#i feel like they have something fundamentally important going on in their brain that i am missing out on

[pepprs]

so deeply in hell

[mandyyvibes]

was listening to some random spotify user’s winterbones playlist (as one does) and the song “hands up x ayesha- remix” is on there and i’ve been thinking about that all day

[walkingstackofbooks]

Consider: Julian being pregnant with Yoshi and going to Federation parenting classes with Miles and Keiko. And encountering a list of all the rights and freedoms every child is supposed to be entitled to. Some of which... don't sound like his childhood. (Cw child abuse)

I've got SO MANY more ideas for this it may turn into a series who knows??? But I want to share it now so people can maybe like it? Because I have feeeelings.

--

"So these are just, uh, suggestions, right? Parents don't have to do all of them?" Julian asked, instantly regretting it. If Miles' dirty look was anything to go by, clearly that had been the wrong thing to say.

"Julian," he gritted out, "you're my best mate and you're carrying my child so I'm going to give you a chance to explain. What the hell do you mean by that?"

Julian really wasn't sure that he could. Some of the statements on the poster had surprised him, that was all, but he didn't really want to get into the reasons why.

"Don't, uh— Don't worry. It's not important," he tried to deflect.

"It bloody well is important, if you're just planning to ignore what you're learning here."

"Miles—" Keiko broke in, placing a hand on her husband's knee.

"I didn't mean it like that!" Julian exclaimed, cradling his stomach protectively. "I was just saying that, um... I guess that they're not all as important as each other, are they? Lack of privacy, for example - that's not exactly abusive, is it, like some of the others?"

"That's a common misconception, but no, Doctor Bashir," answered Mx Rakoto. "Any parent showing a consistent failure to meet any one of these standards would be enough to investigate them for abuse."

"Oh."

"What do you mean, "oh"?" Miles asked, with an irritation that compelled Julian to shrug and look away.

"I guess I just didn't realise it was taken that seriously," he replied, feeling kind of silly and small as he said it. "I know we learnt about them in school, but back then it was more of a thing for teachers than parents, wasn't it?"

There was a pause, before Keiko said tentatively, "...These have always been for parents, Julian."

"Mrs O'Brien is correct," Mx Rakoto added. "Your parents would have completed a very similar course to this - some things have changed of course, there's always more progress that can be done, but the fundamental rights and freedoms of children haven't changed, and nor has the law."

"No, but..." Julian's brain didn't seem to be working properly; was he missing something?

"You're saying these are things I should have had at home and at school?"

"Yes?"

"And my parents should have known about them?"

"I would find it hard to believe that they didn't. Parents are required to access learning about this every few years."

"Oh." Julian's voice had gone very quiet at the point. "I think I— I need a minute..." he said shakily, eyes glued to the poster in front of him, reading and rereading the information as he tried to figure out what he'd got wrong.

Right to privacy.

Right to choose their own name.

Right to appropriate support and accommodations of a disability.

Freedom from unnecessary medical interventions.

Freedom from torture.

Right to make mistakes.

"Julian?" asked Keiko softly, startling him out of his thoughts. "Are you alright?"

Slowly, he shook his head. "I didn't know," he whispered. "I mean, it's not like I thought they were great parents, you know, but I didn't think... Well, most people complain about their parents, don't they? I didn't think mine were abnormally bad. But there are so many things—" His voice quavered, almost breaking. "And you say they could have been investigated for just breaking one?"

"What... what kind of things?" asked Miles hesitantly. "Only if you want to tell us, of course."

Julian's eyes flicked around the room, but Mx. Rakoto seemed to have left the room.

"They've gone," confirmed Keiko, seeming to catch onto what he was thinking. "I can go too, if you'd prefer..."

"No - it's alright," said Julian. "It's just... a lot to take in."

His eyes returned to the poster. Right to encouragement. Freedom from humiliation and constant criticism. Right to self-expression. Right to relax and play. Right to mistakes.

"It must be hard, right," he started, looking to them both anxiously, "to keep these all in your head? There's a lot of them, it must be normal to not remember all of them all the time?"

Miles and Keiko exchanged glances, a second-long conversation that Julian was not privy to.

"All parents make mistakes," said Keiko kindly. "It's when these things start getting ignored often that there's a problem."

"And some of them you barely have to think about anyway," added Miles. "You know, "right to shelter", "right to food", "right to clothes" - it's not difficult stuff. You don't have kids if you don't want to look after them properly."

"Then why did my parents find it so difficult?" The words burst out of Julian before he could stop them. "What was so wrong with me that meant they didn't do all this?"

"No, oh no, Julian," said Keiko, as Miles reached out to pull him in for a hug. "Don't think like that. It wasn't you—"

Julian wasn't really listening: his question had finally given him the puzzle piece he had been missing - he'd realised what hadn't been adding up.

"No... no, it's fine," he said, feeling a little floaty now he'd got his thoughts all in order. "No, it was me. I was a difficult kid. That's..." He shook himself, feeling his cheeks get hot as he wondered what the O'Briens must be thinking. "I'm sorry, this session was supposed to be about your child, not about me."

"Our child," corrected Miles gruffly. "And this is important, Julian. I don't give a damn if you were "difficult", your parents don't get to just ignore your rights."

"You don't understand," said Julian desperately, hoping he'd be able to make them see even without mentioning his enhancements. He'd made a real mountain out of a molehill here, he didn't know why he hadn't managed to connect the dots quicker before this all had spiralled out of control. "I tried to piss my parents off. I'd stay out too late and go drinking illegally and date guys way too old for me just because I knew it would annoy them. And I'd always talk back and argue with my dad, and find ways to be smarter than him, and—"

"And none of that was enough to lose your rights, Julian," said Keiko gently. "That's not how it works."

Julian was shaking; he didn't want to listen to them. He'd figured it out - it was his fault his parents hadn't done everything they were supposed to, because if it wasn't his fault, it was their fault, and that meant... well, that they were abnormally bad parents, and that... that...

"Hey," said Miles, more softly than Julian had ever heard him, peeling Julian's hands away from where he'd been covering his ears. "Let's say you're right — just for a moment," he added in response to Keiko's hissed "Miles?". "Maybe we don't understand everything that went on. Why don't you tell us which of these you weren't getting from your parents, yeah? Explain it to us a bit more?"

Flashing him a weak smile, Julian nodded. He should have known he could always count on Miles.

"Okay, yeah, um— so I guess, uh, "right to choose your own name"?" he said, feeling slightly uncomfortable as he watched Keiko pull the poster up on her PADD and circle it, but choosing not to comment. "It wasn't like, transphobic or anything though," he defended. "They'd just always called me 'Jules' since I was little, you know? So it's not really..." He trailed off, shrugging.

"Okay..." said Miles, and Julian tried to ignore the dubious look his friend shot at Keiko. "Anything else?"

"Um - I always had to, uh, leave my door open? Or if I closed it, they wouldn't knock before coming in... That's not that weird though, right? One of my Academy friends thought it was, but--"

"Did you feel like your parents respected your privacy?" asked Keiko, and Julian looked at her for a few seconds, before shaking his head.

"But they were my parents," he said. "That was just how they looked out for me. They were supposed to look out for me."

"And you were supposed to have a right to privacy," replied Keiko, making another circle on her PADD. Fuck, this wasn't going the way Julian had thought it would. Hurriedly, he looked for a different one to try to explain better.

"Constant criticism," he said, distantly noticing the strangled tone to his voice. "That's hardly surprising, right? I mean, if you get things wrong all the time, you're going to be criticised, that's just how it works."

Neither Keiko nor Miles looked convinced; clearly he wasn't trying hard enough, describing clearly enough why it had been alright his parents hadn't been perfect. He was getting this all wrong.

The right to make mistakes.

For some reason, those had been the words his eyes hadn't been able to leave alone. Every time he went past them, his heart caught on them, as though the words were a rusty nail left half-buried in his skin.

It wasn't a fair comparison, really. He had been different to the other children - better, smarter - so of course he hadn't been allowed to make the same mistakes they did. Of course his parents' expectations had been high; they'd known what he was.

But all the same, it sounded nice, that imaginary childhood where all mistakes were okay, not just the ones he'd carefully measured out to avoid detection.

He didn't realise he was crying until he felt a rough thumb wiping a tear off his cheek.

"Oh, Julian," Miles was saying. "It's okay, you can let it out now. We're here for you. I'm so sorry. I wish I'd known."

[erinwantstowrite]

any writing tips for how to write efficiently/quickly while not making the stuff you write shitty as a result?

this is a pretty open ended question, because there are a lot of factors to writing and it's not a simple answer (when is anything ever simple on my page lmfao?)

what you're feeling:

it mostly matters what headspace you're in. i say it a lot, but mindset is the most important part of the writing process. for multiple reasons!

if you're going into a writing session while feeling tired or angry about something, you will often make mistakes. it's important to write while you're feeling pretty good (this is nuanced as some people prefer to write when upset/angry, or have no choice if they're trying to get their final papers done in an academic setting). you'll find yourself editing a lot more if you wrote it while tired, so if you can, start off feeling good. this will also increase your writing speed because you're starting off with a fresh mind.

so that means to take breaks. which sounds counterproductive, but hear me out!

just like when you're studying, you have to take some brain breaks. you'll get way too caught up in stuff/will get tired/will get upset with what you're writing/etc etc etc. there's a lot of reasons. so every 30 minutes or so, take a break. go watch a youtube video, or walk around your house, whatever clears your mind of your writing. when you come back to it, you'll have a fresher mind. not as fresh as the start of your time, but still better than if you kept burning yourself out while trying to push through it

though if you're like me and you get distracted if you leave a room or change a tab: just pull up a different writing tab and work on a different project for a few minutes. set a timer. or don't leave the room, and just do some stretches or jumping jacks

2. fundamentals

i wish i could give a cheat code, but there isn't one. it takes a lot of practice to be able to write quickly/efficiently. the best way i can describe it is like another trade: an artist or musician that has already mastered their fundamentals will be able to sight read a piece or sketch a figure drawing in under a minute, and have the quality of the art turn out well.

if you haven't mastered your fundamentals and you try to speed run it, your writing quality will go down. you'll miss simple spelling or grammar mistakes (one or two is fine, but it can become a problem), you might get very short or clipped sentences that read out as play directions rather than an internal dialogue or interesting narration (example: "She picked up the glass and took a sip." VS "Her long, red nails clink on the glass when she picks up the champagne offered to her. She takes a long sip of her drink, her clinical gaze sweeping over the partygoers. She doesn't leave a lipstick stain on the glass, but her companion does.")

(though, sometimes they really did just take a sip of their drink. it depends on the impact you want that action to have.)

your writing speed will naturally progress as you pick up these fundamentals. so practice makes perfect!

3. Awareness

being aware of what you're writing while you're writing is a big one. i'm guilty of the play directions too. and while i have a beta reader (hey bestie), i don't want to slow myself down. so i often remind myself of my fundamentals as i'm going, not afterwards. to help myself there, i pause while writing to read what i have written out loud. i try to make sure that what i have written is easy to say out loud, which in turn makes it far easier to read. and i try to make sure the inner voice makes sense as well. if i'm writing damian, i try to speak the words in his intonation. same with peter, who has a very different internal monologue. it will point out mistakes to me. like "oh he would never say that/he wouldn't say it that way")

editing while you go is also important. sometimes i write a few paragraphs, then go back to the start of the segment i just wrote, and then read it out loud. the editing will come out as i do so, because i will notice mistakes that i wouldn't have otherwise. in turn, the editing often makes paragraphs longer. (or shorter, in some cases! often times, writing is like "i really wanted that to be said, but it's kind of redundant and adds nothing" and so things get scrapped.)

if it's an academic paper you're writing for, put yourself in the shoes of a presenter. imagine that you've already written this paper and studied it a million times before, and now is the time that you are reading your paper for classmates or a professor or someone who wants to read your research. it'll put you in a more critical mindset of "oh that doesn't make sense when i say it to someone else" or "that's not true" or even "whoa, that sounded really smart."

same goes if you're writing for entertainment purposes. if you're writing horror, then you're telling the story as someone who experienced the horror itself or at a campfire trying to scare your friends. if you're writing fantasy, then you really got to put yourself in the shoes of your narrator. this might bring to your attention "wait, how tf are their feet not hurting for walking as long as they have."

(which goes back to mindset!!)

4. planning

have as much planned out before you write as you can... and also do not go strictly with what you're planning

that sounds like i'm being contradictory again but it's like this: i have an overarching outline for my story, so i know what goals need to be met. then, you plan chapter by chapter. some goals NEED to be met in certain places... and they will have a domino effect to your outline. you'll get to a previously established goal and realize that it doesn't fit at all anymore. and this can even happen for your chapter outlines!

(this post here has some tips about if you're struggling while writing a chapter)

essentially, you gotta be adaptable. you need a map to guide you before you start going off on different paths. it'll cut down a lot of your writing time if you're going into a writing session aware of what your goals are.

and so, we get to the end of this post that wasn't meant to be this long. story of my life. i hope this helps/makes sense? this is what helped me write faster/more in depth. i learned tips and tricks by practicing and keeping a critical eye on my work. and sometimes the tricks and tips are more geared towards my own brain and how to get around things

(like learning that art block just means you're improving, and so you should do some studies of your favorite artists and anatomy, and go back to those fundamentals, so you can play around with them)

[mindfulstudyquest]

❥﹒♡﹒☕﹒𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝘂𝘁 𝗺𝘆 𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆

organization: i know it's the most trivial advice in the world, but i swear it works. before doing anything, i take my planner and review everything i have to do, i divide the study by subject, amount of things to study and review spaces for exams. realistically, you can't expect to do it all in one day, but a good plan could almost allow you to sleep at night!

a clean workspace: i can't fucking concentrate if there's a mess aroud me, i get distracted easily, even by dust, so before i start studying i always deep-clean my desk. i know that not everyone can afford a personal and quiet place to study in their houses, so try to find yourself a small angle where you can really focus.

go to study in a library / café: i didn't believe it at first, but it's actually useful. if you have the opportunity to go to a library or a café after school ( or near your house ) do so. being surrounded by people who are studying like you really helps to focus, you'll be less inclined to get distracted and procastinate. i would feel uncomfortable using my phone in a library with other people who are doing their work while i'm sitting there scrolling on tumblr.

breaks: ik ik, not very blair waldrof, hermione granger, spencer hastings, rory gilmore of me, isn't it? but is it worth it. sometimes i end up having really bad headaches from studying and, even if i keep studying, the quality of my work decreases significantly. breaks are fundamental. i would not recommend using social networks for your beak, because they litteraly drain your attention, rather do your skincare, prepare yourself a snack ( eating is important! it's what makes you focus ), read 10 pages of your book, dance a little bit in your room, do stretching, go outside and buy some mint chewingum, something like that.

EAT!: girls, boys and theys, we know. i honestly think that almost every person that craves academic validation ends up developing a sort of eating disorder. it's not even the food, is the fact that you are too busy studying that you forget to eat, ignoring stomach cramps, or the fact that you didn't get that answer right and now you don't feel like you deserve the lunch. i understand bc i AM like this, like you. but think about it: you need to do it in order to survive ( but this is secondary to the grades, right? ) and to keep your brain active. you can't walk around with blurred vision because you haven't eaten or drunk for fourteen continuous hours. i swear that eating like a normal human being helps you to keep going.

sleep: same thing as eating, but with our terrible sleeping schedules. i know that school is toxic so we end up finishing our homeworks at 2 am everyday ( if we're lucky ) but when you have the chance, take a nap and recover.

repeat things as if you were explaining them to someone: this is litterally the fastest way ever to learn fundamental concepts when you're studying. imagine that you're talking to a friend that doesn't know anything about the subject that you're studying and try to explain the topic to them. finding simple words for a difficult topic will help you understand it thoroughly, on this basis you can then build an articulated and more academic speech. repeat things out loud, doesn't matter if you look crazy, you already are <3

check and organize your notes the same day: i never have time to take proper notes in class, so i review them as soon as possible, with the lesson still fresh in mind. it really helps me understand the subject and makes the further study much easier.

watch youtube videos: youtube is my favourite class. sometimes teachers are dumber than students and you, who don't have a degree in that subject and are tackling a topic for the first time, don't understand a damn thing. ofc not!! sometimes professors are terrible at explaining stuff, but fazal from pakistan isn't. i passed my physics class with a 10/10 thanks to an indian guy on youtube. documentaries and yt videos are a simple and nice way to understand better topics and do insights for extra credits.

delete social media: i'm gonna do another post specifically for this.

"STUDY!" wallpaper: last but not least, the dumbest yet the smartest advice, set as lockscreen a white / black / whatever background with a big fat "STUDY!" written on it. everytime you're about to pick up your phone and procastinate the wallpaper will scold you.

hope this was useful or at least fun to read byee

[dr-spectre]

I think that it's now more important than ever to keep making art.

Whether it's some scribbles on a piece of a paper, paint on a canvas, typing out erotic fanfiction about two cephalopod women, i need you to keep going. OKAY?!

Keep going at your own pace. Don't feel like you have to "grind" to achieve success, you're probably young as hell, you don't need to become a masculine obsessed fucking nutjob that is so obsessed with "discipline" and all this bullshit. Sure "discipline" is cool but... That shit takes a LONG TIME to develop and it only comes with experimentation and see what you believe in and what you enjoy. Don't get.... heh...... heh heh..... BRAINWASHED!!! by women hating bald bastards online who wanna turn you into a fun hating robot that's all about "work work work." Fuck them.

You are a human with flesh, blood, bones, a heart and a brain. You are not a machine. Got it?

Anyways, in talks of art, i wanna give my own sort of help for my writer friends out there! I thought it would be fun and plus, there's too many damn writing tips out there that boil down to "you HAVE to do this thing, you HAVE to follow this structure" and i think that is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit that gives you more stress than needed. You know how many boring mid action movies come out that follow the hero's journey? The three act structure? The story circle? It is better to just make shit and learn what you could do for next time.

There are no rules, all of the "rules of storytelling" are just optional suggestions that you can either take or leave. Plus it seems like every fucking YouTuber has a different set of rules that conflict with each other anyways. However, I wanna share my own sort of "basic ass fundamentals of stories" that can fit into any story structure you want! I got these guidelines from the YouTube channel The Closer Look. I like their content, it's very insightful.

Here's Dr. Spectre's basic ass fundamentals for stories.

Characters. Simple, a story must have characters otherwise you are making something else that is not a story.

Progression. Is there a sense of progression? Does it feel like for every second of story it isn't stagnating or getting dull and boring? Does it feel like shit is happening and growing? If it feels boring to read for you, then it's gonna be boring for another person reading it. Progression could be plot based or character based and them growing as the story goes on. Doesn't matter which one, can be both or one. Good stories never feel like they are staying the same or spinning their wheels.

Delivery (Aka. Setup and payoff). Do you deliver on the promises in the story? And do you deliver them in a way where the audience after they finishing reading or watching, they felt like it was all worthwhile and they didn't waste time consuming your story.

Everything else? IT'S OPTIONAL!!! COMPLETLY OPTIONAL! YOU KNOW HOW MANY STORIES BREAK THE "RULES"?! Do not become reliant and dependent on these "rules" because it'll slow your development and discourage experimentation. Not every story is gonna fucking follow the Save The Cat format.

There is also the talk of theme and i will say this.

Theme is not "this story is about sex, drugs, greed." No. Theme is a message or argument, it is not a word, it is something you are trying to say via a story. People don't have to agree with the theme, but it must make people think about it. If your story is about sex, what is it trying to say about sex? That sex is a scary thing and that it's okay to feel scared and worried about your first time? What are you trying to say about greed? Etc. Etc.

I read through a Sonic comic recently that everyone loves called Scrapnik Island and guess what? I fucking love that comic too.

Scrapnik Island isn't truly about Sonic and Tails getting stuck on an island and Mecha Sonic is there and he becomes evil and does all this stuff. No, what it's ACTUALLY about is that your worth as a person isn't determined by successes and failures, Mecha Sonic feels like he is worthless and is a failure because he not only failed to kill Sonic, but also failed to help his friends on Scrapnik Island. However, Sonic snaps him out of that bullshit mindset and it's truly, truly wonderful stuff.

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion isn't truly about Agent 8 being trapped in a facility and defeating an evil ai. It talks about racism and what does it talk about specifically? That it doesn't matter what someone looks like, as long as they are a good person that's all that matters. That life is varied and beautiful and it's worth protecting from those who wish to destroy it.

There's a reason why Agent 8 takes the time to soak in the fresh air and sunlight near the end of Octo Expansion, why Eight has memcakes to collect and we see their thoughts and wishes. it's there to explore that theme, that idea of what the story is truly about.

Splatoon as a franchise is about how wonderful creativity itself is, that art and life are connected and grow together and are important and deserved to be protected. Commander Tartar, Mr. Grizz and Overlorder are all opposed to that idea and that's why they are the antagonists. DJ Octavio less so because he is trying to save his own culture and art, even as to go far as manipulating a mentally ill Callie who was already growing distain and tiredness from her own culture, so it just so happens that these two chaotic forces share the same ideology.

Now, I wanna say, do you NEED a theme to make a story? No. BUT! If you don't have something to say and that connective tissue, then it's gonna weaken everything else and the action, plot and characters have to be fucking top notch. The "Rule of Cool" only works when... you know.... it's cool? And well done?

Anyways, I've rambled long enough. Please keep making art, please? Especially now considering what has happened. I need you to hold onto hope, hold onto creativity and fun. You must. You have to...

Be good people.

[skaldish]

I'm about to give you all the single most powerful piece of advice that was ever told to me:

It is important to be a principled person.

This is more important than being a good person. But don't take this to mean I think we should be bad people.

The reason why "being principled" has more weight than "being good" is because the definition of "good" is arbitrary. It changes depending on who you ask, which means the standards of achieving goodness are always going to change and pose contradictions.

Principles are different. They are more actionable and concrete. Principles are ideas and concepts you personally value, in that you find them valuable to your lived experience. This makes them different than something like a commandment, because they're not a doctrine. Their source is your personality—who you are and the experiences that have shaped you—rather than your goals and ambitions alone.

To give an example, here are a few of my own principles:

I value self-sovereignty. I think it's a person's inherent right to be free of undue influence, and to act as agents of their own free will. (Not to be confused with acting with impunity; people have the right to experience the consequences of their own actions the same way they have the right to act upon their own free will.)

I value people. I show people courtesy as a baseline, even during arguments, until it becomes clear the other person simply wishes to engage in the spirit of hostility. And even then I don't really lash out—I just leave. At no point do I lose sight of the fact that the people I'm interacting with are as real as I am, who have feelings and complex lives the same as I do. This means I also really value trying to understand where people are coming from, and to look at things from their perspective, even if I don't agree with it.

I value being accurate, as opposed to being right. This has been a more rewarding approach for me, by comparison.

I value discernment. I want to know what things are, which means differentiating them from what I think they are from what they seem to be, and from what they are not. The reason why I practice discernment is due how I think—my brain understands things based on how they are, rather than based on what they are—but the reason why I value discernment is because it allows me to interact with the world in a much deeper way.

I value being a mammal. Life becomes easier when I (to quote another Tumblr post) let the mammal that is my body love what it loves. Fighting against this in the past proved to be a pointless and joyless endeavor.

I have more, but these are just the things that come to me off the top of my head. And keep in mind, these will likely change as I change as a person, because that is how principles work.

To be honest, I've never put much thought into whether other people should have the same principles as me; people have different personalities and lived experiences than I do, so it makes sense to me that we would all prioritize different things.

But what I do know is that I fundamentally disagree with people whose principles are antithetical to my own, principles like conquest (of self or other), conformity, purity, and controlling others. Whether or not someone realizes they're embodying these principles is another story, but in any case it's how I know who to avoid engaging with. This is regardless of someone's political alignment or identity.

In my opinion, thinking this way makes it easier to stay grounded in a rapidly-changing world, and to remain focused on what's actually important to you in the face of the unknown. It allows you to find stable ground within yourself.

[transgenderer]

music is fundamentally mysterious to me. visual beauty feels fundamentally explicable. like…evolution has all sorts of reasons to make the organism feel positively towards visual stimuli. visual stimuli is their main way of forming a world model! obviously hearing HELPS but it's evolutionary function is subtler. the main thing is i guess…threat detection, prey detection, and mate detecting? you dont really form a world model with it. i mean a human does. but if youre like, a cat, or a monkey. i guess theres also social aspects. so those are the aspects: prey, threat, mate, social

when we think about visual things that are really beautiful, what are the typical examples? like, nature, or the human body. both of which have an obvious evolutionary interpretation. and music isnt like this! music does not resemble prey, threat, mate, social. i mean. obviously lots of psychological stuff is mysterious in origin. but the beauty of music is so important, and so inscrutable

maybe the natural comparison is abstract art? i mean, this is a classic observation. ornamentation is typically nonrepresentative. but it RESEMBLES desirable stimlu, just abstractly. its often vegetative, for example. i guess the origin of the aesthetic appeal of abstract ornamentation is strange to. modern asbtract art is yknow, trying to be INTERESTING, its easy to justify the aesthetic appeal there. but traditional ornamentation isnt interesting, conceptually. but its still often beautiful. so...why, whats going on there. i mean i know no one knows. but i think its significant that we don't know

the usual answer is something something simple structure. the human brain likes structure, and relationships. or whatever. but like...come on. theres clearly something else going on. a good melody has a better "structure" than another one. cmon man.

maybe the best explanation is that its just a weird edge case of stimulation, its not a straightforward result of any evolutionary pressure. its like...fuzzing the human brain, in the computer science sense. throw a bunch of weird data at the system, eventually some of it will strike it weird and you can get it to do nonstandard behavior. and a composer is someone who gets a sense of the structure of this "backdoor access", and so can actively craft tools to poke around back there....

but then, is visual art like that? it doesnt FEEL like that, to make visual art. but maybe im just not a good enough artist. maybe composers arent getting a sense of the shape of the keyhole in the backdoor, theyre just learning how to simulate their own response to music. so then their brain can just combinatorially search melodies step by step until it finds one that tickles itself, and it puts that in the music

[nocturnowlette]

How much does someone's perception of hypnosis affect the experience of being under itself? I've heard the common rhetoric of how if soemone's told they can't go into trance it'll make it harder for them to, but using the previous ask as an example:

If someone had been told, and truly believed that it'd be impossible for someone to lie in trance, would that make it less likely that they'd lie? Of course it wouldn't make them unable to, but could it get to the core of them easier?

Anything that is perception based to some extent can be altered through hypnosis. That is to say, a near incomprehensible amount of things.

The answer to the question in the second paragraph, if someone would be unable to lie in trance if they were completely convinced it was impossible to is yes. No ifs, ands, or buts. In this hypothetical scenario of someone so susceptible that they truly believe it with all their heart, their control over their ability to lie would be entirely overridden and they would be unable to do so.

It's deeply important to recognize the hypothetical nature of this. I have met, now, multiple subjects that are closer to the hypothetical perfect subject than I would have ever expected, but no such absolute exists.

...that being said. Several people I know, with the proper training and expertise, could be almost entirely rendered unable to lie or even unable to intentionally tell the truth, even if they try to fight it.

Many people like to hand wave trance as something entirely within our control, but this ignores the very very obvious fact that our perceptions are not even fully in our control. We are given worldviews that stick with us despite endless attempts to purge them, concepts and feelings are embedded into us that color every thought we have and we did not pick these out in a custom character wheel.

Perhaps one of the single most common demons of intelligent people is that despite their brain having more power to analyze and break down problems, this power can be just as easily (if not easier) used against the person. Many intelligent people remain locked in mazes of delusion, held strongly in place and made indistinguishable from actual reality by the pure strength of one's ability to compartmentalize, rationalize, and dissociate.

In practical reality, most things are not pure exercises of perception, but many are close to it. Lying is one I'd say is absolutely perception, and the same goes for our perception of what is correct and what is false. For most, this is not fully alterable, as our minds (much like conditioning itself) are strengthened around core concepts that we experience just by living in this world and existing on a day to day basis.

You could argue that we are literally conditioned by life to understand its common rules and functions. Our brain could be popped into a different reality with entirely different rules and we would adapt just fine. We're a thing that forms connections and strengthens them entirely through the information we are provided. Reality and day-to-day life is just so ubiquitous that it becomes our "normal".

This makes it so that a lot of things strongly imbued into our normal that are almost entirely to entirely matters of perception might be given a practical unchangeability threshold. However, that varies between brains.

Dissociation is literally the ability to detach from "normal" and from "reality". It's been found that those who experience dissociation have weaker conditioned bonds in specific parts of the brain, the amygdala for one, which plays a strong part in designating the strength of generating memories and connections. If you're able to detach more from normal, that means your sense of normal is able to be changed far easier. The most susceptible subject I've met, though only briefly, exists seemingly in a state of eternal dissociation. They don't feel connected to the world or their body and see it all as fundamentally separate. They are deeply, deeply susceptible.

The only reason why the idea of not wanting to go into trance doesn't work in absolute is primarily because we're always in a state of trance. There is no actual line, it's just a "noticeable" amount of difference in focus or feeling that one associates with the abstract concept of trance. We are always unevenly focused and always suggestible by nature of how brains function. We respond to information presented, that is all suggestibility is. That makes it so that someone can reject the concept and feelings one associates with trance while still being able to be affected in the very same way. It does make things tricker, though.

Hope this helps.

[unsoundedcomic]

For all her dissaproval of 'The Man' writing the importance of cruelty into 'The Story', the Lady (and btw you too Ashley 😁) took some serious notes from his textbook. I mean, I really feel for Prakhuta here: all that pain, all that suffering, all that enduring, all for nothing..? He's truly one of your most tragic characters. Born into an abused, enslaved people. Tortured by Delicieu for years, abandoned by his only friend, maimed and banished by his own kin, haunted by the pure pain and horrorside of the Khert, and now failing in the one task that could've made all that suffering atleast have a purpose. A good cause. A true ending. I know he's also a homicidal maniac, but his journey mirrors that of Duane's in so many ways that it is extra sad to me that there seems to be no sympathy or understanding for him in your readership. I mean, with the way Delicieu 'bound' a human soul unto him, can Prakhuta even make or recall happy memories? Is cackling in the proximity of promised relief and being privey to some of the Lady's plans, the only respite he gets/deserves?

Oh, there are readers who have sympathy for Prakhuta. They've been in my inbox all day! :)

I don't think anything redeems suffering and I don't think anyone fundamentally deserves anything. In the words of Ssael, good men keep no accounts. It's better to live day by day, for the sake of others, and not obsess over all the wrongs done to you and by you. Because nothing can undo them. They and everything else remain suspended forever in time. The only way is forward, and we are all going to the same place.

It's not all that different in Kasslyne. There is no redemption. There is only Today and, if you're very lucky, Tomorrow.

Prakhuta lived a life full of suffering and torment, and there is nothing that can undo that fact. Yerta could appear and open her motherly arms and embrace him and he still would have lived a life full of suffering and torment. If Knock had not been there for Ana in the end, what would have changed? Nothing, really, except the reader would have missed out on that brief burst of catharsis as our pattern-seeking brains recognised the bookend of a narrative arc. But Ana still suffered horribly, and she still was dead, and not one jot of that was undone by a hug from Knock.

Anyway, I know I probably sound very grim, but I do like to keep it real. If you see a Prakhuta or an Ana, and you feel you can do something for them, do it. Redemption's for stories, and sometimes not even then~

[awh-bowie]

⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪21 things i’ve learned since becoming an adult

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ three years is not a terribly long time, but, i feel like regular metrics of time simply cannot be applied to girlhood and the transition to womanhood. my childhood felt like a single moment and being a teenager felt more like a century. but i digress, what have i learned in the three years since i became a legal adult?

୨୧ fostering meaningful friendships is far more important than any romantic relationship ୨୧

♡ the thing about romantic and physical relationships, especially when you’re young, is that they are not a reliable constant. all i can say about this is that close, trusted friends will benefit you better than any “situationship”.

୨୧ think of yourself like a plant, just a little bit more complex ୨୧

♡ what i mean by this is simple: if you feel awful for seemingly no reason, get some water, eat some fruit and go outside. more often than not, the mysterious specter making you sad is just yourself forgetting fundamental self-care!

୨୧ the best product for glowing skin is free! ୨୧

♡ drinking enough water is one of the easiest and most effective ways to maintain healthy skin. hydration helps flush out toxins, keeps your skin cells plump, and improves elasticity. scientifically speaking, staying hydrated supports your body’s natural detoxification processes!

୨୧ cry, cry, cry! ୨୧

♡ crying is a wonderful and natural way to release negative emotions, not something that is weak or embarrassing. we go into this life screaming and wailing, why stop now?

୨୧ invest in blue light glasses ୨୧

♡ blue light is the enemy of your eyes, especially looking at it in the dark. getting yellow-tinted glasses is a game changer, especially if you prefer low light! i never turn on my big light.

୨୧ you have boundaries, period. ୨୧

♡ there’s no such thing as not having boundaries. you can go through life without experiencing things you’d rather not experience again, these experiences create boundaries. if you genuinely can’t think of any boundaries, i suggest doing some journaling! here are some prompts i made for myself that really helped me.

୨୧ balance is good, but extremes aren’t evil ୨୧

♡ it’s okay to indulge, to be hedonistic! as long as you’re honoring yourself and the people in your life, go crazy every once and a while. that’s what life is about, diving into the things you love.

୨୧ use lighter concealer under your eyes ୨୧

♡ a lighter shade of concealer under your eyes helps brighten your face and hide dark circles!

୨୧ diet affects your skin and hair ୨୧

♡ proper nutrition plays a critical role in skin and hair health. consuming foods rich in vitamins and antioxidants, like fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins, can help prevent acne, improve hair growth, and promote a radiant complexion. see my post here to learn more ;3

୨୧ no one is looking at you, seriously, it’s biological ୨୧

♡ let me get a little sciency here. humans tend to overestimate how much people actually notice us, and this is something called the spotlight effect. it happens because our brains are wired to be super focused on ourselves, making us think everyone else is just as tuned in to us as we are. spoiler alert: they’re not. studies have shown that people pay way less attention to you than you think. realizing this is so freeing because once you know that your little slip-ups or bad hair days go unnoticed, you can start living with a lot less self-consciousness. embrace the freedom—no one is watching as closely as you imagine.

୨୧ independence isn’t loneliness ୨୧

♡ being independent doesn't mean you can’t ask for help or rely on others. sometimes the strongest thing you can do is reach out for support when you need it. true independence comes from knowing when to lean on others and when to stand on your own!

୨୧ dedicate time in your day to unplug ୨୧

♡ taking regular breaks from technology allows your brain to rest and recharge. studies indicate that unplugging can improve focus, reduce stress, and enhance well-being. scheduling time each day for a digital detox is beneficial for your mental health and productivity.

୨୧ you don’t have to justify the things you love ୨୧

♡ “i know it’s dumb but i really love [media] because it has my favorite actor in it!” STOP!! if you find yourself preemptively insulting your interest or explaining why you like it, stop and think. ask yourself what about the situation made you feel like you needed to do that.

୨୧ it’s okay to outgrow things ୨୧

♡ i wish i could stay a kid forever, but being an adult is kinda sick. drifting away from people, hobbies, media, etc… is a natural, unavoidable part of growing.

୨୧ it’s okay to not outgrow things ୨୧

♡ that being said, there’s nothing wrong with hanging onto the things that make you happy! if something you have from when you were a kid still brings joy to your life, it would be silly to give outgrowing it another thought. the fact that it still brings you joy means it cannot be outgrown.

୨୧ vitamin C for bright and even skin ୨୧

♡ vitamin C is a powerhouse for your skin!! it helps brighten your complexion, fade dark spots, and even out your skin tone by reducing melanin production. dermatologists recommend incorporating a vitamin C serum into your skincare routine to fight off free radicals and promote collagen production.

୨୧ being “busy” doesn’t equal being productive ୨୧

♡ it’s easy to confuse busyness with productivity. but being constantly busy doesn't mean you're getting more done. true productivity is about working smarter, not harder, and taking time to rest when needed.

୨୧ taking breaks IS productive ୨୧

♡ like i said, taking time to rest is key. studies show that regular breaks throughout the day, especially short ones, can improve concentration, reduce mental fatigue, and enhance performance!

୨୧ cold water rinse for shiny hair ୨୧

♡ a cold water rinse at the end of your shower can help seal your hair cuticles, resulting in shinier, smoother hair. cold water also helps reduce frizz and preserve hair’s natural oils.

୨୧ celebrate every victory ୨୧

♡ no win is too small! celebrating your successes, big or small, reinforces positive habits and boosts motivation. you deserve it, every day you exist is a victory in the eyes of others. according to psychologists, taking the time to acknowledge achievements can increase your sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

୨୧ they say “trust your gut” for a reason! ୨୧

♡ your gut feeling, also known as intuition, is your brain’s way of quickly processing information based on past experiences and instincts. neuroscientists have found that gut instincts often come from subconscious pattern recognition, and trusting them can lead to better decision-making in situations where logic might not offer clear answers.

-Beau

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

I rewatched s1e4 recently, and I've been thinking about what it can tell us about the way Izzy and Ed have operated for years.

The very first thing we see Ed do in this episode, literally his first significant scene in the entire show, is try to bring Izzy in on the plan he's working on. He starts talking about the clouds (famously an important thing when you live on a boat), tries to draw Izzy into the conversation, an obvious lead in hindsight into "the shape of the clouds confirmed the fog I'm counting on for this plan to work." If Izzy had engaged with Ed at all, he would've been able to start talking about his plan, which he obviously already has nailed down at this point, but he's asking "do they look like frankfurters to you?" because he's wanting to get Izzy's opinion. If Izzy had responded in a way consistent with someone who understands that a genuis sailor and tactician like Ed will be looking at clouds because they're important for gauging weather patterns at sea, then the hassle later in the episode could've been avoided, because Izzy would've been able to point out the date.

But not only does Izzy not respond that way, he responds like he's taking it as a given that Ed not only does not have a plan, but needs to be reminded of the urgency for one. He completely misses what Ed's trying to do. We can understand why Ed thinks that working with Izzy is "like pulling teeth sometimes."

And this continues throughout the episode. Every time Ed finds something interesting and tries to include Izzy in his excitement, Izzy treats him like a child who needs to be managed, incapable of understanding the gravity of the situation unless Izzy reminds him.

And what really sticks out to me as especially interesting is the way Izzy responds when Ed stops trying to play with him. When Ed finally gives up on trying to include Izzy, Izzy screams in Ed's face, insults him, and tries to come up with a ""plan"" of his own over Ed' s head, and Ed is completely and entirely unsurprised by any of this. He acts like he's not just accustomed to Izzy insulting and berating him when he's not performing the way Izzy would like, but he's also accustomed to Izzy trying to go over his head to make decisions that are honestly very, very dumb.

All of this paints a picture of two people who just fundamentally cannot communicate well with each other at all. Izzy is entirely uninterested in the ways Ed attempts to communicate his ideas and excitement, Izzy's nagging shuts Ed down, and there are fundamental breakdowns in communication. Ed doesn't feel like he can let Izzy in on the plan until the "big reveal" when he gets to prove that Izzy's been wrong about Ed this whole time, and I'm honestly surprised Izzy doesn't straight-up have an aneurysm because he's getting himself so worked up.

It's so easy to see this cycle repeat over the years. Ed has such a jaded feel to him during the scenes where he talks with Izzy, like he's given up on getting anything but condescension and nagging from Izzy until the moment of the big reveal of his plan. Izzy is so absolutely convinced that Ed needs to be "managed" that he can't see past it, even though he's worked with Ed for long enough that he should presumably be able to get these very obvious cues by now. And the way Izzy immediately turns to berating Ed and trying to take over himself when he gets fed up isn't just further proof of Izzy's elevated sense of self-importance, it's like he's convinced himself that he really is the "brains" behind Blackbeard when he's really just grabbing at Ed's feet and hindering him.

[ashlingiswriting]

do i know you? chapter ten

[ chapter ten — 5.5k words ] [ masterlist ] [ prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine ] you don't open the letter. richie jerimovich x reader, past mikey berzatto x reader, slow burn

handcuffs, bus, metal detector, strip search. three pairs of socks, toothbrush, toothpaste. everything stolen by your cellmate as soon as you arrive, except what you’re wearing. entire jail segregated to hell. you claimed by the italians, who were expecting you. instructions are simple: stick to the bottom bunk, keep your mouth shut, and you’ll make it. this is jail, not prison.

nothing and no one can touch you when you’re like this, sunk deep inside yourself. your throat is still hoarse from shouting last night, but that’s incidental, not important. nothing is important.

you don’t want to be here, so you’re not. 

you’re standing on the corner with half a pack in your jacket pocket, and he’s not there—you can’t see him right now, not even in your head—but he’s on his way. the winter sinks cold so deep into you that your forehead starts to hurt. if you stand here much longer, you’re going to get a runny nose. you’re itching for a cigarette. you don’t want to smoke without him. 

a lot of people want your attention.

julie, you’ve got mail. who’s this, your man? is he trying to get you back? put a price on it, maybe you can finally get us something from commissary. 

julie, the feds are not playing around. it looks like there’s charges related to human trafficking coming down the pipeline, and they’re trying to tie you to it. i’m doing my best with your defense, but if you don’t want to cooperate, i can’t guarantee—do you hear me? 

julie, when she comes through, we’re gonna take her back here. if you see a guard coming, just keep your mouth shut and kick the dryer, okay?

a lot of people want your attention, but nobody gets it. you can survive this, put one foot in front of the other, only as long as you can stand partly sheltered by the angle of your apartment building, and listen to the wind rushing past. waiting and safe, as long as he never arrives.

the snitch gets carried out on a stretcher.

the lawyer leaves unsatisfied.

you don’t open the letter.

.

.

.

it’s much worse at night. but still, sometimes, you can sleep.

.

.

.

lunch here has a queasy familiarity. it feels like barracks or school. you sit at a long table and corresponding bench with the italians, wondering if all this sodium is gonna worsen your perpetual low-grade headache, squeezing peanut butter from its plastic packet directly into your mouth, not bothering with the bread. 

behind you, you pick out the word doctor in somebody else’s conversation. thinking that it might have something to do with you, you turn and glance over your shoulder, just in time to catch a woman saying, too loudly, no i’m fine. you think her words sound a bit slurred. you’re fifty percent sure her name is aja. 

you’re sweating, says her friend, a woman with box braids whose name you’ve never learned.  she sounds exasperated. did you take something? when she gets no answer, her voice gains a note of urgency. hey. did you take something?

aja, leaning hunched forward on the table, mumbles no.

relieved, her friend says, then just eat your lunch.

i don’t...aja blinks. goes to lift one baby carrot to her mouth, looks at it, then stops. is car warning, she explains.

in the back of your brain, something stirs.

by now, you’ve been noticed by the other women at that table, and they’re staring daggers back. they’re almost all black women, just like all the women at yours are almost all white—and your stare is violating rules more important than the law. 

beside you, your cellmate janine has caught on too. she smacks your arm a little harder than she needs to, annoyed that she has to reiterate a fundamental lesson. mind your business. but you can still hear aja muttering out a slow explanation of increasingly jumbled words, and that’s all you care to hear.

it’s like there was a heavy weighted blanket keeping you down and separate from life, and that’s suddenly lifted. you can see and hear. there are words floating to the surface, and next steps, and you’re on the move, standing up. 

every woman sitting at aja’s table is up on their feet in five seconds flat, except for aja and her friend, though the friend gives you a look that could cut glass. you can hear everyone from your table getting up behind you, too. 

what’s your problem? says one of the women standing opposite.

i’m a doctor. you’re not even looking at her, but when she says, sure you are, there’s enough menace in it to stop you in your tracks. then janine has an iron grip on your arm, trying to drag you away. it’s too late. when you said you’re a doctor, you believed it, and with that the world has come into focus with perfect clarity. the rest doesn’t matter.

is she diabetic? you say.

janine hisses in your ear stupid fucking bitch fast and low and you can see a flicker of movement to your right, another woman from your side coming for you, so you wrestle free from janine and dart a few steps forward. as quick and smooth as if you’d planned it, a woman from aja’s side steps behind you, between you and your own table. she’s taller than you by about six inches. she says, yeah, she’s diabetic. 

permission enough. you sit down on the other side of aja. up close, she’s sweating and wearing a concerned expression, like she’s forgotten where she left her phone. you can hear the guards shouting, getting closer. you ignore them.

don’t touch her, the friend snaps.

who’s gonna take her pulse, then? keeping a careful eye on the friend, you reach for aja’s arm. nobody stops you. aja herself looks at you with vague suspicion in her golden brown eyes, but she’s not all there enough to resist. once you get your fingers on her wrist and find her pulse, you don’t bother counting it for a full thirty seconds, that’s how fast her heartbeat is going. 

at this point, the outside world has gotten too loud, too insistent, and you can feel the moment about to break. 

she needs sugar now, you say to the friend. or she’ll end up in a coma.

got it, she says, and then the guards are on you. with shouts and shoves, they break up the gathering, end lunch ten minutes early. with a yank of your shirt, you’re returned to your group. 

what the fuck is wrong with you, janine hisses, but you barely hear her. you’re still thinking on your patient, trying to get a look. you think you see the friend reaching for somebody else’s tray—to get a packet of strawberry jam, maybe—but you can’t be sure.

.

.

.

it makes no sense. your head throbs. if janine’s threats are even half true, you’re in for more trouble than you know how to handle, and you didn’t know how to handle your troubles before. but somehow, once you’re in the laundry room, it happens. 

you realize that you like it all. the strong smell of detergent, the sun coming in golden through the high windows built too thin for jumpers, the way you have to lean forward and really push against the weight of hundreds of t-shirts in the hamper trolley. even the finicky machine quitting mid-cycle only amuses you, because you know the trick to starting it up again: thump it in the right spot a couple times, hear it rumble back to work. it’s not until one of the guards passes by you that you hear, the fuck are you smiling about? and you realize you were smiling at all. you stop at once.

the thing is: you fucking did it. at dinner, you’ll see aja sitting at that same table, eating and talking clearly. she’ll be fine. you did that. you never thought you’d get this again, but it seems not everything is over. there is still a little life in you, enough to save hers.

not everything is over, and for once you can think about the letter tucked into your bra without it burning you. 

you don’t imagine it contains forgiveness—hope isn’t the same as delusion—but there could still be something in it that you would want to keep. richie could never respect your decision to leave. loyalty is what he’s cared about most, the one value he’s managed to cling onto by the skin of his teeth. but he might at least understand. 

times past, he has understood you far better than you expected, and strangely enough, you’ve understood him too. he might understand you now. stranger things have happened.

you won’t read the letter, of course. but you’ll keep that possibility with you, the one thing you have left to hold.

.

.

.

hey doc, come here. look at this. 

janine is calling to you from across the laundry room, beckoning you towards the back corner where the security cameras don’t quite reach. you hesitate. you’re not stupid. that’s exactly the spot they once made you stand guard, and given how publicly you ignored all orders today, you wouldn’t be surprised if it was janine’s turn to stand watch and your turn to take the beating. it’s been a while since you’ve done that. you’re probably rusty. ah, fuck it.

you leave the bin of stained shirts where it is and walk over, rounding the corner to find two women waiting for you. one you recognize immediately as an enforcer, blonde and tall and glaring ferociously at you. the other, slight and silver-haired, is the leader. 

do you know why you’re here? she says. calm, even pleasant, like a schoolteacher. 

i have a guess, you say.

so the leader explains. she takes her time with it, uses so many words, but the long and short of it is: you have been living an easy life. they have been taking care of you, and you’ve repaid them with nothing but trouble. angie—the massive woman leaning on the far wall, the enforcer—burned herself today in the kitchen, on purpose, badly enough that she got sent to the infirmary. sure enough, there’s a bandage around the enforcer’s left forearm. aja was supposed to also be in the infirmary, unconscious.

why angie and aja would need to be in the infirmary together, with aja unconscious, is obvious. the leader doesn’t need to explain that part. 

interfering is a crime. interfering in someone else’s murder is a crime whose punishment you can’t afford.

i didn’t know, you say. on hearing your thin voice, you realize your mistake. times like these, you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. matter of fact, almost always, you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. 

i’ve been told you have a letter on you, the leader says. let me see it.

you say nothing. she motions to the enforcer.

in your second tremendously stupid choice of the day, you fight back. you duck one punch only to get your ears rung by another, square in the left eye. after that, she deals with you easily, with the advantages of height, weight, reach, and the knowledge that this might be her one chance to get you back. she hates you and she fights like it, like she might just kill you and call it an accident. it’s all you can do to keep quiet, not yell for help. 

in under a minute, she’s back to the leader with your letter in her hand, snatched from your bra. the sound of your own heavy breathing is so unsteady, it’s almost as bad as crying. your eye has already begun to swell up. 

we have a problem, the leader says. if you can’t follow the most basic instructions, how can we trust you? and if we can’t trust you, what can we do? 

in the silence, you realize: they have everything now.

you need to prove that we can trust you. you have no idea how you could possibly do that, and then she adds, tell me about what you did for linda.

this time, you think it through before you open your mouth. 

you know what she’s asking about, of course. it’s the only thing you’ve ever done for your boss’s wife directly, and you were told to keep it secret, too. an iud for her daughter-in-law, along with a fake fertility treatment. what a woman would do to convince the people closest to her that she wants children, when she doesn’t. you know what those men are like.

i don’t know what you’re talking about, you finally say. if you have a problem with linda, go settle it with her. 

the enforcer starts forward, but the leader stops her. i’ll give you the night to think about it, she says, as undisturbed as ever. but first, i want you to tell me the list of things we could do if you turn out to not be trustworthy. i need to make sure that you know.

you need to get these women away from you so badly now that it’s almost easy to talk. 

you could kill me. you say that first because you doubt they’d bother with that much effort. or make my life miserable. you could keep that letter. you could talk to your boss and work it so i get stuck in here for a ten-year stretch. 

and other than that?

i don’t know.

we could make it so you never work as a doctor again.

does she know?

her pale green eyes give nothing away, and the longer you stare at her, desperately trying to pierce her pitiless calm, the more you feel you’re only exposing yourself. eventually, you give up. it doesn’t matter if she knows. the carusos know. if they expose you, the best years of your life, spent in hard work and little else, they’ll be gone. the worst years of your life, spent in restless loneliness and little else, they’ll be gone too. if that bomb drops, there’s no point to any of it. a decade of your life, best and worst, all for nothing. every second of every day. everyone you pushed away. 

i’m in jail, you manage to say. i don’t think i’ll get work as a doctor ever again.

i’m just the messenger, the leader says. see you tomorrow.

.

.

.

that night, you wait for janine to snore, then you bury your face in the pillow and discover that you’re wound too tight to even cry. the pillow smells like old socks. you turn over and stare up at the bunk bed above you instead. 

it’s not a choice, it’s just pure dread. in this place, you have nobody else. if the italians drop you, you’ll be as easily extinguished as the slugs that little boys like to sprinkle with salt, but it’ll take much longer, however long they make your sentence. your lawyer said the feds were trying to pin human trafficking on you. maybe they’ll succeed. it’s life or hell, that’s the point. life or hell isn’t a choice.

you will tell them what they want to know. they will pass it back up the chain to old caruso, who in turn will figure out that alessandra has been fooling him all along with that combination of iud and fake fertility treatment. wronged the family, in his eyes. maybe, given the raid that came not long after, it will be considered a sign that she knew the end was coming and helped it along.

maybe she did snitch. you don’t know. does the truth matter? this man looked at his own wounded son and said, he should be dead. not helping death along was his idea of fatherhood. but he had considered it, you know. this is the man you’re going to deliver your patient to, the man who has you by the throat.

when you first learned about the hippocratic oath, you found it romantic in the only way you could bear: do no harm. not be kind or even do good, not change the world or save the day, and certainly nothing as lushly irrational as love. something possible and real. a solid foundation. first, do no harm. 

alessandra might never know that you’re the one who gave her up.

that’s your patient, you remember a veteran surgeon saying to another resident. you can’t exactly remember what made him say it, some disrespect, but the viciousness of his voice left an impression on you. the unspoken seemed obvious. they’re the patient, you’re the doctor. they let you cut them wide open and put your hands inside them, so you better be prepared to show some fucking respect. surgeons always have a reputation for ego, so maybe it had nothing to do with treating the patient well, maybe it was a pure ego thing. but it felt, and still feels, like a personal claim. you violate your own patient and you might as well be a leafless tree, an unloving father.

you think over the leader’s words, trying to find yourself some loophole. relive each word as best you can while sniffing back snot because you have no tissues. but all you find is that the letter is gone now too, and with that, you tighten your jaw and refuse to let yourself start crying, because this time if you lose it, you’ll be lost.

the laundry room sunlight feels like it fell on your face years ago. that hope is gone. richie would not understand you abandoning your patient, and you wouldn’t want him to. you don’t even want him living in the same country as this fucking place. 

why didn’t you open that letter when you had the chance? if it’s not understanding, it’s probably rage, and you want that.  you would willingly read in excruciating detail just how fucked up it is that you caused his best friend’s death and then wormed your way so deep into his life that you could see him up close fighting the grief like a fish against the hook. you’d take that. if he tells you to go fuck yourself, fair enough. as long as it’s his words. that letter is the last of him, and you want it. 

that letter is the last of him because once you give up alessandra, there’s no coming back. once you give up alessandra, you’re not just a legal liability, not just a burden, but a genuine honest to god piece of shit twice over. you were a piece of shit already, but this?

you only realize you had hope now that you’re losing it. you only know you want to be a doctor once your license is on the line; you only know you were going to go back to him now that the door is receding many more years into the distance. there’s some life left in you, yeah. that’s not a good thing.

.

.

.

when you get up out of bed the next morning to meet your fate, your left eye has swollen up so badly you can barely see out of it. you face the morning, the sudden harsh overheads turning on, with half vision and a desperate, helpless longing to be numb. the numbness doesn’t return, though the leader does. 

she sits next to you at breakfast. there’s no enforcer this time. apparently you’re not enough of a threat.

well? she says.

you should’ve cried last night; maybe then you wouldn’t feel such an intense urge to cry now. stupid. you say nothing. you want to pick at the lumps of rubbery scrambled egg on your tray, but you only stare at them.

this is your chance. she doesn’t say it like a threat. she says it like a friend. you sure you have nothing to tell me?

it’s happening, you can feel it happening, but you can barely process. she thinks your silence is a no. she thinks she’s being denied. and you know you need to tell her what she wants to hear, but the guilt of it is so heavy that your mouth stays closed. you’re terrified of her. of yourself. you know what will happen once you crack and open your mouth and let your patient down: your life will be over. and you have no idea of exactly what will happen if you don’t open your mouth, but your imagination can fill in those blanks a thousand different ways. 

you’re just fucking scared in all directions, and what it amounts to is this: you keep your mouth shut.

after what feels like hours, the leader speaks.

okay, she says. i’ll pass it on. 

she gets up from the table. around you, women are eating and joking and squabbling as usual. it doesn’t feel like you made a decision. it doesn’t feel like the end of anything. it just feels like you’re waiting for the next punch to land.

.

.

.

days go by and you’re still tensed, waiting for that punch. nothing seems to change, but it’s cold comfort. and there’s no comfort in the moral victory, either—discovering that you have a single principle left doesn’t make you feel any better when all your energy goes into keeping your guard up. every dull hour, every dull meal could be taken away from you at any moment. the afternoon light in the laundry room is still beautiful. somebody should try to hurt you, and soon. if they don’t, you’re just going to lose it.

and then there she is. the enforcer, sitting on your bed, when you come back from the laundry room smelling of bleach from the white shirts. the burn on her arm is still bandaged. in full light, she looks even bigger. dirty blonde hair swept back in a ponytail, grey eyes hateful. 

when she takes out that blue envelope, your chest tightens. you can tell that she enjoys the look on her face, but it doesn’t last long. it’s strange. she tosses the letter with a dismissive gesture, and it lands on the floor between you.

congratulations. she still hates you, that much is clear—but she’s no longer enjoying herself, and that’s vital. that’s a good sign.

yeah? you say.

jack says you pass. 

she shoves past you hard on her way out. it’s all you can do not to snatch up the letter from the ground, to try and look as though you have some kind of control. 

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.

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> dear julie, 

> i don’t know if you remember me, but you dated my best friend mikey a while ago. when i found out you got arrested, i talked to tina about it. she said you helped him till the day he died, and you’re the one who got us narcan.

> that sounds about right to me. i heard negative things about you once, but i never believed them. some things only come around once in a while, like a leap year. (which doesn’t have 365 days, it has 366.) one of those rare things is a friend who’s there when you need them. you have to recognize them when you see them. i think i recognize you now.

> this is just me saying that we haven’t forgotten you. tina says hi, and i’ll come visit, if you’ve got the time to spare. i’m guessing you’re pretty bored in there, and i can honk my horn and take a pie to the face as well as the next guy. 

> yours,

> richie

.

.

.

yeah, that’s him. 

you know it’s him on the first reread, because you can see all the tightness falling away as he writes, from the cramped propriety and false casualness in the first sentences to the dear clown stupidity of the last. you know it’s him on the second reread, because he’s lying in his own way, trying to fit in with what you wanted, pretending he’s just the friend of your ex, not admitting to knowing you. you’re crying. you’ve waited a long time to cry. that’s incidental. 

it’s only on the fifth reread that you snag on the part about the leap year. it’s the weirdest part, the parentheses. long after you have the letter half-memorized and tucked away in your bra, after dinner and lights out, you’re thinking on it. you fall asleep to the question and wake up the next morning with the answer. 

i’d bet my life that there was a sig p365 in his hand when they found him.

some things only come around once in a while, like a leap year. (which doesn’t have 365 days, it has 366.)

what if it wasn’t you?

no, you’ve been inside for less than two months and you’re already detaching from reality. that’s probably what’s happening here. but you can practically feel the warmth coming off the page, and that’s all that matters. 

your nose is practically fountaining snot, and without kleenex, you just wipe it on your sleeve and read the letter again.

it’s only hours later that you stop obsessing over the letter for long enough to truly realize what has happened. you’re going to be okay. 

.

.

.

the days pass quiet now. your swelled eye heals up slowly, until one morning you have full vision again. just as before, all you do is sleep, eat, work, and keep to yourself. nothing has changed. 

nothing has changed on the surface.

.

.

.

you think about alessandra all the time, because of course you do. 

just because old caruso couldn’t get you to flip on her doesn’t mean she’s safe, and yet you think about her the way you think about aja, the way you think about a gap-toothed surgery patient from way back in your residency sometimes. the thing that made you text your bosses begging for news about the carbon monoxide poisoning patients. that’s still in you. 

you know you can’t actually save anyone in a way that lasts—any and all work can be undone in an car-crash instant, and sometimes is—but still. one of your patients has to make it, or else what’s the point?

eventually you stop seeing aja around, but you don’t hear any talk about her getting killed, so you figure: that’s the one. that’s the one you got to save. it makes no sense, you know, but you have this feeling that if you get to save anyone, you only get to save one. so you try to prepare for the news that alessandra is gone. 

but when the news comes of a death in that family, it’s not the one you expected.

you stare at your lawyer, shocked. wait, so old caruso is dead?

suicide, she says matter of factly. hung himself in his cell. 

the fuck? so do we think that… you trail off, mindful of the cameras, even if they’re technically supposed to be turned off for lawyer consultations. you believe he’s dead, but you don’t believe for a second that he actually killed himself. 

your lawyer shrugs. who knows. all that matters is that apparently there’s an informer of some sort that’s turned over a bunch of shit—cellphone records, emails—and they’re willing to give an affidavit that you were threatened. there’s a couple pretty graphic and specific examples. for example, allegedly, after the first surgery you performed in the easystop basement, the oldest of caruso’s sons put his hand in the semi-coagulated blood and—

he’s dead now, you feel obligated to say. it’s whatever. you remember it well, though you wish you didn’t.

she’s admirably noncommittal, your lawyer. it would be nice if it wasn’t so annoying. which one is dead now?

most of them, i guess. the father’s dead, the oldest son is dead, and the youngest son will probably never be the same despite your best efforts. considering those numbers, it’s nothing short of a miracle that jack, the middle son, has apparently decided to spare you. you kept your mouth shut on behalf of his wife, but right now there’s such a tangle of complications and so few actual facts available to you that you can’t begin to guess what’s truly happening behind the scenes. you can only be grateful that you haven’t been hurt worse. 

your lawyer is considering you with shrewd eyes. after a second, she says, if i can get you a plea deal, will you take it? 

i can’t testify, you say automatically.

i know. i think i can get a deal without testimony included.

wait, really? 

she gives you a look, as if to say, catch up, dummy.

how many years? you say.

months, possibly. we’ll see.

you hardly know what to say to that. cool, you say, feebly.

you’ve kept your mouth shut, so they’re taking it easy on you, that’s the bottom line. it feels like a copout to escape the worst punishments on the basis that you were coerced, even if that’s true, because you feel like you probably deserve worse. but fuck, you’ll take mercy from anywhere right now, right and wrong and dignity be damned.

i’ll let you know. your lawyer gets up to go, but just as you’re about to call for the guard, she stops short. oh, one last thing. your landlady finally agreed that you don’t need to pay her rent for the past two months.

lovely.

she threw out all of your belongings that the cops didn’t take.

can’t say i’m surprised. it still hurts, but it’s a hurt dwarfed by the immense relief of an imminent plea deal. i’d sue, but we both know my retainer’s gonna run out too soon for that.

she did forward your mail to me, though. 

my mail? what is it, a dollar fifty off a personal pan pizza?

one postcard from your mom and her boyfriend and his family. one interview request for a doctoral residency program in indiana. 

you don’t know which of those is weirder. the residency applications you mostly did in a period of loneliness and boredom. they were an exercise in desperation daydreaming, not meant to touch real life, and you never even imagined a person reading the papers you submitted. getting a response, a good response, is as strange as a character stepping off a page. and your mom having a boyfriend is no surprise, but a boyfriend with a family? the world’s ended, yeah, but is the world ending?

can you forward those to me? you say.

they’re already in the mail. you should get them within the next two weeks.

when your lawyer leaves, you’re still sitting there. the guard has to call your name twice before you get up.

what a fucking week.

.

.

.

if you’re gonna get out in months, then…

.

.

.

you earn seventy-two cents per day working in the laundry. the first time you go to the commissary, you buy a stamp, an envelope, and a blank card. then you smuggle detergent out of the laundry room so you can bribe janine into letting you borrow her pen.

you have richie’s letter memorized, but you read it again anyway. then you stare at the blank white space of the card. 

what is there to say? well, fucking everything, but there isn’t much you can say with the inevitable prison guard reading it all too. that cuts you off from saying most things, and then dignity wants you to shut up about the rest. sorry i thought my life was over and tore you to pieces about it. turns out my life isn’t over, can we be friends again?

thing is, if you write him a letter, he’ll write back, even if it’s to tell you to fuck off. and honestly at this point, you’d give up a lot more than dignity for that. so here fucking goes.

> dear richie,

> thank you for writing. i’m not good company right now and i can’t really write letters, but maybe we can get coffee sometime when i’m out?

> yours,

> julie

the yours gives you away, but you have so little else to offer. and besides, he started it.

it’s disciplined. that’s what you’re trying to tell yourself. it’s disciplined and concise and it gets across exactly as much as he needs to know and jesus fucking christ that short note looks absolutely pitiful in the comparatively vast white space of the card. 

so you make an addition.

> p.s. tear the bottom off for eva.

as best as you can, you draw the horses from memory. arched necks, white and dark patches on their coats, as close to the style of the girl who loved horses as you can. and then one girl with a superhero’s mask and a cape, holding up an apple so the tallest horse can eat it. you don’t draw well, but you don’t have the pen long enough to try a do-over. there’s a small chance you’ll make her smile, and that’s all you want. 

lick envelope, peel stamp, and send.

[ next chapter pending ] [ masterlist ]

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a huge thank you to all readers.

taglist: @garbinge, @narcolini, @drabbles-mc, @beingalive1, @eternallyvenus, @cerial-junkie, @jackierose902109, @shinebright2000, @scorpiolystoned, @fancyvoidtragedy, @justficsandstuff, @fromirkwood, @gills-lounge, @lostfleurs, @spicydonut25— if anyone wants to be added to or removed from the taglist, let me know!

[theresattrpgforthat]

The computer game Pacific Drive has the player driving a supernatural station wagon and delving ever deeper into an abandoned exclusion zone in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, dodging anomalies, scavenging for resources, exploring, and seeking answers to what events caused the creation of the zone. The game takes heavy inspiration from the art of Simon Stålenhag, which has its on TTRPG in "Tales from the Loop", but can you recommend any other games that would recreate the experience of Pacific Drive?

THEME: Pacific Drive

Hello friend, so I looked up Pacific Drive and one thing that I found out about it was that it was inspired by media such as Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, so first I’m going to send you to my Fucked Up Settings Rec post, especially to the games titled Trespasser and The Zone.

What I’m getting from Pacific Drive is that it’s focused on travel, exploration, an interesting story, the ability to improve the one thing that you survive with, and experiencing a world that fundamentally doesn’t care about you. So let’s see if we have anything that hits any of those tangents.

The Last Caravan, by Ted Bushman.

In this cozy, melancholy post-apocalypse, the aliens came less than a year ago. The war lasted two months, but nobody won. Now, with an alien army rising from the ashes of war, you will have to make a dangerous journey across a shattered North America in search of a new home.

You are normal people finding heroism in extraordinary circumstances. You will explore transformed landscapes, search abandoned towns, discover otherworldly technology, negotiate with newly-formed factions, outrun alien pursuers, and — and all you’ve got is a car, your fellow travelers, and the road.

The Last Caravan combines the survival-horror genre with the fiction-first ethos of Blades in the Dark and No Dice No Masters. Each character has a list of prompts called triggers that reward you with a narrative resource that can open up abilities as you tell your story. The alien apocalypse has come, but the story isn’t over, as a some kind of threat shows signs of growing as you travel across a cold, frozen highway. If you’re interested in The Last Caravan, but missed the Kickstarter, you can check out the Quickstart while you wait for the final release.

24XX-D: Aftertime, by xiombarg.

As a volunteer for the  private paramilitary group Project Aftertime, your health was altered and your brain preserved so you could be revived after society collapsed. 

You awoke in an unfamiliar base filled with unfamiliar technology, with even stranger ultratech outside. 

The Event the wastelanders describe makes no sense. "The gods left us."

I feel like I’m missing something when I look through my folders because the 24XX system feels perfect for these kinds of ‘exclusion zone” games but Aftertime feels the closest to it, and it’s definitely not perfect. There’s too many people milling about, and there seems to be too much pointing towards some kind of answer about the alien event. However, I think in general, 24XX is a great system to root around in if you want to make something for yourself. A lot of these kinds of games have great roll-tables for events, locations, and missions, and inventory (which seems really important in Pacific Drive) is simple to track but absolutely necessary.

Aftertime is different from other 24XX games in that it uses a pool of resources rather than dice rolls to determine what you can or cannot do. You could stick with that, or mash this game together with some other 24XX games like PREDATORS to incorporate dice rolls, and vehicles. What I like about Aftertime is that it includes a base that you can upgrade over time, similar to how your car in Pacific Drive gets better as you find upgrades for it.

Crush Depth Apparition, by amandalee.

February 1902, somewhere on the North Atlantic. Mountainous waves blot out the horizon, and the wind and thunder roar too loud to tell one from the other. But 200 ft down there’s only still cold darkness and the submarine.  

No one has ever dived this deep before, so far from shore and safety. Maybe no one was ever meant to try. The submarine is 170 feet of dripping pipes and fogged up dials, levers rusting stuck in the damp. It was two weeks into the voyage when things started going wrong.  Little accidents, inexplicable mistakes. Someone heard a noise, like tapping, soft against the hull last night. Bright paint flakes off a torpedo and underneath there is a story scratched into the metal. The Captain turns down a hallway that can’t be there,  into pipes and steel and miles of ocean.

The one thing keeping you safe down here has turned into a labyrinth. 

Crush Depth Apparition is an eerie survival horror stand alone adventure zine for 3-5 players and a GM by Amanda Lee Franck. It  includes rules for running and repairing a state of the art (of 120 years ago) experimental submarine, a map of the ocean, an unnatural labyrinth,  ghostly encounters,  hundreds of things that can go wrong, and a crew that depends on you.

Because you are depending on your submarine for survival, much of the focus of this adventure is going to be on keeping it running. You’ll need to manage your fuel levels, the submarine’s battery, and how deep you go, all while trying to find a way home. The setting is very different from Pacific Drive, and I think the horror amps up a little bit because there are more personal details that will likely worm themselves into this game. You’re also less likely to survive the entirety of this game; but the weirdness that happens the further that you adventure may mirror some of the strangeness of Pacific Drive.

ZONE, by Iron Cutler.

ZONE is a genre-agnostic TTRPG , heavily inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, though adaptable to a wide variety of settings. It is about trespassing in a bizarre and dangerous area—the Zone—and becoming changed by what you find inside.

ZONE is a GM-less ttrpg that uses collaborative worldbuilding to design and deepen the strangeness of the world around you. Each session will contain an expedition of Trespassers, people who enter the Zone without permission, and thus destined to be permanently changed. Your Trespassers will not usually survive from one expedition to the next; this place will change them, and that is why ZONE is described as “un-winnable” by its designer.

Unlike many of the other games on this list, ZONE is very abstract because it doesn’t expect you to succeed. Your characters are destined to fail once they incur too much shock, so managing resources is not really something worth doing in this game. Character creation is also rather simple, and I think that is because the main focus of this game is on the place you are exploring, rather than the character themself. If you want a game about the horror of being changed by something alien and ultimately uncaring about you, I’d recommend ZONE.

RAD, by ¡Hipólita!

We don't know who broke the world, but we know what weapon they used.

In the year 1990, the United States of America fired a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, immediately killing millions and poisoning the land, air and water for years.

The scarce few survivors were forced into hiding. About 50,000 people fled to the relative safety of the Moscow Metro, with smaller numbers following suit in cities like Novosibirsk, Volgograd, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Samara and others.

RAD is a game full of radiation-induced body-horror and all about survival. You have four core stats, and the rest of your character sheet is all about resources and inventory, including three resources called Bedroll, Rations and Battery. The game mechanics are inspired by systems like Mausritter, which means that player creativity and smart item use will take you far. It’s all about a delicate balance of resources, so if that’s what you liked about Pacific Drive, you might want to check out RAD - as well as an adventure for it titled The Technicolor Forest.

Other Games I've Recommended Before

Nibiru, by Araukana Media.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan.

Roadspire, by Glempy.

[alexanderwales]

There was one week in July of 2021 when my brain was actually working, when I was just happy to be alive and able to effortlessly focus on the things that were important. It was like my brain was a car that had been making a weird noise for years, and then I went over a pothole and somehow it fixed itself.

And I kept thinking to myself "is this going to last?" and also "life would be so easy if my brain were always like this, this is just how some people are". I wouldn't say that I'm depressed as my default state, but that week made me think that maybe there's some level of background depression that's just always there, something I've acclimated to. And for that week, it was gone.

But it only lasted a week, and then I was back to my old self. The depression and anxiety come in waves, and sometimes I can control them, but other times the triggers start piling up and it's just this downward spiral as the chemicals slosh around up there. I've trained myself to go into robot mode, to just get things done mechanically if there's no working human inside me, which is about what it's like for me on Lexapro.

I think about that week a lot.

It's bad this time, maybe as bad a depressive episode as I've had in a decade. When I was young, I used to imagine gnomes inside my head who were responsible for a bunch of levers that controlled emotions and would go into the backrooms to retrieve memories, and it took me a long time to understand that the gnomes were, in many cases, utterly incompetent, pushing down the wrong levers at the wrong moment, making me feel anxious about routine emails and causing these cascades of bad feelings over what should have been minor bumps.

I want to not be like this. I want to be the person I was when the stars aligned on that one week three years ago. That person exists, I was him, it didn't feel like losing a part of me, or like I was fundamentally altered. It felt like I had cast off my training weights and was moving around the arena at supersonic speeds. It felt like I had become the person I was always meant to be.

When I think about how unfair it is, I get more depressed. When I think about how unfounded the sadness is, I get more depressed. When I think about the things I'm not getting done because I'm depressed, I get more depressed. When I think about how other people have it worse, I get more depressed. It's like the brain gnomes have a single button that they use for everything, and that button is "I dunno, make him more sad, maybe that will help".

It'll pass. I know it'll pass, because it's passed before.

Sucks tho.

[her-satanic-wiles]

October 9th

Glory Hole, Papa Emeritus I x GN!Reader

Masterlist

Words: 1.9k

Warnings: Glory holes; sex work; gn!Reader (but reader has a vulva); major inspiration from those slavic glory hole porn videos (iykyk); free use; fingering; overstimulation; cunnilingus; pussy worship (because of course there is); body worship (because this is Primo we’re talking about, man will lavish you in praise unprovoked); squirting; multiple orgasms; unprotected sex; piv sex; spanking; I may have accidentally made this reader plus size so if you are, great, if not, also great… ;

Taglist: @sodoswitchimage @enchantedbunny @bitchywitchygardener @thew0man @sodomiser @the-did-i-ask @copias-sewer-rat @gehrmansbignaturals

🔞 MDNI 🔞

There were times in one’s life where partaking in sins of the flesh wasn’t quite as romantic as one always wanted. The church, of course, always promoted the use of sexual rituals when it came to invoking the Dark One, as well as carnal lust being one of the most important fundamentals of their beliefs. However, sometimes sex was a bare necessity. Banging one out was akin to taking your car to the mechanic to get the oil changed, or cleaning your house and resetting it every season.

Primo, being the old man he was now, didn’t often find himself partaking in rituals anymore. Didn’t feel like he wanted to play cat and mouse with a pretty young sister - or old sister, he wasn’t picky. The idea of wooing a goddess every time exhausted his old brain, thus when nature did call on him, as rare as it was, he would go down to the basement levels where strings of Siblings also needed some attention and couldn’t be bothered with chasing down someone they deemed attractive. Where faces could remain hidden and the thrill of anonymity heightened the pleasurable experiences.

The Ministry’s glory hole.

Now, it seems ridiculous and kind of culty that a religious sect would own a plethora of custom built glory holes, I completely understand. But it just seemed fitting to have one when so many people live in a small space, and a large portion of these people are insanely horny introverts.

So, Primo walked into the corridor that lead to private rooms, chose the orifice he wanted to use and entered the room. After knocking, of course, he wasn’t a monster. The Sibling who was waiting for him had been propped up on a cardboard structure, the perfect height for the average penis-wielder. They were positioned on their stomach, allowing whoever came in two holes to easily play with.

Primo grabbed the camping chair that had been folded neatly in the corner of the room and placed it in front of the hole. His head was at the perfect height to play with the Sibling with his hands and mouth, which is something he intended to do first. Primo, like all of the Papas after him, was a very attentive lover - gracious, even with people he was to spend only twenty minutes with. He had no idea how long they’d been there, but he could see by their bare and swollen folds (and even a droplet of cum on the floor) that they had been used before him. Therefore, he wet two of his own fingers and delicately placing them inside them, tentatively, so as not to hurt their already sensitive pussy. They hissed at the feeling, the overstimulation catching up to them, but the moan that followed afterwards told Primo that they were still ready and happy to go. The light above their hole was green, so he knew the other person was consenting to this.

Green light - good to go.

Yellow light - stop what you’re doing and switch it up.

Red light - stop completely.

Everyone within the booths had buttons to press to express their consent as well as alarms just in case someone overstayed their welcome. Big and burly Ministry officers would come charging in and forcibly remove the other person if needs be. Safety was always the most important thing.

When Primo pulled his fingers out, the only thing coating them was the Sibling’s juices, meaning whoever had used them before had cleaned up after themselves. Primo grunted in appreciation. He didn’t mind eating cum out of a pussy, provided it was his own. With the confirmation he needed, Primo nuzzled into the Sibling’s folds, and allowed his tongue to flick over the sensitive bud softly, tentatively making sure this was okay before proceeding to get more intense. The light remained green.

So, Primo placed his hands on the Sibling’s deliciously plump ass and spread them apart, giving him complete and unobstructed access to his favourite place of worship. His tongue darted erratically over the Sibling’s clit, alternating between licking and sucking. He knew this was a hit with the Sibling, given that their hips were rocking back and forth, working Primo’s nose deeper into their wetness. They tried not to give away their identity with their voice, but their moans and little gasps of “yes!” and “more!” wasn’t helping them. Thankfully, Primo didn’t recognise their voice, but his cock was certainly standing to attention and appreciative of the noises it was hearing.

Pulling away temporarily, Primo inserted two of the same fingers into the Sibling’s slick hole and curved downward, roughly fingering them as he sucked on their clit. He had been around long enough to know exactly what to do and how to please whatever partner he was with, and the Sibling’s gasps of affirmation was enough for him to know that they were seriously enjoying him. It wasn’t long before his fingers felt the familiar tightness, and his face became drenched in the Sibling’s cum, their squirt trickling out of them and flooding the shelf they were lay on. Papa only stopped when he saw the light turn yellow.

He stood and removed the chair, placing it back to where he got it from, before undressing himself. He was a traditional man, preferring to be completely nude under his robes, and so he stood as naked as the Sibling, cock standing freely and begging to sink into the sopping cunt in front of him. In reassurance, and perhaps a gentle warning, Primo placed one of his hands on the Sibling’s ass and stroked it gently. He ran his cock through their folds once, twice, three times before easing himself in gently. The Sibling’s gasp was music to his ears, and it took everything in him not to thrust forward and take his own pleasure. But he held on to the very last bit of sanity he had for the sake of this poor Sibling’s overworked hole. Even with his cock working its way inside the Sibling, he was still giving them reassuring touches and being as gentle as possible. But their pussy was warm, and wet, and fluttering with every movement. He hadn’t felt this good in years.

Papa didn’t care who knew he was in there, he just wanted to make sure the Sibling was comfortable. “Flash your light green when you’re ready for me to move.” He requested.

After a few seconds the light flashed, and Primo began his assault.

The thrusts were tentative and shallow at first, but soon enough he let his wants take over him. His pace quickened and his hands gripped tightly onto the Sibling’s hips to ground and allow himself to hit the right spots more precisely. He would alternate between quick, short thrusts to long, powerful hits where he’d slam himself back in and reach the very back of their hole. He needed this. He didn’t realise just how horny he’d been until he sank deep into the Sibling. He’d almost forgotten how good a tight, wet cunt felt wrapped around his achingly hard cock. Sathanas - if He was good, He would allow Primo more reminders of his youth so he could come back down and play with as many Siblings as he could get his hands on. But he almost wanted to keep this Sibling forever. He wanted to find out who they were. He wanted to bring them up to his chambers and watch their voluptuous ass bounce on his cock as he lay on the bed like a King.

He watched with intent as their ass jiggled at the recoil, every time his hips rammed against it and bounced with the force. He bit his lip and let out a groan, resisting the urge to spank. He didn’t want to do anything the Sibling was uncomfortable with. “C-can I spank you? Fl-flash if yes.”

Another flash, this one even faster than before. Primo chuckled. His hand came down with a slap over and over again, the intensity getting bigger and bigger until their right cheek was red and raw with the impact. Every time he hit them, they squeaked like a little mouse. Between each hit was a reassuring rub, followed by an even more intense one. Sometimes, he would couple the slap with the timing of his cock hitting their cervix. This would earn him an unintentional scream.

When Primo had tired of the spanking, he moved his hand under their bodies and began working his middle finger at the Sibling’s clit. They had already cum once by Primo’s mouth, and it felt great when their cunt constricted his fingers, but he was desperate to feel it around his cock. With the amount they were worked up, he didn’t believe it would be long before they came. And sure enough, the familiar tightness began to appear and Primo felt their walls closing in again. His own throat released a growl as the Sibling’s orgasm ripped one of his own and his balls emptied inside them. They stayed connected for a moment, Primo being too tired to move but also not wanting it to end. But eventually, he pulled out, hissing at the loss of warmth.

His eyes were transfixed on the Sibling’s pussy, watching his cum ooze out of them like melted ice cream down a cone. His finger ran through the mess and gathered it before licking it off. He couldn’t help himself. Once more he unfolded the chair from the corner and set to work abusing their cunt in the sweetest of ways.

The Sibling, who was now almost entirely fuck-drunk and brain dead from orgasms, was babbling incoherently to themselves on the other side of the wall. Their hips were bucking at the feeling of Primo’s tongue eating his own cum out of their cunt and they could hardly contain themselves. Their hand moved backwards, reaching for Primo’s bald head and pushing him further into their cunt as though they were desperate for another orgasm. “Papa!” They cried. “L-like that! Right th-ere. Oh fuck! Please don’t stop! Don’t stop!” And it didn’t take much more than a nudge to the clit to have them tipping over again and cumming for the third time from Primo’s body alone. They were completely breathless by the time Primo pulled away, and in their somewhat delusional state, they clumsily climbed out of the hole and exposed their entirely naked body and face to their Papa.

“Hey, hey!” Primo said, concern in his voice as he watched the exhausted Sibling sway. He gently moved them to the seat and had them sit on it. “Are you okay, little one?”

They nodded. “I wanted to see you.”

Primo chuckled fondly. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

He wrapped his own robes around the Sibling, who was now shaking, and stood behind them giving them an awkward back hug, trying to bring warmth back to their adrenaline-filled body. “What’s your name?”

“I’m ___.” They answered. “C-can I see you again, Papa? Please?”

It had been a long time since a person had attached themselves to him because of his bedroom prowess. “Only for coffee, little ___. Your head is not clear enough for other decisions.”

They nodded. Primo found themselves looking at them in adoration - they were so unbelievably cute. If nothing else, Papa may have just made himself a new friend.

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