurines of them under a dome of glass filled with water. They held their title belts. Shake it, orange and green confetti glitter swirled around. Pieces of fanmail, notes on their Twitter, asked where they’d gone. Some wished them well. Some worried that they were hurt or worse. Some said they felt betrayed. Why couldn’t you have even said goodbye? We believed in you. Quitters. Mike’s grip tightened on the snowglobe, their teeth gritting together hard. ‘It got taken from me and I wasn’t ready, and it fuckin’ sucks. So bad.’ Their own words from a year past slam into their brain and with a roar, they throw the snowglobe down, sending a shatter of broken glass and glitter water splatting over the concrete floor. A t-shirt snatched from a box, the phoenix that’d been emblazoned on their viking flags torn in two with an obnoxious ripping sound, the rest of the box kicked over. Their head whipped around, glaring viciously at the cardboard face of David Scott. Screeching, all but consumed by their fury, they dashed forward, grabbing him by the top of his large, scowling head and tearing the cutout apart. They couldn’t believe their own anger. They felt robbed, cheated, resentful. And all those feelings made Mike feel even worse, because they didn’t want to direct them at John. They couldn’t have kept going if he hadn’t wanted to. They didn’t want to be one more person who knew his desires and chose to ignore them. Mike’s train of thought slowly cooled their anger. All that was left was a giant mess of broken glass, torn t-shirts, dented boxes, ripped up cardboard. Something sick heaved in their chest and they left the garage, numbly trekking through the backyard until they found themselves in the ring.

-------------- So there they were. Maybe they could salvage something. Maybe the fans they hadn’t completely alienated would still want them, for old time’s sake. If they got back into auto repair maybe they could even sell them there as a bonus. Nostalgia was always a hot ticket, and somebody in the future was bound to remember that one tag team that got super hot and then vanished without a trace out of nowhere. Raising an arm, they laid it over the bridge of their nose, shielding their closed eyes from the moonlight as they tried not to sob. Don’t be fuckin’ stupid.

John stood in the doorway of garage backdoor. Behind him was the aftermath of the disturbance that woke him. He had noticed immediately that Mike was gone. He had sat up from the bed and waiting until the noises subside. Quietly, he went to the garage and looked upon what had happened. His emotions ticked up slightly to disappointment that the quiet last few days had been a simmering pot and it had just spilled over. Soft footsteps went across the yard to the source. He stood just outside the ring, keeping his distance for the moment. He cut through the ambience of the night.

“I know you’re angry at me.” There was a long pause. The soft, occasional chirp of an early cricket or two. “‘M not mad at you. I feel shitty that I’m mad at all. S’ fuckin… complicated.” They didn’t move, their speech muted. If their anger was a fire, right now they were the embers that some knowledgeable Eagle Scout had doused with water and stirred up with a stick. Only You Can Prevent Wildfires. “...i didn’t want to not give you this. I feel like I’ve let people down. Myself a little. And then I get mad at myself cuz the alternative is what? Making you run yourself down when you don't want to anymore just to feed my own fuckin’ dream that I should’a grown out of? It… I…” Sniff. “...it just happened so fuckin’ quick. Like slammin’ a book shut ‘fore you read the end.”

John circled around to the wooden steps leading up onto the apron. He put a foot on the first step.

“I thought it would just be the end of a chapter.” Slowly lowering their arm from their face, they scooted themself across the canvas a bit away from the center- not a recoil, but an invitation. Reaching up, they curled their hand around the bottom rope. They knew that. It made them feel even more foolish for exploding the way they had, the silvery light of the moon accentuating the blush standing out on their damp cheeks. “I’m bein’ a fuckin’ dumb baby, aren’t I…”

“No. Not happy that I advertently made a decision for you as well.”

“We’re a package deal. Can’t do it without you. Don’t want to. I know what you said’s right. Our story ain’t over. Just feel like I’ve been thrown violently into the next scene without any time to brace myself. But I’ll get over it. Get over myself, maybe.” Their right arm, the one not gripping onto the rope, reaches out to the side, fingers beckoning a bit. “‘M sorry I broke all that stuff… poor Milscott…”

“It was just that. Stuff.”

He stepped up onto the apron.

“I believed in what we said. All of that talk about hall of fames and being the greatest. It was fun. It lit a fire inside of me. But it made me feel like we were walking down the wrong path. Like we almost did before.”

“Mouthy little shit talks a big game.” There was a dry chuckle at that. All that talk of being the first tag team in the EWC Hall of Fame would likely amount to just that. Talk. It was one of the things that’d jagged at them these past few days, that their ultimate legacy was apparently a foul-mouthed hothead who made big grandiose boasts only to bail without warning. Exhaling, they turned their head toward him, hand still reaching in his direction. “How so? We weren’t bein’ dicks again, were we?”

“No.”

He walked along the the edge of the apron, stopping just before them.

“Don’t think it was that simple. Our words, though? They started to mirror something we swear we’d never be. Started to have some folks nod along that weren’t before.”

It took Mike a moment to puzzle that one out, their mouth pursing, flicking two and fro, nose crinkling a bit. After a few seconds, though, their red-rimmed eyes popped, left hand releasing the rope and going to their mouth with a gasp. “Noooooo. You can’t fuckin’ mean… no. No motherfuckin’ way we were sounding like him. … Were we really?”

“Maybe not exactly. But it made me think. Readjusted a few priorities.”

He had finally stepped through the ropes and entered the ring. He stood over them.

“I would have gone as long as we had those belts. And sure, there were amazing possibilities on the horizon. I love the sport. But I had been wrong in the assumption that it was the only thing I was meant to do. You made me see that.” Mike looked up at him. From this angle he looked impossibly huge, and it made them feel smaller in comparison. Physically anyway. John never made you feel small as a person, and if he did, you probably deserved it. “...maybe I’ve had it backwards this whole time then. I kept seeing things as… I don’t fuckin’ know… a block building. You take out any one part of it- me, you, our home, the business- and everything falls to pieces. I mean I figured we’d stop someday, maybe in a year or two, kinda ease out of it, tell everybody where we were going an’ why. But in all those big fuckin’ pipe dreams I didn’t think about what you thought. I just assumed you wanted the same thing I did when it came to the business an’ that was fuckin’ selfish of me. I’m really sorry.”

He knelt down beside Mike, before finally sitting back, crossing his legs.

“I wanted all of that. But there’s more to us, I believe. I’d be naive to think there isn’t conflict elsewhere in the world but it is less likely than what we were doing. I had remembered what I loved about the business before it was taken all away. But more importantly, I now have something I never had.”

“...VIP customer status at Barnes and Noble?” The cheeky grin that flicked onto Mike’s face wasn’t the wavering, willing-yourself-to-smile expression she’d given him the last couple days. Like a breath of fresh air, it was real. Slowly, they pulled themself up to a sitting position, folding their legs likewise, facing him, reaching for his hands. Without hesitation, John placed his hands into theirs. He smiled in response to Mike’s joke. Sighing softly, Mike ran their thumbs over his knuckles tenderly. Even if they had been mad at him, it wouldn’t have lasted. They could be mad at a lot and hold grudges for ages, but never at him. Something about John was impossible to be angry with- least that’s how Mike saw it. “So… now what?”

John shrugged in response. But in that same moment, he felt an answer come through.

“We stop hiding who we are.”

[dfroza]

Today’s reading from the ancient book of Proverbs and book of Psalms

for july 5 of 2021 with Proverbs 5 and Psalm 5, accompanied by Psalm 16 for the 16th day of Summer and Psalm 36 for day 186 of the year (now with the consummate book of 150 Psalms in its 2nd revolution this year)

[Proverbs 5]

[Avoid Promiscuity]

Listen to me, my son,

for I know what I’m talking about.

Listen carefully to my advice

so that wisdom and discernment will enter your heart,

and then the words you speak will express what you’ve learned.

Remember this:

The lips of a seductress seem sweet like honey,

and her smooth words are like music in your ears.

But I promise you this:

In the end all you’ll be left with is a bitter conscience.

For the sting of your sin will pierce your soul like a sword.

She will ruin your life, drag you down to death,

and lead you straight to hell.

She has prevented many from considering the paths of life.

Yes, she will take you with her where you don’t want to go,

sliding down a slippery road

and not even realizing where the two of you will end up!

Listen to me, young men,

and don’t forget this one thing I’m telling you—

run away from her as fast as you can!

Don’t even go near the door of her house

unless you want to fall into her seduction.

In disgrace you will relinquish your honor to another,

and all your remaining years will be squandered—

given over to the cruel one.

Why would you let strangers take away your strength

while the labors of your house go to someone else?

For when you grow old you will groan in anguish and shame

as sexually transmitted diseases consume your body.

And then finally you’ll admit that you were wrong and say,

“If only I had listened to wisdom’s voice

and not stubbornly demanded my own way,

because my heart hated to be told what to do!

Why didn’t I take seriously the warning of my wise counselors?

Why was I so stupid to think that I could get away with it?

Now I’m totally disgraced and my life is ruined!

I’m paying the price—

for the people of the congregation are now my judges.”

[Sex Reserved for Marriage]

My son, share your love with your wife alone.

Drink from her well of pleasure and from no other.

Why would you have sex with a stranger

or with anyone other than her?

Reserve this pleasure for you and her alone and do not share it with another.

Your sex life will be blessed

as you take joy and pleasure in the wife of your youth.

Let her breasts be your satisfaction,

and let her embrace intoxicate you at all times.

Be continually delighted and ravished with her love!

My son, why would you be exhilarated by an adulteress—

by embracing a woman who is not yours?

For God sees everything you do and his eyes are wide open

as he observes every single habit you have.

Beware that your sins don’t overtake you

and that the scars of your own conscience don’t

become the ropes that tie you up.

Those who choose wickedness die for lack of self-control,

for their foolish ways lead them astray,

carrying them away as hostages—

kidnapped captives robbed of destiny.

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 5 (The Passion Translation)

[Psalm 5]

For the worship leader. A song of David accompanied by flutes.

Bend Your ear to me and listen to my words, O Eternal One;

hear the deep cry of my heart.

Listen to my call for help,

my King, my True God;

to You alone I pray.

In the morning, O Eternal One, listen for my voice;

in the day’s first light, I will offer my prayer to You and watch expectantly for Your answer.

You’re not a God who smiles at sin;

You cannot abide with evil.

The proud wither in Your presence;

You hate all who pervert and destroy what is good.

You destroy those with lying lips;

the Eternal detests those who murder and deceive.

Yet I, by Your loving grace,

am welcomed into Your house;

I will turn my face toward Your holy place

and fall on my knees in reverence before You.

O Eternal One, lead me in the path of Your righteousness

amidst those who wish me harm;

make Your way clear to me.

Their words cannot be trusted;

they are destructive to their cores.

What comes out of their mouths is as foul as a rotting corpse;

their words stink of flattery.

Find them guilty, O True God;

let their own devices bring them ruin.

Throw them out, and let them drown in the deluge of their sin,

for in revolt they brazenly spit in Your face.

But let those who run to You for safety be glad they did;

let them break out in joyful song.

May You keep them safe—

their love for You resounding in their hearts.

You, O Eternal, are the One who lays all good things in the laps of the right-hearted.

Your blessings surround them like a shield.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 5 (The Voice)

[Psalm 16]

The Golden Secret

A precious song, engraved in gold, by David

A prayer of David.

Protect me, God, for the only safety I know is found in the moments I seek You.

I told You, Eternal One, “You are my Lord,

for the only good I know in this world is found in You alone.”

The beauty of faith-filled people encompasses me.

They are true, and my heart is thrilled beyond measure.

All the while the despair of many,

who abandoned Your goodness for the empty promises of false gods, increases day by day.

I refuse to pour out blood offerings,

to utter their names from my lips.

You, Eternal One, are my sustenance and my life-giving cup.

In that cup, You hold my future and my eternal riches.

My home is surrounded in beauty;

You have gifted me with abundance and a rich legacy.

I will bless the Eternal, whose wise teaching orchestrates my days

and centers my mind at night.

He is ever present with me;

at all times He goes before me.

I will not live in fear or abandon my calling

because He stands at my right hand.

This is a good life—my heart is glad, my soul is full of joy,

and my body is at rest.

Who could want for more?

You will not abandon me to experience death and the grave

or leave me to rot alone.

Instead, You direct me on the path that leads to a beautiful life.

As I walk with You, the pleasures are never-ending,

and I know true joy and contentment.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 16 (The Passion Translation / The Voice)

[Psalm 36]

The Blessing of the Wise

A poetic song by King David, the servant of the Lord

The rebellion of sin speaks as an oracle of God,

speaking deeply to the conscience of wicked men.

Yet they are still eager to sin,

for the fear of God is not before their eyes.

See how they flatter themselves,

unable to detect and detest their sins.

They are crooked and conceited,

convinced they can get away with anything.

Their wicked words are nothing but lies.

Wisdom is far from them.

Goodness is both forgotten and forsaken.

They lie awake at night to hatch their evil plots,

always planning their schemes of darkness,

and never once do they consider the evil of their ways.

But you, O Lord, your mercy-seat love is limitless,

reaching higher than the highest heavens.

Your great faithfulness is infinite,

stretching over the whole earth.

Your righteousness is unmovable,

just like the mighty mountains.

Your judgments are as full of wisdom

as the oceans are full of water.

Your tender care and kindness leave no one forgotten,

not a man or even a mouse.

O God, how extravagant is your cherishing love!

All mankind can find a hiding place

under the shadow of your wings.

All may drink of the anointing from the abundance of your house.

All may drink their fill from the rivers of Eden.

The fountain of life flows from you to satisfy me.

In your light of holiness we receive the light of revelation.

Lord, keep pouring out your unfailing love

on those who are near you.

Release more of your blessings to those who are loyal to you.

Don’t let these proud boasters trample me down;

don’t let them push me around

by the sheer strength of their wickedness.

There they lie in the dirt, these evil ones,

thrown down to the ground, never to arise again!

The Book of Psalms, Poem 36 (The Passion Translation)

to be accompanied by these lines:

How exquisite your love, O God!

How eager we are to run under your wings,

To eat our fill at the banquet you spread

as you fill our tankards with Eden spring water.

You’re a fountain of cascading light,

and you open our eyes to light.

Keep on loving your friends;

do your work in welcoming hearts.

Don’t let the bullies kick me around,

the moral midgets slap me down.

Send the upstarts sprawling

flat on their faces in the mud.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 36:7-12 (The Message)

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

I don't think I've ever seen this particular meet up around, and if you've written something like this please kindly point me to it, but...

I'm dying to know. How would Legacy react to the other Harbingers?

We kinda know Ajax's opinion on them from voice lines, but I really wanna know what Moth TM thinks

And, if you wanna go the sagau route too, how would he feel being in a Harbinger only team? (Aka Childe, Scara/Wanderer and Arlecchino, in the present moment, but let's pretend we have a fourth one of them already)

hoohoohoo i got you, this is going to be a long one so bear with me mothlings!!

Director: Pierro is suspicious to Foul Legacy, he smells like the Abyss, yet not. the stars in his eyes match the ones in Legacy's glittering wings, but their light is from Teyvat, not the otherworldly glow from beneath this land. Legacy doesn't like it, the feel of being so close to home but with something obviously wrong that he simply can't put his claw on

First: Capitano is a pillar of strength, someone both Childe and Foul Legacy admire wholeheartedly- but Legacy also sees his nobility, the way he treats even his lowest level agents with respect. he aspires to be like that one day, someone people can look up to and expect kindness in return, so even Foul Legacy will give the First Harbinger a small, polite bow

Second: Legacy detests Dottore with all of his heart. not only does Childe have younger siblings, but Dottore has also attempted to rope him into experiments on his Abyssal half. Foul Legacy hates being treated like a thing, like just a feral animal, and that's not even mentioning what he fears the Doctor could do to you. Childe has to hold him back from growling viciously whenever he passes Dottore in the hall

Third: Columbina is strange, but Legacy is also strange! she's unsettling, yes, but she never tries to harm him or Childe- unless the latter riles her up enough to fight. sometimes when Foul Legacy is particularly homesick for you, nations away from Snezhnaya, he'll listen to her eerie singing as she sits nearby, not paying him any mind at all

Fourth: Legacy regards Arlecchino with both fear and respect. she's cordial enough, keeping her operations quiet and training her children to be the next set of Fatui soldiers, much like how Ajax became Tartaglia. the Knave terrifies Foul Legacy with her calm ruthlessness, but as long as she doesn't raise a finger towards you, he won't do anything

Fifth: Pulcinella is a curious case, treating Childe like a grandson and regarding his Abyssal half with kindness as well. it's a welcome change, and yet... Legacy can't help but feel like he isn't completely sincere. there's the barest undertone of a lie when he tells Childe about the other Harbingers, and Legacy watches the information with a care, suspicious eye

Sixth: ERROR. DATA NOT FOUND.

Seventh: Childe doesn't get the chance to interact with Sandrone that often, so neither does Foul Legacy. but he's very curious about what she does, always tinkering away in her lab- it's less foreboding than Dottore's set of rooms, at least. once she begrudgingly allowed him to watch her work, and needless to say her robots consider Foul Legacy their friend now

Eighth: Signora wasn't Childe or Legacy's favorite coworker when she was alive- they're not happy that she's dead, but it is somewhat of a relief to not have Childe bite his tongue with a vengeance whenever some snide comment slipped from her mouth. still, Legacy almost wishes he knew a bit more, having seen her stare longingly out the window at the silent snow all too often- he knows that longing. it's the type he feels when he misses you

Ninth: Legacy doesn't know much about Pantalone, apart from his love of wealth. he's an elegant man, to be sure, someone who can simultaneously keep his composure while also being entirely condescending. but Childe has a habit of buying you trinkets and gifts during his travels, so he's still grateful for the funds the Regrator provides

Tenth: ???

Foul Legacy wouldn't mind being in a team with other Harbingers- he knows they can't hurt him, at least not directly, and it seems to make the Creator so happy. he basks in your warm words, your loving attention, purring happily whenever he hears your sweet voice praise him- but only when his teammates aren't watching. he just knows that the Wanderer, mysterious as he is, will mock him for it, and Arlecchino always seems to know what's going on even when she's not present. his fourth teammate always seems to switch; he likes it best when it's Sandrone or Capitano. Legacy knows how the rest of them feel, though, how the Wanderer lowers his hat or how Arlecchino's lips quirk when they hear your compliments- the Creator has the adoration of them all

[jelanisaeed]

Flawed

I have a bad habit of putting people before me

I dunno why I do it or where this comes from

When my fuse is so short that the slightest disrespect

Unleashes an explosion worthy of planetary destruction

When my words are flung like poisoned daggers

Little care to aim, because I know they'll make their mark

Somewhere be it your heart, your brain

Or either the speck of common sense I'd expect you to have

But you always seem to evade simple thinking

Or did I allow it by finishing your thoughts for you

Nurturing your wellbeing far more than you did mine

And pretending if only for a second that were perfect human being

Beneath hurting my emotions and me because you understood

That my feelings varied worse than the weather with this climate change

That one misstep could turn taint a sunny day with hailstorm and gale force winds

That one moment was all it took to wipe a smile off my face and transform me into a ticking time bomb

One moment was all it took, you thought it was just one moment

But it was never one, no your perception was just so limited

Blinded, so illegally so for you to drive through my life

Crashing my individuality and hospitalizing my thoughts

I gave up my time, but you always threw tantrums

That I forgave over and over and over

Fed me lies after lies while I fed you the truth

You couldn't comprehend it when I gave you the truth

Am I yelling? Perhaps I should apologize

If only to relieve my conscious of your pained emotions

When you never gave a damn about mine

But see that's the fatal flaw of a Pisces

We expect too much without laying the foundation

So, when the storm devastates the town

We don't rebuild, only throw on the glitter

And hide behind rosy shades and say

Hey, it's not so bad

We Chant it over and over like a ritual or spell

Double, double toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble

Turn these ruin on the double

Into a garden, oh so subtle

Cause it doesn't have to fit reality

So long as your dreams can cloud your perception

And you begin to believe and trust the illusions

Until your stranded, lost and insecure

As a rage far surpassing anything you've experience

Burns from the inside and you struggle to release it

So, you smile and laugh while they fuel the flames

Coal, coal they toss it all with their false promises and smiles of toxic honey

But you always did like honey

Especially in your tea when sat under the shade

Offering it only to toss to those in dire need of reality

Ignoring the ones who are killing you softly

With their words or love you can't differentiate

Until it's too late and flames of disaster have risen

And those bridges they told you cherish of nothing more than ashes

But you hope for a sign of reconnection, but see no birds soaring above their remains

So, you wait and wait with high expectations and desires too high

And just never quite enough

So, you dust off your shoulders, burn your clothes and even cut your hair just for a change

You isolate yourself and think just for a change

You fall behind on your health just for a change

You learn to let go and breathe just for a change

You learn to embrace the pain just for a change

You learn to shine like the stars just for a change

Cause you remember you weren't some porcelain doll

Cause you remember you weren't a doormat

Cause you remember you weren't made to be a stepping stone, but something greater

That's the problem with putting people first

You've taught them that your needs, your feelings, your story, your shine, your legacy deserve second place to their success

And you could be foul and remind them just who's stars were truly brighter but

Sometimes it just feels better to laugh, live, and love yourself more

With a healthy and daily dose of savagery and shade of course

As so dedicated by the memoirs of a Pisces

[junker-town]

The extraordinary life and times of George Nicolau in the era of collusion

Art: Tyson Whiting

George Nicolau served an invaluable role as a labor arbitrator across sports, and helped save baseball from itself.

We are living in the age of scandal, each one more shocking and outrageous than the last. Who can keep track of them all when each day feels like a struggle for survival? Against that backdrop, history can seem as if its become engulfed in a circular time warp, endlessly spinning off its axis.

Yet, some moments demand to be preserved and re-examined because they reveal something real and tangible beyond a headline or a tweet. Take Collusion. That’s now something of a buzzword in baseball circles. But Collusion also refers to a real historical event, which exposed the inner workings of the sport. In the 1980s, baseball’s owners stumbled haphazardly into an ill-conceived plot to assert control over an economic system they could no longer contain.

For three years between 1985 and 1987, Major League Baseball clubs conspired to freeze the free agent market to such a degree that players had no choice but to re-sign with their former teams for a fraction of what they were worth. As with most MLB schemes, it was doomed to failure due to a combination of hubris and greed.

The roots of collusion were sown following the 1985 season. Coming off his great triumph — commercializing the 1984 Olympic games for the enrichment of the organizers, but not the athletes — Peter Ueberrorth was a made man when he agreed to become commissioner of baseball.

As recounted in John Heylar’s seminal Lords of the Realm, Ueberroth dressed down the baseball owners for outbidding each other on long-term contracts with free agents. He asked the owners what their policies were for signing free agents, if they even existed at all. At one point he turned to his counsel and said, “Stop this discussion if any point it smacks of collusion.”

As Heylar relates, Ueberrorth went on to tell the owners it was their fault that salaries were so high and to stop blaming the players. They were smart businessmen, he said, and they should act like it. Everyone agreed there was a problem, Ueberroth said, according to testimony in a later grievance. “Go solve it.”

It was the “Go solve it” part that was at issue. Ueberroth later denied he said those words, but the message was clear. That winter, 29 of the 33 free agents went back to their original teams, hat and glove in hand. Not even George Steinbrenner’s Yankees would make bids on free agents.

Collusion carried on into 1986 when a more robust free agent class found the market even more tense. General managers were now telling one another who they wanted to pursue and for how much. The phrase that carried the day was “fiscal responsibility.” Industry revenues went up, while player salaries went down.

As big-name players continued to be left out in the cold, Montreal star Andre Dawson went so far as to offer the Cubs a blank contract. The club could fill in the amount, which they did for the outrageously low sum of $500,000 with $200,000 in incentives for a player who would go on to win the Most Valuable Player award.

In the midst of all this, Ueberrorth went on the offensive against drugs, specifically cocaine use, by instituting mandatory drug testing. The players union cried foul, saying drug testing was a collective bargaining issue. An arbitrator named Thomas Roberts found for the union, so the baseball owners fired him.

That was a mistake on two levels. First, Roberts had begun hearing the first collusion grievance and an arbitrator couldn’t be fired in the middle of a grievance. Roberts was a deliberate man. He didn’t make a ruling on collusion until September 1987, when he found for the union. The delay allowed the conspiracy to continue unabated.

The second part of the mistake was that Roberts was eventually replaced by George Nicolau, who would hear the second and third round of collusion hearings. Nicolau was a formidable presence in the hearings. As a union lawyer named Steve Fehr put it, “The clubs’ case was obviously falling apart. George Nicolau was asking tougher questions than I was.”

In what became known as Collusion II, Nicolau found for the players, writing:

“‘What transpired in 1986 occurred because everyone ‘understood’ what was to be done. By common consent, exclusive negotiating rights were, in effect, ceded to former clubs. There was no vestige of a free market, as that term is commonly understood. The object was to force players back to their former clubs and the expectation was that all would go back in a replication of 1985, requiring nothing more to be done.”

Undaunted, the owners tried a new tack with the creation of a so-called Information Bank. Essentially, they created a centralized system in which teams would “deposit” their terms into the bank and “withdraw” information on other players. The idea was to prevent some team from coming in and offering too much, thus blowing up their carefully planned salary structure.

Of course, it only takes one team to upset that balance and of course, that team was Steinbrenner’s Yankees who made a play for slugger Jack Clark. As owners went back to the time-honored tradition of distrusting one another, the market began to thaw.

Ueberroth continued to insist he had done nothing wrong. Technically, he didn’t come right out and say the words “collusion,” but then, he didn’t have to. The owners got the message and Nicolau found for the players a third time.

“It must be remembered that the bank was unilaterally established shortly after Chairman Roberts’ decision, following two years in which bids for free agents desired by their former clubs were either nonexistent or virtually so,” Nicolau wrote. “Against that backdrop, the bank’s message was plain — if we must go out into that market and bid, then let’s quietly cooperate by telling each other what the bids are. If we do that, prices won’t get out of line and no club will be hurt too much.”

Now the question was what to do about it. Roberts and Nicolau had made several players “second-look” free agents, which allowed them to re-enter the market. On the question of damages, the players were awarded $285 million.

Despite undergoing a concerted effort to suppress salaries and effectively weaken their own teams competitive prospects, no one was ever fined or suspended for their role in the scheme.

The Collusion Years have all but disappeared from memory, but owners have continued to find ways to corral their spending habits. Nowadays the backstop is a luxury tax, a legally permeable but wildly effective deterrent in keeping salaries down.

Nicolau’s place in history has also been widely ignored. He died early 2020 at the age of 94 following a long and fascinating life. The son of Greek immigrants, he enlisted in the armed forces right out of high school at the height of World War II. Nicolau served as a navigator in B-17 bombing missions. On his fourth and final mission, his aircraft came under fire that shattered his leg resulting in an amputation above the knee.

“If I had been hunched over it would have shattered my head,” Nicolau told Michel Picher in a lengthy interview. “But it threw me about four or five feet against the bulkhead and I thought, well, I wonder what this is going to be like.”

After leaving the service, Nicolau attended the University of Michigan on the GI bill where he graduated with a degree in political science and economics. He then went to Columbia for law school with an eye on becoming a labor lawyer.

He did work for the Newspaper Guild and the Actors Equity Association before leaving in 1963 to join the Peace Corps. While in the Peace Corps, he convinced George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO to allow union workers to take leaves of absence from their jobs to train others in their mechanical areas of expertise.

Following his stint in the Peace Corps, Nicolau worked in various capacities for, among other things, the Office of Economic Opportunity and then-mayor John Lindsay in New York on anti-poverty programs. He also began involving himself in labor mediation and arbitration, helping write a training manual and establishing mediation protocols in prisons.

He also met Peter Seitz, the arbitrator who in 1975 found for the players in the Messersmith-McNally case that gave players the right to free agency. It was Seitz who encouraged Nicolau to become a full-time arbitrator.

Some years later, Nicolau was introduced to Bill Bradley, the former Knicks player who had been elected to the senate. Bradley introduced him to Larry Fleischer, the executive director of the NBPA and Nicolau was eventually brought on as an arbitrator. He also served in that role for the NHL and indoor soccer.

Among the cases he heard during his time with the NBA involved Bernard King who had been suspended without pay by the Utah Jazz following a cocaine arrest. The question was whether the team could suspend the player without pay. Nicolau said they could not.

Drugs became another part of his legacy years later when the case of Steve Howe came before him. Howe had been suspended six times for cocaine use and was granted one final chance by then-commissioner Fay Vincent. Howe pitched well for the Yankees, but was arrested once again for trying to purchase cocaine in Montana during the offseason. Vincent banned Howe for life.

In the grievance hearing, Nicolau suggested that a psychiatrist be brought in to examine Howe. The psychiatrist determined that Howe suffered from Attention-Deficit Disorder and that was the clear cause for his addiction. “So all of the time he had been in rehab,” Nicolau told Picher. “All of the time he had been suspended, no one ever picked this up, that there was some underlying cause.” Howe was reinstated.

Vincent proceeded to haul in various members of the Yankees to his office including manager Buck Showalter and general manager Gene Michael to tell them their testimony in Howe’s grievance had gone against the best interest of baseball. Vincent told them they had, “effectively resigned from baseball.”

The Yankees had a game that day and Showalter arrived just before the first pitch, shaken. The press naturally picked up on it and turned on Vincent in the natural style of New York tabloids of the early 90s. As Heylar wrote, “Between the media firestorm and the pointed words of arbitrator George Nicolau, Vincent backed off.”

Some 35 years after Collusion, the landscape has shifted but it has largely remained the same. Money has poured into sports by the billions, yet we still live in an environment where the lords make the rules and enforce them at their convenience. Teams continue to preach the gospel of fiscal responsibility, while at the same time shaking down cities for tax breaks and sweetheart land deals.

We could use more arbiters of fairness. We could use more like George Nicolau.

[ladymischievous]

Short Warcraft Fic

A short fic inspired by the recent news of the PTR build involving Wrathion. So spoilers, but moreso headcanon and fanfic shenanigans if anything.

-o-o-o-o-o

It has been days since Khadgar had arranged for me to stay in Karazhan. Unfortunately, the Archmage had to return to Dalaran to attend to some trouble that started up during his time away. This has left me to my own devices in the tower. There are many ghosts in this place, even the lingering spirit of the Last Guardian himsel--

“I am not a ghost.” Medivh drawled. He was very much alive and lounging on his favorite couch of his private study. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Wrathion, who had been writing in his journal, blinked before looking at the Magus. “How did you--”

Medivh answered by pointing to something above the dragon pup. Looking up, Wrathion spotted a raven that had perched itself on a nearby bookcase. It had a clear view of what he was writing in his journal. Of course, Medivh would be able to peer through the eyes of his precious birds. The raven croaked at the dragon prince before taking off and flying across the room. Wrathion watched as the large bird landed on the back of Medivh’s couch. The Magus reached over and gently scratched the raven, the bird gave a couple of soft, pleased clicks in return.

“Being a little paranoid, aren’t you?” Wrathion asked while quirking a brow. “I’ve been here for a few days, it’s not like I’ve tried to kill you in your sleep or anything.”

“No, but we both know that to even try would be a fool’s errand.” Medivh said bluntly. His gaze then locked onto the prince and glowed ever so dimly. “But you did try to put sleeping potion in my tea and wine a few times. Which I suggest you don’t do again, there’s only so many times I can talk Moroes out of killing you.”

“Maybe you should have better control over your servants.” Wrathion said as he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 

“And maybe you shouldn’t be trying to poison the person that’s letting you stay in his home.”

“Why are you acting like you’re being generous?” Wrathion scoffed. “You’re only doing it because Khadgar asked you to!”

“I didn’t have to say ‘yes’ at all, you scaly cat!”

“I’m not a cat!”

“You act like a foul-tempered cat!” Medivh shot back.

“Oh yeah?! Then you act like a pigeon!”

“Joke’s on you, pigeons are cute!”

“Oh yes, they’re especially cute in pies!”

“You little monster!”

Moroes walked in with a tray of tea and snacks just as the argument was reaching a crescendo. The undead Castellan paused and took a second to listen to what the two were arguing about this time. Moroes drew a breath through his nose (out of habit, since he didn’t truly need to breathe) and released it as a dramatic sigh. Moroes then cleared his throat loudly enough to signal he was standing there. “Master Medivh…”

Medivh’s words died in his throat the moment he heard the castellan addressing him. He looked at Moroes and tried to regain his composure. “Yes, Moroes?”

“I’ve been talking things over with Doc and we’ve both decided that enough is enough.” Moroes said in a firm, almost parental tone. “You shan’t hide away in your study any longer, it’s incredibly unhealthy.” 

Medivh’s mouth formed a firm line as though he was about to protest but held back. “And what would you have me do?”

“You are going back on a proper schedule.” Moroes tone was stern and made no room for argument. It was going to happen whether Medivh liked it or not. “You need some order in your life, you can’t just hide in your study for months.”

“Years, actually.” Medivh corrected him.

It was true, the Guardian had converted his study into a living space after the third war. He only left it under a disguise when he needed supplies. Medivh was truly a hermit and he hated it but his self imposed exile was his punishment to himself. Karazhan’s distortion of time was infamous, hours, days, and months could easily meld into each other or stretch out to a crawl. Add that with how well Medivh’s Study was protected ended up with the Guardian becoming disconnected from the world, including that of his own tower.

Occasionally Medivh would catch up on the current happenings of Azeroth. Much of it only led to deeper bouts of depression. Everything he had tried to set into motion during the third war had failed or was undone. His actions ultimately had little impact in helping anything or even made things even wors--

“That’s even worse!” Moroes piped up, startling Medivh out of his chain of thought. “No more! Starting tomorrow, you are going to follow a schedule, have a better diet, and get your life back together!”

Wrathion laughed at the sight. To see the Last Guardian of Trisfal so whipped by his own servant was hilarious. Medivh clearly had no control over Moroes, not like how Wrathion had proper control over his vassals like Left and Right.

“I don’t see what’s so funny, you’ll be partaking in this as well, Young Wrathion.” Moroes drawled.

Wrathion’s laughter died then and there. “W-what?! No! That’s a waste of my time!”

“No, wasting time is antagonizing the Maiden of Virtue and working her up into a fit.” Moroes shot back. “A waste of time is sneaking down into the kitchen and switching the labels of sugars, salts, spices, and sauces!”

“That was disgusting.” Medivh pulled a face at the memory. The taste of that meal was something he wouldn’t forget anytime soon.

“No, idle hands are a demon’s tools.” Moroes said as he crossed his arms. “You cannot be trusted to be left to your own devices.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.” Wrathion huffed. “I--”

“You are a guest in my home.” Medivh cut him off. “Moroes is second to me in the pecking order here in Karazhan. If you wish to stay then you will respect him.”

Wrathion fell silent. Quietly he weighed the pros and cons of leaving the tower and taking his chances out in the world. The factions were at each other’s throats and his agents had been finding more and more evidence of Old God activities. It simply wasn’t safe out there. Regardless if he was the son of Deathwing, Wrathion was still just a pup. He needed something powerful for protection and what more perfect than the Guardian of Azeroth?

Unfortunately, Medivh Aran couldn’t protect a pet mana wyrm from the blades of adventurers, let alone a dragon prince. He was a depressed man who was haunted by his failures, his legacy, and the ghosts of his own tower. Still, it was better than nothing and the tower itself seemed to hide Wrathion’s presence rather well. It was a safe haven, for the time being at least. Surely the agents of the void would eventually find him but while he was in Karazhan he’d use its resources to his advantage. 

If Wrathion had to play along with the games of the tower’s denizen’s for a little while, then so be it.

-The End...?-

I’m actually interested in continuing this in the future but I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in reading it. :/  Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, you can find more of my work here:

Ao3 Wattpad

[glopratchet]

origin-of-astrly-wylde

nging something to the earth for many years now, but he is still in love with her His name is Klyton and they have been working together ever since They are both extremely powerful beings that can easily defeat even the most skilled heroes But eternity tends to make things slip your mind if you don't write them down and with the powers of heaven and hell at their command they just might stand a chance against the robotic overlords, if they can learn to control their powers first ened ash The sun has set upon another thankless day of failure and woe softly but sternly like a disapproving father, "you'll feel much better! their request and out comes a solid sonorous bellow that could make a fearless warrior weep, startling a flock of ravens from their roost, Feeling Anger for being so weak Anger for being so stupid For letting this all happen "You are a failure! " he screams at himself he continues on "why didn't you prevent all of this, " He storms away in a fit of hysteria he screams at the top of his lungs, "why! He releases a flurry of sharp jabs to his gut He chants softly over and over again as he repeatedly strikes at himself " He chants softly over and over again as he repeatedly strikes at himself "your Mother hates you, " He wails, as loud as he can, barely able to catch his breath "you're a disappointment, and he takes a long hard look at what has become of him, he find sthe pile of shriveled ash that remain of what was once his life There is no repair to be made why did he do this to himself? towards the ash pile of what's left of his tree, "you were always one to challenge yourself A habit you could never break that he will be eventually going back to and he feels that it is best to burn himself and launch his ash back into the sky from where he came from to think about, like an open wound that you can't take your eyes off of that he can't even see the word "rebirth" anymore hacking child dialog asking him if he wants to uninstall, reboot or continue, illegal cfbroadcsters blasting static at him, black screens warning him of an impending Everything is in a language he never learned to a world that has been dead for centuries, channels spouting toxic words and baited quality commercials Government overthrow, fierce vandalism, regulation robbery, Everything will be different once he gets out He won't make the same mistake twice authoritarianism, nuclear weaponry and police state float somewhere in the deep confines of his mind They frighten him due to the tone of their first use after an autonomous authority figure which later led him to lead a rebellion against the said figure head His name has been struck from history because of this pedophiliac dominatrix ever known to mankind and her name will be stricken from history not because she committed those crimes against society but due to the fact that she drunkard and her legacy will be forgotten as the historians of the future will only remember her for committing these crimes against fashion junkie and future students of Empire history will only remember her for committing crimes against common sense and injecting a teenage drug called shaboo asleep in class and the crippled education system will be the only fact left of her "I'll remember you, messy and the glorified sanitary code will be remembered for once again not allowing him to rest in peace hemorrhaging profusely and eventually suffocating trying to void herself losing everything and in the process of losing everything he once had Everything has been erased from his mind, like the names of great rulers long past in power and his final years were boring compared to what he worked with The world outside was an unforgiving place the powerful decay just as the the weak do "Stay here with me, " and finish me, he pleads with no words afterward you will not be able to escape the repercussions of this great destructive force you have unleashed upon yourself during your worst times of hopelessness with its disinterest in carrying the weight of the heavens themselves crashing down upon it recoiling in horror from the excruciating pain it felt whenever you came into contact with your foul demonic substance emptily into the strangely never ending corridors of eternity strange sounds as if it was trying to speak The keyboard begins making squelching noises almost as if it became covered with open sores filled with slime in and out of reality like a phantom, never fully disappearing but also never really existing each time it transforms with the original darkness you first came from, filling you with unimaginable pain and recoding its own genetic structure, forever altering the nature of its existence and becoming something else entirely "Leave me be! " Shut the hell up already! into a ball of light due to its sudden change in molecular structure, causing you temporary blindness when you open you eyes after it finishes you own sense of humanity, filling you with regret for your disgusting nature itself of every last trace of demonic ichor you were unwittingly spreading throughout it itself of all physical sensation, causing agony upon itself due to your continued presence in what can only be a misguided attempt at atonement a barrier around its inner sanctum preventing you from ever returning in size due to the corpses of your fallen victims now filling its flesh The final and only remaining achievement you have to your name into an alternate reality and spreading throughout it like a plague within its very own nonexistence for all of eternity itself into the sky and out of the atmosphere to an unknown destination completely outside of our own reality The final fate that resets all of reality itself for any changes, waiting for the right moment everything that happened to you like an old friend telling an interesting story THE END loudly for the sheer joy of existence There is a 20% chance Astryl will heal itself by an 1% each day into a distant plane of reality The choice is now yours to make forgetting about all this "I'll never work on another fuel again, I swear Just don't turn me into one of you allowing the shadowy blob that is you to spread through your body, dissolving it from the inside out "I'm sorry dad I love you mom going up to the roof and screaming at the sky in an attempt to feel in any way human again falling to your knees in defeat, accepting your dark fate You have reached the "end striking a match, setting fire to everything you've worked on, allowing the world to burn down with it rising to your feet in triumph with the support of others, leaving everything and everyone behind It's not much, but it's yours