#i haven’t played with my rags to riches family in forever i miss them :( once i clear all the crap out of my game i’ll play with them<3 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

wern · 8 years ago

Text

Rules and tips to dating a hockey player:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye—es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Yale News.”—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. it was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. “Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. “I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore. “It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.” We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. “Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically. “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.” “How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.” “I’d like to.” “She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?” “Never.” “Well, you ought to see her. She’s——” Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. “What you doing, Nick?” “I’m a bond man.” “Who with?” I told him. “Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. “You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.” “Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.” At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. “I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.” “Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.” “No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.” Her host looked at her incredulously. “You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever g

#an earlier draft of this post had the entire novel #please be thankful

26 notes · View notes

zadzapfanfiction-blog · 8 years ago

Text

They Corrupt them Chapter 1 (ZaDr)

The Control Brains are corrupt, they have been hiding something since the beginning of their existence, the Irkens are in danger and they don’t even know it and the few who know have been assassinated throughout the years. After telling Zim his mission is a lie and a video of his death is released the Tallest cannot remember the one event that caused them and all of Irk to hate the smallest Irken, along with the strange behavior that caused said event, along with the rest of their pasts. This is a story of love, a story of the Irken race, a story of secrets, a story of two enemies…well, no spoilers! Eventual ZaDr, RaPr and possibly other pairings in the future.

All was peaceful on the Massive, aside from the slight bickering of the two Tallest who were fighting over the last doughnut while the rest of the crew watched on, waiting for one of them to drop the bag so they could have it. One of the Irkens behind the controls looked at the screen, ignoring the fact that their Tallest were arguing over the food; he groaned as they were getting a call from the one and only annoyance to all the Empire. “Excuse me my Tallest, but we are receiving a call from…Zim…” The blue eyed Irken said, a hint of annoyance in his voice.

Red groaned and let the bag go before turning his attention to the Irken who had interrupted them, doughnut forgotten by both Tallest at the mention of the smaller defective Irken; he turned to his co-tallest and crossed his arms. “I think it’s time we tell him that his mission was a lie, and we deactivate him for good.” He said.

Purple sighed. “We thought we deactivated him the last time but it didn’t work, how do you expect it to work this time?” He asked Red, curious as to what his plan was.

“Obviously we need to connect his computer to his PAK, it’ll have no choice but to listen to the Control Brains and deactivate him.” Red smirked, earning another from Purple, who obviously thought it was a good idea too. “That sounds like a good idea!” Purple said, excited. “This way he will not contact us again!”

~~~

It was quiet in Zim’s base, except for the small hum of Computer and the burst of giggling coming from the robot that was watching TV though it seemed someone was missing. In fact, the Irken we are thinking about is currently down in the lab working away at his project to show off; he wanted so much to impress his Tallest and hope they liked his plan. It had been a few years since he had landed on this planet and he felt he was close, close to finally succeeding his mission and getting off this planet once and for all.

Zim looked up, antenna twitched a little. “Computer! Contact the Tallest!” He said, feeling giddy on the inside, oh the plan he had this time…yes, the Tallest would be pleased!

As the Irken waited he leaned against the table with a confident smile, glad that he hadn’t had to deal with Dib for the past few weeks…though part of him wondered why. Why had the human just up and stopped trying to foil his plans; he couldn’t understand at all, did he not think Zim was worth his time?

The thought made him very upset, had the Dib just decided to go ahead and give up on Earth? He tried not to let it get to him but it worried him a little, after all; he and Dib had been fighting over Earth for a very long time now. The question should be; why does he even care if the human gives up fighting over the planet, not Zim of course…stupid human and his giving up...

Zim’s antenna perked when he heard the call connecting, geez it had taken a while…what was going on in the Massive to make his leaders take so long? Ah well, all that mattered now was that they were now answering the call. When the two tall Irkens appeared on the screen Zim smiled happily. “My Tallest I have something to show you, I’ve been working on it for a few months now you see, and I just wanted to show you what I was going to do-“ The Irken was interrupted by Red.

“Zim, that’s enough, we’ve heard your stupid plans for the last time, we do not have patience for your idiotic behavior.” Red started, glaring at Zim. Zim gasped, antenna going back in disbelief as he heard his leader speak to him this way. “B-but-“ He was interrupted yet again. “No, we have listened to this for far too long Zim, you were never supposed to find a planet, we sent you out to die like the pathetic defective you are and yet you just end up being an even more annoyance.” Red continued on.

The smaller Irken could feel tears leaving his eyes as he listened to his leader tell him how pathetic he was; he couldn’t understand why they were treating him this way, Zim was nothing but loyal to his Tallest…all he wanted to do was show that he could be the best Invader there ever was.

“N-No, please my Tallest…Zim will prove himself!” He cried out, watching as his computer as forced to do the actions he was commanded to do; he watched as the screen went blank and screamed in pain as electricity surged through his body. The computer let him go after a while, leaving Zim with a horrible clicking in his PAK; his body hurt all over and cringed when the clicking went on.

“I-I hand no control Master.” The computer said, trying to defend himself.

Zim looked up and panted; he didn’t blame his computer…no it was the Tallest. The Irken curled up in a ball and began crying, soon to be joined by Gir who tried his best to comfort his Master the only way he knew how. The Irken hugged his robot close and tried to calm himself down; he had to continue on with things as they were, maybe if he could get Dib to fight with him again then things would go back to normal or something. Dib wouldn’t even have to know.

~~~Weeks later~~~

It had been a couple years since Dib and Gaz had seen their so called father, family time just sort of became a thing of the past and he hadn’t been home in so long; Dib had made it his job to take care of Gaz along with trying to provide for the family he had left. The big headed teenager had decided to devote all his time to taking care of his sister, which meant he had no time to defend the Earth from Zim; he had begun to see no point in it.

What was the point in protecting people when none of those idiots believed him anyway? All was peaceful in the Membrane household this Sunday evening of course, Gaz was currently sitting on the couch playing on her Game Slave; Dib was in the kitchen cooking dinner. Over the years Dib had sort of started a vegetarian diet, it was healthier of course and as far as he knew Gaz didn’t mind it either; she had stopped complaining and beating the crap out of him.

It was a surprising fact after realizing their father had probably just straight up abandoned them; she would act annoyed most times, but there was no malice behind her words. Dib was glad their relationship was starting a new, hell he never knew his sister was like this; he smiled as he was deep in thought and started returning to reality and put his and Gaz’s food on the plates before calling her into the room. He heard her saving her game and then closing her Game Slave, then a few moments later she joined him in the kitchen and sat down to eat.

“After dinner do your homework.” He told her, knowing he needed to do a bit of his own though he may let it go for now so he could fix up the house a bit, or look for a job. The amount of money he had taken out of his father’s account wouldn’t last them forever, and he figured he better get a job now before they ran out. Admittedly Dib had taken quite a lot out of his father’s account, but he didn’t think the other would miss it or anything; he was a pretty rich scientist after all.

Gaz gave an acknowledging grumble as she ate, to be honest she had cooled down quite a lot after Dib had decided to mainly care for her; she hated how he sometimes ran himself ragged trying to do things at times. Sometimes she wondered if Dib would just take a break sometime, instead he just continues to work tirelessly; she had stopped being so mean too. What amazed her the most was that Dib had stopped trying to defeat Zim, admittedly he wasn’t that good of an invader anyway…but still.

“So…have you talked to Zim?” She decided to ask, it was strange to not hear her brother constantly talk about Zim and what his plans were; he had been concentrating on trying to take care of her and what little they had left after their dad had stopped coming home. It seemed her brother was starting to grow up, though she did sort of miss his bursts of insanity; she supposed that was life though. Gaz did wonder what Zim was up to though; she had seen him around school with an air of confidence around him, but lately it sort of dwindled a bit and she wondered if Dib was aware of the fact that Zim seemed to be upset about anything.

Dib looked up from his food. “No, I’ve been a bit busy, I don’t really have time to worry about his plans…”

In reality, Dib truly did worry about what the Irken was cooking up; he hadn’t seen him at school in a couple of days and when he was there he didn’t seem like himself. He brushed the thought from his mind and continued to eat his food, earning an eye roll from his sister; she obviously hadn’t wanted to hear any of that. What was he supposed to say? That he would just stop what he was doing and chase after him or something? He couldn’t, just couldn’t.

Their dinner was interrupted when Dib heard noise at the front door; he got up from the table only to see Zim coming in and glaring at him. “Why have you not been trying to foil Zim’s plans!?” The Irken said, crossing his arms. “Do you not thing Zim is worth your time anymore? Do you not see Zim as a threat? Do you not think I can take over this stupid planet?”

Dib frowned. “No…Zim that isn’t it at all. Look, things have been a bit…hectic around here, our dad hasn’t been home in a few years so we’re assuming he just up and abandoned us. I haven’t been able to foil anything of yours, as much as I want to Zim…it’s just that I’ve picked up a lot more responsibilities.”

Zim’s ruby eyes looked at Dib for a moment. “Y-your parental unit abandoned you? Just like Zim’s leaders abandoned him…” He frowned and looked away. “Zim is sorry to bother you Dib-human; he will leave you alone now…” The Irken turned to walk away but Dib grabbed his shoulder. “No Zim…why don’t you sit down and I’ll give you some food.” He said, wanting to speak with the Irken more about what had happened to him. He made Zim sit down and grabbed one of the extra burgers he made. “Don’t worry, this isn’t real meat.” He assured as he put it on some bread and then sat down himself.

Gaz decided to get up from the table to give them some privacy, whatever had happened was between them for now; she didn’t want to interrupt them.

Zim looked at the burger Dib was offering him and looked at him. “If this hurts Zim…” He said, unsure and Dib shook his head. “It won’t I promise.” He assured and sat back in the chair. “So…your Tallest abandoned you?” He wondered as he looked at the Irken, who seemed very upset as the took a bite of the food, surprised that it didn’t hurt him; he then looked at Dib with a sigh.

“They told Zim that his mission was a lie, they sent me out her to die…there wasn’t even supposed to be a planet out this way.” Zim said and looked at Dib with a sad sigh. “Y-you win Dib, take me to your Earth authorities.” He whispered, earning a scoff from the Dib who was shaking his head. “Forget about that, I’m calling a truce, I think we could be friends.” The human said, earning a confused look from the Irken, who was unsure about this. “Alright…a truce, Zim and Dib will be friends.” The Irken smiled and shook Dib’s hand.

Dib watched him a moment and sighed, deciding he would do anything in his power to keep Zim safe for as long as he could.

#ZaDr #Zim #Dib #zimdib #Invader Zim #Fanfiction #ZaDr fanfiction

9 notes · View notes