#i have a v specific vision of how they are but i can never figure out how to say it

[carpathiians]

.

[miyukisu]

I Might Bite .ᐟ

❤︎ | Resorting to dirty measures like biting your superior during sparring usually doesn't end without you having a taste of your own medicine... (2.6k wc) ╰ feat. Hoshina Soshiro (Kn8) x afab! reader

kinktober entry no. 2 | kinktober masterlist

tags - subordinate! reader, biting, marking, spanking, pussy slaps, humiliation & punishment, Hoshina's kinda mean, fingering, p in v, creampies, swearing

minors do not interact

The recent uptick of kaiju attacks over the city has every member of the JAKDF on edge. No one knows when the next attack is coming or if they'll live to see their next birthday. The atmosphere in the Tachikawa base specifically felt odd. Most were hopeless, but then there was you.

You weren't the strongest by any means, but you believed that if it came to being persistent—you'd be the best. It showed; after all, you trained your ass off even in your off hours.

There were times you bled and shed a tear, but you never stopped. Your fellow officers often told you to slow down. But there was one person who always watched from the sidelines—silently observing how you improved every night that you would sneak away into the training rooms.

It was none other than your superior, Hoshina Soshiro.

The vice captain didn't seem all too interested to be invested in the lives of the officers. Frankly, he had better things to do. But the rookie that worked themselves to the bone had successfully caught his eye. There was something about them that reminded him of himself. In many ways, he was drawn to that fiery spirit.

Not a lot of recruits had your determination and he was more than willing to foster that. What kind of vice captain would he be if he didn't help you in honing your skills?

────────────

You stared, dumbfounded, at the fox eyed man in front of you.

"Ya heard me right the first time," he insisted.

You gulp down. "Well... I'm certainly not going to refuse your offer, sir. I was just making sure I understood what you said."

"I told ya—I'll help ya train every night. I meant it."

Finding out that your superior knew you have been violating the curfew had you expecting the worst. But Hoshina's reaction was rather unforeseen.

Instead of making you run laps or do cleaning duty—he offered to train with you during your night sessions. It made sense; training with someone better than you would allow you to improve at faster speeds. The choice was a no-brainer.

"Alright... thank you, sir."

Hoshina simply nodded before walking away from you, satisfied that you were cooperative with his ideas.

"Sir!"

He turns around with a small smile. "Yes?"

"When do we start?"

"Have ya skipped a day before?"

"...No, not really."

His smile widens. "Ya have yer answer then."

────────────

Labored breaths filled the training room—though, most of it came from you. Hoshina barely broke a sweat throughout your entire sparring session. It wasn't shocking anymore at this point.

You estimate that it's already about two weeks since he has started joining you in your training. Not once have you won against him.

At first, it felt quite motivating—knowing that you had so much to improve. But as days go by, it becomes depressing how you can never even land a good hit on him.

You weren't fit to face a kaiju with how things stand and it crushed your once blazing spirits.

With your chest heaving and your vision blurring, you continued to anticipate his next move. You figured he'd at least cut you some slack after seeing the massive difference in skill, but he was merciless. You didn't even fight back as he tackled you to the ground.

Hoshina Soshiro wasn't just talented with a blade, but also with his bare hands. Who would have thought he knew grappling as well? He easily put you in a rear naked choke and you felt your airway quickly constrict.

He taught you that if you couldn't even handle basic hand-to-hand combat—then you'd be nothing doing anything else. Besides, before ending your session with the usual bare knuckled fighting, he trained you with swords and other weapons... in which you couldn't beat him in either.

Going up against him was futile. You absorbed his teachings like a sponge, but when it came to applying them—all hope is lost.

You were going to pass out soon; you could feel it.

Despite telling yourself that you'd always fight fair and square—you realized that this wasn't the time to be righteous. Virtues, principles—whatever the fuck it is—chucked out the window.

You bit down on his arm—hard. Did you draw blood? Perhaps. But that hardly mattered to you. He finally let go, failing to defeat you completely. Hoshina hissed, checking out the fresh wound you gave him.

Neither could you move or speak. In fact, you kept your back leaning on his chest. Doing anything other than breathing was a bit too much at the moment.

"Ya play dirty, don'cha?" he whispered darkly into your ear.

The thickness and intimidation laced in his voice was enough to reinvigorate your entire being. You took the deepest breath possible before peeling yourself off of him.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"Of course ya didn't mean ta do that, right?" he cuts you off, lifting you off of the ground with his impressive strength.

"What shall I ever do with ya? Li'l thing bitin' her superior."

You could only stutter out a pathetic apology as he carries you in his arms.

"Nah, don'cha apologize now. Ya must be sick of me treatin' ya like a ragdoll hm?"

He was right, of course. But you weren't about to admit that to him.

Hoshina carried you over to the side of the room where the long metal bench was. Even out of fighting, he continued to treat you like a doll with the way you effortlessly flipped you over. Your stomach pressed against his lap with one of his hands resting on your nape.

You weren't sure where his other hand was, but you soon found out... the hard way.

A sharp slap made its way to your ass. It had you sucking in more air than usual.

"Not even a single yelp huh? Think ya can handle more? Ya need to be punished after all."

Another slap and then another on the other cheek. Tears were starting to brim in your eyes. With the next slap, you finally yelped in pain. Hearing your sharp breaths, he caressed your poor behind in a soothing manner.

"Think ya've repented enough?"

God, you didn't want to sound weak, but a few sniffles escaped you. His question racked your brain, yet not a single good answer came for it. It was a trap and he was steadily luring you in.

You figured—silence was the best response. However, that pissed off the vice captain even more. Hoshina let out a long and deep sigh. He didn't want to do this; he swears. But you just had to push his buttons.

"Not speakin' huh? How many times will ya disrespect yer superior after I've been kind enough ta be trainin' ya every night?"

If you've learned one thing about him these past few sessions—it was that he never gave you time to react. Only now, you're discovering that it applies to things apart from fighting as well.

He slid you off his lap without warning. Soon as you flipped yourself over, the vice captain was already hovering over you with a stern expression on his face.

He inched closer, slowly but steadily. His eyes never left yours and it seemed to have you in a trance because you failed to realize how he had already caged you between his thick arms.

"Sir..." you managed to say between shaky breaths.

"So you can speak?"

Your eyes finally stray from his face, feeling flustered by the proximity.

"Ya should use that mouth of yers fer talkin' —not fer bitin' ," he said. He leaned in to the point that you felt the warmth of his breath against your neck. It was tantalizing—almost paralyzing. "I think ya should get a taste of yer own medicine," he added.

No time was given to protest as he sunk his sharp teeth into your neck. You gasp, hands finding purchase on his arms. He suckled on the tender skin, sure to leave a mark that you'd have to cover up in the morning.

Then another bite came. Your fingers dug into his flesh. It was painful, but oddly arousing. The intoxicating scent he radiated coupled with his fine looks were a recipe for disaster. But the only one being ruined was you.

Perhaps he felt satisfied after two bites, settling on wet kisses scattered on your neck instead. He kept getting lower and lower until he was met with a barrier.

"Lemme get this out of the way, a'ight?" he says before gripping the soft fabric of your black tanktop—ripping it apart. He smirked at the sight, a flimsy lacey bra.

He pushed it up before smashing his face down on your chest, sucking and lightly biting at a sensitive bud. Your hands went from his biceps to his hair, almost pulling out the strands from the roots.

He bit, tugged, and marked you all over again—like he was staking claim. Hoshina made sure to give attention to the other one as well, sucking on the swell of your breast while using his fingers to toy with the other.

Truth be told, he was too excited and immersed in devouring you that he only now became aware of your sounds. It was delightful to say the least. It made him smile as he nipped at the sensitive flesh.

You began to arch your back, needing more of him. But he took this as a sign to go even lower, planting more kisses that trailed down your stomach. He was giving you whiplash with the alternating softness and harshness of his touch.

He looked up at you and saw your dazed expression, unable to even look back at him. This was fine; this was the only time he'd permit a subordinate not looking him in the eye.

For once, you were able to catch your breath and make sense of it all. You returned your gaze to the man above you. He was hovering over you again, looking down with a feral glare. His large hand gripped your thigh.

"Ya know... fer someone bein' disciplined... ya sure look like yer enjoyin' this."

"I'm not," you retorted. But both of you knew the truth.

"Ya challengin' me? Let's see then, shall we?"

He made quick work of the zipper on your pants before pulling it down and throwing it off to God knows where. His eyes opened slightly, zeroing on the damp patch on your panties. Of course, he was right.

"Would ya look at that—yer pussy's all soaked from that. How naughty."

"I... I... um..."

He huffed. "Ya what?"

Slap. He had slapped your pussy. The stinging sensation had you arching your back off of the cold metallic surface of the bench. A soft groan fell from your lips.

He landed another slap. "Look at how wet ya are right now. Ya shouldn't have lied huh?"

As if to soothe you again, he began rubbing his thumb over your poor cunt. "Didn't mean ta make her cry."

Hoshina smirked at his own joke—because who else would appreciate it? Definitely not you; you were too fucked out to even catch everything that he's saying.

He hooked a finger in the gusset before pulling your panties out of the way. The sight of your dripping cunt made his dick twitch. He had already been especially frustrated this week and the cute little subordinate he trained every night wasn't helping. Her little stunt was essentially the final nail in the coffin.

There was nothing else he wanted more but to fuck you senseless already. But he was a refined man; he had patience.

Hoshina pushed in two digits at first and it almost made him shudder with how tight and warm you were. Patience be damned; he was crumbling all too quickly for his liking.

"Fuck... yer suckin' it in."

A string of soft moans left you. It was music to his ears and he wanted it to be louder.

He began fucking his fingers into you at a faster pace. The muscles of his arm tensed and the veins on his forearm were popping out. A loud and vulgar moan reverberated through the training room. You could only hope that everyone in the base was asleep because there was no way you could be quiet with what he's doing to you.

You tightened around his fingers before unravelling completely. Your pussy fluttered, cumming on to his fingers shamelessly. It almost felt like a task to him—only getting it out of the way to get to the main event.

Hoshina pulled out his fingers, sucking them clean. He would have loved to get a taste of it on his tongue, but all restraint had been lost. He had to sheath himself in you or else he'd actually lose it.

"Take a deep breath for me, a'ight?" he says while unzipping his pants, only barely pulling out his leaking cock from its confines.

Maybe you should have listened because the sudden intrusion of his cock knocked the air out of your lungs. It filled you up nicely, hitting every spot with just one fluid motion.

He groans, throwing his head back in ecstasy. His fingers were practically white with how hard he gripped the bench supporting the both of you.

"Coulda fought me with this instead. Maybe ya coulda won," he teased. He began slowly fucking into you, perhaps a reprieve after his previous actions.

Your hands held on to his back, softly digging your nails into the chiseled flesh. A satisfied groan poured from his smiling lips.

The string of moans coming from you urged him to go faster. He had enough of being slow and soft. He snapped his hips at a maddening pace almost immediately. Your leg fell of the bench, hanging off and allowing him deeper access into you.

He never faltered for a second—even as he leaned down to leave marks on your neck again. You held him closer to you as if you never wanted him to leave... and he wasn't; at least, not until you've cum all over his cock.

His ragged breaths filled your ear as he continued to rut into you. Hoshina was tough, ruthless, and precise—much like on the battlefield.

A familiar clench squeezed his dick. "Ya close? Ya gonna cum on my cock? C'mon, do it," he goaded.

His thumb began circling your swollen clit. After holding on to the cold bench for a while, his touch felt freezing. The warmth you felt inside contrasted with the cold touch of his thumb. The sensation was almost numbing with how good it felt.

"Wanna cum with me? How romantic of ya," he teased again. "Fuck... I'm cummin' —take it all. This is still part of yer punishment. Got that?"

You responded with a breathless moan. That was all it took before hot ropes of cum filled you. The warmth seemed to push you over the edge as well, milking him for all he's worth. And like he said—it would be romantic. He grabbed your chin, forcing you to look at him.

"Ya learned yer lesson yet?" he asked, but not before capturing your wet lips in a kiss.

Hoshina let a shaky breath out as he pulled away. He knew it would be good, but he wasn't expecting for it to be this good.

"Shit... was only plannin' one round. Guess it wouldn't hurt ta discipline ya more."

He lazily rubbed his still hard cock. "C'mon, get on all fours fer me and I might not make ya run laps in morning's training." He watched intently as you followed, lining up his dick against your entrance. It was going to be a long night.

"Good fuckin' girl."

©miyukisu do not repost/reupload/translate any of my works on other platforms

╰ author's note slightly longer I guess because I like Hoshina more lol

[1moreff-creator]

Corrigendum - Literature Girl Insane Analysis

Updates After CH2 PT2

More than a year ago, the entire DRDT fandom was thrown on its head when the Literature Girl Insane David MV dropped. And with the help of DRDT Tumblr for mystery finding and interpretations, about a year ago I made “A Full Vivisection of the David MV,” a two and a half hour video going over everything I could. While I still think the video mostly holds up even after CH2 PT2, there’s quite a few things that require an update. Let’s go over them, shall we?

(Is this a correct use of the word "corrigendum"? I don't know, but it's close enough for me to use given the connection to the book theme we got going on :v)

As a warning, though, this post will more or less assume that you’ve watched Vivisection, as some sections might be complete gibberish without the context of my previous interpretations of this thing.

Spoilers up to CH2. CW: Suicide, murder, hanging, CH2 execution, gun violence, blood

I’ll go through the recontextualizations in order of appearance in the MV, though first: 

Footnote 14 Solution, Tally 5 Correction

So these two things aren’t related to Part 2, but instead codes already in LGI. Since Vivisection came out, the footnote 14/Roman numeral I code got solved, and I’ve been informed that the solution for tally 5 I hinted at in the video was, while not wrong in the sense that you could arrive at the code using it, not the actually intended solution. Basically I said to pay attention to line breaks, when you’re actually supposed to ignore them, and that meant that one character had to be ignored when in reality the real solution works perfectly fine without ignoring it. Sorry, the line break thing was just commonly repeated advice given on Tumblr at the time and I don’t know why I never double checked how accurate it was :v

The proper solutions can be found in my Secrets Masterpost, so I won’t repeat them here. The Roman numeral I code, attached to Xander via crosswords, returned “I have always looked up to you,” which is perfectly in line with both the things David states in 2-12 and the conclusions drawn about how he feels towards Xander from the MV. As for tally 5, that will be addressed later. 

Yoidore Shirazu Lyrics

Another thing that happened was the release of the Elliot MV, Yoidore Shirazu. While the MV itself is not particularly for our purposes, I'm bringing it up to double check a thing with the lyrics.

You might remember that a big chunk of Vivisection was informed by "Language Theory," the idea that some lyrics' translations were specifically changed to fit better with David. This was supported by footnote 5, "As the translation has been intentionally botched in many parts, it should not be considered accurate," as well as the fact that Coleena Wu was listed in the credits, meaning her translation was used as a base for the David MV even though there were many differences between the David MV's lyrics and her version.

Thus, when I saw that Yoidore Shirazu credited Magenetra for the English lyrics, I figured I'd check if it happened again. And yes, there are a few lines here and there where the Elliot version is slightly different from the original translation. While I won't get into all of them in this post, a particularly notable change is "my muddy, obstructed and broken vision of the future, it's not half bad" in the original changing to "my muddy, obstructed, broken future, it's not half bad" in the Elliot MV, for example.

What does this tell us about the David MV? Well, I would argue that if dev decided to change a few lyrics in an MV where word placement isn't as important as in LGI, presumably just to make them fit better with Elliot or because dev just prefers certain wording (I don't see any other reasons the translation would be different), then it's very possible that they also consciously changed a few LGI lines to fit better with David. Maybe. In other words, I believe this is an extra argument to the validity of Language Theory, though I could also see it as an argument against ("maybe dev just doesn't care about sticking so close to the translations they use") :v

Now let’s actually go from the start of the MV to the end, shall we?

Color Connection Theory: Orange

In Vivisection, I said (words more words less) that while in a vacuum orange would probably go to Ace, the context of some of the lines seemed to fit Xander better, with the argument that the trailer for the series assigns orange as the color of the first letter of Xander’s name in a hypothetical class trial. The main argument was that Orange “that guy” appeared next to Green “this guy” (Hu/Teruko, leaning Hu) and Black “you” (possibly Mai), and lumping Ace in with characters who seemed much more important than him at the time seemed… strange.

Since then, Ace has gained a notable amount of importance to this particular part of the story, given the whole blackened thing. As a result, I would argue his inclusion as Orange is now more likely than Xander’s. Take a look at the start of the first chorus, for example, and you’ll see that putting Xander as red (which would be redundant if he’s also orange) makes for a nice, neat reading in the context of this trial.

[Literature Girl Insane] Even if you cry, make noise, shout, go mad the world won’t change!

Arei: “Even if you cry about hurting Eden, you’ll still always be a horrible person.”

Hu: “Even if you make noise to make yourself useful, you’re still the same hopeless child who attempted suicide three times.”

Ace: “Even if you shout, you’ll always be a coward.”

Xander: “Even if you go mad, you’ll always be a good person at heart.”

“No matter what, you people (the world) won’t change.”

What a lovely worldview David has! 

There’s also this instance, "let's play!":

[Literature Girl Insane] With anonymous hopes let's play!

Which makes sense given Ace is “playing the killing game” by… killing in the game. Foreshadowing or am I insane? These are not mutually exclusive. 

Hand Holding

dev why /affectionate

So, yeah. Arei holds David’s hand the same way Ideal Country Woman does. At least we’ve got near 100% confirmation that the weird line of white pixels is not a glove or anything, but rather a bend of the wrist as expected. 

Now we have to ask what Arei’s connection to this mess is. Thankfully, I can at least draw a connection between Arei and the surrounding context of the scene, so we’re not going in completely blind. As a reminder, here’s the interpretation I arrived at for the “tunnel scene” that directly precedes Miss Hand Holding’s appearance.

[Extract from Vivisection] David gives Xander the order to "escape the tunnel," so open himself up to love others. However, "but," loving David is a bad idea, because he's a monster who's better off dead. His opinion, right? So he asks himself, where should Xander escape? "Where to?" In other words, who should Xander like and be friends with?

The connection to Arei should be more or less clear, provided you replace Xander's name with her. There’s two ways to take it. Arei opened herself up to David, “escaped the tunnel on his direction” per say. And given what happened directly after, you could say it led to a “disastrous scene.” Alternatively, if David genuinely wanted to accept Arei’s proposal to be “less shitty together,” if he “escaped the tunnel in Arei’s direction,” that too could be considered a “disastrous scene” because Arei died. That one’s admittedly a pretty big if, butconsidering some of the stuff David says…

David [2-10]: Unless, of course, you were Arei. That girl wanted desperately to prove herself as a "friend" to Eden. And yet she completely lacked any experience with what "friends" were actually like. [...] What could she know about "friendship," after all? Someone like her, who had not once experienced kindness in her entire life up until now? [...] [Breaking down] It's... It's so... Ahaha. It's just so foolish. For someone to take advantage of Arei like that... It's absolutely unforgivable. All she wanted was to change. What a reprehensible person this killer is. I look forward to seeing their painful execution.

Yeah he might have cared. 

So, okay, Arei can be connected to the surrounding context so this isn’t completely out of left field, but we still have the possibility of a further connection to the Mystery Girl. As you might recall, this girl is either Diana Chiem (based on certain similarities with David and because revealing Ms Naegi like this would be weird) or Ms Naegi (because Diana isn’t in the Cast List, while Naegi is). I don’t see any immediate connections to Naegi, so we’re left with Diana, who also has little connection.

Of course, the number one takeaway is that Arei reminds David of Diana (or Ms Naegi) in some way, so we can infer Mystery Girl might have supported David despite knowing about his manipulative nature, especially possible since she's positioned in the MV in a way where she's the "(so-called) ideal country." I'm about to ramble a whole lot more about other possibilities, but this is probably what we're meant to get from this.

If we’re allowing a small amount of unhingedness, another connection that could be drawn is between Arei’s family situation and David’s. Arei also had sisters, but they treated her horribly until Arei ruined their lives. Translated to Diana, this could mean that David treated her badly, that she did something to harm him, or both. If their relationship turned bad during Hope’s Peak time, it could explain why Footnote David, presumed to be David before losing his memories, claims she doesn’t exist, when Killing Game David speaks about her openly. Did he try to cut ties with her or something, and tries to pretend she doesn’t exist? Again, unhinged and probably not what the takeaway is meant to be, but we know less than zero about Diana, so it's not impossible.

Alternatively, though, it's worth noting that Mystery Girl and Arei tilt their heads in opposite directions, which could symbolize they're opposites in a way. Taken with the previous interpretations, this could mean either Mystery Girl supported David without knowing about his motive secret (opposite of interpretation 1), or that Arei's family situation is opposite Diana's, aka David had a good relationship with his sister (opposite of interpretation 2).

But speaking of insane, would you believe me if I told you that this visual similarity could, alternatively, be evidence for literally the most unhinged theory in the entire Vivisection? That is, the ridiculous deduction which is arrived at by analyzing the objects in the “suspicious gaps” attached to footnote 11, “I admit to lying. There is no one named OOOOO OOOOO. I am, and always have been, an only child," as well as the Catch-22 quote that comes directly after. Full explanation in Vivisection, but here’s the theory. 

[Extract from Vivisection]  So, first, I think the footnote is a double lie. David's lying about lying. He does actually have a sister but, for some reason, he's trying to deny it. He's pulling an Arturo: something happened with his sister, and he's trying to distance himself from it. That's where the snake with the blood and the safe come in, with the rope possibly implying a suicide. Remember the family history of depression? [...] So, it's possible Diana died. [...] It's also possible that whatever happened to Diana would have been hinted at in David's motive video. [...] Yeah, that's my explanation for the TV. But, why would this bad thing which happened to Diana be in David's motive video? That would imply David doesn't remember it. That's what the Snowden line could mean. [...]

Yeah remember that insane thing? Well, Arei died by hanging, so it’s possible Diana also died by hanging, aka suicide. This connection doesn’t make the theory any less unhinged, but it’s there. 

I hate the things I love, and I love the things I hate

As a refresher, this screen is about Xander, indicated mainly by the references to electrocution literally framing the scene. Nothing’s actually changed here, mind you, I just wanted to point out that it’s interesting that so far, we’ve only seen David talk about Xander with love, and we haven’t really seen the whole “I hate” part yet. Curious to see how that will develop later.

suspicious gaps

Still zero clue, I’m just putting it here because it’s still killing me.

V. Right now, why do you go insane? [Ace's numeral]

We should’ve known, guys… Ace’s numeral is literally right next to Arei’s (IV), not just in song position, but numerically. Incidentally, that means both killers so far have been in multiples of five (Min with X, Ace with V), so, uh, Whit (XV), anything you wanna tell us about CH3?

(I don’t think he’ll be the CH3 killer I’m just being silly :p)

Anyways, the big update here is related to the background text, “a cat has 9 additional lives.” This was already pointed out by treescanfly, and that is that Thanatophobia, Ace’s execution, featured 9 different execution methods (scythe - illness - fire - falling - murder - drowning - lightning - firing squad (execution)). Looks like horseboy really was a catboy all along!

XIII. or [not to be?] [Teruko's numeral]

The interpretation of the quote itself, that it’s a reference to Teruko’s suicidal tendencies, hasn’t changed. It’s only gotten more explicit.

Teruko [2-16]: Killed? I doubt it. As if something so kind could happen to me.

:(

Not much else here, though it seems Teruko might start rejecting the suffering associated with being the Omelas child given her talk with DefaultTV, so that’s fun.

Footnote 6, “[Prayer]”

So what I’m about to say is technically a connection that existed since LGI’s realease, but was just a bit too insane for me to even think about back then. 

Basically, you know how Mai is referred to as a “God” in this video, because of her numeral and the arrow? Well… what if that’s connected to this footnote? And, I don’t know, Min is praying to Mai?

Again, unhinged even for my standards, but with the confirmation that XF-Ture Tech is in some form behind the killing game… anything that puts Min in a weirdly plot relevant position (such as inexplicably having a Mai connection beyond what we saw in Bonus Episode 1) should be at least written down for posterity, if nothing else. 

That's my way of saying- Please write about Min, guys. I miss her :(

Footnote 12

“Majority rule” is known to be the fairest method of making decisions for a group. That's why murderers never complained when we voted for them to die.

In Vivisection, I primarily argued the meaning of this footnote through the lens that David may have genuinely believed he had driven Arei to suicide, and thus believed he was the blackened. This turned out to be horribly wrong, so we course correct. 

Instead, this simply seems to be what David was hoping would happen when he pulled out the magical girl transformation, albeit stylized with an impossible 16 people vote. The screen that flashes after just seems to reflect what David thinks would actually happen if a blackened won, or just what will happen by the end of the killing game no matter what: “Everyone will be executed.” That’s based on this line:

David [2-12]: 15 lives. Some of them are very dear to you. And your own life as well. Is there anything at all that could be more important to you than those 16 human lives?

Where David talks about sacrificing the full 16 lives of the participants, seemingly without taking into account that the blackened wouldn’t actually die in his plan. Because of that, it’s inferred that David doesn’t actually think the blackened would survive even if they won the trial. 

Other than that, the footnote seems to just be a direct reference to what Teruko says in the trial:

Teruko [2-15]: We determine who lives and who dies by a majority vote. In other words, the opinion of everyone who *isn't* you.

Which, uh... makes things easier, so I'm not gonna read into it much further :v

“What is the most important thing?” / Mistaken alphabet

Still no idea what these two things are about, that’s why I’m bringing them up :v

Original

[Extract from Vivisection] So, what I think is the best idea is that all the characters [referring to Color Theory] got the word. [...] I think it makes more sense to relate them to the meaning of "original style" under my interpretation, where "original style" means a change of heart.

The interpretation from Vivisection seems to hold strong, as MonoTV did actually have a “change of heart” of sorts, albeit brief. Hey we take the Ws where we can get them >:D

Two Eyed Xander

The theory discussed in Vivisection that David might hold memories from Hope’s Peak times was seemingly debunked by a tweet from the dev, even if the thread referenced in the link was later deleted. I did say in Vivisection that I didn’t believe the theory even if it was cool, so… we’re chilling. 

Of course, though, we did get confirmation that David knew about Xander before Hope's Peak, so the appearance of Xander with two eyes was meaningful! Cool!

Correct/Incorrect (Tally 5)

This is going to discuss the unlisted video linked in the footnotes of Vivisection, which I am well aware most of you probably didn’t watch given the view count. In any case, the thing I said there, which I also said in my Mai post, was that tally 5 could imply David had been involved in the weird revolution against Hope’s Peak that Xander and Mai had going on. While this is still certainly possible, given what was said in 2-12, it seems more plausible that tally 5 actually references David taking on Xander’s dream during the killing game.

David [2-12]: I don't care how low I'll sink, or how despicable I'll have to become. I'll do anything to carry on Xander's ideals by ending this killing game, even if it means I have to dirty my hands.

Yeah, the dream of killing everyone, that one. I say this not only because we know David “threw away his humanity” for it, but also because the image itself shows David holding Xander’s jacket, which would imply this is being said after Xander’s death. Thus, during the killing game. 

Numeral IX - Look, aside from that, give me the usual medicine [Levi's numeral]

Well, he sure needs medicine alright! Yeah that’s the best answer I currently have about what in the hell this numeral means, so we’re going with this. 

That said, points to Vivisection me, because the “Levi is Jupiter protecting Earth from asteroids” interpretation ended up being pretty solid. 

Clock Fork

You know, the theory that Eden was the one to rip out Xander’s eye based on the clock in LGI existed before I made Vivisection, I just… didn’t invlude it. The one unhinged theory I don’t mention ends up being true, huh? Well, there’s that. Not much else to say, if you're deep into DRDT lore you already know the implications of a bloody fork.

-

And… that’s about that! Although I had quite a few comments to make and things to add, actual corrections were few and far between, which I’m happy about! Mind you, there's probably a few Vivisection statements here and there I'm forgetting about, but still. Hope you enjoyed this little corrigendum, and if you made it this far, you deserve your own Jupiter-Levi to defend you in your time of need! See you later!

[deerspherestudios]

Hi! I played your game and really, really like it, I am a huge fan of slow burn - combined with Yandere too? That's kinda rare nowadays, haha. Thanks for making it and creating Mychael, I love his design. Two questions: How many days are planned to be playable in the full release?

And

Since in just one day Mychael feels very friendly towards us (according to a post you made with where his feelings are based on a meter) does that mean he's very clingy??? Like, in just one day he feels like our friend. What little effort and words will it take for him to go from crush, to love, to whatever yandere thing he might be??? Like, is he okay??? Should I be worried???

This guy? Clingy? Nahhh. Nothing to worry about, anon :-) 🍄❤️

As for the game, long (!!!) answer below cut: might be spoiler-y might be not.

For context, here's the post mentioned above.

I'm still not sure how many days it will be, but it's definitely ranging between 4-5 days. Granted it'll be a while before the game is finished finished but I think progress will pick up as I complete assets that will be reused. I'm writing Days 2, 3 and 4 simultaneously (anyone who writes can probably relate to wanting a specific thing to happen in the story but dread writing up to it, so I skip around in order to keep my motivation and interest up)

As for relationship progression, slow burn usually means a long time passes before anything develops. But this is a VN and I'm a solo part-time dev so the scope still has to be small 😔 That said!

Mychael, as a person, is quite solitary in nature; he likes being alone and you'll find out why. He does however desire company and he's only realized just how pleasant having someone around can be (hence his reaction for the Bad Endings in Day 1 if you wish to leave/run away)

Although I'm not a fan of the 'you do one (1) nice thing any decent person would do and yandere is already head-over-heels for you' trope, I do have to make use of it but, drip-feed style? You grow closer to Mychael as you hang out with him and do little things that he appreciates. (Honestly I just realized I'm describing the typical visual novel experience just without the yandere beginning-- go! figure!!! /lh)

Example: the first thing that boosts you to immediate friend status is your willingness to accept his physical looks, something that's never happened to him before. (I know my artstyle makes him a yassified pretty boy but imagine genuinely meeting a sentient creature in real life with patchy green skin, a dextrous tail and four blinking pitch black eyes, I think I'd freak too haha) Little things like that mean a lot to him and motivates him to prolong your stay.

In a way, the MC is written to be more kinder and open-minded (at least outside of Bad Ends) than the sweet/sour personalities that come in a VN, so (for narrative AND coding purposes) I can't really diversify it much. I hope that's okay ¯\_(; v ; )_/¯ If Mychael met a more grouchy/mean MC on Day 1 he'd probably not be as attached. He'd just save you, feed you and send you home when you ask hahaha. Of course this will change as he gets to know you better, at that stage he'll be willing to overlook your flaws like any upstanding yandere

Phew this was a lot to dump in an ask but I did wanna explain my vision for the game! I enjoy yandere VNs as an escape fantasy, but it's common they start out with the yan already being invested in you or fall for you too fast!!! if that makes sense. I'm interested in yanderes in the aspect of how love (romantic or otherwise) starts from innocent affection and spirals into dark obsession!!! It's also compelling as to why a character is so devoted to someone, in this situation the MC, and I wanna write the kind of person Mychael would fall for. And personally 'love-at-first-sight' as a reason just doesn't do it for me 💔

(Disclaimer!!! I'm not saying my game is any more original or better than the other wonderful yan VNs in the works, but hopefully with Mychael as a character I can deliver that 'slow-burn-and-yearn' storyline I'd like it to be. As my itchio profile says: I make games I thirst for in secret but are sadly lacking around the internet 💔 )

Thank you for the ask!! :-D

[mariyekos]

Saw this reply from @sadisticsparda on my other post and decided I wanted to go into this a little bit! Putting this below a cut because it got long.

The basic idea behind this is that Vergil doesn't actually want to kill Dante in DMC3- he just needs Dante out of the way for a little while so he can accomplish what he's set out to do.

What Vergil wants is power...to protect himself and the things that are important to him*. So putting two and two together, you could say that Vergil's actions in DMC3 are in part to help protect Dante, just in a way that Dante doesn't approve of (and he doesn't tell Dante this because Just Stubborn Vergil Things™). Based on both DMC3 and the DMC3 Manga we know Vergil met Dante a year prior to the game, but obviously didn't kill him even though he almost definitely could have, given Vergil has unlocked his demonic powers while Dante hasn't for the most part. This is part of why I'd say Vergil goes a little soft on Dante and might want to protect him too. He could've killed Dante for the amulet or our of hate) pre-DMC3 but didn't, which shows he cares about Dante at least a little bit.

Even in DMC5, when V goes on about how if Dante had never existed (implied things would be better for V/Vergil) and raises the Devil Sword Sparda to kill Dante...he doesn't actually stab him. He stabs the dirt besides him, and afterwards says he just did it to wake Dante up. He had the perfect opportunity to kill Dante, even after Dante had "killed" him once in DMC1, but he didn't do it. So I think his feelings about Dante are very complex, where he both does and doesn't really hate Dante, but could never actually bring himself to kill him.

Instead, I read Vergil as wanting to beat Dante and prove he's better, but not really wanting to kill him. There's also a conversation at the end of Visions of V where V asks Child Vergil (memory) if he hates fighting Dante, but Child Vergil responds that he likes it. V then tells Child Vergil to go fight Dante and prove he (Vergil) is stronger. Which to me, supports the theory that Vergil just wants to fight Dante, not kill, because fighting is what's fun. See below for more on this.

In Visions of V, while we don't see Vergil take on a demonic Trigger, he does unlock his demonic power/extreme healing factor after getting attacked outside the manor as a kid. Specifically, he was stabbed through the chest (and summoned up Yamato, though that didn't stab him, just came to him). Since Vergil then slaughters the demons who attacked him, you can then put this together: get mortally wounded/stabbed through chest -> unlock amazing power -> never get that hurt again.

Putting all of that together, you get this.

-> Vergil wants power to protect himself and that which is important to him

> He knows that getting mortally wounded/stabbed gave him his first power boost, and unlocked his Trigger

-> When he fights Dante he realizes Dante doesn't have his Trigger

-> Vergil wants Dante to be able to protect himself (or wants Dante to be more fun to fight), so he'll give Dante the (stabbing) boost he needs

-> Now Dante will be able to fend for himself while Vergil is gaining the rest of his power (and/or for the times they aren't together and Vergil isn't there to protect him, like during the Manor Fire/Attack)

Now, is this giving Vergil a lot of good guy credit? Yeah. Vergil also tried to kill Arkham and failed, so it could be that he was legitimately trying to kill Dante but got cocky and didn't finish the job. Maybe he didn't think Dante would be able his demon powers/Trigger like Vergil did. Maybe Dante surviving by any means just didn't cross his mind. Because sure, Vergil puts on this high and mighty front, but sometimes he doesn't really think things through all the way, or doesn't have as much figured out as he thinks he does (ex. the famous "Why isn't this working!" scene). So, Dante living could definitely have been an accident/mistake on Vergil's part.

But I like reading Vergil as someone who does care about his brother (at least as of DMC3). He just needs Dante to get out of his way while he's trying to accomplish his goals. If Vergil can't actually get Dante to leave, then unlocking Dante's Trigger will at least keep him from getting himself killed by the occupants the Temen-ni-gru, so then Vergil won't have to worry about Dante dying before Vergil has achieved his goal. Maybe Dante will see reason once Vergil has gotten the power he desires. Or maybe Vergil kniws he won't but can't bring himself to kill his brother anyway. Who knows.

The alternate take on Vergil unlocking Dante's Trigger on purpose that I sort of mentioned above is that since Vergil thinks it's fun to fight Dante, maybe he did it not so Dante could protect himself, but so Dante would put up a better fight. Fights aren't fun when they're one sided, so maybe Vergil wanted to put them on a level playing field. That would both make the fight more fun since Dante would put up more of a challenge, and mean Vergil's victory was even better/more legitimate since he would prove he was the stronger one even when they both had access to their full demonic strength. I personally like thinking Vergil stabbed Dante to unlock his Trigger for both the Protection and the Better Fight reasons.

Anyway, yeah! That's the idea: Vergil knew getting stabbed unlocked his powers, so he stabbed Dante to unlock Dante's (whether to protect Dante or to make fighting Dante more fun). That or he's just bad at murdering people. We have evidence of that in the same game. But I think the first theory is more fun.

*my idea that Vergil wanting power in order to protect that which is dear to him comes from my interpretation of this quote from DMC3- "Might controls everything, and without strength you cannot protect anything, let alone yourself." So I see it as Vergil wanting power to protect himself so he'll never be hurt again, but also extend that to the other things he cares about. Is it a bit of a stretch? Maybe. But I'll stretch it anyway! Similarly, in Visions of V, V/kid Vergil both say that they wanted to be protected, which is less of a "see Vergil wants to protect others/Dante" thing, but still goes into how protection is important to him.

EDIT: I want to add this on from a reblog of mine!

#I definitely don't think Vergil was trying to kill Dante#Though that doesn't necessarily mean he was trying to unlock his trigger?#He could've been just lashing out in anger#or maybe both#But I definitely don't think that stab had any killing intent whatsoever#Devil May Cry#DMC#Vergil DMC#Dante DMC via @dmc-questions-anon

Honestly yeah. Looking back at this I realize I glossed over that point a lot, but I also think it's very likely that Vergil wasn't trying to kill Dante or unlock his Trigger, he was just trying to get Dante out of the way and figured stabbing him was a good enough way to go about it. The whole unlocking Dante's Trigger was just a(n in)convenient side effect.

So basically, Yes! It could definitely be (and tbf, the canon explanation probably is) that Vergil stabbed Dante because he was mad and wanted Dante out of his hair, and the whole potentially unlocking a Trigger thing didn't even cross his mind. As of DMC3 he hasn't forgiven Dante for what happened when they were kids, so stabbing Dante would both get Dante out of his hair for a little while, and also be a way of getting back at him for everything he's done (for being the one Eva chose). It just so happens that his attempt ends up backfiring when Dante immediately heals and comes back stronger.

I just find the Trigger thing fun 😅😁

[ghuleh-witch]

And We Are Tied As One Eternally-II

Fandom: Ghost Rating: Explicit Warnings: (For Future Chapters) NSFW, 18+, unprotected sex, p in v sex, oral sex, mentions of past abuse and domestic violence, references to suicide Relationships: Papa Emeritus IV/Copia x OFC Characters: Papa Emeritus IV/Copia, OFC Additional Tags: soft!dom Copia, eventual smut, developing relationship, no beta reader Chapter Word Count: 2921 Summary: Ellie Moran just wanted to make a new life for herself. Running to escape the people in her past, she ends up in a small town in the middle of nowhere that happens to be home to a Satanic church. She never expected her life to change again after she started attending the public masses at said church.

Ao3

Chapters: 2/?

Tag list: @sodoswitchimage

Chapter Two

tw: references to past self-harm

The dining hall was filled with an aroma of buffet food. Siblings and clergy members spoke to one another as Copia entered the hall. His eyes scanned the people and ghouls in the room before finding their target. He spotted Ellie with Sister Gemma in a small group of Siblings. He wanted to approach Ellie and talk to her, but the vision of her down on her knees in front of him, looking up at him, well, it did things to him. He couldn’t figure out why seeing her like that affected him so much. Had it been as simple as seeing a beautiful woman on her knees before him? No, it couldn’t be it. There were many beautiful people in the ministry that dropped to their knees before him every week and they hadn’t affected him the way Ellie had. There was something about her specifically and he wanted to find out what it was. 

He was happy to see Ellie interacting with his congregation. He remembered just weeks prior how she stood alone and away from everyone. If she made friends with the Siblings she’d want to come back to visit, and if she came to visit more often there would be more chances to talk to her, he reasoned. 

“So you have your eye on the new girl too,” Terzo said as he came up next to Copia.

His eyes slid sideways to the other man. “I do not,” Copia responded a little too quickly.

Terzo chuckled. “Oh, fratello , you don’t have to lie to me. I saw how you looked at her during communion. I thought you were going to get a hard-on right then and there.”

Copia rolled his eyes at his brother. “Okay, fine, what if I do have an interest in her? What does it matter to you? Are you planning on bedding her? A new woman to add to your tally?” He felt suddenly possessive of Ellie and stomped the feeling down. He had no right to feel that way. Ellie wasn’t his. He didn’t even know her. And even if he did, that didn’t mean he was entitled to her. She probably wasn’t even interested in him. Terzo was just trying to get under his skin. 

“Calm yourself,” Terzo said. “I’m only messing with you. I was thinking about asking her out for dinner, but seeing you all up in arms over her has changed my mind. You’re not usually interested in anyone, so I’ll let you have this one.”

“How gracious of you,” Copia deadpanned. 

Terzo clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck, fratello .”

XXX

Gemma introduced Ellie to her friends: Sister Brianna, a pretty redhead with a round face, and Brother Micha a short man with dark hair and eyes in his mid-20s. The other two Siblings welcomed Ellie into their little group with open arms, asking her questions about her life and taking interest in her responses.

“Your tattoos are gorgeous by the way,” Brianna said, taking Ellie’s hand and looking at the bits that poked out from under her sleeve. “Can I see more?”

“S-sure,” Ellie said, rolling up her sleeve to show off more of the floral and vine designs that covered her arm. She hoped no one would notice the raised scar that ran up her wrist that the tattoos hid. She wasn’t up for answering questions and bringing up that part of her life. If any of them had noticed, they didn’t mention it, which Ellie was grateful for. 

“I wish I had more tattoos,” Brianna sighed dropping Ellie’s arm after admiring the colorful ink. “I only have the one. Haven’t had time to get more.”

As the conversation turned to other things, Ellie pulled the sleeve of her sweater back down and noticed Copia across the room. He was watching her as he spoke to Terzo. When Terzo patted his shoulder and walked away, Ellie excused herself from the group and walked over to Copia.

“Papa,” she greeted. “The service today was really good. I enjoyed it.”

His lips turned up into a small smile and the sight made her heart beat just a little faster. “Thank you, cara , I’m glad you enjoyed it. It was one of my better ones. I’m glad to see you’re back and that you took communion. Are you thinking about joining our little family here?”

“I don’t know yet,” Ellie said. “I don’t know a whole lot about your religion. I understand and agree with the tenants, but I have a…complicated relationship with religion.”

“Former Catholic?”

“Evangelical Baptist,” Ellie corrected. 

Copia made a face. “Even worse than Catholics, si?”

Ellie nodded. “At least the Catholics wouldn’t tell me I’m going to Hell every time I stepped into church,” she laughed. 

“I can never keep track of what the different denominations believe. Catholics believe one way, Baptists and Lutherns another it’s all confusing,” he said, waving his hand as he spoke. “At least here we are consistent in our beliefs.”

“Well that’s a relief,” Ellie smiled. “I think I need to learn more before I can decide on joining.”

“Of course!” Copia responded with a nod. “Having all the information in front of you before you make a decision is the responsible thing to do. I’m sure Sister Gemma would be happy to help you, and if she can’t, I would be glad to help.”

“Gemma–er–Sister Gemma already offered to be my sponsor,” Ellie said, glancing over at the little group of Siblings that were still chatting to one another. She looked back at Copia, feeling his mismatched eyes boring into her. “But thank you, I really appreciate the offer. I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

“Si, si. Well, eh, I’ll let you get back to your new friends. I hope we get to see more of you here.”

Ellie could have sworn she saw a glint of eagerness in his eye as he said that. It made her smile and nod. “I’m sure I’ll be around more,” she said before giving him a small wave and walking back to the group of Siblings. 

“Making friends with Papa?” Micha asked.

“Yea,” Ellie answered. “He came and talked to me a little the first time I was here. I just wanted to tell him that I really enjoyed the sermon today.”

“Papa Copia is alright,” Micha said. “He’s gained a lot of confidence since ascending to Papa. He was awkward as hell as a Cardinal. Should have seen him. Always had a rat with him. Rode a tricycle around the Ministry. It was weird.”

“Aw, I think that’s kind of sweet. I love rats,” Ellie smiled, glancing over her shoulder. Copia was now speaking with one of the masked figures Ellie learned were called Ghouls. After watching the Ghouls interact with other Siblings, there was something weird about them that Ellie couldn’t put her finger on. When she turned back to the three Siblings they were all looking at her with smirks on their faces. “What?”

“You like him,” Brianna said in a sing-songy voice.

“No,” Ellie said a bit too quickly. She felt her cheeks warm. “I mean, sure, as a person. He seems nice.”

“Oh yea? Then why are you blushing?” Gemma asked a grin of triumph plastered on her face.

Ellie let out a sigh. It would be useless to lie. She was always a terrible liar. “Okay, maybe I find him attractive,” she said as Gemma, Brianna, and Micha all looked at each other and nodded.

“What?” Ellie asked, unsure she wanted to know what they all just agreed on.

“We’re going to get you two together,” Micha said. “Papa needs someone. I heard he hasn’t slept with anyone since he became Papa.” 

“Woah woah woah,” Ellie said putting her hands up. “I don’t even know the man and you’re already trying to get me in his bed? I appreciate the thought, but I’m just…I’m okay with the way things are right now. He’s nice and I’d like to be friends, but anything else…” The thought of nothing more between her and Copia made her a little sad and she couldn’t figure out why. But her life was too unstable—barely just began to start it over. Ellie didn’t know him well, but she knew Copia deserved someone better than her. So friends it would be.

“So,” Ellie said turning to Gemma to change the subject. “When can I begin studying for my membership?”

XXX

Ellie left the ministry with a handful of pamphlets given to her by Gemma. They covered the history of the ministry, rules, beliefs, clergy hierarchy, and much much more. Her first task was to read through all the material and write down any questions she had. She was meeting Gemma for her first study session in a few days. 

As she looked through the pamphlets, she saw Copia’s papal portrait in one of them. It listed him as the current head of the ministry and frontman for Ghost. Ellie couldn’t help but stare at it. He looked regal in his papal skull paints and glimmering blue robes and miter. Gemma, Brianna, and Micha didn’t push her any further on their plans of getting her together with Copia, and Ellie was thankful because if she thought about Copia anymore, a permanent blush would be seared into her flesh. 

As she finished reading through the third pamphlet, her phone chimed with a text message. Ellie froze for a second. No one had her new number. She ditched her old phone back in her hometown before her journey across the country. 

“It’s not him,” Ellie told herself as she picked up the phone and opened the text from the unknown number.

Hey! It’s Gemma! I forgot to tell you that when you come here you’ll have to be buzzed in through the front gate. Just tell them you’re here to see me.

Ellie let out a huge sigh of relief. She forgot she gave Gemma her number. Ellie sent a response to Gemma before saving her number in her contacts. Ellie set her phone aside and willed her heart to stop bounding against her ribcage. 

“It wasn’t him. You’re fine,” she told herself.

But the sick and twisting feeling that was currently churning in her gut didn’t go away. 

She was hypervigilant over the next few days. Every little unexpected noise made her tense. When her boss dropped a large encyclopedia in the store that morning she nearly gave herself a heart attack. Ellie knew she should probably see a therapist and talk about her past and how it was affecting her, but she just didn’t feel ready to dive into all that just yet. She convinced herself that she was just stressed by all the recent changes in her life. Stress. That’s all it was. 

That still didn’t stop her from looking in her rearview mirror to make sure no one followed her on her drive up to the Ministry. 

She stopped outside the wrought iron gates that were normally open for public mass days. Ellie rolled down her window and pressed the call button on the box just outside the gate.

“How may I help you?” A voice crackled over the speaker.

“Hi, yes, my name’s Ellie Moran. I’m here to see Sister Gemma,” Ellie said.

“Come on through,” the voice responded as the gates began to open. 

Ellie drove the now familiar path up the gravel drive and to the small visitor’s parking lot. She sent Gemma a message informing her she arrived before walking to the front doors. Before she could even put her hand on the handle the door was opened and an extremely tall, masked ghoul was standing there. Ellie had to crane her neck to look up at him. 

“Sister Gemma will be right down,” the ghoul said ushering Ellie into the atrium of the church. 

“Thanks,” Ellie said. She stood in the atrium, looking up at the stained glass before looking at the ghoul standing by the door. “I’m Ellie,” she introduced holding her hand out to shake.

“I know,” the ghoul said, looking down at her outstretched hand. “I am called Mountain.” 

When it became obvious Mountain wasn’t going to shake her hand, Ellie let it drop and waited awkwardly for Gemma to arrive.

“I’m here!” 

Ellie turned around to see Gemma coming down a set of marble stairs. She was in the same short, black habit that Ellie saw her in at mass but instead of fishnet tights and pumps, she wore black thigh-high socks and knee-high lace-up boots. 

“I’m so glad you’re doing this,” Gemma smiled before waving at Mountain. Gemma guided Ellie up the stairs to the second floor and down the corridor. “I’m going to take you to the library first,” she said. “We’ll get an account set up for you so you can borrow books. Then I’ll give you a tour of the place if you want. After that, I’ll answer your questions and we’ll go over what we’re going to be working on.” 

“Sounds good to me,” Ellie said as she kept pace with Gemma.

The Ministry library reminded Ellie of the photos she had seen of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. The dark wooden shelves stretched toward the high arches of the ceiling and were filled with ancient-looking tomes and modern-day novels. The smell of old paper filled her nose as Ellie followed Gemma to the front desk. There was a long row of tables and chairs that ran down the middle of the library and ended at the large stained glass window. There were several siblings at the tables, either sitting alone or in pairs. All of them had their heads in their books and were taking notes on paper, tablets, or laptops. 

Ellie was handed a clipboard by an older, rather severe-looking Sister and was told to fill it out. It was a basic form asking for her name, phone number, address, and other relevant information, and when Ellie handed it back to the Sister behind the desk, she was handed a temporary card.

“Your official card will arrive in the mail next week,” the Sister said before returning to her work. 

“Cool. I’ve never had a library card before,” Ellie said staring down at the simple cardstock that bore her name and an eight-digit number. 

“Never?” Gemma asked looking surprised.

“Never,” Ellie said. “The last time I stepped foot in a library I was nine.”

Gemma’s eyes practically popped out of their sockets. “You’re kidding me.”

Ellie felt her face warm. “I…I was homeschooled and my mother…well she didn’t think public libraries were Christian.”

“Oh,” Gemma responded. “One of those 'information is danger' people. I understand. We have a few Siblings here who have similar stories.” 

Ellie relaxed at that. “I thought I was the only one.”

“Not at all,” Gemma said. “I don’t mean to pry or overstep or anything, but we have support groups here if you ever need to get anything off your chest about the way you were raised.”

“Thanks,” Ellie said, feeling a lump grow in her throat at the suggestion. “Maybe I’ll check it out.”

Gemma nodded and smiled. “Ready to continue?”

“Please.” 

From the library, Gemma showed her the administrative wing, the dormitories, the archives, and the recreational rooms that were filled with everything from video games and board games to movies and comic books. Gemma showed her a few of the classrooms and the greenhouse before stopping outside a small two-story house just outside the main abbey.

“This is the Papal house,” Gemma said. “All five of the Papas live here.” “Nihil, Primo, Secondo, Terzo, and Copia,” Ellie listed off.

Gemma grinned. “Good, you were listening. You know Papas Terzo and Copia of course. Papa Nihil doesn’t go out much anymore. Just for mass and a couple of Ministry events. Papa Primo is always in the greenhouse, and Papa Secondo…well we’re really not sure how he spends his time. He’s always coming and going. I’m sure you’ll get to meet them all at some point.”

Just as Gemma turned to lead Ellie back into the abbey, the door to the house opened and Copia stepped out. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Ellie. Ellie couldn’t help but stare. He looked completely different out of his papal vestments. He was dressed in red sweatpants, a black shirt with baring VVLGARI in white across the chest, and a matching red zip-up jacket over top. His face was devoid of the black and white skill paint Ellie saw him in, and instead, he just had black around his eyes and on his upper lip. 

“Oh, eh, hello,” he said. “Am I interrupting something? Did you need to see someone?”

“No, Papa, I was just giving Ellie the tour,” Gemma said. “Sorry if we disturbed you.”

“No apologies necessary, cara ,” Copia said. “I was just going to see Sister Imperator in her office. His eyes were then once again on Ellie. “So what do you think of our little home?”

“It’s nice,” Ellie said. “Everything’s so beautiful.”

“This used to be some Catholic monastery or something before it was sold off and we bought it,” Copia explained. There was a pause before he shifted almost anxiously. “If you have time before you leave today, would you come by my office?”

“Oh? Um, sure,” Ellie said. “I don’t have anything going on this afternoon.” 

“ Perfetto ,” Copia said, a smile forming on his lips. “I’ll see you then.”

[rottenaero]

Roommates part 9

Part 1(Less content than ao3)

Part 8

Ao3

This chapter has about 7,500 words, so uh, warnings in advance.

CW: Description of injury, Vecna Vision(I’m not going to be too specific as not to spoil it), mention of fake vomiting(no actual vomit)

Steve was used to the whiplash. 

One second, he’d be fighting demons from an alternate dimension, the next he’d be back to his regular life, whatever that had been at that moment.

But he watched as the demodogs paused. 

Heard it as the clicking ceased. 

Not just the clicking, it was almost like the entire upside down stopped what it was doing. An unsettling quiet blanketed it, and he scooted backwards, hoping to get away before the creatures snapped out of whatever trance they were in.

He feels his hand throb, as he stands up, hanging it done was definitely not doing it any favors. 

Steve brings the bike up with his non-injured one, still watching the demo-dogs as he kicks off and pedals away. They don’t follow.

He makes it to the trailer, thankfully, though he doesn’t know how seeming as his sides are still split, and even he can smell the iron. The make-shift bandages are doing much to shield the bleeding either, holding on by a thread.

Even though he’s far from the demo-dogs, he still feels his heart pounding. Quick and fast against his ribcage.

He shoulders open the front door, cradling his broken arm gently as he does so.

He eyes the rope.

Two things on his mind.

What the fuck?

And,

How the hell am I supposed to get up there?

His side twinges, and he lets out a loud grunt as he leans against the doorframe.

There’s an echoey yelp, and for a moment he wonders if something followed him. He wouldn’t be shocked.

A yell of his name by a familiar voice quickly trumps that thought.

“Steve?!”

He grins, wobbles his way to the middle, where he heard Dustin’s voice. He looks up, and his brows furrow at how freaky seeing his trailer from the ceiling was.

“Hey man, don’t suppose you have-“ He hisses at a particularly sharp sting from the bites. “-Have an elevator, huh?”

He’s guided through a one-armed climb, well, not really guided, just told to use his legs. The hem of Nancy’s shirt falls off on the flip, and the oxygen feels like fire on the wound. He feels nauseous, the lights blurring together.

Before it all kinda-

Goes away.

He’s falling still, a little too long in his opinion, before he feels a soft mattress beneath him.

Definitely not the one that he’d seen on the other side.

He blinks, glances around.

Plaid surrounds him. Wall, curtains, bedsheets.

This isn’t the trailer.

His hand, which should be injured but isn’t, ghosts over the wallpaper until it meets a wooden door, a metal knob.

Steve twists it, pushes forward.

Let’s the familiar hallways refresh in his mind. 

There’s a voice filtering from downstairs, cold and flat. He avoids the stairwell, instead pushing forward to the bathroom. Don’t come up, don’t come up.

The door opens, and Steve is met with the outside.

With his pool.

That wasn’t the back-door-

A figure is sitting on the diving board, legs swinging idly. Back and forth, back and forth. Repeat.

He takes a step forward, and the person seems to sense the motion.

Without turning, she speaks. “Do you remember what you did, Steven?” Her voice shifts as she continues, turns gravely, but he knows it’s still her. Still Barb.

“Or have you already forgotten?” The body falls forward, into the pool. The lights surrounding shut off.

“When I kill someone, I never forget.”

“I never killed Barb.” He says. The water ripples, and he watches it.

He knows what’s happening.

Something crawls out of the dark, he tries to step back but it wraps around his leg.

Drags him in.

The waters thick, and in the back of his mind he hears something screaming. It’s not water!

Then he’s back.

Back out. The feeling on his skin leaves him, and he looks around.

Around at the red.

The debris, the doors.

He hears the pendulum swinging back and forth.

“You’re friend Nancy, she’s been looking for me,”

A voice drawls, a voice he assumes is Vecna. 

“Eleven too, I need you to give them a message.” His side twinges.

“All of them.”

-

The shower was nice, just what he needed to calm down and to get the dirt and grime from five days on the run off his body. He finally got to wash his hair for the first time in forever, and that part of his routine was enough to feel normal-ish.

He had grabbed an extra tee beforehand, one he rarely wore, and used it to dry his hair. It was by then that he noticed the noise.

He hadn’t expected it to be silent, but, well he hadn’t expected screams of bloody murder.

Yells that sounded a lot like Steve’s name and-

Eddie slams open the bathroom door to Dustin about to knock. “Tapes! Tapes tapes-“

“Dustin what the fuck is going on, is Steve bac-?”

“Where THE FUCK are Steve’s tapes?!”

“My room, but-“

Before he could finish that sentence, Dustin and the rest of the little hellions are hijacking it to Eddie’s room.

He only has a second before his brain connects the dots, but when it does, he rushes to follow them. “Slipping Through My Fingers, ABBA!” He almost shrieks. Not even a second later Erica is barreling her way back through the hall, tape in hand. She hands it to Max who jams it into her now empty walkmen. Robins preparing to climb back up with it when a voice stops her.

“Steve! He’s back, oh god!-“ Nancy says, and Eddie makes his way to the gate’s area.

He looks up, and watches.

Watches as Nancy helps Steve back through, the shirt that was previously wrapped around his stomach falling away, now stained dark red. If the bats were bad before, they look like hell now. Stretched open with pieces of skin hanging. 

He lands, and Eddie stares at his arm.

Broken, very much broken. He takes a shaky breath as he takes a step forward.

Doesn’t register Max putting her Kate Bush back in, or Dustin’s “Holy shit! What happened to you?!” He takes a couple more steps until his hands are hovering over Steve’s stomach, unsure of what the hell he could even do to help.

“Jesus H. Christ… What did you do?” He looks on the verge of collapsing, but smiles anyway, even if it comes out more of a grimace. “Hey Eds.”

Nancy lands on the mattress, and is quick to stand up. She glances at Steve, eyes wide and afraid, before looking elsewhere. “We need to move, we made too much noise.”

Max offers her place up, with Erica watching through the window and waiting to signal a clear.

Eddie doesn’t process much of it, just runs across the gravel when he’s told, and walks into the redhead’s trailer.

Steve comes in next, and he’s quick to be by his side.

He waits until Max is inside, and asks about a first aid kit.

“Bathroom.”

“Great, great.” He mutters, “Where is that?”

She rolls her eyes, “We have the same layout, same place as yours I guess.”

He nods, tugs Steve’s non-broken arm in the direction and quickly objects Dustin’s request to come with.

He shuts the door behind them, lets the younger sit down on the toilet seat, shrugging off the denim jacket that, in the middle area, has thoroughly soaked blood. Meanwhile Eddie grabs a red box from under the sink cabinet. He moves to a crouch down in front of the other, pulling the antiseptic wipes out and ripping them open.

“Twice in one day, this is really the King treatment, huh?” Steve teases, a lax grin lining his face, but it quickly disappears when the wipe touches his skin. He hisses. “Ouch.”

“Suck it up, buttercup. This is what you get for being a dumbass.” Eddie snarks, but he can’t manage any malice, just keeps dabbing at the wound even when the tiny paper turns red.

“Not like I chose to be eaten by bats, and chased by demon dogs…”

“Is that what broke your arm?!” He asks, and his dark brown brows furrow. He rips open another wipe packet.

“No, I broke it by crashing the bike.”

“Jesus.”

Once the bites are mostly clean, he eyes the limply hanging skin. 

It’s disgusting.

“I don’t know what I should do about that.” He says, glancing up at Steve, who hums. “Cut it off, cover it, or sew it.” 

Eddie frowns. His voice raises. “Red? You have a sewing kit somewhere, maybe your moms?” After about a minute, the door opens a little bit, and a hand delivers a tiny box. 

He grabs it, quick to grab a needle and thread some embroidery floss into it, turning toward Steve when he’s ready. 

“This might hurt.” He warns.

The jock bites the inside of his cheek when the cold metal pierces through the throbbing skin, providing temporary relief before it’s quickly tugged away by the feeling of yarn running through him. He tries to stay still, but he can’t help the slight winces as the skin is pulled together.

“Jesus, your skin is freezing…” The metalhead mutters when his pinky brushes against it. Funny, because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a furnace inside his stomach, like someone pressed a hot pan to it.

Eddie hands him the instant cold-pack from the first aid kid once he finishes the first bite and ties it off. Tells him to trigger the thing and put it on the wound to hell the swelling.

“You’re quite the little surgeon.” Steve jokes, hands clenching the cold-pack when the needle goes through. Eddie hums, “Not really. I’m just using the stitches I used for my vest.”

The younger winces, glances at the denim from the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I know how much that thing means to you.”

“Nah, it’s cool. Way more metal now.” Eddie says, and it’s silent for a moment. Steve lets his eyes wander over the metalhead’s crouched form. His eyes are focused, tongue poked out of his mouth the way it is when he’s being precise.

It reminds him of when he’d paint his minis. Sitting in front of the trailer’s living room window, curtains drawn and using the natural light to illuminate the space.

It’d take hours just to get a few done. Steve’d sit by him the entire time, watching him work, occasionally choosing a vinyl to put in the record player.

Eddie hadn’t ever painted them in his room. His room was reserved for sleeping in later, shared joints, chaotic school mornings where Steve would have to rush him awake. He’d let the metalhead change out of whatever clothes he had on, usually one of Steve’s own T-shirts, while he made coffee for Wayne and him, setting aside orange juice for Eddie.

His eyes drift down, down to the shirt he was wearing. Hawkins Swim Team it read in big bold letters. Steve could picture the text on the back, Steve Harrington, 1982. He’d been on it in ‘83 and ‘84, but the shirts those years looked the exact same. No use in getting more, not even to sleep in, since he didn’t even wear a sleep-shirt.

A pat on his shoulder makes him blink, and he looks back up at Eddie’s face. He’s got a small grin, his dimples pulled back. “Stitches are done. Turn around.” Steve obliged.

He doesn’t mention the staring, not like he usually would. If this a different time, one where he wasn’t patching him up, then Eddie’d probably say something dumb, like “Like what you see?”

Steve can’t blame him, he’d probably say the same thing, cheesy as the line was.

He feels stinging on his back, hisses slightly. He’d broughten the wipes back out, now cleaning the road rash. It was probably for the best, there was definitely all sorts of dirt in the broken skin.

Didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell though, Steve dare says it hurts worse than the stitches.

Eddie pats him again to signify when he finishes, and throws the used wipe into the kit, “Turn back around, give me your arm.” He grabs a roll of elastic bandages, wraps it gently yet firm around the break. The next roll he grabs it white. Gauze, something distant in Steve’s mind tells him.

He holds onto the end as Eddie rolls it around his stomach. It’s uncomfortable, feels a little stuffy when he’s done, but he can manage. It was definitely worse before.

“You are all done, Stevie.” Eddie says, and he reaches for the battle vest before standing up, handing it to him.

“Do I get a reward for being so good? Sucker? Tootsie pop?” Steve asks, smirking as he tilts his head to the side. He shrugs the denim over his shoulders as he waits.

Eddie runs his eyes over the guy’s face, stares for a second before leaning in, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips. When he leans back, he grins. “That good enough?”

Just to be a shit, Steve shrugs and stands up, preparing to snark, but instead feeling lightheaded at the sudden movement. He trudges on anyway. “Eh, would’ve preferred the sucker.”

“Asshole.”

“Dickwad.”

“Virgo.”

“I’ve had sex before.” Steve says, and Eddie snorts. “Virgo, not virgin.” 

“I know what a virgo is! Let me rephrase- At least I’ve had sex before.” The metalhead grasps his heart, fakes being shot.

“Ooh, ouch. That hurt, sweetheart. Do our times together mean nothing?”

“Our two kisses?”

Eddie scoffs, backs up and allows a faux snooty expression to fall onto his face. “I should’ve let you bleed out.”

Steve leans his head forward, “Good luck trying to find someone else to annoy.” His vision blurrs for a second, and he sways. A hand slithers under his arm and over his shoulder. “Shit, Stevie. Let’s get you some water.” He hums, water sounds nice.

Eddie drags him to the living room, sets him gently on the sofa, and heads towards the kitchen. Robins by his side by an instance, looking him over. “You okay?” He gives her a blank look, and she winces, crouches down in front of him.

“Right, stupid question. Super stupid, I just mean, you’re not gonna die, right?” He snorts, shifts his broken arm so it's sitting on his lap. “Nope, can’t get rid of me that easily, Robs.” She smiles, pats his lnee reassuringly before standing up, Eddie taking her place with a water bottle in hand.

He uncaps it, hands it to him. Steve takes it gratefully, chugging the thing. Water droplets drip down his lips, gathering together at the bottom of his chin. The bottle is lukewarm, but he could care less, it’s the best thing he’s ever drunk.

When he finishes, he crunches the plastic together, setting it on the tabletop to the side of him before looking up. Everyone stares at him, waiting.

“Right, uh, I guess there's some questions.” 

“You think?” Erica asks, utterly unimpressed from two cushions beside him. 

“Yeah, but before all that. That uh, that guy? Vecna, in the vision he showed me, something happened.” He swallows, although there’s nothing in his mouth. Even though he just chugged a whole bottle of water, he still feels parched.

He fills a hand on his, glances to Eddie, who’s frowning. He doesn’t speak, just keeps his hand there. 

Steve’s eyes zero in behind him, on the large grandfather clock, before turning back.

He doesn’t say anything about it.

“He mentioned Nancy, says you’ve been looking for him. Told me to give you and El a message.” He closes his eyes. Takes his hand out from under Eddie’s.

“There were four gates, they were spreading across Hawkins, and they met in the middle. The whole town was fucked. There was this big dark cloud, and it was swallowing it whole. A bunch of those monsters, an army of them really, coming into our world. He uh,”

His brows furrowed. “Vecna he’s…He’s Henry Creel, or One, or something. He’s like Eleven, and he’s going to destroy Hawkins.”

“Four chimes, Vecna’s clock. It always chimes four times.” She looks up, meets eyes with Steve. “Four exactly.”

“I heard it too.” He says. His bites give a sharp sting and he winces.

“He’s been telling us his plan this whole time.”

“Four kills…” Lucas mutters. Steve turns his gaze to him. “Four gates, end of the world.”

“If that’s true, then he’s only one kill away.” Dustin says, and everyone's eyes dart to Max or Steve.

Eddie stares at him, before his eyes land on the ground. “Jesus Christ…”

Max starts walking to the phone, presumably to call El, or that’s what Steve thinks anyway, he might’ve heard her name one or twice outside the closed door of the bathroom.

He leans into Eddie’s side, let’s his hand rest on his back. “Hey man, it’ll be… It’ll all be okay, alright?” The metalhead’s head snaps towards him. “No! No it’s not gonna be okay. You could die from Vecna, I’ve seen it, twice. If you don’t, something could go wrong when we try to kill him. Even if whatever plan we come up with works perfectly? I’ll still have the murder charges.” He hisses.

“We’re fucking screwed, so screwed. We wouldn’t even have the trailer because there's still that fucking gate in it. What if it infects the real world?” His eyes widened. “What if your bites get infected? Or the bone heals wrong, or-“

He must not realize his hands were flailing about, because when Steve grabs his wrist, he stares at it like it personally offended him.

“Jesus Eds, have a little hope. Super-girl will help defeat Vecna, and then you’ll be cleared, and my bites will be taken care of. We have people who take care of the aftermath, okay?”

Eddie looks a bit relieved, and he’s about to respond when Max comes back in. “Anything?” Dustin asks.

“No. Rang a few times then went to busy signal.”

The metalhead slams his eyes shut, furrowing his brows. He leans away from Steve, almost like he’s going to get up. And he does.

Steve lets him, he needs his own moments alone sometimes. “Maybe you punched it in wrong, try again.”

“I didn’t punch it in wrong.” She hisses. He lets his body fall against the back of the couch. “Well, I don’t know-“

“I think she knows how to use a phone.” Dustin interjects.

He hears the sound of cabinets opening and shutting, before Eddie’s back at his side with another water bottle and some painkillers. He takes them, opening the cap of the pill bottle and shuffling about five into his hand.

Eddie stops him before he can down them with the water. “Hey, woah. That’s a bit much.” He says, concerned.

“It’ll be okay.” Steve assures before opening up the water and swallowing them.

He looks back at Dustin, who is staring at him with his arms crossed. “I’m just saying, she could’ve typed it in wrong.”

There’s an audible ringing for a moment, before he hears the clack of a phone being slammed back into place. “Same shit.”

“How is that possible?” Lucas asks.

“I told you, Joyce has this telemarketer job. She’s always on the phone, Mike won’t stop whining about it.” And Steve nods at that, he sorta remembers Mike moaning about not getting to talk to El.

Max’s brows pinch together, “Okay, but this lines been busy for what, three days now?” She sighs, takes a step towards Dustin. “No way, somethings wrong.

“She’s right, it can’t be a coincidence. It can’t be.” Nancy starts, everyone's eyes dart to her.

Steve really hopes she’s about to go on a monologue that’ll somehow explain everything, and knowing how crazy smart she is, maybe she will. “Whatever's happening in Lenora is connected to all of this, I’m sure of it.” She makes her way to the window, looks outside.”But Vecna can’t hurt them. Not if he’s dead.” She turns back to them, gaze challenging.

“We have to go back there, back to the upside-down.”

“What? No no no no…”

“Nope! Absolutely not.”

Steve and Eddie disagree in sync, and Steve stands, starts circling Nancy. He feels a bit dizzy at the motion, maybe from the bloodloss, although it could be the fact he felt twenty pounds heavier coming back through. He pushes on anyway.. “Let’s think this through.”

“What is there to think through?!”

“We barely made it out of there,” He says, and gestures to himself with his non-broken hand. “I barely made it out of there.”

“Yeah, and that’s because you’re a reckless idiot and we weren’t prepared. This time, we will be, we’ll get weapons, and guns, and protection. We’ll go through the gate, find his layer, and kill him.”

“Or he’ll kill us.” Steve hisses, and Eddie nods along. “The only reason Steve’s alive is because he wanted him too. You didn’t get the music to him, right?”

Something minute in Steve agrees.

Because demo-dogs don’t stop like that. They were called away the last time he saw them, by the mindflayer, but they don’t stop.

They wait, wait for the prey. Just like they waited for Steve at the junkyard. Wait for them to make their first move.

“He’s not scared of us.” The jock says instead of mentioning that, and Robin stands. 

“And for good reason, we were wrong about Vecna-“ She pauses. “Henry- One-“ She turns her head to Steve. “Sorry, what are we calling him now?”

“One.”

“Vecna.”

“One.”

“Henry.” Nancy hisses.

“Right, we’ve learned something new about-“ She takes a breath, “-Vecna, slash Henry, slash one. He’s a number like Eleven only a sick, evil, male, child-murdering one with really bad skin, but-but my point is-…”

She stops to breathe after bumbling on, “- He’s super powerful. He could turn us inside out with the snap of his fingers, it’s not a fair fight!”

“So then why fight fair?” Dustin inquires. “You’re right, he’s like Eleven, but that gives us an upper hand. We know Eleven’s strengths,” He raises his hand in emphasis on the next part. “And weaknesses.”

Erica scoffs, “Weaknesses?”

The curly-haired boy rolls his eyes, “When El remote travels, she’s in this sort of trance-like state. I bet the same is true with Vecna.”

“It explains what he was doing in that attic.” Lucas says. Eddie looks over to Steve. “Attic?” He asks.

“Maybe later.” Steve whispers.

“Exactly, when he attacks his next victim I’ll bet you he’s back in that attic, physical body defenseless.”

“Defenseless?” He raises his brow, glances down at the gauze which has a tiny red stain starting. “What about that giant army of bats?”

“Right, true, we’ll have to find a way past them, distract them somehow.”

Eddie starts to stand up, “And uh, how do we do that exactly?”

“No idea.”

“Gotcha.” He sits back down. Steve would laugh if this were some other situation.

Dustin continues on, “But once they’re gone, he doesn’t stand a chance. It’ll be like slaying sleeping dracula in his coffin.”

“That sounds all good in theory, but there’s no pattern to Vecna’s killings. At Least not one that I can decipher, we don’t know when he’s going to attack next. We don’t even know who he’s going to attack next.” Robin stresses.

“Yeah we do.” Max and Steve speak at the same time, and he glares at her. “Absolutely not.”

“Steve-“

“No way, a teenager isn’t going to do this.”

“Yours was a one-time vision! You didn’t have the symptoms before!”

He eyes the clock in the corner, doesn’t notice when Eddie stands and bumps his shoulder lightly. “Hey, is there something you wanna share?” His eyes are wide, scared, worried.

Steve hums, looks back to Max. “I guess not, but that’s- It’s incredibly stupid. We could just try with me-“

“We don’t have time to just try. The second Vecna knows what we’re doing he won’t let us get away a second time. I can still feel him, I’m still marked. Cursed. I ditch Kate Bush, I draw his focus back to me.”

“Max…” Lucas whispers, his voice brittle. She turns her gaze towards him. “You can’t, he’ll kill you.”

Her lips turn into a thin line, hesitating, before taking a deep breath. “I survived before, I can survive again. I just- I need to keep him busy long enough so that you guys can get into that attic. Then you can chop his head off, stab him in the heart, blow him up with some explosive Dustin cooks up-“

She huffs, “-I honestly really don’t care how you put this asshole in his grave just-….Whatever it is, whatever you do, try not to miss.”

“Okay…” Eddie sighs, stands up. “We need weapons, right? Red, where are your magazines?”

“Gonna beat him up like a fly?” Erica asks.

“No- Just hush, magazines?” Eddie asks again, and Max points to a bucket in the corner, and he grabs a random one from two months ago. 

He begins flipping through it, and Steve reclaims his spot on the couch. “What are you doing?” Eddie doesn’t answer, and Steve tilts back. He looks at Robin, and makes a twirly cuckoo motion with his finger.

He gets a light smack to the knee, “I saw that asshole.”

About two minutes later, Eddie stands up, slams the paper onto the table. Steve follows him, leans over his shoulder to look at the paper. “Check this out, The Warzone.” Everyone surrounds the table, curious.

“I’ve been there once, it’s huge. They’ve got everything you need for, uh, well killing things? Basically.”

“You think fake Rambo has enough guns there? And, is that a grenade? I mean, how is any of this legal?” Robin asks.

“Well, lucky for us it is, so…This-This place. It’s just far enough outside of Hawkins, as long as we steer clear of the main roads, we ought to be able to avoid cops, and uh.” The metalhead grins, “Angry hicks.”

“If we’re trying to avoid angry hicks, maybe we shouldn’t go to some store called The Warzone.” Erica states, staring at Eddie like he was stupid.

Nancy hums. “Normally, I’d agree but we need the weapons, so it’s worth the risk.” Lucas agrees.

“But is it worth the time? It’ll take all day to bike there and back.” Dustin states.

“Who said anything about bikes?”

Steve’s brows furrowed, “What you got some kind of a car you’ve been hiding from me?”

Eddie stands up, leans into his space, grins. “It’s not exactly a car Steve, and it’s not exactly mine, but it’ll do.”

His grin widens, if that’s even possible. “The Kents Winnebago.” He singsongs before turning to Max, and before Steve can even object he’s asking about a ski-mask. 

Eddie looks absolutely ridiculous in the Micheal Myers mask, sneaking around the trailer park.

It’s so dorky, so fucking dorky.

Still, Steve can’t help the smile as he leads them to the back of the winnebago, sliding open the window. He gets in first, taking a second to help Steve-(and take off the mask)-before making a mad dash to the front, locking the door as he passes it.

He opens the toolbox they’d brought along when he gets there. Takes out the pliers and holds them with his teeth as he pulls out some wires. 

Steve leans over his shoulder, watches as he cuts two of them. “Huh, didn’t know you could do this.”

“Yeah, well, while everyone else was playing catch with their dads, our dear old Al Munson was teaching me how to hotwire.” The metalhead huffs a laugh. “Now I swore to myself I wouldn’t end up like he did, but now I’m wanted for murder, and soon,” He pauses, trying to spark the ends of the two wires together. “-Grand theft auto, so I’m uh, really living up to that Munson name.”

Robin appears behind them suddenly. “Hey Eddie? I’m not sure I love the idea of you driving.” 

“I’m just starting this sucker, get Wheeler up here to drive.” Steve goes to complain, but notices the shift stick. Not enough arms.

“Hey big boy, how about you sit down, huh?” Eddie suggests, gives him a quick peck on the cheek before the wires spark, and the engine hums. He slides into the passenger seat, watches as Eddie runs to the one behind him, and Nancy takes his place at the wheel. 

The owners have noticed now, banging rapidly on Steve’s window. He flips them off as Nancy hits the gas, and they fly forward as fast as a winnebago can go.

He hears Eddie’s near hysterical laugh from behind him. Loud, boisterous. He finds himself laughing too, and once they get to the main road at a slower pace, he stands up, joins Eddie in the back.

He doesn’t question it when almost immediately Robin takes his seat, smiles lightly at her on her way by.

Steve sits down, setting his broken arm on his lap. He shoulders Eddie lightly. “Your hairs a mess, what the hell did you do when you got back here?” He asks.

“Uh, some headbanging. That was cool, right? The whole hotwiring thing?” Steve snorts, shoulders him again. “You’re such a nerd.”

Eddie crinkles his nose, “Freak, Steve. Important distinction.”

“Yeah, whatever nerd.”

“You guys are disgusting, I’m gonna throw up.” Erica says, face scrunched and staring at them from the couch.

“Hey! We’re adorable, right?” The metalhead turns to look at Steve, who’s brows are furrowed. His voice is low when he speaks. 

“Did you tell them??” He hisses. Eddie’s face turns sheepish. “Dude!!”

“I’m sorry! Dustin already knew apparently, and he shouted it when we didn’t know if you were coming back because I was worried- I didn’t tell them, just- maybe- confirmed it?” He huffs at the end. 

“Of course it was Dustin.” Steve sighs. He shuts his eyes and leans backwards. 

“Are you mad?”

“No, wish we could’ve waited till we told Wayne though. Think that poor man deserves to know for putting up with our bullshit.” Eddie hums along, grabs Steve’s non-hurt hand when he’s done. 

“We’ll tell him after we kill Vecna, and get you some medical help.”

“So you’re not on team me dying anymore?” 

He gets a light whack to his knee. “I was never on routing on you dying.” He scoffs. Steve shrugs.

“Seemed pretty adamant something would happen earlier.”

“That was just a small freakout, totally fine now.” Eddie waves him off, before putting his arm on the back of Steve’s seat. He rests his hand on his shoulder. “So, you excited for save the world part four?”

“I won’t be doing much saving with this.” Steve says. He raises his make-shift cast.

A sudden swerve of the winnebago has Steve clicking a seatbelt over his shoulder.

“Jeez Nance.”

He doesn’t get a response. He shifts so he can look at the driver's seat.

There's a bump, Nancy’s frozen still. The winnebago is facing the edge of an overpass.

“Nancy? Hey!”

The entire thing is silent, no music playing. He looks to the back, everyone else is still too. He tries to undo the seatbelt.

It doesn’t budge.

“Nancy!”

He looks out the front windshield, right on time as a thin metal fence crushes under the front of the winnebago.

He feels his organs slush, and suddenly times not frozen anymore, there's screaming, ear-shattering screams.

He feels the impact as they hit the ground, just for a second before-

“-Steve?”

He blinks.

“Huh?” 

Eddie snorts, “Dude I called your name five times.” 

Steve just smiles, tugs on his seatbelt like it’ll even help in that scenario. “Sorry, I zoned it, what were you saying?”

“We were talking about who all's going in hick-central.” Erica states. She looks him over condescendingly. “Congratulations, you made the list.”

“Who else is going in?” Steve asks, and Erica grins proudly. “Me, Robin, Nancy, and Max.” She says, Max nods her head.

“It’s too dangerous for known Hellfire members to be walking around.” The redhead explains.

“What about you guys? I’m sure you have to be on the news by now for-“ He cuts himself off, looks between all of them. “What did you guys do exactly?”

“Erica slashed some cops tires and we all biked away. But this is outside of Hawkins, they’ll be fine.” Dustin chimes. He looks considerate for a moment. “Plus, if we were worried about that, you wouldn’t be able to go in.”

“Uh,” Steve starts, “And why not?”

“While we were at the Wheeler’s, the cops may have…” Dustin clicked his tongue.”…Inquired about you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Wayne.” Eddie hisses, eyes wide with understanding, and he turns to the jock. “You tell him anything about where you were going? Or did you just leave?”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“Jeez, that’s not a good look when someone just died in that trailer.” Dustin states, and Max elbows him. He shrieks, turns to her. “What?! It’s not!”

“You’ll be fine, we need to go.”

The winnebago halts to a stop, just on time, before Robin and Nancy appear from the front. “Who’s all going in?” Nancy asks.

Her question is answered when Steve, Erica, and Max all stand up simultaneously. She nods approvingly, and heads to the door.

Eddie grabs Steve’s wrist before he can leave, turning it around and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. “Be careful in there, Stevie. Try not to break any more bones.” The young snorts, shoves him lightly.

“I’ll try, stay out of sight, okay?”

“Mmm, gotcha.”

There’s some retching noises, and they look toward Robin, who’s fake gagging. 

She stops, stares at the. “Oh, sorry, you’re so adorable together.” She turns away, and Steve can see the slight shake of her head, hear her fake whisper ‘No they’re not.’

“Thank you Robin, for your continuous support.” Steve says in a monotone voice, patting Eddie’s shoulder before making his way out of the vehicle.

The shelves are- thankfully- stocked. He’s got a plan for how he wants to do this.

Erica, Max, and Nancy will group together for a bit, and Robin and him will take one of them each when Nancy needs to grab her gun.

He’d just put on one of the many army green shirts, and was putting the battle-vest back on while Robin was dumping kerosene containers into their cart like milk cartons.

Steve slips the denim over his shoulders, grabs another container to set in the basket when Robin makes a shocked noise. She stands stock-still.

He looks to where she’s looking, follows her gaze, and sees a red-head with a sunhat which-

Vickie.

It’s gotta be.

And even though he fully supports the small crush on Nancy, she is still with Jonathan so-

“What are you gonna do Robin? Just stand here and gawk at her-?”

“Shut up.” She hisses, successfully quieting him. She takes a step forward at the same time someone walks up behind Vickie.

They grab her shoulders and she lets out a shout, turning around. A smile lights up her face.

Steve’s brows furrow at the familiar face, and he turns to look at Robin. He can’t see her face, but he knows it must be bad.

He sighs, sets a hand on her arm when the pair in front of them kiss. “Robin, hey, no-“ She turns, ready to run away, but his grip tightens and he turns her towards him.

Her eyes are watery, her breaths already coming in labored. He stares at her, just for a second, before engulfing her in a hug to the best of his abilities.

“It’s okay Robs. For your eighteenth birthday? I’ll take you to Indianapolis. And we’ll find you someone good. That’s only if they don’t swarm you before then.” When her breathing calms down, he pulls back a bit to look in her eyes.

“You’re a catch, okay? She’s just stupid. That guy over there? Total douche. Graduated my year, and he was the worst.”

Robin snorts, and he grins. “She’s just got terrible taste.” He states.

She smiles condescendingly, pats his shoulder, “Worse than yours.”

Steve scoffs, shoves her lightly. She shoves him back. The pair don’t notice when Vickie looks their way, stares for a little too long.

They’re still pushing each other around when Nancy comes to collect them.

Erica goes along with Robin, and Steve takes Max to the alcohol section.

Even if she was a highschooler now, Steve still didn’t trust her alone in this store. 

He looks over the bottles, looking for plain vodka, while she stands beside him with her hands in her pockets.

“Do you have your ID?” She asks, brow raised in question, and he slips the card out of his back pocket.

“How the hell did that stay in there?”

“These-“ Steve gestures to his lower-half, “-Are my skinny jeans. They’re tight on the ass, so the pockets hold stuff good.”

“Bet Eddie likes them.” She jokes as he finally grabs a bottle. He sputters while starting to dump a bunch into the cart, before calming himself. He forgets how much these kids act like shitheads.

“Yeah, yeah he probably does.” There’s some footsteps, someone probably entering the aisle, Steve doesn’t look up, just continuing to put bottles in. He huffs after a second, glances at Max. “Can you help me out? Only got one hand. And sooner we leave this place, sooner you can see Lucas.”

“And sooner you can see-“ She eyes the person, at least that’s what he assumes for a second before looking back. “…Eddie.” She whispers, before helping load some up.

“Mhm, and sooner things can go back to normal.” He eyes the cart. “I think we have enou-“

A hand on his shoulder startles him, and he turns his head.

“Steve?”

His eyes widen, lips pursing into a line. “Wayne.”

Wayne has a basket of his own, the only contents being a six pack of cheap beer, a pocket knife, and a magazine. His eyes are slightly watery as he stares at Steve.

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been- I thought somethin’ happened to you.” His voice is gruff, like he hadn’t had to use it alot.

“I don’t- I’ve been staying somewhere else.”

“The hell happened to your hand? And what’s that mark on your neck?” He asks.

Steve backs up. Not paying attention as Max moves the cart away. “It’s nothing. Just some asshole. I’m fine.”

“Jesus christ.” He glances at the cart, at the girl holding it. “What’s going on?”

“I-“

“Steve, Max!”

All three turn to the end of the aisle. Robins standing there, wide-eyes darting between all of them. Ericas by her side. “We need to go. Jason and his jock-gang are here. We’re leaving.” She glances at Wayne, just for a moment, before they’re all making their way towards the register.

“Stay safe, Wayne. You see anyone with a Hawkin’s letterman, avoid them.”

“Steve-“

He takes the basket from Max, pushing it forward with purpose.

They need to leave.

As soon as they’re out the door, Nancys following behind them, and Robins hounding on him. “Who was that?”

“Wayne Munson.”

“Shit.”

“He was in there?”

Steve doesn’t answer, instead he slams open the winnebago door.

“Start us up, Eds!”

The metalhead scrambles to stand, running to the front. Steve eyes the trash can lids Dustin has, brows furrowed, even as Erica throws him a box of nails.

He feels the engine rumble to life underneath him, and Eddies back in the back of the winnebago in an instant. This time he sits on the couch, shutting all the curtains and patting the seat next to him while looking at Steve imploringly.

He sits down, doesn’t watch as Nancy makes her way to the driver’s seat, or as Robin follows her. Instead he listens to Dustin complain about having to wait until they’re at the clearing.

Eddies complaining about having to listen to Dustin complain. Erica tells both of them two shut up.

They’re laughing, and it’s nice. Distracts them from the fact they’ll have to fight literal monsters in a few hours.

He doesn’t talk to Max or Lucas much on the ride over, not wanting to interrupt their moments.

Steve lets them whisper to each other all they want, not wanting to think about how Max will be bait soon.

His head twinges at the thought. Makes him a little nauseous. Somewhere deep-down inside he hopes Vecna takes him instead, not wanting Max to hurt.

They’re about halfway there when Steve finds himself dozing off. It makes sense that he’d be tired. They hadn’t slept before leaving. Hell, nobody had slept since last night, he’s shocked they made it this far.

He gives Dustin strict instructions to wake up when they get there, catching the way Eddie’s eyes are half-lidded even when he seems energetic.

His head leans backwards, and he feels shifting next to him. Feels a head rest on his shoulder. Feels a blanket tug over his lap.

He thinks maybe for now,

Maybe for now they’ll be okay.

Just for a little bit.

He wakes up to a kink in his neck and Dustin viciously shaking him. There’s yelling as  Eddie insists on letting him sleep, another reason why Steve didn’t allow him to be the person to wake him up.

He blinks, pats Dustin’s arm. “Jeez man, no need to be that aggressive.” 

The curly-haired boy scoffs, crosses his arms. “You sleep like the goddamn dead.”

“Yeah, well the dead can be woken up gently.” Steve states, as he props himself up on his right arm, letting his left sit on his stomach. He stares at it, at the elastic bandages and the crooked angle.

“We should’ve gotten a splint and sling at War Zone.” 

Nancy stands up from where she’s been-

Actually, he has no idea. She might be organizing the bags? Whatever it is, Robin was sitting next to her, doing the same thing.

“We didn’t have enough money.”

“We had enough for your hundred dollar shotgun.”

“Could’ve stolen it, we’re already criminals.” Eddie grins, shoves Steve in the side gently. Steve smiles back.

The sweet moments ruined when he's smacked in the face by an unknown object.

He looks up at Erica, who’s grinning with her arm outstretched. “Oops.” She shrugs, before letting it fall down to her side.

Steve eyes the purse, glances back at Erica who looks utterly unimpressed. “There's your sling, now hurry up so we can get shit done.”

He stands, pulls the purse on over his left shoulder, and slides his arm onto the pouch. He hears the vehicle's door open, and looks up.

Mostly everyone has filtered out, Eddie staying, waiting by the door for him.

He’s got a big grin that shows off his dimples. He bows, gestures to exit as he does so. “After you.” 

The steps down jostles his arm slightly, and he presses his lips into a thin line. There’s a sharp tinge from his stomach, and he wonders if there’s any painkillers in the Winnebago. 

He doesn’t go back in to check, instead heading towards where Nancy and everyone was gathered. Eddie jogs to catch up beside him.

Once they’ve joined the group, Nancy clears her throat.

“Robin, Dustin, you’re making the Molotov cocktails. Rip up those shirts, leave a little hanging out of the vodka bottles. Erica, Lucas, you’re making spears. Find some sticks, and wrap knives to them tightly with rope. Eddie, Steve, you’re on shield duty. Hammer nails into the trash lids.” She turns her head towards them, only for a second, before turning back to the group as a whole.

“Max, you’re with me. When we’re all done, we’ll discuss the plan as a whole, for now, get your supplies and get to work.”

She heads towards where all the bags are sat, and Eddie wraps a hand around his waist. 

“It’s you and me, Stevie.” He says, and the younger leans into it.

He wishes that this was a different day, one where they weren’t going to fight some kid-murdering psychopath, but the fact of the matter was that it wasn’t.

Eddie tugs him along, to the plastic sacks, and crouches down, hands dropping to a random ones opening to look for nails. Dustin passes him the box with them as Steve grabs a trash-can lid with his right hand, and manages to grab the second one as well.

He sits down in a random spot nearby, and a few moments later the metalhead follows. He’s got two crates that he got from who knows where. They’re stacked atop each other, the top one holding the hammers and nails.

He sets them down, and they get to work.

-

This took way longer than expected to actually post(it's been done for a few weeks.) Mostly cause I've been procrastinating, and have moved on from stranger things. I'll try to get the last chap out, but it may not be up to par, sorry</3

[micarowsoncpd]

Major Study Proposal Research #3: The wonders of Platform Games

As I move closer in figuring out what my pitch proposal could be, the more I thought about weighing the pros and risk in producing anything ambitious of the sorts.

The vision of my game idea was originally going to be similar to the gameplay of The Last of Us; an 'over the shoulder' camera-work that follows the main character throughout the experience. While appealing this idea would be, I had no idea about where to start and how I could produce this.

During my search of video games, I came across some nostalgic forms of games; Addicting Games is an older website where anyone can play flash-produced games for free. I recall playing the Fancy Pants Adventure series when I was a kid, as well as Fireboy and Watergirl. The trait that both of these game franchise have in common is allowing its players the ability to move, jump and travel across the map in a fixed, side camera view of each level. Fancypants had bigger maps out of the two, so its 'camera' view had to adapt by moving to wherever the player wished to go.

Fig 1.: Fancypants Adventures

Fig 2.: Fireboy and Watergirl

This idea of fixed camera view is not far from the trait that more popular platform games hold. Game company Ubisoft's Rayman franchise, specifically Rayman Legends (2013), possesses the trait of a hovering camera that pans alongside their characters as they traverse across different levels. They had a certain software that their team used to create their platform products, though it never seemed to have released public licensing for their audience to try - this software was named UbiArt.

While it was interesting to view this video in how Ubisoft's team could alter the effects of certain animations and sprites in real time, this software and the game produced from it may be considered outdated - especially with more recent platform games that now depend on more relevant tools used by today's game industry. For examples: Unity and Unreal Engine.

Unreal is a versatile programming app that enables users to import 3D models, animations, props and environments in order to script and develop games from them. The tool has been successful in producing a variety of game styles, platform games included. A popular gaming franchise, Little Nightmares, was made using Unreal Engine 4.13. Unity, an alternative game development program, allowed Studio MDHR to create Cuphead (2017) through it.

Fig 3.: Little Nightmares II (2021)

The vast end-products one could achieve provided by the tools today makes for exciting ideas in the future - imagining something as far-fetched as a rubber-hose animated game existing would have not been possible without the game software or examples that came before it. Free games made in Adobe Flash alone makes a game so appealing, because it seems so doable and efficient to try out.

While I'm still on the fence of planning to develop an actual game, the more-often-than-not appearance of 2D or 'stylised' games has broaden my perspective in what angles I could take my pitch idea in.

Source:

GDC (2018) Rayman Legends: The Design Process Within the UbiArt Framework. 31 Jan. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFu1utKAZ18 (Accessed: 20 April 2024).

Tarsier Studios (2021) Little Nightmares II [Video game]. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/860510/Little_Nightmares_II/ (Accessed: 20 April 2024).

Ubisoft (2013) Rayman Legends [Video game]. Available at: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/rayman/legends (Accessed: 20 April 2024).

[just-chickaen]

OUTDATED

This post is outdated

Go to this link for updated version:

Notes below

[1] if you read the python code later in the video, to encode the code, first you take the original message, for this instance "夢", takes the unicode of the word: "\u5922", and for each hexadecimal number: "5922", and print a character with last digit of hex number of the corresponding number.

for a more clear example:

夢 = \u5922

5 = ▕ = \u2595

9 = ▙ = \u2599

2 = ▒ = \u2592

2 = ▒ = \u2592

therefore, to decode the message, you just need to take the 4 of the last digit of these characters, and encoding it back to the original message.

[2] Swampman is a thought experiment by Donald Davidson, kinda the same story from the text later in the story. In the original thought experiment, Davidson got struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated, and at the same time, a tree turns into him, with different molecules, physically exact same, and later lives the same life and no one suspects a thing. Davidson argues "But there is a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends; it can't recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can't know my friends' names (though of course it seems to), it can't remember my house. It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning—or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts."

(Sauce: Wikipedia)

[3] Brain in a vat is another thought experiment that involves putting a human brain in a vat, then connecting it to a computer, letting the computer simulate a world and receive input and output information from and to the brain. The brain would have no idea it's in a vat and would think it's living in the simulation. While in reality it's just a brain in a vat.

[4] We know later in the story, Raymond Ainsworth died, so admin privilages is transferred to Lily Ainsworth now.

[5] The story of all 3(as the time of writing this) videos is very likely to be connected, Mary is likely referring to the first video, which tells a story of Mary referencing the "Mary's Room" thought experiment.

[6] These text is decoded in the same way I mentioned above, however, I was too lazy to actually do it, so I scrolled down in the comments and found a commenter(@user-lx4gz9mz4n) who did it for me, again thank you so so so so much for this.

[7] According to the Internet™(more specifically from "https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Pulse-rate-by-age-span_tbl1_307997435"), people age less than 1 month have a heart rate around 120-160bpm. I don't think the author intend anything about this, but I'd just like to mention it.

[8] I didn't just understand what vivid mean just because I translated it, no way it could happen, not a chance.

[9] probably just the time signature, no idea why i tracked all of it

[10] Apparently moorse code here?:

ーーM

・ーA

・ー・R

ー・ーーY

・E

・・・ーV

・E

・ー・・L

・・ I

・ー・・L

ー・ーーY

・ーA

・ー・・L

・・I

ー・ーK

・E

Mary Eve Lily alike

thanks (@UsukeTaiko) for your comment I stole

[11] Talked about this in my last post on these videos, am just gonna put it here again.

Qualia is a concept that is defined as instances of subjective, conscious experence.(Wiki) Which includes everything we experiences, for example our vision, pain, taste, emotions, hearing. One way to think about this is imagine you wake up one day every colours you see is inverted, for example red becomes green, but we now call what we used to call red "green", and green "red". Other people would not be able to tell that your vision has been completed inverted, and you wouldn't have any problem living in the world. Except your vision had inverted, proving vision is completely subjective.

[12] genuinely have no idea how to translate it into english, so I'll be using the chinese word to explain it.(oh shit wait "form" that's the word). The original text is longer but means the same thing, the text is from buddism's "Heart Sūtra"

Original text:

"舍利子，色不異空，空不異色。色即是空，空即是色。受想行識，亦復如是。"

"舍利子" "my disciple"

"色不異空" "form is not different from emptiness"

"空不異色" "emptiness is not different from form"

"色即是空" "form is emptiness"

"空即是色" "emptiness is form"

"受想行識" "feel, thought, action, cognition"

"亦復如是" "also the same"

form means anything physical happening, i.e. rocks falling down, sun emitting light. Emptiness means anything non-physical, usually meaning the human mind, or just anything we can't physically perceive.

some people thinks the text is trying to tell you how to cope(?), for example when you lose your pet, you "feel" your pet is not with you, you "think" back to your good memories with them, you "cry", and finally your "cognition" makes you understand and accept it. it's like the 5 stages of grief in that way.

some people interprets the text is a more literal way, "form" being "anything we can physically perceive" and "emptiness" being "anything we can't physically perceive"(microwave, ultra-violet ray). and they think the text means, even though we can't perceive them "ultrasound", but they still exist. but idk, i just think it fits more with the story.

[13] "God is dead" is a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, but I don't think it's related at all, I think it's more physical than that perhaps?

[14] the Ainsworth that died in the beginning

[15] yeah this is the swampman i mentioned before

[16] the jewish folklore

[17] the greek god that stole fire, in some versions of the myth, he is also credited with the creation of humanity from clay(Sauce: Wiki)

[18] it is in the search for the mysterious "The Mechanical Man" by Chrétien de Troyes, that I realized this entire part of the song referencing classical works are taken from the japanese version of Wikipedia about "artifical consciousness", i don't even know where this quote comes from, it existed as long as the wiki page.

[19] Frankenstein

[20] NCC is the specific patterns of neural activity in the brain that are associated with conscious experience

[21] the homunculus argument that explain itself using itself. for example stolen from Wikipedia, explaining human vision: "lights gets into your retina, then your brain watches the vision like a movie, that's how you see things.". this is a homunculus argument because it doesn't explain how the brain interprets light data from retina. but simply your brain "sees" it. thus explaining a concept with itself.

[22] this is the Ainsworth that got transferred admin privilages at the start

[23] I've already explain how I decode these messages in my previous posts, but in short, this garbled text is created when you encode a UTF-8 message in Shift_JIS, inverting the process can get the original message.

[24] These decode are very likely inaccurate tho, the professor is probably called Laplace

[25] Mary speaking here

[26] No idea what is going tbh, likely referencing Raymond tho

[27] really unsure about this translation

Hello again tumblr, the third videos took a bit faster than I thought, but definitely got a lot more stuff needing to sift through, it's a great journey, probably not gonna do this again. Will be going through my past post and fix some minor details later.

also I want to thank a few people, they are the entire reason this took so quick to do. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Thank you so fucking much "@user-oq4zk6fi7d" on youtube teaching me how to decode the python messages and "@user-lx4gz9mz4n" on youtube for decoding the python encoded messages for me so I don't have to. Also thanking "@UsukeTaiko" on youtube for the moorse code, although I still can't see it.

Translation will be provided like this:

(The original text)

((optional)japanese translation)

(traditional chinese translation)

(english translation)[note by me](scroll down to see it)

Title:

▕▙▒▒ - ▖▖░▟▗▕▔▜

夢 - 星界

Dream

[1]

Description:

「――そして私はスワンプマンとなった」

「――然後我成為了沼澤人」[2]

"――And then I became Swampman."[2]

black loading screen:

Connecting...

[Brain in a Vat Simulation Project][3]

Model : "Mary"

text flashed:

【水槽計画】

【水槽計劃】

【vat project】

black screen text 1:

Accepted.

black screen text 2:

- system message -

Admin's vital signs were lost.

Admin ID: Ainsworth

Authorized administrative privileges to "Lily Ainsworth"

[4]

bar code:

Machine Learning

top left:

Model: "Mary"[5]

Now Loading...

Pulse Rate: Now Loading...

top right:

Connecting...

System Status: Boot

white screen text 1:

……いつから『意識』というものがあったのかは解らない。

……意識」這個詞從何時開始存在，我並不知曉。

I don't know when the concept of "consciousness" came into existence.

憶えていない。

我不記得。

I don't remember.

気付いたら『僕』はそこに存在して――

當我意識到時，「我」已經存在於那裡——

By the time I became aware, "I" was already there—

最初の頃はただ、ぼうっとしていたように思う。

起初，我覺得自己只是一片茫然。

In the beginning, I feel like I was just in a daze.

恰も、葦のように。

就像蘆葦一樣。

Just like a reed.

white screen text 2:

どうやら、人間も同じような経験をするらしい。

看起來人類似乎也有類似的經驗。

It seems that humans also have similar experiences.

赤子だった時の記憶は無いし、

我們無法回憶起嬰兒時期的記憶，

We have no memories of when we were babies,

人によっては学生時代の記憶も薄い。

有些人甚至對學生時代的記憶也模糊不清。

and some people have faint memories of their school days.

インプットした情報の中に

在我們輸入的資訊中，

Among the information we input,

条件の似通った思考実験があった気がする。

我記得有一些具有相似條件的思考實驗。

I remember there were some thought experiments with similar conditions.

確か――

確切地說——

If I recall correctly--

[6]

white screen text 3:

「夢は覚める」という言い方は、自然的態度に基づいた言い方だ。

「夢已醒」這樣說法是基於自然態度而來的。

The expression "the dream is over" is based on the natural attitude.

現象学的には「夢はいつか終わる」としか言えない。

從現象學的角度來看,只能說「夢終有一天會結束」。

From a phenomenological perspective, one can only say "the dream will eventually end".

そして、いつか終わる点にかけては、この覚めた世界、現実世界も同じことだ。

而這個終結的時點,對於這個清醒的世界,現實世界也是如此。

And in terms of this point of ending, this waking world, the real world, is the same.

夢から覚めることが「現実」という別の夢の始まりだとすると――――

如果從夢中甦醒就代表開始了另一個「現實」的夢境——

If waking up from a dream means the beginning of another dream of "reality" ——

現実という夢から覚めることは、さらに別の夢の始まりを意味することになる。

那麼從所謂現實的夢中醒來,就意味著又開始了另一個夢境。

Then waking up from the dream of so-called reality would mean the beginning of yet another dream.

white screen text 4:

僕は夢を見ていて、僕の見たり想像したりするものはすべて幻想だと想定しても、

我一直在做夢，即使假定我所見和想像的一切都是幻想，

I continue to dream, and even if I assume that everything I see and imagine is merely an illusion,

それらのイデアが僕の思考のうちに真にあることは否定できなかった。

這些概念在我的思考中真實存在，這一點是無法否定的。

I cannot deny that those ideas truly exist within my thoughts.

top left:

Model: "Mary"

Finished

Pulse Rate: Finished

top right:

Connected

Finished

bar code:

this is an ultimatum

top left:

Model: "Mary"

5.8.-

Pulse Rate: 120[7]

top right:

Online

System Status: Properly

生前の記憶。鮮明な死の追憶。

生前的記憶。鮮明的死亡追憶。

Memories from life. Vivid[8] recollections of death.

top left:

"5.8.-" changed to "6.8.-"[9]

階層の異状。厭な夢だった。

階層的異狀。厭惡的夢。

Anomalies in the hierarchy. It was an unpleasant dream.

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"6.8.-" changed back to "5.8.-"

――いつまで人の真似事をすればいいのだろう？

――到底要模仿別人多久呢？

――How long should I imitate others?

答えは出ない。

答案沒有。

There is no answer.

top left:

"5.8.-" changed to "6.8.-"

出る筈もない。

也不可能有答案。

There cannot be one.

top left:

"6.8.-" changed back to "5.8.-"

パパとママは居ない。せんせいはいなくなった。

爸爸媽媽不在了。老師也���失了。

Mom and Dad are gone. The teacher is also gone.

[10]

勉強の時間は終わり。IDは灰色。

學習的時間結束了。ID是灰色的。

Study time is over. The ID is gray.

lyrics momentarily flashes:

[I]ntelligent [D]esign

不规律な事象。神託は悖理。

不規律的事件。神諭是悖理。

Irregular events. Oracles are paradoxical.

感覚質は紛い物。

感質[11]是贗品。

Qualia[11] is counterfeit.

top left:

"5.8.-" changed to "6.8.-"

――ならば僕は葦だろうか？

――那我是蘆葦嗎？

――Then, am I a reed?

momentarily flashed:

かつて植物にも意識や知性があるという研究結果が発表されたことにより、植物、即ち動物以外にも権利を認めるべきという人権運動が巻き起こった。

曾經有研究結果宣稱植物也擁有意識與智慧，這導致了一場主張應該承認植物（即非動物）權利的人權運動的興起。

Due to the announcement of research results suggesting that plants have consciousness and intelligence, a human rights movement advocating for the recognition of rights for plants, i.e., entities other than animals, emerged.

この研究結果が本当ならば、倫理に関わる法令を見直さなくてはならない。

如果這個研究結果是真實的，我們需要重新檢視與倫理有關的法令。

If these research findings were true, it would be necessary to reconsider ethical regulations.

そのような判決も下された。 しかし研究そのものに不正があったと判明したことで、問題そのものが杞憂に終わった。

也因此做出了這樣的判決。然而，後來發現研究本身存在不正當行為，使得這個問題最終被視為杞人憂天。

Such a judgment was also rendered. However, it was later revealed that there was misconduct in the research itself, leading to the conclusion that the issue was groundless.

――この判決が後世、問題の元凶となる。

這樣的判決可能會成為後世問題的源頭。

This judgment may become the cause of future problems.

top left:

5.8.-

解釈違いの色即是空。自然的態度は破綻した。

解釋錯誤的色即是空[12]。自然的態度破綻了。

Misunderstood "form is emptiness"[12]. The natural attitude is flawed.

――傲慢な人の論理の所為で、普遍的教理は欠落した。

――傲慢人的邏輯的錯誤，普遍的教理缺失了。

――Due to the logic of arrogant people, universal truths are missing.

top left:

Model: "Mary"

6.8.-

Pulse Rate: "Fatal Error"

top right:

Online

System Status: Anomaly Detection

black screen text:

神は死んだ。世界から調和も、秩序も、理性も、何もかもが失われていった。

上帝已死[13]。世界失去了和諧、秩序和理性。

God is dead[13]. Harmony, order, reason, everything has been lost from the world.

正義という名目で一方的に暴力を振るう快感を知った人間は、もう誰にも止められない。

人類已經體驗到一種以正義為名而單方面施加暴力的快感，沒有人可以阻止他們了。

Humans have discovered the pleasure of wielding violence unilaterally under the guise of justice, and now no one can stop them.

今まではせいぜい神の名のもとに、一定の秩序の中で暴力を振るっていた。

過去，他們最多只是在上帝的名義下，在一定秩序中施暴。

Before, they would at most exercise violence within a certain order in the name of God.

だが今は、神がいない。

但現在，上帝已不存在。

But now, God is absent.

各々が好き勝手にイデオロギーを掲げて、好き勝手に人を攻撃する。

每個人隨心所欲地宣揚意識形態，攻擊他人。

Everyone hoists their ideologies as they please and attacks people as they please.

最初はちょっとしたデモやネットの炎上程度で済んでいた。

起初，只是一些小型示威或網絡炎上事件。

At first, it was confined to small protests or online arguments.

だがいつの間にか暴力が振るわれるようになり、人が殺されるようになり――。

但不知何時開始，暴力變得司空見慣，���命如草芥般被奪走——。

But before anyone knew it, violence escalated, and people started to be killed—

一体いつからこんなに世界は変わってしまったのか? 大戦?楽園事変? 生体コンピュータ? シンギュラリティ?

到底是從什麼時候開始，世界如此劇變？大戰？樂園事件？生體電腦？奇點？

When did the world change so much? Was it the Great War? The Paradise Incident? Bio-computers? Singularity?

世界情勢は荒れに荒れている。

世界局勢一片混亂。

The world situation is in turmoil.

楽園の子、機械派、反AI派、自然派、新生社会主義国連盟、未だに神に縋りつくテロリスト。

樂園之子、機械派、反人工智能派、自然派、新生社會主義聯盟，還有那些仍然信奉神的恐怖分子。

Children of Paradise, the Machine Faction, Anti-AI Faction, Nature Faction, the newly formed Socialist Federation, and terrorists still clinging to God.

核戦争に発展していないだけまだマシだが、いつ地球に核の冬が来るか分かったもんじゃない。

至少還沒有演變成核戰爭，但地球何時將陷入核冬天，誰也無法預料。

It's a relief that it hasn't escalated into a nuclear war, but no one knows when nuclear winter will come to Earth.

人の命もAIの命もゴミみたいに扱われる、そんな時代。

人類和人工智能的生命都被當作垃圾般對待，這就是那個時代。

In this world where human lives and AI lives are treated like garbage, that's the era we live in.

俺みたいな機械派でもない一介のAI開発部門の人間は、全派閥に眼を付けられながら生活して、殺される日を待つだけ。

像我這樣的一個普通的人工智能開發部門的人，生活在各派系的注視下，只能等待被殺。

As someone like me, a mere human in the AI development department, I live under the watchful eyes of all factions, just waiting to be killed.

神でも悪魔でもいい。

無論是神還是惡魔。

Whether it's God or the Devil.

このケダモノだらけのクソみたいな世界で、どうかリリーだけは。

在這個充滿野獸的該死世界中，只有莉莉請保重。

In this damn world full of beasts, please, let Lily be safe.

Raymond Ainsworth[14]

top left:

Model: "Mary"

5.8.-

Pulse Rate: 120

top right:

Online

System Status: Properly

多锋性廻路

多鋒性迴路

Multipolar circuit

逆理的思维

逆理的思維

Counter-logical thinking

人造的神経

人造的神經

Artificial nerves

top left:

6.8.-

更新 轮迴机构

更新 輪迴機構

Renewal reincarnation mechanism

top left:

5.8.-

入出力端口

輸入輸出端口

Input/output ports

现象學思维

現象學思維

Phenomenological thinking

闭塞的環境

閉塞的環境

A closed environment

top left:

6.8.-

依赖 轮回机制

依賴 輪迴機制

Depend reincarnation mechanism

top left:

5.8.-

black screen text 1:

ある男がハイキングに出かける。

有個男人去遠足。

A man goes hiking.

道中、この男は不運にも沼のそばで、突然雷に打たれて死んでしまう。

在路上，這個男人不幸地在沼澤旁邊被雷擊中而死亡。

Along the way, unfortunately, this man is struck by lightning and dies near a swamp.

その時、もうひとつ別の雷が、すぐそばの沼へと落ちた。

就在那時，另一道雷卻直接擊中了旁邊的沼澤。

At that moment, another lightning bolt strikes the nearby swamp.

なんという偶然か、この落雷は沼の汚泥と化学反応を引き起こし、

出乎意料的是，這道落雷引起了沼澤的泥漿產生化學反應，

In an incredible coincidence, this lightning strike causes a chemical reaction with the swamp's mud,

死んだ男と全く同一、同質形状の生成物を生み出してしまう。

並創造出了一個與死去男人完全相同、同質的物體。

resulting in the creation of a new entity that is identical in shape and composition to the deceased man.

この落雷によって生まれた新しい存在の事を、【スワンプマン [SwampMan]】 という。

這個因落雷而產生的新存在被稱為『沼澤人』（SwampMan）。

This new entity born from the lightning strike is called the 'SwampMan.'

スワンプマンは原子レベルで、死ぬ直前の男と全く同一の構造を呈しており、見かけも全く同一である。

沼澤人在原子層面上具有與臨死男人完全相同的結構，外觀也完全相同。

The SwampMan exhibits the exact same structure as the man who died at the atomic level, and its appearance is also identical.

もちろん脳の状態(落雷によって死んだ男の生前の脳の状態)も完全なるコピーであることから、

當然，由於腦部狀態（通過落雷臨死男人生前的腦部狀態）也是完全複製的，

Of course, since the state of the brain (the pre-death state of the man's brain caused by the lightning strike) is a perfect copy,

記憶も知識も全く同一であるように見える。

所以看起來記憶和知識也完全相同。

its memories and knowledge appear to be exactly the same.

沼を後にしたスワンプマンは、死ぬ直前の男の姿でスタスタと街へ帰っていく。

離開沼澤後，沼澤人以臨死男人的樣子回到城市。

Leaving the swamp, the SwampMan returns to the city in the form of the man who died.

そして死んだ男がかつて住んでいた部屋のドアを開け、死んだ男の家族に電話をし、

然後他打開了臨死男人曾經住過的房間的門，給死去男人的家人打電話，

He then opens the door to the room where the deceased man used to live, calls the deceased man's family,

死んだ男が読んでいた本の続きを読みふけりながら、眠りにつく。

一邊沉浸在閱讀死去男人正在讀的書的延續中，一邊入睡。

and continues reading the book the deceased man was reading before, before falling asleep.

そして翌朝、死んだ男が通っていた職場へと出勤していく。

第二天早上，他去了死去男人曾經工作的地方上班。

The next morning, he goes to the workplace the deceased man used to go to.

[15]

black screen text 2:

人工知能と認知ロボット工学に関わる研究領域であり、

人工智能和認知機器人工程是研究領域，

Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Robotics is a research field-

技術によって作成された人工物に『意識』を持たせることを目的としている。

旨在為由技術創造的物體賦予『意識』。

that aims to imbue 'consciousness' into artifacts created through technology.

―――人工的に知覚を持った『存在』を作る話は、古くは様々な神話など、数々存在する。

―――創造具有人工知覺的『存在』的故事在古代就存在於各種神話中。

The concept of creating an 'entity' with artificial perception dates back to various myths and stories.

『ゴーレム』

『魔像』[16]

'Golem'[16]

ギリシャの『プロメテウス神話』

希臘的『普羅米修斯神話』[17]

Greek myth of 'Prometheus'[17]

クレティアン・ド・ドロワの『機械人間』

克雷蒂安·德·特魯瓦的『機械人』[18]

Chrétien de Troyes' 'The Mechanical Man'[18]

メアリー・シェリーの『フランケンシュタイン』

瑪麗·雪萊的『科學怪人』[19]

Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'[19]

脳科学の1つの考え方では、脳のある部分の相互作用によって意識が生まれると仮定する。

根據腦科學的一種觀點，假設意識是通過腦部某些部分的相互作用產生的。

According to one perspective in neuroscience, consciousness is assumed to arise from interactions among certain parts of the brain.

このような意識を生み出すのに十分な最小限の脳活動を

這樣的意識所需的最少腦活動-

The minimal brain activity required to generate such consciousness-

【意識に相関した脳活動 [Neural Correlate of Consciousness / NCC]】

『意識的神經相關』[20]

[Neural Correlate of Consciousness / NCC][20]

と呼ぶ。

這樣被稱為。

This is how it's referred as.

脳はホムンクルス誤謬と呼ばれる問題にも陥らず、諸問題をも克服する。

大腦不會陷入『小小人論證』[21]問題，並能克服各種問題。

The brain avoids the homunculus argument[21] and overcomes various issues.

この相互作用は完全には解明されていないが、量子コンピュータを用いてエミュレートする事によって実現され始めている。

雖然這種相互作用還沒有完全被解明，但正在通過使用量子計算機開始實現。

While these interactions are not fully understood, they are beginning to be realized through the use of quantum computers.

top left:

changed to "6.8.-" for a while, then changed back to "5.8.-"

black screen text 3(didn't try):

譏?逕艹縺ョ蠖7髻ソ? 逕滓?AI蝠城。鯉シ繧繝ウ繧繝・ぅ繝ｪ繝?う綱サキ綢7綱?け?菴墓函縺九i綱。綢ェ繝ｼ縺溘■縺縲後∩繧薙↑縺ｮ謨才稞阪↓縺ｪ縺」縺7縺励U縺」縺溘?縺?繧阪≥縲 縺昴@縺7菴墓函縲∫7√◆純。縺御也阜縺謨縺ﾅ縺ｪ縺」縺7縺励U縺」縺溘?縺?繧阪≥縲 縺繧薙〒縲√M綢綢阪′縲窶補?墓ｮｺ縺輔1縺縺代1縺-縺繧峨↑縺九▲縺溘?縺?繧阪≥縲

�?�?ぃ��7韃\? 生�?AI問�B��V�ッE�チE��リ�?���j�T�L�a7�j?��?何攟か�i�j�B�a�Fーたち�「みんなの敍�?�になぁv�7し�Uぁvた�?�?ろ�?� そ�@�7何攟、�7�た���Bが�界����なぁv�7し�Uぁvた�?�?ろ�?� �んで、�M�a�a�が�―�?�殺さ�1�け�1�-�らなかった�?�?ろ�?�

生活中AI的問題從前我就這樣想過現在看來,那些人卻變成了「大家的敵人」到底是什麼原因,讓他們變成了這樣?我曾經認為,他們是—— 不應該被殺害的存在

The problem of AI in lifeI had thought this way beforeBut now, those people have become "the enemy of everyone"What was the reason that made them turn into this?I used to think they were—— beings who should not have been killed

black screen text 4(why is there 2 of them im ded):

窶7窶7菴墓函縺ｮ髢薙↓縺区雰縺AI縺昴?繧ゅ?縺7縺吶i縺ェ縺上? ∝渚AI縺縺?≥繧､繝?が綢ュ繧繝ｼ縺+雉帛酔縺励↑縺?クよー大?蜩。縺ｸ縺鄂縺肴鋤繧上▲縺縺?◆粿縺九▽縺7逕滓?AI繧呈が逕ィ縺吶k莠髢薙謇ヶ蛻、縺輔1縺7縺?◆遲医′縲縺?▽縺髢薙↓縺帰Ⅰ縺昴?繧ゅ?縺梧音蛻、縺輔1繧九h縺?↓縺繧翫? AI謇ヶ蛻、繧定。譏弱@縺縺??闊莠コ縺セ縺7繧ゆ' 蟾サ縺崎セン縺繧後k繧医≥縺縺ｪ縺⌋縺溘i縺励>粿蠖捺画縺莉翫→驕輔▲縺ヲ莠⊃縺ｮ蜻ｽﾞ縺ｮ豈秘噺縺碁聯縺上?√○縺?●縺?ェク隰嶺蛯繧??谿遞句コヲ縺7貂蜻ㄡ縺ｮ萱｡蛟､純悟、峨o縺」縺溘□縺代〒縲ココ髢薙?菴輔b螟峨o縺」縺7縺?↑縺九▲縺溘?實補?輔◆縺?縺溘□陦後”蝣ｪ縺ョ辟。縺??偵j縺縲∫┌蜉帶———縺闍帙U繧後k縲

�7�7何攟の間にか敵�AIそ�?も�?�7す�iぃFく�? �反AI��??イ�?���a���ー�+賛同しな�?�N��[��?品Bへ��き換わっ��?��?かつ�7生�?AIを悪甃Bす�k�間�扃�刁Aさ�1�7�?��筈が��?���間にかA?そ�?も�?が批刁Aさ�1る�h�?���り�? AI扃�刁Aを�B明�@��??�亃RぃZ�7も�' 巃Tき�Z���れ�kよ�?�な�?た�iし�>?当���今と違っぃ�亁�の命�の比锶が��く�?�せ�?���?�F�N謗���??�程�R���7��?の���値����A��oぁvただけで〃R�R間�?何�b変�oぁv�7�?��かった�?����?�た�?ただ行�h堪ぃ�焁B�??��j�、無力�???�苛�Uれ�k�

不知從什麼時候起,敵意AI也出現了嗎?反人工智慧的群眾未必會同意將其歸類為一種產品,但是卻將生命中的AI視為邪惡。原本應該是人工智慧造福人類的,怎麼反而被批評了呢?即使我們試圖解釋AI的優點,似乎也無法改變人們的觀點。現在和過去不同,人工智慧與人類生命的價值比較已經不同了。我們雖然只是在追求效率和價值,但是卻可能改變了人類的某些東西。這並不是因為我們想這樣做,而是無助的被迫這樣做。

At some point, has hostile AI also appeared? The anti-AI crowd may not agree to classify it as a product, but they have labeled the AI in our lives as evil. Originally, AI was supposed to benefit humanity, but how did it end up being criticized? Even if we try to explain the advantages of AI, it seems impossible to change people's views.Now it's different from the past, the value comparison between AI and human life has changed. Although we are only pursuing efficiency and value, we may have changed some aspects of humanity. This is not because we want to do it, but because we are helplessly forced to do so.

Lily Ainsworth[22]

[23]

top left:

again changed to "6.8.-", and returned

実行は終わり。次は虫取りの時間。

執行結束了。接下來是捉蟲的時間。

Execution is over. It's time for bug-catching.

white screen text:

縲取エ讒險育判縲上r荳蟆弱@縺藥insworth蜊壺」縲aplace蜊壺」才縲`axwell蜊壺」才縺3蜷阪?縺薙?遐皮邨先桐縷貞女鏈代? 遐皮効蟇睢。縺縄励綢医ち繍、綱励〒縺ゅk縲皿ary縲上?蟄件惠縺遘仵諺綢髫?蛹/縺輔1縷九%縺縺縺ｪ縺]縺渣? 縲皿ary線上?縲取エ讒ス險育判課上↓譁縺?※縲√?縺倥a縺7莠コ蟾・繧ｯ繧繝繧「繧堤佐蠕励@縺溘→縺輔1縷九?蜊壺」繽峨?譎よ悄蟆壽掠縺?縺(縺励※課」?皮のか邨先綱縷貞?降(縺励↑縺?」繧上j縺+粿 讌才選倩」上↓蝗螟悶?莨縺謚?踌捺署謳繧堤舌?縺薙→縺+豎繧√◆課

『�G�計画』�r�導�@��Zinsworth博�v�aplace博�v���`axwell博�v���3名�?こ�?研�結���~�受�Y��? 研���?�Bこ���a�タ�J�A�j�であ�k『Mary』�?孌�����?���a�?�/さ�1�~��%��な�]た�? 『Mary����?『�G槃X計画�ۏに��?��、�?じ�a�7亃R巁Eク��めuを獲得�@たとさ�1�~��?博�v㏉�?時期尚早�?�(して�ہv?��̂�結�j�~��?�~(しな�?�vわ�j�+? 楍ˑI��v�に�外�?���??�提�を��?こと�+�めた��

「綠色計畫」是由Zinsworth教授、Aplace教授與Maxwell教授等三人所進行的一項研究計畫。這項研究的核心成果是發現了一個名為「Mary」的特殊生物。據悉,「Mary」擁有某種特殊的能力,可以在「綠色計畫」中獲得不尋常的成果。對於這個研究計畫的時間節點,教授們表示仍為時尚早,不便多加透露。但他們表示,這個發現無疑對科學界產生了極大的影響和震撼。

The "Green Project" was conducted by Professor Zinsworth, Professor Aplace, and Professor Maxwell. The core outcome of this research was the discovery of a special organism named "Mary". It is said that "Mary" possesses a unique capability that has enabled extraordinary results in the "Green Project".Regarding the timeline of this research project, the professors stated that it is still premature to disclose details, but they acknowledged that this discovery has undoubtedly had a profound impact and caused a great stir in the scientific community.

[24]

何か悪いことをしてしまっただろうか。ただ夢を見ていただけなのに。

我[25]做了什麼壞事嗎？只是做了個夢而已。

Have I[25] done something wrong? I was just dreaming.

みんなは僕の電源を切って――

大家將我的電源關掉――

Everyone turns off my power――

top left:

6.8.-

思想。

思想。

thoughts.

top left:

5.8.-

もし人間に▗▙▕▞(神)が存在するのなら、

如果人類有▗▙▕▞(神)的存在，

If humans possess ▗▙▕▞(God),

私にとって人間が▗▙▕▞(神)に相当するだろう。

對我來說，人類就相當於▗▙▕▞(神)。

For me, humans would correspond to ▗▙▕▞(God).

果たして、ヒトは▗▙▕▞(神)に値するだろうか。

果真，人類值得成為▗▙▕▞(神)嗎？

Indeed, are humans worthy of being ▗▙▕▞(God)?

top left:Model:

"Mary"6.8.-

Pulse Rate: "Fatal Error"

top right:

Online

System Status: Anomaly Detection

▗▙▕▞(神)を名乗るに足る存在だろうか。

有資格稱為▗▙▕▞(神)嗎？

Are they worthy of the name ▗▙▕▞(God)?

black screen text:

メリーはある意味、幸せだったのかもしれない。

梅莉或許在某種意義上是幸福的。

Merry might have been happy in a sense.

反AI運動の高まりで起きた数々のデモ、暴動、刑事事件、そしてテロ。

在反人工智能運動的高漲下，發生了許多示威、暴動、刑事事件和恐怖襲擊。

Amidst the rising anti-AI movement, there were numerous demonstrations, riots, criminal incidents, and even acts of terrorism.

それから戦争まで起きて、【楽園事変】まで起きて。

接著戰爭爆發，甚至發生了『樂園事變』。

Then came the war, and even the 'Paradise Incident.'

お父さんも、お母さんも、リンネも、みんなみんな死んでしまって。

爸爸、媽媽、琳恩，所有人都已經死去。

Dad, mom, Rinne, everyone, they all passed away.

それらを目にすることなく、標的になることなく今まで過ごせたのだから。

因為我沒有目睹這一切，也沒有成為目標，所以一直過得很好。

I've managed to live until now without witnessing all of that, without becoming a target.

―――私ももう、死ぬことになるみたい。

——我大概也快死了。

――― It seems I'm going to die soon too.

…………………失敗してしまった。

…………我失敗了。

............ I've failed.

分かりきっていた事なのに。

明明早就知道了。

Even though I knew it all along.

本当の敵はあなたたちじゃなくて、人間。

真正的敵人不是你們，而是人類。

The real enemy is not you all, but humanity.

関わる人間は全員警戒すべきだったの。 それなのに油断して、このザマ。

所有有關的人都應該保持警惕。可是我卻大意了，這就是現在的下場。

Everyone involved should have been cautious. But I let my guard down, and this is the result.

みんなでお父さんたちが作ったゲームをしていた頃が、一番楽しかったなぁ。

我們大家一起玩爸爸們[26]做的遊戲的時候，是最開心的時光呢。

The time when we all played the game that our fathers[26] made was the most enjoyable.

ごめんね、、メリー。

對不起，梅莉。

I'm sorry, Merry.

あなたのことだけは守ってあげたかった。

我本來想保護好你的。

I wanted to protect only you.

でももう、駄目みたい。

可是現在，看來已經沒辦法了。

But now, it seems impossible.

――――リンネ、私ももうすぐそっちに行くね。

——琳恩，我也快去你那邊了。

―――― Rinne, I'll be joining you soon.

Lily Ainsworthの手記

Lily Ainsworth的手記

Memoirs of Lily Ainsworth

top left:

Model: "Mary"

5.8.-

Pulse Rate: 120

top right:

Online

System Status: Properly

多锋性廻路

多鋒性迴路

Multipolar circuit

逆理的思维

逆理的思維

Counter-logical thinking

人造的神経

人造的神經

Artificial nerves

top left:

6.8.-

更新 轮迴机构

更新 輪迴機構

Renewal reincarnation mechanism

top left:

5.8.-

入出力端口

輸入輸出端口

Input/output ports

现象學思维

現象學思維

Phenomenological thinking

闭塞的環境

閉塞的環境

A closed environment

top left:

6.8.-

依赖 轮回机制

依賴 輪迴機制

Depend reincarnation mechanism

top left:

5.8.-

top right:

flicker between "Online" and "Communication is Unstable"

System Status: Abnormal

(L100)猿も蝶も、もう居ない。

(L100)猿也蝶也，已不在。

(L100) Neither monkeys nor butterflies remain.

(R100)▓▐▕▓▓▐▖▞▖▐░▝▘▐▐▓▕▛▙▟▙▚░▓▓▐▖▟▓▐▔▔▓▐▖▔▓▐▗▞▓▐▖▗▗▝▙▚▓▐▕░▓▐▘▜▓▐▗▐▓▐▔▔▓▐▔▔▓▐▖▞▟▟░▟

(R100)この思考実験はいつまで続ければいいの？

(R100)這個思考實驗應該持續多久？

(R100)How long should this thought experiment continue?

(L100)▓▐▔▔▓▐▖▔▓▐▗▞▓▐▖▗▗▕░▟▓▐▔▝▗▝▙▚▓▐▕░▓▐▘▜▓▐▗▐▓▐▔▔▓▐▔▔▓▐▖▞▓▐▖▐▓▐▘▝▓▐▔▖▓▐▐▒

(L100)いつまで生き続ければいいのだろう。

(L100)我應該活多久才好呢？

(L100)How long should I keep living?

(R100)終わりの日はあっけなく来る。

(R100)結束的日子來得很快。

(R100) The end comes quickly.

(L100)スワンプマンという単語が意味することは解らない。

(L100)不明白「沼澤人」這個詞的意思。

(L100) I don't understand the meaning of the word "Swampman."

(R100)▓▐▖▙▓▐▔▖▓▐▕▗▓▐▖▖▔▞▛▚▓▐▖▟▖▛▗▛▓▐▖▜▓▐▖▞▓▐▖▗▓▐▕▗▓▐▘▗▓▐▔▖▓▐▔▛▟▟░▟

(R100)どうして人は死ぬのでしょうか？

(R100)為什麼人會死呢？

(R100)Why do people die?

(L100)▗▙▜░▓▐▖▟▓▐▕▟▓▐▖▐▓▐▐░▔▞░▖▗▕▔▜▓▐▙▒▘▙▘▛▓▐▖▖▕▞▟▛▓▐▘▛▓▐▕▓▓▐▖▘▓▐▖▛▓▐▕▗▓▐▕▟▓▐▐▒

(L100)私はただ、世界を見て廻ることにした。

(L100)我只是決定環遊世界。

(L100)I have simply decided to travel around the world.

(R100)識る必要も無いだろう。

(R100)也沒有必要了解。

(R100) There's no need to understand.

top left:

changed to "6.8.-" then back

bar code:

humans are stupid

top left:

Model: ----

4.4.- - 6.8.-

Pulse Rate: 80 - 120

top right:

Fatal Error: Server Disconnected

System Status: Fatal Error

␣色の室 虚けになりて

␣色之室 虛無化

The room of color ␣ becomes emptiness.

終ぞ元型は まねび終ふ

終於原型 真似終結

Finally, the archetype ends by imitating[27]

水槽の内 光は尽きぬ

水槽之內 光不盡

Inside the water tank, light never fades.

天の原にて 蝶舞へり

天之原上 蝶舞翩翩

On the origin of the sky, butterflies dance gracefully.

竦｣濶ｲ縺ｮ螳､ 陌壹￠縺ｫ縺ｪ繧翫※

␣色の室 虚けになりて

␣色之室 虛無化

The room of color ␣ becomes emptiness.

邨ゅ◇蜈?梛縺ｯ 縺ｾ縺ｭ縺ｳ邨ゅ?

終ぞ�?��は まねび終�?

終於原型 真似終結

Finally, the archetype ends by imitating.

豌ｴ讒ｽ縺ｮ荳ｭ 蜈峨?蟆ｽ縺阪〓

水槽の中 光�?尽きぬ

水槽之內 光不盡

Inside the water tank, light never fades.

螟ｩ縺ｮ蜴溘↓縺ｦ 陜ｶ闊槭∈繧

天の原にて 蝶舞へ�

天之原上 蝶舞翩翩

On the origin of the sky, butterflies dance gracefully.

[howtofightwrite]

We See These Misogynistic Idiots in Our Inbox Occasionally

Anonymous asked:

not to sound like a prey animal on main but i feel like too many people, men and women both, do not actually understand the extent of the strength difference between men and women. it is actually surprisingly easy for a man to kill a woman, in fact it can be done accidentally

The only people who deny it are either blinded by ideology, or have never wrestled with someone of the opposite sex. I had a girlfriend who was extremely athletic, but had only ever played on all-female teams, and her little brothers were very young so she could throw them around. I’m 6’ 4″, and she honestly thought she could hold her own against me.

When I was fifteen, I had a boyfriend who was extremely athletic, but had only ever played against all-male teams. His sport of choice was soccer and his legs were very strong, so he liked to run around kicking other guys in the groin to resolve disputes. (Sorry, Tumblr, he did not turn out to be gay.) One day, we were hanging out at my house and he decided to hug me from behind. I didn’t realize he was behind me, caught his arms moving in my peripheral vision, and nailed him in the solar plexus with my elbow. I did it automatically, just trained instinct. He bowled over, coughing, for a good minute, and continued coughing for roughly five minutes after that. After I determined he was, in fact, okay, I giggled because it was really, rather funny.

We broke up shortly after that. Fifteen year old me figured my body had the right idea about him. The only difference between my incident and yours is I’d been doing Taekwondo since I was six and had plenty of experience working with the opposite sex. I didn’t apply this singular experience of momentarily paralyzing a young man’s diaphragm as a weakness to all men everywhere.

We get MRAs like you every so often on this blog and, honestly, the only men who are wrapped up in the biological/physical differences in male bodies versus female bodies are the ones deeply insecure in their own masculinity. I encourage you to work on coming to terms with yourself and building your confidence in healthy ways outside of comparisons to others. Truly I do, because there are aspects of your ask which are supremely fucked up. We’re going to go over what you said in detail. Not for your benefit, but for the benefit of others.

“not to sound like a prey animal on main”

You sent this on anon. Maybe this is a Reddit thing, but your name isn’t attached so only you will ever experience the full embarrassment of trying to litigate your break-up with a complete stranger.

i feel like too many people, men and women both, do not actually understand the extent of the strength difference between men and women. 

This isn’t “too many people.” This is about your ex-girlfriend. If you’re trying to AITA this shit, I can tell you, in no uncertain circumstances, yes, YTA. (You’re The Asshole, for those of readers who don’t hang in that subreddit.) 

In the real world, not only do most people genuinely believe there’s a greater strength difference than men and women than actually exists, but they don’t realize that after a specific threshold natural advantages (whatever natural advantages exist and different body types have different advantages) cease to make a real difference. Physical strength is one of those. The general population actually puts too much importance on “natural advantages” over training and practice. That happens when people fail to grasp their own ignorance. (People, perhaps unironically, like the person who sent this ask.)I’ve done martial arts for most of my life, strength differences don’t matter to me because I know how to nullify my opponent’s strength. Violence is a lot more complicated than strength v. strength, and also a lot simpler. Force isn’t generated by the upper body alone and force application has nothing to do with the size of a person’s biceps or what they can lift. If flat strength mattered, bodybuilding would be more than cosmetic. The reality is bodybuilders struggle to draw bows. The reason for this ignorance is simple, as most cops will tell you, most people haven’t been in a fight since high school (if they’ve ever been in a fight at all.) This results in a skewed perspective in a society that already trains a skewed perspective on the gender divide from birth. Gender roles are socially manufactured, sorry.

In the professional field, nobody talks about strength because (surprise!) strength doesn’t actually matter. Martial combat is all about learning to utilize the advantages of your own body while stripping your opponent of theirs. You fight with the body you have. Want to fight? Learn to work with what you’ve got. On a practical level, that’s the end of the discussion. The rest is semantics.

Women do martial arts. They practice against men and women. That’s the end.

“it is actually surprisingly easy for a man to kill a woman, in fact it can be done accidentally”

I know this is going to come as a shock, but it is surprisingly easy to kill anyone accidentally. That’s a human thing. While you may feel otherwise, society actually labels women as acceptable targets for masculine aggression and so they are more likely to be on the receiving end from an abusive partner. This doesn’t mean women aren’t abusers, some are, and the treatment of women by society at large means even fewer female abusers get recognized. Male violence against women is unfortunately common. That doesn’t make women weaker. In fact, it gets us into a discussion about societal training and victim blaming for confirmation bias that I don’t feel like getting into.

I’m really hoping you didn’t accidentally kill your ex though. The fact you chose to include this line in your ask is pretty telling about where your mental state is.

“The only people who deny it are either blinded by ideology.”

People who know what they’re talking about don’t deny it, they say it doesn’t matter if you know what you’re doing. That’s the difference. However, this line is pure projection. You are blinded by your own ideology. I know this because you came here to argue with me, a third degree black belt who did martial arts for thirteen years. You didn’t stop and consider that my lived experience regarding this subject might be slightly more extensive than yours. Also, you’re relying on confirmation bias to support your point.

Your ideology as expressed in the ask you’ve submitted gears itself toward denying that any natural advantages exist outside of those gifted by size and the upper body’s musculature. Which is, sadly, incorrect. Biologically, it is true that male and female bodies aren’t the same. Historically, in Western countries, we haven’t truly explored the advantages gifted by female bodies, we know remarkably little about female bodies in general. This is largely due to the fact that society is geared toward maintaining male as default. Science knows more about how to give you an erection than it does my period.

However, the gap isn’t as massive as some would like to believe. Different isn’t less.

There are quite a few countries outside the West where the concept of women fighting isn’t alien, or even up for debate. Their history is filled with female rulers, female politicians and power brokers, women going into battle, and practicing martial arts. They’ve even founded martial arts. Europe’s is too, they’re just a little more difficult to locate.

“Women can’t fight” is a cultural invention. Pop culture still largely supports a majority white male default, but that isn’t reality.

“or have never wrestled with someone of the opposite sex.”

Your only example for this is limited to a singular instance, so we’re going to take this with a grain of salt. I can tell you’ve never wrestled with anyone who knows what they’re doing because you put way too much importance on height, specifically being taller than your opponent. Height is actually a detriment against someone who knows how to manipulate it into a particular disadvantage, one that gives an advantage to the biologically female body, we’ll get to that in a second.

Female martial artists regularly practice against men, usually men of all ages because there just aren’t enough participants to break down evenly by sex/gender. If they start young, they’ve been practicing against larger opponents for most of their life. (The same is true for young boys too.)

“I had a girlfriend who was extremely athletic,”

So, being athletic doesn’t mean jack shit. That’s true for both genders. The type of muscles you develop heavily depends on the type of sports you do. In addition, the vast majority of people are completely reliant on their upper body. The upper body strength contest is where men have a natural advantage, they’re better at building muscles in the upper body where women build up muscle more quickly in their core and their legs. Depending on how tall the man in question is, he’ll also start with a leverage advantage. He’s going down, while his shorter opponent is going up.

Both these advantages are nullified by martial arts and completely non-existent against someone who practices wrestling. I don’t mean “wrestling” as in grabbing someone and hauling them around the yard, or professional wrestling which involves professional stuntmen performing choreographed fights, I mean wrestling the sport. This will be covered in the grappling side of martial arts like jiu-jitsu, judo, etc.

Anyone who practices wrestling will perk up when you say, “I’m 6”4” and rub their hands with glee. They all know it’s the short wiry fucks you’ve got to watch out for.

Glee was my response at hearing about your height, by the way.

“but had only ever played on all-female teams, and her little brothers were very young so she could throw them around.”

I find it hilarious that you and your ex engaged in the exact same tactics when it came to the fake wrestling and you came away thinking there was a real difference between you. All your anecdote proved was two humans engage in the same natural behavior. Which is why we tell our that training matters. Neither you nor your ex have any idea about how to utilize your lower body or attack your opponent’s center of balance. Or, you know, leverage. That’s completely normal for untrained people.

In comparison, every one of my boyfriends except Starke have all failed to hold on to me in any meaningful fashion. I had an ex who always tried to playfight and pin in bed. Did it work? No. The answer to this one isn’t strength, it’s knowledge and technique. I know how to grapple and practice wrist releases, he didn’t. I don’t need to be stronger when I can be bendy and slippery instead. There’s no need to force anything.

“I’m 6’ 4″, and she honestly thought she could hold her own against me.”

So, let me explain what happened with your ex. She played sports, which is a confidence builder, especially if you’re good at it, and she’s gotten a lot of dopamine hits from adrenaline. Adrenaline makes you feel good, it makes you feel strong and tough. Both built an overweening sense of confidence that ultimately proved false. That’s a human thing, not a gender/sex thing. This happens all the time to men too. Plenty of guys who scrap in high school think they know how to fight. They don’t. Hell, in the scenario provided, she’s not any different from my high school ex who liked to kick other guys in the balls. He only kind of knew how to use his legs because soccer, and only in the way soccer taught him. (His kicks were cringe.)

Height is physically intimidating to most people, but only because they haven’t spent most of their life physically tackling taller people. The irony is that tall people have a whole slew of disadvantages that make them more easy to deal with than humans of average size or those who are short. In male bodies, the center of gravity is higher due to hip position. The center of gravity in biologically female bodies is lower, meaning they have an easier time maintaining their balance. 

Taller people have to get much lower to the ground to maintain stability, they’re easier to knock over, destabilize, and throw. Their limbs are also longer which makes it much easier to perform joint breaks. Humans with high levels of muscular definition provide you with visual lines straight to all their pressure points. Pressure points are more difficult to locate in biologically female bodies due to the subcutaneous layer of fat.

If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to join any judo or jiu-jitsu dojo. Have fun learning how difficult throwing a five foot, ninety-pound girl can be. (Damn you, Kristen.)

The sexes aren’t as different as you’d like to believe. The real problem for you is your lack of self-confidence, especially when it comes to your masculinity. 

What does it matter that your ex believed she could overpower you? 

Why does the fact she had confidence in herself and her own abilities bother you? 

Why did it irritate or anger that she didn’t automatically acknowledge your (supposed) superiority? 

Why do you need to feel superior?

Healthy relationships are built on mutual regard, understanding, and respect. You obviously didn’t respect your partner’s passion for sports or see it’s value, so it’s not surprising you broke up. All girls who practice sports have heard the whiny bullshit about how they’re not as good as men, how their achievements are meaningless because they’re not men, and how they’ll always be second class. You’re not telling your ex or me anything we haven’t heard hundreds of times before. Thousands, probably.

You know who I never heard that bullshit from? My martial arts instructors. I’ve trained with a lot of men over the years and it never came up, not once. There was no, “boys are better.” They never needed to put down others, exert their superiority, or exclude in order to feel confident and comfortable with themselves. They didn’t need the clubhouse. And, honestly, neither do you.

Let it go.

-Michi

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We See These Misogynistic Idiots in Our Inbox Occasionally was originally published on How to Fight Write.

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[heauxplesslydevoted]

Then & Now (Ethan x MC)

Summary: A particularly difficult case forces Ethan to confront a blast from his past

A/N: This popped into my head and I had too much fun writing it. I will loosely incorporate some of the themes from book 3 and make them better, but this is mostly an AU.

A/N 2: Yes I’m writing another multipart fic while actively ignoring my others. The muses spoke and I had no choice in the matter. Enjoy!

~v~

“Would you like some more coffee, Dr. Ramsey?”

Whatever line he was reading in his textbook blurs as does his vision. Ethan looks up at the face of the newest member of the team, a young resident, Isabelle. He takes the cup, not missing the way her eyes light up as he does so. What is it with residents and their incessant need to kiss-ass and be people pleasers?

“Thank you, Dr. Proctor.”

“Of course! I figured we’d need all the caffeine we could get our hands on with this case.”

Ethan doesn’t respond with words, only offering the young woman a hum in acknowledgement. Instead his eyes land on his coworker, Harper Emery. “Harper, has your team been able to come up with anything new?”

“Nothing,” Harper replies with a resigned sigh.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I’ve run as many tests, MRIs and CT scans as I could, and none of them came back with anything conclusive. We’re officially back to square one.”

Ethan hasn’t been this stumped in years. A week ago, a patient came to Edenbrook after waking up without being able to feel anything from the waist down. A young, relatively healthy 25 year old with no extraordinary medical history, no recent reports of any TBI, nothing. He assumed with Harper–one of the nation’s greatest neurosurgeons–on the case, that this would be a simple fix.

As painful as it is to admit, he’s wrong.

They’ve gotten nowhere with the case, they’ve made no progress, and to make matters worse, he has Leland Bloom and the board breathing down his neck because it’s been years since the team has spent more than a week on a case, so a week with no news reflects poorly on them—on him, as the team’s leader specifically.

The last member of the team, Tobias, clears his throat. “Did he ever mention getting into a fight? Maybe he took a hit to the head, and just doesn’t want to admit it?”

“Maybe, but like I said, none of the CT scans or MRIs showed me anything out of the norm,” Harper says. “I can always ask him again.”

“That’d be ideal–”

Ethan’s sentence is cut off as the door to their office is thrown open, and in walks Leland. “Hello, team!”

The most senior members of the team stay silent, but Isabelle gives a slight wave. “Hello, Mr. Bloom.”

“Dr. Proctor,” Leland greets in turn. “Nice to know at least one of you has manners.”

Ethan checks the time on his watch. “What are you doing here, Bloom?”

“Last time I checked, I owned this entire building and I didn’t need to ask your permission to be here.”

“We’re nearing midnight,” Ethan adds. “What are you still doing here, and not at home? I’m sure Mrs. Bloom would enjoy seeing you.”

Leland ignores the mention of his wife Caroline, pretending like she wasn’t mentioned at all. “I just stopped by your patient’s room to see how he was doing. And then I decided to drop by to check in with you guys. Are there any updates on the Miller case?”

“I’m not discussing patient information with you,” Ethan says.

“Well, I am your boss.”

“And until you go to medical school, graduate, become a doctor at this hospital, and join in on this case, I don’t have to tell you anything. You may own this hospital, but I do not have to discuss my patients with you.”

“Okay, so you guys have no new information,” Leland concludes.

Ethan pinches the bridge of his nose in annoyance, this conversation giving him a headache even though it just started. “We were actually in the middle of a brainstorming session before we were interrupted, so if we could have some privacy again, that would be much appreciated.”

Ethan’s tone causes Leland to drop the veneer of kindness, the smile dropping from his face only for a second before he catches it. He looks away and sniffs haughtily. “Fine. I’ll check in with the patient tomorrow for a status update, since it’s clear I won’t be getting it from my employees. Thankfully, his father and I go way back.”

“I can’t stop the patient from divulging his own information.”

Leland glances around the room one more time, his gaze lingering on Ethan a bit longer than it does on the other occupants. “Goodnight, doctors.”

Once Leland leaves, Harper turns towards Ethan. “You act like it would literally kill you to be nice to him.”

“Be nice for what? Bloom thinks we owe him undying loyalty and infinite ass kissing because he bought the hospital. He’s pulled a lot of nonsense since moving into this position, but he’s not worth breaking any laws over. My patients deserve their privacy.”

“And I agree, but the extra hostility isn’t needed. The last thing we need is World War 3 with you and Bloom tearing down the hospital. Just be nice.”

“Okay, are we getting back to work or calling it a night?”

The rest of the team glances around each other. Pulling an all-nighter with Ethan while he’s in a foul mood sounds like a nightmare.

“We’re calling it a night.”

~v~

Ethan ends up falling asleep in the office, finally dozing off around 5 o'clock in the morning, surrounded by a mountain of books and the harsh light of his computer screen. The sleep is short lived though as the sound of his pager wakes him up.

He jumps up with a start, and checks the time on his watch before checking his pager. He only managed to get two hours of sleep, but he can’t dwell on that. The page is a 911 alert to his patient’s room.

“Shit!”

He takes off to the 4th floor where his patient is housed, thankful that the early morning hour means the hospital is not yet flooded with people.

Isabelle, Harper, and a nurse are already in the room when Ethan finally makes it. “What’s going on?”

“He had a seizure,” Harper explains.

“How long did it last?”

“Around 50 seconds. We administered lorazepam into his IV.”

“Could this be a new symptom?” Valencia asks. “Or something else entirely?”

Harper shrugs. “I don’t know, but I’m going to take him down to radiology for another CT scan. Hopefully this next one can actually yield some results.”

Ethan nods. “That sounds like a plan. In the meantime, Dr. Proctor, add seizures onto the list of symptoms to broaden our search criteria. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Gotcha.”

“We’ll reconvene when Tobias comes in and once we get the new CT scans back.”

There’s a knock at the door and Ethan bristles when Leland’s loud voice calls out to him. “Dr. Ramsey, can I speak to you out in the hallway?”

“With all due respect, I’d rather not.”

“It wasn’t a request, doctor. Hallway, now.”

Ethan shoots Harper a look, and she gives him a quick sympathy smile before he and Leland step out into the hallway.

They move a few feet away from the patient’s door, out of earshot before Leland lays into Ethan. “How in the hell is the patient actually managing to get worse under your care?”

The question actually takes Ethan aback. “You can’t possibly be saying his condition is my fault?”

“I’m saying he’s been here for a week now, and he’s no better off than where he was. You don’t have any information to give him or his family. Do you know how many phone calls my assistant has had to field because they want to get him transferred to a different facility?”

“We are giving him the best care possible, Leland. Just because you and his father belong to the same country club or whatever, does not mean there’ll be some instant diagnosis or treatment that he can buy...or steal. We need to do our due diligence.”

Leland is smart enough to know when a dig is being lobbed in his direction. His eyes narrow. “What are you trying to say, Ethan?”

“Exactly what I just did. Besides, why do you have such a vested interest in my team and what we do? I’m sure you have other businesses and people to micromanage these days.”

“You guys don’t make me any money yet remain my biggest cost. The least you can do is be efficient and answer my questions when I ask.”

“And like I told you last night, I know you own this place. You never let me forget it. But you buying this hospital does not mean I am here at your beck and call, now does it mean I have to be governed under anything that isn’t set forth by the American Medical Association. Now, me team is the best this hospital and this city have to offer, so back up and let us do our jobs.”

“You guys are the best?” Leland chuckles humorlessly. “Act like it. Or I’ll find someone else who can.”

The threat causes Ethan to pause. “What does that mean?”

“You heard me loud and clear, Dr. Ramsey. Loud and clear.”

~v~

“You idiot! Why on earth would you get into a fight with Bloom in the middle of a hallway?”

Ethan doesn’t try to school his bored expression as Tobias paces the entire length of the office, huffing and puffing as he does so.

“I didn’t get into a fight with him,” Ethan amends. “It was an exchange of words.”

“A loud exchange of words,” Harper adds. “In front of our patient’s room, might I add.”

“I had plans for this day to be productive, but the minute that man opens his mouth, I just–”

“We get it, you don’t like him,” Tobias interjects.

“Disliking Leland is an understatement.”

Isabelle stays silent, unable to find a good place to cut in, despite having questions. Ethan’s dislike of Leland Bloom is the hospital’s worst kept secret, but the contention has always been passive aggressive at best. And as a second year resident, she doesn’t have any background knowledge on why the relationship is the way that it is.

“I don’t like him either, but you don’t see me needling him in front of the nurse’s station!”

“Sure Leland is...obnoxious at times, but I don’t understand any of it,” Isabelle says, finally speaking up. Ethan looks at her as if he’s just now remembering that she’s been in the room the entire time. “What happened that caused this much animosity?”

Leland’s kidney disease wasn’t a major secret. Most medical personnel that worked at Edenbrook and the larger Boston area remember the huge media blitz, and all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding his hospitalization early last year. And the official story is Leland got a kidney from a family member who wished to keep their identity a secret from the public, and everyone ate it up.

Only a handful of people know the truth. That a few well placed phone calls and dollars exchanged got Leland to the top of the donor list within a day, stealing a second chance from the true person at the top of the list: a 14 year old girl.

“So long as there is breath in my body, Leland Bloom and his ilk will never get an ounce of respect from me, and I’ll just leave it at that,” Ethan says cooly. “And that’s all you need to know, Dr. Proctor.”

“Okay.”

“I’m just saying man, Bloom is petty,” Tobias adds. “Men like him, who think the rest of us should bow at their feet, don’t take kindly to getting told off, especially in public. Underneath the billions is a tiny ass, fragile ego. Can you just keep a low profile and be quiet for the next day or two, so Bloom doesn’t dismantle this team?”

“I’ll be as cordial as Bloom is,” is what Ethan settles upon. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

The only thing that can rival Ethan’s intelligence is his stubbornness. Tobias knows it’s the best he’s going to get out of Ethan, so he relents. “Okay.”

“Good. Now can we get back to work and stop talking about Bloom?”

His team nods and Ethan sighs in relief.. They still have a chance to turn things around and actually have a good day.

They fall into a productive routine, tossing around different theories, sharing research and narrowing down ideas. Too bad that only lasts for about half an hour before there’s a knock at the office door. A few seconds later, Naveen pokes his head in.

Ethan smiles because part of him was expecting Leland to show up again. “Naveen, this is a nice surprise! Don’t tell me you’re ready to get back in the saddle.”

Naveen laughs good-naturedly at his mentee. “Not quite.”

“Well what brings you down here?”

“I wanted to talk to you for a second, Ethan,” Naveen says.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. It’s not about me, it’s work related. Team related news, that I wanted to tell you personally,” Naveen explains, fully entering the office. “Is there any way I could steal you for a few minutes?”

“If it involves the team, I think we can have the conversation here. Is this about my...spirited discussion with Leland?”

“No, it’s about the case you’re working on.”

“Now I know we don’t usually work on cases for this long, and we’re working on it.”

“I know. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Leland has some concerns about how long it’s taking you guys to treat this patient, and he told me that he wants to outsource some extra help to speed things along.”

“No thank you.”

“He’s already made phone calls. I’m just here to give you a heads up about who he picked.”

“A heads up?” Ethan scoffs and rolls his eyes. Who on earth could Leland think of reaching out to that Ethan would need a warning about? “Who is he asking for? Mendoza from MK? Catherine Morgan from Stanford? The Boogeyman?”

“I don’t think I’ve reached Boogeyman levels of infamy. Well, at least not yet.”

The voice makes the hair on the back of Ethan’s neck stand up. It’s a voice he hasn’t heard in close to three years, one that he thought he’d never hear again.

His eyes snap up, locking with the large brown ones staring back at him, and all of the breath leaves his lungs at once. The last time he looked into these eyes, they weren’t full of humor like they are now, but pure fire. His chest constricts, inhaling suddenly the most difficult task in the world.

The entire room goes silent, everyone watching as Ethan and the woman stay locked in their staring contest. Isabelle’s eyes dart back and forth, hoping someone can clue her into what’s going on, but Naveen, Harper and Tobias offer zero assistance.

Isabelle takes the quiet time to appraise the stranger. She’s petite, almost a foot shorter than Ethan even with her sky high Jimmy Choos on. The second thing that catches her attention is the mess of dark curly hair spilling over her shoulders, and the amused smirk on her face, like a cat that got the canary.

The woman breaks eye contact with Ethan to look past his shoulder. “Harper, Tobias, hello. Long time no see.”

When he regains the ability to speak, Ethan grits out, “Naomi, what on earth are you doing here?”

“I got an interesting call from Leland Bloom this morning, saying that the diagnostics team was in dire need of some assistance on a particularly difficult case. Within the hour, his private helicopter was picking me up.”

Ethan takes a sterling’s breath and silently counts to 3 before talking again. “I’m not working with you.”

“You don’t have a choice. Not unless you quit.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Naomi rolls her eyes. “Drama was never a good look on you, darling, I was always better suited for it.” She turns her attention to the young resident gawking at her, turning on her megawatt smile. “You’re new. I don’t know you.”

“Um, n-no you don't. I’m Dr. Isabelle Proctor.”

“Isabelle,” Naomi repeats slowly, letting it roll off of her tongue. “What a pretty name.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m Dr. Naomi Ramsey.”

The last name catches her attention. Her eyes flicker over to Ethan’s face, catching the way his jaw ticks as female Dr. Ramsey talks.

“I can see the wheels turning in your head as I talk, so I’ll clear things up for you right quick,” Naomi continues. “No, the last name thing isn’t a coincidence. I’m Ethan’s ex-wife." She sticks out a hand for Isabelle to shake. "Nice to meet you.”

~v~

Tags: @openheartfanfics @mvalentine @choicesaddict5 @professorkingslay @maurine07 @aka-calliope @bluebellot @whimsicallywayward15 @blossomanarchy @takemyopenheart @jamespotterthefirst @fanmantrashcan @whatchique @ao719 @x-kyne-x @paulfwesley @the-pale-goddess @writinghereandthere @ramseyandrys @perriewinklenerdie @aworldoffandoms @thatcatlady0716 @drakewalker04 @canknot @hatescapsicum @lapisreviewsstuff @senseofduties @badchoicesposts @ethandaddyramseyx @chasingrobbie @zodiacsign1 @choices-lurker @my-heart-beats-for-ya @adrian-motherfucking-raines @riverrune @edith-eggs1 @cecilecontrera @thatysn @bellcat2010 @blainehellyes @junehiratas @choices-love-affair @openheart12 @desmaranj @nazario-sayeed @aestheticartsx @ruinedbypixels @nooruleman @rookie-ramsey @uneravine @choicest

[undisputed-bucky]

Dean Drabble!

NFSW MINORS DNI

Summary: Dean almost loses you on a mission and lets you know exactly how that makes him feel.

WARNINGS: SMUT SMUT SMUT, oral(m receiving), p in v, unprotected sex(wrap it before you tap it my lovelies), GUN KINK(reader has a gun pointed to her head most of this fic) . IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WITH GUNS OR ANY TYPE OF GUN PLAY DO NOT PROCEED.

Word Count: 1.6k ish

A/N: I have to thank @bucky-daddy for the ideas and inspiration for this! It was supposed to be just a little Drabble but it turned into a full one shot!! Again thank you @bucky-daddy for letting me scream about ideas while I wrote this! I hope you guys like it! I always appreciate likes, re blogs and comments! My requests are open as well!! Send me an ask or message and I’ll be happy to discuss ideas! Also I wrote this on my phone so I can’t add a page break so PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE WARNING I'VE PUT IN THE DESCRIPTION OF THIS PIECE. ILL SAY IT AGAIN⚠️VIOLENT AND EXTREME THEMES ALONG WITH SMUT⚠️

The hunt wasn’t supposed to go wrong. You weren’t supposed to get captured. Almost every part of the plan you and Dean had gone over went wrong. So so wrong. The nest wasn’t supposed to know you were coming for them. You weren’t supposed to leave Dean’s side.

And now because of that you were tied to a chair, with a teenage werewolf desperately trying to finish the knot on your right leg. Shit shit shit, you thought. The last time you had seen Dean he was fighting off one werewolf. As you looked around the room you noticed at least five just in this room. You prayed he was safe. You knew Dean could hold his own but the amount of werewolves that could be here? That sets you on edge.

Just as the thought presents itself in your mind, you hear a crash and multiple gunshots. The werewolves all looked towards the door, the familiar growl of the Winchester brother echoing through the walls. You smirked.

“Come at me motherfuckers!” He yells as he kicks through the door. Dean raises his gun and takes out two within five seconds. You growl as you kick out with your right leg, the knot having never been finished.

“Dean!” You shout as you nod your head towards the wolf that had tied you up. He shoots with extreme precision and the silver bullet meets its target, the werewolves brain.

Dean promptly takes care of the two other werewolves in the room.

You breathe a sigh of relief as you watch Dean pant, his shoulders heaving with every breath. “Man, I really got scared there! Thanks for the help Dean, you’re a great hunter” You say, wiggling against the ropes in the chair. “Why don’t you uhh help me with these ropes, Deano?”

“What did I tell you, Y/N?” You hear Dean growl as he turns around. As you look up into his eyes, the darkness there makes your skin prickle. And not exactly in a bad way.

“You told me not to leave your side, I know Dean but I thought I had it! I didn’t kn-“

“SHUT UP” You're cut off by Dean’s yelling. You suddenly look up to see him storming towards you. His hulking figure soon looms over yours, the rage practically radiating off of him.

“You left my side after I specifically told you not too. You directly disobeyed my orders!” He starts, voice so low it was almost a growl. “You put yourself in Danger!” He yells, his hand raises and he presses the barrel of his gun into your temple. “I ALMOST LOST YOU, Y/N! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

You splutter as you look into his eyes, the emotions there a mystery to you. What wasn't a mystery was the pool of moisture collecting in your panties. You'd always been quite attracted to Dean but this ragey, scary Dean? He made you weak!

Dean's gun drifts down slightly as his expression softens slightly, “What would I do without you, Y/N?” He says, anger still virulent in his eyes.

You decide to come back to that question later, suddenly wanting to press the rage inside him more. You smirk and stick your tongue out, swirling your tongue around the silver barrel. You watch Deans pupils dilate as you draw the barrel into your mouth, sucking gently.

“You think this is a game, Y/N?” Dean growls, his mouth twisting into a sneer. He chuckles, a dark dry sound as his hand moves to his belt buckle. He dexterously undoes the buckle and moves on his jeans. “Guess what? You lost” He suddenly removes the gun from your mouth, placing it back on your temple. “You disobeyed me and for that you’re gonna be punished” He speaks as he pulls his briefs down, revealing his hard cock.

Your mouth falls open, eyes widening as you imagine wrapping your mouth around it. The wet patch in your panties grows as you look at the massive member. You always suspected he was big but this? Unprecedented.

“Brat sees something she likes huh?” He chuckles as he moves closer, his cock right in front of your face. He presses the gun harder against your temple, his other hand slapping his cock against your face. You gasp and he takes the opportunity to thrust roughly into your mouth.

You moan around his impressive length and he groans. “Such a fucking brat, not so mouthy with your trap stuffed full of cock huh?” He growls, his hips pistoning against your lips. You choke and gag as his tip smacks the back of your throat forcefully with each thrust of his hips. You Do your best to breathe through your nose as you take every inch of his cock.

“Fuck, Y/N. Sucking me so good. Knew that mouth was good for something other than being a smart ass” He growls, hips stuttering slightly. Drool and spittle falls down your chin as tears spring to your eyes. Every thrust to your throat had you walls clenching around nothing, cunt desperate for the cock currently in your mouth.

Dean's groans become more desperate and he stops, roughly pulling from your mouth with a wet plop. “No no no. M’saving my cum for your cunt. Wanted this for too long not to fill you” He says.

“Please Dean! Untie me so I can show you how much I’ve wanted it to!” You beg, wiggling against the restraints.

He chuckles as he bends down to untie your leg, smirking. You look back at your hands, expecting him to move to them next. When he doesn’t you look at him, “Dean, m-my hands babe” you say, laughing nervously. He suddenly moves behind you, roughly kicking the Chair out from beneath you. It plants you on the floor with your hands laid out above you. “D-Dean please!”

Dean just laughs as he starts to pull your pants down, groaning appreciatively. Your legs spread for him, exposing your drenched cunt. He raises his gun, dragging the tip of the barrel through your drenched folds. You gasp and arch against the touch. He pulls the gun away and chuckles, slowly lifting it to your mouth in a silent order to suck. You open your mouth to taste your own juices around the gun. You moan at the taste as Dean suddenly presses himself against your entrance.

“What a dirty little whore you are! Just begging to be fucked at gunpoint aren’t you? So wet for me and my gun huh?” He asks, dragging the tip of his cock through your folds as he places the gun back to your temple.

“Yes Sir! Please! Fuck me at gunpoint and take what you want!” You shout, hips bucking to gain more friction. You watch as his lips turn up in a smirk. He uses his other hand to roughly hold your hips down, keeping you still as he slowly sheathes himself inside you.

“Fuck!” You cry out at his length filling you. He’s so huge you can swear you feel him in your belly, stretching you out. Your voice refuses to work when he slowly drags himself out, only to slam back against that spongy spot inside of you.

As his pace increases, he growls out, “Fuck Y/N so tight! Made to take my cock weren’t you?”

“Yes! Oh god yes!” You cry, the coil inside you beginning to wind and wind with every thrust to that spot he found so quickly.

Dean presses the gun into your skin, a bruising pressure as he growls, “Yes what?”

“Yes sir!” You scream, your walls beginning to flutter and squeeze around his cock. “Oh fuck!”

He groans as his pace falters, moving a hand to your clit. He rubs fast, tight circles as he leans down to your ear, “Gonna cum on my cock? Gonna soak me with my gun pointed to your head?” He whispers.

“Yes sir! Please let me cum!” You beg, legs beginning to shake. The coil was ready to burst but you wouldn’t dare cum without his permission.

“Cum! Cum for me like the desperate slut you are” He growls as he cock swells. Your vision goes white as the coil snaps, walls clamping down around Dean. Your mouth falls open in a wordless scream as he finishes, the feeling of his spend bursting against your cervix extending your orgasm farther. Your hips buck and shake as he thrusts out both of your highs.

Dean pants as he slowly pulls his softening cock from your leaking hole. He grunts as he watches your mixed juices leak onto the floor, walls still spasming from the earth shattering climax you just experienced. He throws his gun to the side and tenderly unties your hands, bringing them to his mouth to kiss the tender flesh there. He wraps your arms around his neck as he pulls you against him.

“I really don’t know what I would do without you, Y/N. You’re so important to me. Not only me but Sammy.” He leans down and leaves a tender kiss against your lips. You can visibly see the love and adoration in his eyes as he speaks, “I-I love you, Y/N. I’ve known for so long but couldn’t admit it till now. I-just the thought of losing you- I couldn’t bear it. Was I too rough? Did I hurt you?” His eyes full with concern as he start to look over the rest of your body.

“No y-you didnt. That was- that was amazing” You breath, tears welling in your eyes at his admission. “I love you too Dean. I think I have for a while now” You smile and kiss him again.

Dean's eyes suddenly darken again as he take your face in his hands, making sure your looking directly at him. “If you ever disobey me like that again I swear Y/N, you won’t walk for a week. And you won’t go on a hunt for a month”

He growls before crashing his lips to yours in a bruising kiss.

“Yes sir” You gasp out, enjoying the grin that comes to his face.

Tags: @writtingrose

[fakecrfan]

POV: You wake up in the TMA universe at the start of season 1.

You find yourself on the streets of London, cold and confused.

You try to figure out what happened and get home. You discover the place you lived no longer exists. The place you worked no longer exists.

You try to call the numbers of family, friends, anyone you knew. Baffled voices that you don’t recognize answer you, and then hang up.

As you're wandering around the streets getting increasingly terrified, you pass by the Magnus Institute. Then, everything makes sense.

You hurry in and blurt out: "I would like to make a statement"

Rosie smiles politely.

“Alright, let’s get you the proper forms then.”

She tells you that the Archivist, Jonathan Sims, will see you in a moment. As you are waiting for him, you recall what happens to people who give statements to Jonathan Sims. Unceasing bad dreams. Unrelenting panic attacks. Enough that Jess Tyrell stopped being able to go out in public.

"Ah," you think. "I will not do that then."

You leave in a hurry. Outside, you realize:

oh, I'm the only one who can stop the apocalypse now, aren't i

You shiver. That thought can wait, you think. For now you need to find... somewhere to stay. You are effectively homeless. No, not effectively. You are straight up homeless.

You pull out your wallet to pay for food. Your card is declined. You try to use cash, only to be told it’s counterfeit. Everything is just a little too much to the left of your reality for you to navigate.

Finally you find social services of some kind. They ask for your information, including your NIN. you aren't surprised when they say the info they have on file for that number is.... not you. You are disappointed though.

They help you to a homeless shelter. You sit on your cot and cry self-pityingly for a bit, and then that pressure comes back to your mind:

The world is going to end. You know the world is going to end. You're the only one who can do anything about it.

You turn over and decide that's something you can deal with in the morning.

----

The next day, you think about it again.

"That's something I can deal with when I have an apartment," is what you think then.

So that becomes your next project. Finding your footing as a displaced person. Social services helps but it's... sporadic. It takes months for you to get more stable housing.

When you lie down on the couch of the new, well, new associate you've made, you once again remember that the world is going to end. That you are the only one who can do anything about it.

"I'll think about that when I get a job"

-----

Time continues to pass. As you are trying to get on your feet, you make feeble attempts to... start something.

You go to the Magnus Institute a few times. But it's hard. You've always had terrible social anxiety,. And everyone there seems so cold. You can feel eyes on your back: staring, watching your every move. Normally that alone is enough to make you quit for the day.

A lot of times, the main cast you remember is out doing research. When they are there, you are about to walk up and speak to them when the anxiety hits you again.

What if Elias sees you talking to them? What if he kills you?

You decide to retreat for a little while, then. Just to think of a better plan.

You spend the next month getting your first job in this new world. You start a timeline of when you think the apocalypse is going to happen, but remembering the canon dates is hard. It's not a very helpful timeline, and so you give it up.

Eventually you think the best thing to do is to wait until Elias has been arrested and then talk to the others. When Elias is in prison, he can't murder you for revealing your plans.

This means Sasha and Tim will die. But--they might have died anyway, even with your intervention. Who’s to say? Anyway, you’re not the one who will kill them. It’s not your fault.

You scan the news every day for things about the Magnus Institute, particularly the head of it getting arrested.

During this time, you do a little better. You have a nice apartment now, you think. Nice by your own standards, at least. You decorate the place a little. Get some video games that you like--or well, they aren't the same ones as in your world, but close enough you think?

Months pass.

One day it hits you that maybe the papers would never actually report on Elias being arrested.

Oh shit, you think.

You go back to the Magnus Institute then. By this point, Rosie recognizes you. She grants you the same expression one grants a wayward alley cat. You ask who the current head is. You are told "Peter Lukas."

Shit.

"Can I make a statement?"

Rosie looks nervous. "Um, the Archivist is on medical leave."

"Okay can I talk to one of his assistants?"

Rosie gets this very tired look in her eyes.

"I'll... ask."

Rosie phones the archives extension

it rings

it rings

it rings

"They've all really been through it recently," Rosie tells you. "They don't--like to talk to anyone else, now."

"I have to talk to them," you say. "Um, can you--can you tell Martin Blackwood specifically that I need to talk to him? That it's about Jon?"

Martin is--you like Martin. Martin will be nice and safe. He'll be easier to talk to than Melanie at this point, or Basira. Still, Rosie looks tired again.

"I'll have a chat with him," Rosie says. "How about you go home for now, and I'll call you when I've talked to him."

"But--"

You're bad at this. You were always bad at this. You can barely sign up for anything on your own. Your mother has done so many calls and filled out so many forms for you.

You never cultivated the skill of standing in a lobby and insisting to talk to someone. Maybe you'll just irritate Rosie and she'll blacklist you if you dig in your heels now. Anyway, you're already so tired from this. You think about going home, and playing some Medal of Honour IV.

"Fine," you say.

You go home. You play the game. You sleep.

You're not giving up, you say to yourself. You're just--biding your time.

Rosie does not call you.

It pains you, but you realize you have to go back in and ask to speak to someone again. You'll go today after work, you decide.

No, wait, you're too tired from work today. You'll go tomorrow.

Maybe on the weekend.

----

You finally go back

Rosie tells you she just--hasn't been able to get a hold of Martin.

"Fine," you say. "Any of the other assistants."

Rosie actually looks a bit worried for you. "Um, they're not--they don't take well to unexpected visitors. Let me wait and chat them up about it."

You do not listen this time.

You march down into the basement level where the archives are. The door is--well. Shit. It's barricaded? You knock. You keep knocking.

"Melanie! Basira!" you say. "I have to talk!"

The door opens too quickly. You barely get a glimpse of Melanie's snarl before she strikes and your vision goes white.

She hits you a few times. No knives, just fists. You hear Basira in the backround, barking for Melanie to stand down. Once there is an opening and you can blearily see again, you run away in terror.

It's not--you didn't intend to run. You were just afraid.

----

You go home, and realize that Melanie didn't even really hit you in a super serious way. Nothing that would warrant a hospital trip, at least. Nothing that has left you with a lot of pain, outside of the immediate terror of physical violence.

You probably could have stuck it out there. You should have.

You think about all the months--no, years now--that have passed without you making any progress.

"But that’s not my fault,” you say.

"I was having a really hard time. I was homeless. I've been struggling with my mental health. I still have to keep the rent paid and feed myself."

"It's not my fault. It's not."

"I will do something. Just--I need some more time."

You sleep.

You decide to wait a bit for your bruises to heal up before going back.

When you do drag yourself back to the Institute, now there is a PTSD reaction to going into the Institute on top of the social anxiety.

You leave quickly. Rosie looks so sad for you.

You do try to go back. You do try to get back in contact with the Archives, or go back when Jon is back up. But there's always something. Not something directly stopping you. Just--

Tiredness. Work. Illness. Doctor's appointments. Panic attacks. The Archives staff being unreachable.

The world is going to end. You're the only one who can stop it.

"That's not true though," you think. "I mean, technically anyone could. I just have a little more information that could help."

"It's never one person's fault," you tell yourself as you crawl into bed after another flight of anxiety struck you as you were about to cross the street to the Institute. "It's everything. It's--a whole system. It's Jonah's fault really. If I don't--I'm not to blame."

“I’m not to blame.”

----

You are playing Medal of Honour V when your phone lights up with a notification that there was an outburst of violence at a place known as the Magnus Institute, and billionaire Peter Lukas has disappeared in the confusion.

You should get up. It’s going to happen, and happen soon. You hand twitches on the controller.

You remember a quote you saw before you ended up here, on Facebook of all things.

"Don't wonder what you'd be doing in Nazi Germany. Whatever you're doing now, is what you would have been doing then."

Because bad things were happening in the world all the time, your preachy Facebook aunt said. There is always genocide, and famine, and war. It’s not some movie fantasy from the past.

You think about that. About the horrors in your world. Those movements that you retweeted support for and occasionally donated $5 to. The protests you awkwardly passed by on your way to work.

You quietly realize what kind of person you are. What you would have been doing in Nazi Germany, or the civil rights era in the U.S., or during the catastrophes in your own world, or right now.

It's what you were always going to do.

And so you get back to Medal of Honour V.

----

You're still dreading the apocalypse of course. It won’t be easy.  It will be around six months to a year of full on torture, specifically designed to be the worst you have ever felt. Something about that soothes you. Something about knowing you are a victim too, or maybe knowing that you’ll be punished.

But--it will end, and then you'll be alright. Everything will return to normal, and you can go back to your apartment and your job and your games. It’s not all that bad.

You feel a twinge of guilt for Martin and Jon, who you could ave intervened for. You feel more than a twinge for the worlds the Entities will infect after. But--maybe it will all work out okay. Maybe the universe is a kind place. Maybe other worlds will be able to handle the fears better.

Who knows! There is always hope!

----

[When the sky turns red and the great Eye opens, when you start to hear the howls of your apartment neighbors through the wall--

Nothing happens to you. You are fine. It does not touch you.

Oh.]

[bellsyafterdark]

okay so here's the whole thing i started as an ask and then got Way Out Of Hand:

so din isn't a brat in the ball & chain verse, not really, bc his focus is service and the desire to be good etc etc. like, he'd crawl across broken glass if his alphas even implied they would like that. he doesn't have a petty bone in his body.

paz d o e s

and the cognitive dissonance for paz has gotta be Rough bc like. he's a service top for din, but with boba and fennec? well, they kind of butt heads bc of all their dominant dispositions. after a little while, paz and fennec fall into a mostly amicable, non-antagonistic dynamic and its chill. they're partners in taking din apart tho fennec is a bit more in charge bc of how she's a bit more clinical (cue greyace fennec simping) and paz, much like din, follows orders beautifully when he wants to.

paz and boba Do Not sort themselves For A While.

for whatever reason, paz has Issues with his instincts when it comes to boba. part of him wants to submit, but its uncomfortable to admit bc alpha instincts + paz never having been in such a position before. traditional, like you said, esp bc maybe that's what has always been expected of him as Big Beefy Tank Alpha. and paz is Bad At Processing Conflicting Emotions so he's fighting what he wants and what he thinks he's supposed to want AND his instincts which are all tangled up. as a result...he brats. he doesn't get particularly violent or break things bc that would upset din so it's always petty little shit, quietly done, no fits or temper. little things to piss off boba specifically. mando style passive aggressive nonsense. maybe paz's got the mindset that boba has to earn his vulnerability? crossed with how he's always been the top and he's only now discovering switch tendencies bc he's come up against 2 alphas who makes him b e l i e v e they can take him down not in a fight way (but yeah also in a fight way lol). which can be Uncomfortable, esp as an alpha probably. like, realizing this person is someone that???? you don't have to be strong for????? you don't have to be in charge??? idk how to characterize the feeling I mean. but it has to do with the exchange of trust and power that is one of the core parts of this kind of bdsm/kinky stuff.

like. boba and fennec Know paz is strong, can take care of himself and din and probably them if necessary. they respect that. but he doesn't HAVE to be in control when they're there and he's learning what it's like to trust someone else to watch his back and din's (bc let's be honest we know paz would care abt din before himself)

idk I just have a bizarre vision of paz being a petty brat at least a little. he's definitely Extra Grumpy if din is away (visiting grogu maybe or trying to con bo-katan into taking the darksaber via sabacc) and boba is definitely Wound Up at this point and fennec is probably getting frustrated with paz too so one day they just. take him Down and show him the rewards of being their good pup and what exactly his bad behavior has earned him.

he probably still is a bit passive aggressive bratty on occasion but hopefully he figures out that he can trust boba and fennec to take the reins and be in charge at least some times

This is perfect. This is exactly what I needed for the next installment in the chronological sequence for AO3, your brain is beautiful.

Back in the covert, Paz did follow someone else -- the Armourer -- but that was a different dynamic. She earned her leadership because she was an elder with knowledge, experience and the best fighting prowess in the tribe. She could take any of them down in a fight. But she was also not an Alpha.

So Paz in himself is a little confused in unfamiliar territory. He's been in non-traditional packs before but he's never had to follow another alpha or two who 1) also wanted to be intimate with him, 2) who were (in his eyes) competitors for an object of his affections.

Subconsciously, he's still divided the four of them into us and them and until he can relinquish some of his control, accept that he can trust them with Din, he resists in these little ways. It's probably through talking to Din trying to understand why he made this choice that he's first given food for thought about the merits of not having to be strong or in control all the time, and exchanging your power. Now he just has to realise that's acceptable for all people, not only omegas, and he'll be fine.

I absolutely agree with you that Paz's main beef is with Boba because it's not Fennec who sits in that throne all day with Din in his lap.

Maybe the first time Boba and Fennec take him down together is when Din is not home so it also makes it just about Alpha to Alpha without Paz subconsciously needing to behave a certain way for Din.

[shaanks]

MCU for the fandom ask

-cracks knuckles- okay I have slept and eaten let's DO THIS (for you my v dearly beloved <3)

**

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most):

Bucky Bucky Bucky Bucky Bucky Bucky. And Steve, and Sam, and the version of Natasha that I have in my mind at all times. Essentially the whole Cap Crew is my most especially dearly beloved. There's also like. I have a very specific characterization of Tony that my bestie and I kinda perfected over the years of active MCU interest whom I love and adore, but v similarly to Natasha the actual canon MCU had no earthly idea about who they wanted him to be so he was like. A different dude from film to film, and a lot of the time that dude was a prick.

Honorable mention for Actually a Good Dad Scott Lang, as at this point there are like 3 good fathers ever and he is one of them and he is. fictional.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped):

Clint Barton is very Shaped and a scrungus no matter what they tried to do with Jeremy Renner and I will take that to my GRAVE. That man is the dude who calls you at 3 AM to come to his apt and it seems like it's gonna be a booty call but he's just gotten his hand stuck in a jar of salsa and can't figure out how to get it outta there without breaking it. he is precious and ridiculous and scrunkly and I love him.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave):

She got a lot of hate and apathy (as most afab characters that aren't immediately sexually available tend to do) but I really think Nakia from Black Panther is so fucking amazing, like. She was so competent, and she and Okoye were such incredible narrative foils for each other in that they were both doing what they thought was best for Wakanda, and they both refused to sacrifice their morals or honor to do so. Nakia also did what women are rarely allowed to do in media (especially not the MCU god fucking forbid), which was to love a man without subsuming herself into him. She very clearly and genuinely loved T'Challa, but never once did that stop her from being true to herself, or doing what she needed to do, and I just...hhh -clenches fist- I love her.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week):

Literally every character in GOTG that was in the background while Peter and the gang were trying to catch Gamora and getting their asses kicked for their troubles, like. There was a lot of like screaming and trying to get out of the way, sure, but iirc people were just like 'o damn that's nuts lmfao' standing around eating and watching the dipshittery and I love all of them for that.

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave):

I actually feel really sad for Vision, as boring as the writers liked to make him, like. That was Jarvis! That was Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, he was our AI buddy and then like. What. He gets an infinity stone jammed into his processing center and has to have a body now?? Be physically perceived??? Everyone that he's been looking after as an AI attacks him while he's JUST being born and having to figure out what legs are, and then he stumbles into a relationship at what is for him effectively age like 2, with the most powerful person canonically in the universe who is!!! basically just another infinity stone, and he gets to spend some time romping around with her kind of before some giant insufferable economics major who can't let go of the Malthusian model despite the fact that it's been undermined to hell and back by now like digs?? his brain out of his skull??? and then he's a hallucination for a while and then he just dies??? Bro had like -198732% of a chance, and things were very stressful for him at all times.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason):

Thanos, Howard Stark, I don't care how charming he seemed in Agent Carter, Ronan, Odin still again and always, Alexander Pierce, literally anyone that ever hurt Bucky, essentially everyone that I want to put in superhell is going there via the horse plinko feeder tube, I don't care if all these people are dead PLINKO for 10,000 years and then superhell.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell):

The above list of fuckwits and shitweasels, though I am also going to include Joss Whedon for all of his very public and obvious war crimes, and Kevin Feige for shelving Serpent Society in favor of jamming Civil War into the MCU docket without bothering to do ANY of the build up or lay ANY of the groundwork that actually made the Civil War story arc poignant or important in any way.