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0aurelion-sol0 · 4 years ago

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SNK keeps on being amazing. ( A rant that is not really one. )

133.

Just this panel alone is able to confirm everything that I wanted from this manga.

Eren's condition has always been what I suspected.

Ever since he sided with his brother Zeke, who manipulated Marley in attacking Eldia to retrieve the founder and other titans. Something THEY DIDN'T WANT TO DO, because they were being pressured by many other countries and were not as powerful as before due to their lack of powerful weapons like the ones in the Middle Eastern Alliance which were able to PIERCE through the fucking Armored Titan.

THIS resulted in the fucking festival and we know what happened then. Dozens of people died including children continuing the cycle of hate that has been started for god knows how long. And Eren WILLINGLY took a part in it because he wanted his actions to be a little easier while he was going to genocide the whole fucking world.

INCLUDING his own island because let's be honest when Eren is done with the Rumbling, destroying every ecosystems. EVERYTHING that keeps a planet alive, his little island won't live for long.

"The ground... It's crying." CHAPTER 131 said by one of the goddamn kids he fucking killed.

Marley is now sure, let's fucking kill all Eldians.

He did his attack on Liberio, he betrayed everyone. Crushing Hange's every possibilities of finding a peaceful way of settling things down after having been hidden MANY useful informations by Eren, Zeke and his group but also the Azumabitos.

Sparking a civil war inside Eldia, leading to an Eldian supremacist group cause let's be honest when Floch killed that Marleyan and than gave his little first king Fritz speech, it was like seeing Hitler all over again and the Klux Klux Klan.

I MEAN... FLOCH OF ALL PEOPLE! A guy who has PTSD after seing dozens of his comrades died, their faces exploded by fucking thrown rocks. He bastardized Erwin's ideologies and no matter how good willing he was, he was just a dead man walking acting like a fool.

He also betrays his own party now, the Jeagerist by allowing the very people they tried to stop the power to stop him. By activating the Rumbling, he also caused the death of Eldians inside the walls as we've been shown with Hitch.

AND THE WORST... destroy every connection he has with his friends. Hurting them, putting them in danger by the very group he created and the Titans.

Oh but that's not all...

He uses the titan the same way Marley did it, with oppression and violence. He is not stopping the cycle of hate, he is continuing it. And it will have repercussions inside the very group of people he tried to defend.

People killed each other inside the walls and they will kill each other without it. Mikasa as shown us that when her parents got murdered and she almost became a slave.

And he killed Hange with these same titans. I don't care if they sacrificed themself. He didn't live up to what he preached. They died and Hange was someone close to him and was concerned with his well being. Maybe it was too late but they also had many other priorities as Hange was commander. They also fell into depression because of their position. One of his mentors and friends, one who tried to talk with him while he was in that cell planning to destroy the world...

talking to himself...

At this point, you know where I'm going with this. We've all suspected it, we all know it. Let's not be blind about it.

Eren is influenced by the Attack Titan. Not Ymir (at least I hope so and I think so), not Kruger and certainly not Grisha.

It's pretty clear now.

I mean Eren's change happens off screen, every time we see him he is completely different from what we used to know of him.

He barely cares about his friend and don't give me the bullcrap of (hE dOeS tHiS fOr tHeM.) If he was he would have secured them and put them in a place where they wouldn't interfere, he would have tried to convince them. HE WOULD HAVE COMMANDED FLOCH NOT TO HURT THEM.

He would have not commited genocide after knowing what it led to with Reiner, Annie and Bertholt.

That's not Eren. And the stupid argument of "hE's aLwAyS bEeN vIoLeNt". That's just bullcrap and it just destroy every bit of beautiful empathy we have seen of him. With Mikasa, Armin and Historia. Levi who he respected a lot.

It just isn't coherent. Every action he does is not coherent since the timeskip.

NOW HE'S CHALLENGING HIS FRIEND ? WTF ?

I mean is no one questionning this, doesn't it seem off from what we've seen of him.

Eren is no strategist BUT... he isn't stupid. Every sane person would know that these actions will not benefit anybody.

But... they still happened.

If we look back again, here is Eren being positive trying to put Armin in a good mood.

The outside world... endless possibilities. It's a man who wonders.

Yet, AT THE RIGHT MOMENT... he has a flashback of Faye. And his face just change.

Isn't it just weird ? Like at the right moment where he can have a positive outlook on thing. NOPE.

And this has been going and going and going...

Here:

Chapter 130.

Eren arrives in Liberio what does he see.

A flashback of his mother's death

I mean it's pretty clear now.

_________________________________________

Eren has been influenced and convinced by the Attack Titan that there's no way out. He's been reliving past memories of his and others, past memories that were traumatic. It put him in a state of depression and dread through 5 FUCKING YEARS. On top of that, he is able to see the future and what he saw will happen and has happened hence his reaction to Sasha's death.

A fucking mental breakdown.

Jesus Christ, I don't know if I've ever cursed that much in my life.

It's impossible to stop what is going to happen, because what is going to happen, needs to happen.

But as we know Sasha is in the afterlife with Erwin, Hange and the others. And we have been confirmed that this is the afterlife. So we have time-travelling, afterlife, 13 years curse, people who can turn into titans, parallel dimensions and Eren who can see through birds.

But the fandom said, no, the prospect of him being manipulated by the Attack Titan is impossible even after knowing it has special abilities.

I MEAN...

Umm... This has happened before. And I saw no one complain.

So why this ?

Is impossible ?

Especially when Eren's whole arc is about questionning his perspective of the world and becoming in control of his violence and rage. Having an agency. HELLOOOO!!!????

What better way of having the main threat of that being the very thing that causes all of his problems and his powers.

Doesn't this remind anyone of anything ?

Yep. The Uprising Arc. And who ? Historia, the girl whose all life, she couldn't act as herself or have any real agency.

Yes, you know the girl whose pregnant and decided to live the rest of her life Little House On The Prairie style. ( I mean I don't think it's her but... that's what it's looking right now. )

And who is a descendent of Ymir Fritz. With too much uncanney similarities between the two.

They could have said the Founder, Eren Jeager or something else but no they said... "It's the Attack Titan."

And it's not Ymir, if she was the one to control Eren. Why wouldn't she free herself on her own if she's able to do that ?

And in 131, she was clearly in a position where she was questionning her choice.

And perhaps she probably tried to stop Eren but the Attack Titan took over him and her. Using her powers as she is the founder.

And now just like Eren, she has no eyes. She is still a slave. Why ? I thought Eren freed her. So ? This is the only logical explanation right now.

I mean when is the last time we saw Eren.

He was sleeping inside his titan in 131. Having a dream about seeing his "sight" of freedom as a kid. And also potentially watching things with birds.

It's just weird. If he was fully in control, the characters wouldn't have questionned it and none of this weird shit would be happening.

He clearly doesn't have a free will.

This requires too much energy and Eren is a normal Eldian, not one of Royal Blood. Being both in Paths, watching this " sight ", communicating, watching with birds, moving his titan which is enormous and the thousands of colossal titans is clearly hard and too dangerous for only one person to do.

Isayama has fooled us all and me in the process.

All this time, it was that goddamn thing pulling the strings. And with the help of Isayama since he is the goddamn author of this series

In chapter 88, we learn the true meaning of Shingeki No Kyojin.

The beauty of the japanese language, as confusing as it is, can be translated by Attack On Titan, at least for us american and western audiences.

( yes because as someone pointed out in the comments, it's a mistranslation but since I don't understand how to give credit by linking because I don't understand how it works, i can't credit. So you can find the person in the comments. DO NOT JUDGE ME, tumblr is not the best place to post sometimes. )

But it's not the Attack on Titan anymore.

It's the Attack Titan.

( piece of shit is it's surname. )

#shingeki no kyojin #snk #attack on titan #eren jeager #snk eren #aot spoiler #snk spoilers #aot eren #the attack titan #I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK #THIS IS WHAT I CHOOSE TO BELIEVE #EUREKA #snk 133 #aot 133 #snk chapter 133 #ymir the first #ymir fritz

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your-highnessmarvel · 4 years ago

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From Bleak to Bright - Part Ten

All other parts on on my masterlist, link provided below.

AN: omg this chapter is so sad!!!

Warnings: angst, language

MASTERLIST - SERIES MASTERLIST

PART TEN

You cried so much that you forgot what it felt like to not have your breath caught in your throat, or tears in your eyes, wetness on your cheeks. Even if you’d barely spent a week with Loki, when he left you there, without even trying to get to you, the bond inside of you screamed. It’s even worse than when you couldn’t see him, when Natasha and Bruce were trying to get you to stay away. Now that’d you’d had a taste, you just wanted more, and the bond that had been a knot in your belly now felt like burning fire.

Thor took you in his arms and brought you back to a jet, but both the wound on your head and the one in your heart kept you from having any conscience of it. You were crying so hard it hurt, your stomach clenching, breaths hiccupping out of your lungs, eyes swollen.

The last thing you remembered before they put you under, pressing a mask to your face, was the wretched sobs coming from your throat.

Your dreams were nothing but black. It was like floating in space, with no stars, with no air, and the suffocation of the dream left you even more anguished than Loki’s departure.

Why hadn’t he tried? Why hadn’t he at least tried to take you with him, instead of looking at you with those eyes, his mouth parted?

You’d remember that look until the day you died.

Death was more peaceful than this.

When you woke up, Bruce was all over you, acting like the mommy you both never had. He was in your recovering room 24/7, bringing you everything you ever wanted. And when they moved you out of the recovery room and back at the Avenger’s compound, Bruce was still on your heels like a leech.

Nat kept her eyes on you every time you passed by the door, as if you’d pounce right back out there if she dared to leave you alone.

Steve kept giving you speeches about good and evil, how Loki’s bond with you did not mean what he did was right.

Tony dropped by once in a while, asking you questions on Loki, but all you knew was what you’d seen while at the loft, and revisiting those memories made you want to scratch your eyes out.

When you stopped talking, just shut down, they brought in a therapist. But even she couldn’t make you talk. All that anger was the only thing that made you remember him. And the bond desperately wanted you to remember him. Every single moment spent away from Loki, the bond called to him. It gave you stupid ideas to reach out somehow, to runaway, to seek out a way to get back to him.

But you couldn’t leave. Ever. The Avenger’s compound was on lock down, and you could not be left alone in it, ever. It was your own personalized prison.

You wished so desperately, but so quietly, that Loki would come for you. That he’d bring an army and get you back.

But the news you overhead - because they didn’t allow you to know anything about Loki’s whereabouts - suggested Loki couldn’t give more of a fuck about you. He’d terrorized more people across the Earth, all intent on “taking over the world” or whatever.

“He’s got Selvig,” you heard Thor telling Nat. You were lying on the couch and they didn’t know you were there as they prepared lunch. “He’s going to open a portal and bring the Chitauri army here.”

“If he does that,” Nat said with a hiss, “then it’s going to get far worse than it already is.”

You knew what she meant by that. The Avengers already had to take care of you - Loki’s soulmate - and adding an alien war to the pile was not going to facilitate their game.

And if Loki wasn’t coming for you, you wouldn’t make any effort to get back to him.

*** Eighteen days later, Three hours before the attack on New York ***

You didn’t like the movie. Nat had chosen it as the boys had taken over the gym to have “a boys workout” as they called it.

Nat had been careful in avoiding any romance movies, and had picked an action packed, hot boy movie with no story line and a lot of explosions. The main character was good-looking enough to distract you from the actual plot, and the fact that you did not have a phone - actually, not allowed - made you even more concentrated on the character.

It wasn’t long before the boys came back out, smelling like sweat and rubber. Lately, they’d all been hitting the gym often since Loki’s army was waiting to invade. Tony insisted on a seven-day a week training until they’d either caught Loki or killed him.

You swallowed the lump in your throat at the image of a dead Loki in your head. Thor’s presence didn’t really help either. He kept mentioning his brother as if you weren’t even there.

“You okay?” Bruce asked, tapping your knee as he took a seat beside you.

You wrinkled your nose. “Ew, Bruce, you smell so gross,” you whined, pinching your nose.

He smiled, the perpetual look of caution on his face he wore only around you dropping and softening his features.

“Come on,” he drawled, “it’s not that bad!”

But before you could answer, Tony’s cell rang. Everyone went deadly silent. You could feel the blood draining from your face as Tony brought the device up to his ear, his face severe.

Your fingers curled into fists. Your blood ran cold, colder than you’d ever felt as you watched Tony’s face tighten.

The first thought to enter your mind was Loki’s wellbeing.

Please tell me he’s fine.

Tony hummed and hung up. “Suit up,” he said, his tone deadly, “Loki’s opened up the portal. They’re dropping armed Chitauri in the streets.”

The entire living room activated, as if everyone around you had just been waiting for Tony to give the heads up. Nat launched off the couch, running upstairs to get her suit, followed my Steve and Clint - which yes, they’d manage to save between all this time.

Tony turned into the kitchen, mumbling to JARVIS.

Only Thor and your brother remained in the living room, hard like statues, their eyes emotionless.

“Who’s gonna babysit, huh?” you mumbled, but your words felt like ash on your tongue.

“I wager I should stay,” the God of Thunder said, pointing to you. “After all, my brother will attempt to get her out of here before he obliterates the planet.”

The soulmate bond would not let him leave you here to die.

Bruce shook his head, sweaty strands of hair sticking to his forehead. “She’s my sister,” he said. “And you’re more needed than me on the battlefield.”

You frowned, anger and heat crawling up your chest like sour vines. “Bruce, if he gets here and you’re the one standing between him and me, he will go through you,” you argued, crossing your arms over your chest.

“I can take him,” Bruce shot back. “And Thor will man the streets with the rest of the team. No one is going to take this planet and no one is going to take my sister! And until Loki is either dead or locked up until the end of your days, I will never allow you out of my sight!”

Thor knew better than to stay. He vanished from the living room even before Bruce had uttered the last words, either because of the look on your face or the privacy you and your brother needed.

Bruce had stood, towering over you, his face stricken with a mix of anger and annoyance, and you looked up at him from under your brows, heaving, feeling betrayal course through your veins.

“Bruce,” you muttered, trying to keep a lid on your anger. “I’m a grown woman. I don’t need my fucking brother looking after me forever.”

Bruce’s lip twitched. “That’s what you made us all think,” he seethed. “That’s what we thought. That we could trust you. And then you literally betrayed us and went to him with arms wide open.”

“He’s my soulmate, Bruce!”

“I don’t care!” At this point, your brother didn’t care that he was screaming and that Tony could hear him in the kitchen. “You’re a threat to yourself.”

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” you gritted from clenched teeth.

Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “I told you the bond is different for men,” he said. “He doesn’t care about love or passion or whatever he made you think! It’s about possession, owning what is meant to be his! And with Loki, there is no possible way the bond could be -”

“You don’t know that!” Now it was your turn to stand, facing your brother like you’d done so many times as kids, but this time, it was for something a little more severe. “You say all that shit about the bond for men but you don’t even know yours! You stopped yourself from knowing her because of the shit you did to yourself!”

You regretted the words before they left your mouth, but anger had made you open up your lips and spill anything hateful that would deter your brother. And it did. It so fucking did. His face fell from that angered scrunch to something more tragic, tormented.

Bruce had always counted on you to understand that the Hulk was not - absolutely not - Bruce.

And there you’d been, accusing him of creating this monster he hated so much.

Bruce took a step back, his eyes falling to the ground. “If you leave this house, I will not hesitate to use force.” And then he plopped himself on the couch.

You looked up, seething, spotting Tony leaning against the door to the kitchen. He shrugged, jerking his head to the stairs, silently signaling that maybe you should retreat to your room.

Feeling like a child who hadn’t gotten what she wanted, you ran up to your room, crossing Steve in the hallway and not even bothering with wishing him luck. For all you cared at that moment, they could all burn.

You felt like your insides would fall out as you tumbled into your room, slamming and locking the door. You sat on the edge of the bed, holding a pillow to your belly, hoping the pressure would prevent your insides from spilling out.

What had you done? Why had you gone and said those things? The image of Bruce’s face falling, that look of utter bewilderment and betrayal passing across his features, haunted you. You rocked on the edge of your bed, feeling the tears brimming behind your eyes, an odd sort of pressure building in your head.

You knew he was there before he even spoke. The air shifted, like a soft wind inside a glass jar, and the sound of fabric against fabric echoed in your otherwise dark room.

“He’ll kill you,” you said, biting on the edge of the pillow to keep from sobbing.

“I am not really here,” he answered.

Relief and disappointment. They would not be able to hurt him if they caught him in here. He wouldn’t be able to actually touch you.

“What do you want?” you uttered, still clutching the pillow, facing away from him.

“I can come and get you out of here,” he said, his voice calm, leveled.

You frowned. “You left me,” you whispered. “You fucking left me, Loki. You didn’t even try. And even if I wanted to go with you, my brother would rip you to pieces before you even set foot in here.”

You could sense Loki’s anger, rippling from him even in his illusion form. “You do not want to come with me?” His voice was rough, as if fighting to stay even. He was sad.

You clenched your jaw so tight it hurt. “No.” Then you straightened. “No. Leave me alone. You’ve caused enough damage in under a month of being my soulmate. I don’t want to see you again. Now get the hell out of my room before my brother has me put in an actual cell.”

You never got an answer.

When you turned to see if he was still there, the air was empty, dark, silent, as if he’d never even been there to begin with.

DON’T WORRY! I KNOW WHERE THIS STORY IS GOING. I HAVE A PLAN ;)

tags: @subtlemalice @yallgotkik @buckyandlokirunmylife @kaz11283 @legolas-bromance @shylittlemountain @tofeartheunknown @feelmyfckngsoul @kind-of-crazy-butthatsokay @caffiend-queen @tomhollandsslilslut @lady-loki-ren @nathan-no @rosaline-black @abundanceofcarolines @my-own-oracle @it-was-all-a-beautiful-dream @marvelouslovely @drbaureid @bored-as-hell-666 @youhavemyfantasticbeasts @theinfinitenerd @toe-vind-ek-jou @ink-and-starlight @blank-bakabane @sunshineonloki @holaamishamigos @palegoopbearlight @heyarely16 @pleaseexecuteme @athalahild @help-i-need-a-social-life @tapismyforte @coloursforyourportrait @celestialstarshadow @fukyouthink @lust-for-pan @thic-thor

#loki #lokixyn #lokixyou #lokixreader #loki x you #loki x yn #loki x reader #imagine loki #loki imagine #loki oneshot #loki fic #loki fanfic #loki fanfiction #soulmate au #angst

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kylorengarbagedump · 4 years ago

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Defy Your Authority: Chapter 3

Read on AO3. Part 2 here. Part 4 here.

Summary: You always hated tagging along on boys' night.

Words: 3300

Warnings: tw//kassanovella

Characters: Kylo Ren x Reader

A/N: HI LOOK AT ME I GOT THIS OUT IN TIME. I did indeed test positive for COVID so this was wrought through my fatigue--and may be why there is a delay for the next chapter. We'll see!

I hope y'all enjoyed this. I am doing my best to respond to all the feedback, but I'm like... so tired LMFAO. Thank you so much for your support and engagement. It literally means the world to me and is so encouraging.

I love you. ❤️

It didn’t matter how many times you told yourself to calm down. Your pulse bounded like a rabbit, every thump a reminder of your tightening chest. The walls of the Steadfast washed past in black-silver blurs, your mind wild with fear. Hux’s words replayed over and over, a cruel broadcast in your brain. Requests for response from the officers stationed there have gone unanswered.

Realistically, that could mean anything. Pessimistically, everyone was dead and you were homeless.

The thought of losing your crew weakened your knees. For four months, they’d been your solace and something akin to a family. Not like you’d had other real options on that little butthole of a planet--but you’d gotten lucky. You’d made a home out of Orinda; a home where you’d planned to return.

Lip pinched in thought, you joined Kylo in a new turbolift, crossing to the corner again as if he were a disease you wanted to avoid. You folded your arms over your chest, stared at your shoes. If you were homeless, it was anyone’s guess as to what you’d do or where you’d go next. It was clear that your supposed… whatever he was didn’t care for your presence.

Leather gloves scrunched in the silence. The lift arrived, and he stormed off, in expectation that you’d follow. You rolled your eyes, trailing behind him, allowing the need that had burgeoned between your thighs to deflate.

He’d said he would punish you. But you couldn’t think of a punishment worse than going four more months without his touch.

Kylo broke through another set of blast doors into the hangar, officers and Stormtroopers alike snapping to attention in his presence. If he noticed or cared, it didn’t show--he pushed through the quiet floor, furious stride carrying him toward one of the ugliest ships you’d ever seen.

Black durasteel panels formed a long, cylindrical frame, the bow outfitted with a row of rakish teeth and bordered by two guiding flaps. The engines looped like two smooth bricks at the stern of the vessel, the two ends connected by rows of external piping and guarded by a sprinkle of gunning stations. Its blocky build bore a resemblance to a prison transport--if that prison transport was then modified by an eager, unsophisticated halfwit.

He climbed the descended ramp in thundering strides, and you skulked in his wake, only to be greeted with one of the mercenaries you’d seen earlier. You paused, but Kylo passed the soldier, marching toward the stern and abandoning you in the main corridor. The man--at least, you were fairly certain he was a man--wore a mask embedded with breathing tubes, a huge, heavy club in his hands. The weight of his gaze anchored you to the floor. He said nothing.

“Uhm…” You tried to find an introduction, but none seemed appropriate. Grimacing, you offered him a half-hearted salute. “Sir.”

The man did not respond. Face burning, you scurried into the ship, hot on Kylo’s heels.

Few lights rimmed the interior of the vessel, your only guide the resonant thump of his boots along the durasteel slats. It was as dim as it was dank--the deeper you delved, the heavier the air. It was sticky with the stench of war, weighed with iron and brimmed with smoke. And underneath that, a scent you’d only describe as one owned by a pack of panting massiffs.

A chill crept over your scalp. This ship was empty of kindness, barren of mercy. You didn’t need the Force to know that nothing good had ever happened within these walls.

Your fear had you scampering to keep pace. Kylo led you through a flickering hall and turned a corner, swiped a switch. A set of blast doors opened to sharp steps, another pair of doors at the top. Those parted as you approached, light spilling from the Steadfast hangar through wide slats of red transparisteel. You’d arrived in the cockpit.

Six chairs lined the wrap-around dashboard. Two as pilot seats, two positioned at gunning and weapons systems, and two plugged toward the back, each in front of a monitoring station. One seemed to handle communications--or lack thereof, the radio receivers and wiring were all almost entirely torn out--and the other dedicated to internal surveillance. At the latter, a matrix of screens with live feed of the interior of the ship.

Even through the shadowed halls, you could distinguish a handful of prison cells. Each of them was torn apart, littered with metal scrap and half-shorn weaponry. The walls themselves were adorned with sloppy graffiti, one of them decorated by a mural of a massive, five-legged lizard beast. A huge red beam was bursting through its neck. Within the tiny walls were separate collections of cultured artifacts. You knew enough about war to know they were trophies.

Every room also possessed a rumpled, dirty bed. A flash of hall light near one cell, illuminating notches in the durasteel where the head of the bedframe met the wall. Like the frame had been slammed against it. Over and over and over.

You swallowed. On one of the feeds, a body slipped through the hall like a living shade. Pausing, you watched until it disappeared from view. The sound of footsteps whispered, then hummed, then roared. You spun, seeking out Kylo, finding him by the co-pilot’s chair, and darted into the pilot’s spot as if this was a totally normal occasion and you weren’t on a weird deathship surrounded by his weird death bodyguards.

Kylo turned to gaze at you, and the blast doors opened, stealing his attention. In the frame stood another would-be man, outfitted with a ribbed-weave robe and carting a huge plasma rifle. Filth smothered him from his boots halfway up his legs, and his head was obscured by a helmet, not unlike the one you’d known Kylo to wear. This one had two blinders on either side, like this man was a predator.

Like he was a hunter.

Whatever fear you felt for him, he certainly did not feel it for you. He glanced between you and Kylo, trying to ascertain the relationship that resulted in your presence.

“She’s in my seat.” His voice was grainy, like glass on stone, distorted underneath his mask.

You held up your hands in deference. “Hey, sorry. I had no idea this was your seat.” You went to stand, frowning at Kylo, who was studying your every movement. Really had to love how helpful he was being.

“Hurry up,” the man said.

Nodding, you wriggled around the chair with your hands still raised, as if this would offer any form of protection between you and this fully armed guard. He squared his feet and stalked toward the pilot’s seat. You side-stepped him, but he shoulder-checked you despite it, and you stumbled back, wincing.

“What the f--”

Kylo Ren’s saber screamed to life, slicing a divide between the hunter and the chair. He stalled, fists balled, neck rolling to stare at Kylo. You gulped, rubbing your arm, your eyes flipping between him and the crackling rod of plasma only a foot away from the man’s waist.

“Sir.”

“Careful,” Kylo said.

He snorted. “Of a Lieutenant--”

“Kuruk.”

Kuruk pivoted to you, and you met his stare somewhere behind the shield of metal. Whoever was underneath the helmet was rending you apart in his mind.

He shrugged his shoulder and looked back to Kylo.

“Excuse me. Sir.”

The saber disappeared, and Kuruk took his seat at the dashboard. You flushed. At least he’d done that much. You snuck to the back of the cockpit, thinking to sit at the surveillance station, but pausing there too. Every one of these seats could have an owner whose name you didn’t know. Glimpsing Kylo, you threw up your hands in confusion.

Kylo caught this, but did not acknowledge it. “Resistance activity was spotted on the scanners. Get Cardo and Trudgen on the turrets. Ushar gunning.”

“Yes, Master.”

Your eyes widened. Master?

Kuruk fussed with the dashboard, relaying the information, and you gazed at Kylo, examining his body in the same routine you’d practiced nightly with your hands between your legs. Fuck, he was big--the thick expanse of chest rose with a slow breath, and you watched it fall, then watched his neck tense as he turned, attuned to your observation. Heat rushed your spine when you linked eyes. His jaw stiffened.

“Get in your seat, Lieutenant.”

“Oh,” you replied. “Is this my seat? I didn’t know.” You sank into it, shooting him a wide, sparkling smile. “Thank you, Master.”

Kylo swallowed.

The blast doors opened again, the soldier you’d seen at the entrance bursting through and tromping to a gunner console--you assumed this was Ushar. He tossed his club to the side, flicking on the controls and calibrating the sights. The ship itself bellowed to life, rising from the floor, and you gripped the seat, unable to force your focus from Kylo--just as he was unable to force his from you.

The two of you were in competition. That much was clear.

You just couldn’t figure out what the loser would be impaled with--or if that would make them a winner, instead.

The Buzzard shot into the stars, coasting in a direct path toward Orinda. You broke the staring contest, glimpsing the little planet through the cockpit, pulse picking up again. Requests for response unanswered. Once you got on the ground, you’d go find your crew and make sure they were safe. That’s all you needed to know. Whether or not Kylo wanted you to come back was irrelevant.

You met his gaze again, his irises hiding a storm. Blood bit your cheeks.

Mostly.

“Nothing detected on the sensors,” said Ushar.

Kylo glanced at him then turned toward the transparisteel, searing you with a leer before he sat at the dash. You shivered. Whatever you’d done to make him feel this way, his brief glimmers of favor only made it worse. Maybe you did want to fuck him so you could get a chance to figure it out. Or maybe it was just frustrating to know him in ways no one else had while simultaneously knowing almost nothing at all.

The three men operated in silence as you approached Orinda. From space, it seemed normal. With no starcraft popping up, there was a chance it was a false alarm. That it had been a fly-by. You held your breath when you broke the atmosphere, flames whipping the transparisteel. The Buzzard trembled with gravity, diving toward the ground, greens and browns and blues splitting to trees and fields and sea.

Then a flash of light, smog blooming to life, tiny fires swallowing your narrowing field of vision. Air froze in your lungs, nails biting the hard back of the seat.

“Fuck.” You launched from the chair, scrambled toward the dashboard. “No, no no…”

Kylo spun to face you, but you ignored him, shoving between the two pilot seats to crane over the console and peer through the transparisteel.

He stood, looming over you. “Back to your seat.”

His words swum in the tsunami of your mind. The outpost was smothered with smoke. The closer you drew, the dimmer the horizon, until the Buzzard landed on the border of the eruption, the entire sky encompassed with billowing black fog. Every muscle in your chest felt like wire around your ribs, forcing the breath from your lungs. You shook your head, hands starting to tremble.

They were out there. They could be dead.

The blast doors opened, and you whirled to leave, but Kylo caught your shoulder and stilled you.

“What the--”

“Gather the rest,” Kylo said. He was speaking to Ushar. “Spread out and secure the perimeter.”

Ushar nodded, grabbed his club, and disappeared down the steps. Huffing, you wrenched yourself free from Kylo’s grip and stomped toward the exit only to be paralyzed by a very familiar nothing. You growled, unable to even make a fist.

“Dude!”

“You will remain on board the Buzzard until I return.”

The fact you couldn’t turn to look him in the eye made you even angrier. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” you said. “That’s my crew. They’re my responsibility.”

“Stand down.”

You snorted. “Hell no.”

Two long, slow steps brought him behind you. His presence consumed you like a black hole, crushing you in darkness.

His chest met your back. “Every one of your little quips has gone unchallenged.” Another step, and his mouth fell to your ear. “Do not test me here.”

Warmth flooded your thighs. If he didn’t like being challenged in front of his soldiers, he shouldn’t have put you all in the same space. His own fault.

“I don’t care,” you said. “These are my crew members. You don’t know them. I do. Let me go.”

“No.”

“Why are you even doing this?” you said. “You’re the one who fucking brought me here!”

A pause. Silence settled between you, the only sounds the distant noise of destruction and your anxious, heaving breath. You heard him exhale.

“Kuruk,” he said. “Scout and support.”

Behind you, Kuruk stood, followed by the metal click of him grappling his rifle. You watched, stuck to your spot, as he charged through the cockpit and down the steps. The blast doors to the stairs shut behind him. Then the ones to the cockpit. And you two were alone.

Kylo snarled, snatched your throat--he was a swoop of rage, swiveling and slamming your back to the wall. You seethed, squirming under his grip, unable to hide the smirk curling on your lips as you tried to pry his wrist away. He subsumed you like a star subsumed space, bright hot and pure, and you were a simple nothingness, addicted to his heat.

“You think you have earned my submission,” he muttered. “You have not.”

You wheezed, gazing into his eyes, finding an electric spark of hunger and fury within them. Four months without this had been far, far too long. As long as he was treating you like a stranger, you didn’t want to give in. But that wouldn’t stop you from making this torture for him, too.

“Then what have I earned,” you purred, “Master?”

He sucked in air through his teeth, pinning your body flat--his chest rolled with excitement, his voice raked over lust. “The further you push me, the worse your earnings.”

You bit your lip, bucking your hips against his, feeling a growing bulge between his legs. “You’re ridiculous.” You’d thought he’d wanted you to go to Orinda. Maybe you’d been wrong. “What, is this because I left?”

A huff. “No.”

“Then I don’t get it.” You rolled your pelvis into him again, and he jerked forward, crushing you to the wall. “Why don’t you want me around? What did I do?”

Kylo shifted, panting into your neck, his mouth centimeters from your skin. “Not what you did,” he said, clutching your throat tighter. “What you saw. It will not happen again.”

Some bit of that stung. You saw inside of his mind. “You act like I made you admit it!” It was difficult to speak under the pressure of his palm. “You could’ve just let me go.”

“Hm.” His hand squeezed, and he dragged his hardening bulge along your thigh. “Perhaps I should have.”

So that’s what this was about. Whatever had happened, he’d decided that what he’d shared with you was weakness. And being Supreme Leader meant he couldn’t be weak. Meant he couldn’t have room or time for you. All you were was a living regret.

Frowning, you glared at him, driving your thumbs into the meat of his wrist and throwing his hand from your neck.

“Yeah,” you said, shoving him back. “Perhaps you should’ve.” His eye twitched. A screeching blast broke the air, and you tensed. “I’m going to find my crew.”

You stalked out of the cockpit, blast doors parting for you as you hit the stairs and cut through the halls back to exit the Buzzard. It was one thing to abandon you. One thing to make you leave. One thing to act like he’d never held you, kissed you, or whispered your name.

But it was an entirely other thing to imply he wished it never would’ve happened. The thought pierced your heart, and you steeled your jaw, tried to pull the pain free. You didn’t have time to play Kylo Ren’s newest Game of Repressed Emotion. You had friends to find.

The ramp to the Buzzard was already down, and you hurried to the ground, smacked with the scent of blazing fuel. Embered ash battered your eyes, and you coughed, covering your face with your arm. Under the wailing wind of heat, you heard Kylo approaching the exit, so you trudged toward the outpost, seeking out any hint of life.

“Tonis!” Your voice was eaten by the flames. “Mirna! Lin!” Narrowing your gaze to protect it, you pushed toward the hangar, knowing that if they were anywhere, they’d be there.

Sweat crawled down your nape, scattering over your lower back as you drew nearer to the fire. The mercenaries were nowhere to be found, but you supposed that was okay, since they didn’t seem very fond of you regardless. The hangar was beyond the completely engulfed fueling station and therefore impossible to see, but as you curved around the fire, you could discern slivers of it. Edges of the building, and then whole sections.

And your stomach dropped.

Another couple of steps, only to discover the hangar scorched, collapsed in on itself like a shattered greenhouse. You stopped a scream and bolted, careening toward the wreckage to see if you could find anyone or anything among the debris. Thick durasteel girders stuck out of the heap like nails, the ridged ceiling crumpled in pieces and mirroring the fire’s light.

“Tonis!” Your back burned from the heat, but you didn’t care. You tried to find a way in, a way to pull something apart, a way to find someone. “Mirna!” You grabbed a huge wooden beam, hands slipping on the soot, but you fruitlessly tugged anyway. “Lin!”

A ragged shard of wood ripped your palm, and you shrieked, cradling it to your breast in shock. Cursing, you left the mass alone, following the foundation around the corner, hoping against hope they escaped out of the back and were huddled behind the hangar. You approached the corner, calling their names, louder and louder. They weren’t coming to meet you. Again, and louder, and you turned the corner, pleading with the Force that they’d be there.

Of course, they weren’t.

In front of you was a cluster of discarded starship parts, all outdated or malfunctioned or busted. It was a collection you’d gathered since you’d arrived--arranged and created when more parts were added. Each fragment was unique, and when building it with your crew, it sometimes resembled a sculpture. Under the clouds of smoke, it looked like a pile of junk.

Growling, you rushed it, kicking the base and sending it all tumbling to the ground. Your furious hands found purchase and hurled whatever they had grabbed to pieces. A scream shook your chest, and you jammed your foot against a solar array panel, cracking it in half. Underneath, you found an old, pretty fuelcell splinter. You grabbed it in your bloody hand and hissed, pulverizing it with your fist. Grunting, you threw the dust into the air, watching as the firewind ate it all.

You heard the rustle of grass behind you. Your shoulders sagged.

“There are no signatures of life remaining at this station.”

Sighing, you turned to Kylo. He was watching you, face blank.

“Yeah.” You wiped your palm on your pant leg, smearing it with blood. “I know.”

His eyes flicked to your hand for the shortest, sharpest moment. Then he met your eyes. “The silencer is still in need of repair.”

You frowned, averting your gaze. “I don’t want your pity.”

“You’d prefer to sleep outside in melted trash.”

“Maybe.” You shrugged a shoulder, crossed your arms. “Dumpster fire and all that.”

Kylo Ren held you in his stare, cape fluttering and hair rumpled in the breeze. Tears stung your eyes. You wanted nothing more than to run into his arms.

“Come.”

He turned the corner. Clearing your throat of sadness, you followed him. You allowed him to guide you through the devastation, past the flames, and up the ramp until you were safe in the Buzzard cockpit. And then he left, likely to gather his men before departure.

And then you were alone.

#kylo ren smut #kylo ren x reader #kylo x reader #kylo ren fanfiction #kylo ren #defy your authority #fya2 #fanfiction problems #COVID CUTIE BRINGING THE CONTENT........

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alarajrogers · 4 years ago

Text

Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

I wrote a thing. It is a very long thing. It probably contains very little information that most people didn’t already know, but it puts it together in a way I’ve never seen it before.

Most of it will be behind the cut but you get the first few paragraphs out here where you can see them.

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Everything Makes Sense: The Human Body and Energy

So you know how you read all this bullshit about “X improves your energy” and “Y gives you quick energy but then you crash” and “Z improves your metabolism” and it all just sounds like words? Technobabble from the world of science fiction television shows?

It may surprise you to know that practically everything you’ve ever personally observed about energy levels makes sense, as do a lot of the layperson observations you’ve heard in your life, and that there are really good reasons why being sick makes you sleepy and why exercising hard on weekends when you’re a slug all week is bad for you, and that all of this is very understandable from a layperson perspective. Or maybe not, maybe you know all this. I’ve spent years knowing all this, but recently it just dawned on me that it’s all interconnected. All the things I know are pieces of an amazing whole.

So I’m going to explain this revelation I’ve had, and when you read it, my guess is you’ll come away thinking “But I knew all that already… but now I understand how it all works together!”

Metabolism

First, let’s talk about metabolism. What is it?

We usually use the term to mean something like “the speed at which my body does the things I’m not consciously controlling it to do.” Like, “I have a really fast metabolism, so food just runs right through me!” Or “I have a very slow metabolism so I have to be real careful about how much I drink.”

To metabolize means for a living thing to process something it has ingested. Metabolism is usually used to mean the process of converting food and nutrients into energy. Sometimes we use it to mean the levels of efficiency or speed at which a body does this, which is where we get “a fast metabolism”. Here, I’m going to try to use metabolism specifically to mean the process by which your body converts stuff to energy.

Life Energy

No, a vampire from an alien planet can’t suck it out of you, but you really do have life energy! Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive.

The fundamental molecule of life energy, the thing that if it wasn’t there no life processes would be possible because they would not have any energy to work, is a battery called ATP. Its full name, adenosine triphosphate, is a bit of a mouthful, but it basically means that this is a molecule with three phosphorus atoms.

You may have learned in chemistry class, once upon a time, that chemical reactions can be endothermic – they use up energy – or exothermic – they emit energy. Fire is an exothermic reaction; you get it started with heat, usually, but it generates a lot more heat than it took to make it burn in the first place. Your baking soda and vinegar volcano from the science fair a long time ago is also an exothermic reaction. You didn’t put any energy into it to make it bubble like that. On the other hand, melting ice is endothermic. You don’t get any energy when ice melts. It uses up energy to melt.

When ATP releases one of its phosphorus atoms, it becomes ADP – adenosine diphosphate, meaning just two phosphorus atoms! This is an exothermic reaction. ATP turning into ADP is what powers pretty much every single endothermic reaction in your cells. It’s the battery that you run on.

Charging the Battery

Fortunately ADP is rechargeable! An endothermic reaction turns it back into ATP.

The mitochondria do this. You may be thinking, “aren’t they something the lady who wrote A Wrinkle In Time made up?” And you’d be close. The mitochondria appeared in the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door. Madeleine L’Engle didn’t make them up, but she did make up “farandolae”, little creatures in the mitochondria, which don’t exist as far as we know. (Although, if scientists do discover little thingies in the mitochondria that let it do its work, they’ll probably name them farandolae because scientists are big geeks.)

Mitochondria in reality are organelles, components of a cell that do work. They’re independent organelles, which have their own DNA and do all their own reproduction. The only other things we know that work like that are chloroplasts, which are only found in plants… so far. (Personally I think being able to photosynthesize from my skin would be awesome and I am eagerly awaiting the day that genetic engineering allows us to put chloroplasts in human skin, but this isn’t a thing yet.)

Mitochondria combine glucose – a molecule made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, in the formula C6H12O6 – with oxygen, an element that comprises about 22% of our atmosphere, to create carbon dioxide (there’s that di again, meaning two – carbon dioxide is one carbon and two oxygens), water (our old favorite, H2O, sometimes called “dihydrogen monoxide” as a joke about weird chemical names), and enough energy to put a phosphorus atom on a molecule of ADP. Now it’s ATP again! Glucose and oxygen combine in an exothermic reaction.

(Ever wonder why all life on earth depends on the sun? Converting CO2 and H2O into glucose and oxygen is an endothermic reaction. Plants use their chloroplasts to absorb energy from the sun so they can convert CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen. Then animals, like us, eat the plants to get the glucose, and breathe the oxygen. Without the sun, chloroplasts wouldn’t work, plants wouldn’t make glucose, and we’d all starve.)

The Basic Things We Need For This To Work

There are a lot of components going into this system.

The mitochondria need a steady supply of oxygen, but oxygen, being a highly reactive molecule, can’t just float around in the bloodstream like glucose can. (Glucose is iffy too, more on this later.) Hemoglobin, a molecule made with iron, bonds to oxygen and can carry it around safely. Red blood cells are full of hemoglobin. They float in the bloodstream, which goes everywhere in the body. Vitamin B12 is involved in the production of these red blood cells. The bloodstream also carries glucose, but hopefully not too much of it, because glucose is also a reactive molecule and if you have too much, it starts tearing shit up.

The lungs draw in the oxygen that the red blood cells carry, and expel the carbon dioxide. The heart forces the blood to go around and around in this system of blood vessels. The pancreas makes insulin, the hormone that binds up the glucose and regulates how much of it is available in your bloodstream for your cells to take. The speed with which all of this happens can be regulated by thyroid hormone, which requires iodine, and also a working thyroid.

You need all that and a million other things for the system to work perfectly. If the system does not work perfectly, you’re not making as much energy as you could be. That’s pretty obvious.

But here is the thing that’s obvious once you spell it out, and yet, we so often behave, as a society, like we don’t understand it or don’t believe it:

An optimized system still puts out a finite amount of energy at any given time.

If you were in perfect health, right now, you would still have a limited supply of life energy to work with.

We know this. But we behave as if it’s not true. As if we can power through exhaustion with willpower, because being exhausted is a flaw in the system, rather than a really obvious application of the laws of thermodynamics.

What Uses All That Energy?

We also often don’t think about the systems that use those energy, and what they use it for.

The Brain:

The brain is a huge energy hog, using up a whopping 20-25% of all of the body’s energy while awake and conscious (or dreaming – a dreaming mind is as active as a conscious one.) Asleep (but not in REM sleep), the brain still uses about 85% of that, which, lemme do some math here, is 17% if the waking mind was using 20%. A living being can drop to about 50% of that with certain types of anesthesia, but that – the minimum required for a brain to keep a body alive – is still 10% of total energy consumption.

It's not clear how much energy on top of that a very active brain needs. Estimates of how much energy complex and difficult thought consume range from 100 calories a day to 6000! It’s plainly not much on top of basic consciousness, or there’d be no such thing as a fat person doing highly intellectual work all the time, but it’s evident that it’s something.

The Muscles:

We all know about this one. Hard-working muscles use up a lot of energy. How much? Well, swimming, one of the few activities we do that can fully engage the leg muscles and the arm muscles to the same high level at the same time, can burn as much as a quarter of a normal daily intake of calories in a single hour. Most of the time our muscles are not working that hard, but anything more strenuous than vegging out on a couch does burn resources.

The Immune System:

This guy. This guy is the one everyone forgets. The immune system is hard at work all the time protecting you from infections (and, if you’re one of the zillions of people who have allergies or autoimmune disorders, things like cat dander, pollen, and yourself apparently), but when an infection has actually taken hold, the immune system goes into high gear. Most of the responses you experience when you’re sick – nausea, coughing, sneezing, runny or stuffy nose, fever – are actually things the immune system is doing to you to get rid of the infection. Nausea, to expel it through the mouth. Diarrhea, to expel it through the anus. Coughing, to expel it from the lungs, and sneezing, to expel it from the sinus cavities. Mucus, to trap it so it can be expelled. Fever, to kill it, because germs are a lot more sensitive to temperature variation than you, a large multi-celled creature, are. It takes a lot of energy to do all that. Plus there’s white blood cells and T cells and antibodies, all doing their thing.

The Digestive System:

Ever hear the expression “It takes money to make money?” That’s true of life energy as well. The work of moving your food all along the gastrointestinal tract, breaking it down, squeezing and mushing it, making the enzymes to convert it to molecules small enough to get out into the bloodstream, and then pushing the waste out – that’s a lot of effort. There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

The Reproductive System:

Making sperm costs energy. Making a lining for an egg and then expelling it if it’s not used costs energy. Firing up the hormones that cause libido costs energy. And then there’s all the energy burned by the muscles in actually having sex.

Heart and Lungs:

Typically we don’t think of these things as needing a lot of energy because, quite simply, your body’s going to take the energy it needs to run these essential systems whether you want to or not. There’s no re-allocation of baseline energy away from the heart and lungs. But in exercise, when the oxygen demands and the needs of the muscle cells to get more and more fuel increase, the heart and lungs need more energy too.

This is a rough breakdown. You have other systems – we haven’t talked about kidneys and liver and stuff like that – but we’re going to look at these systems in our simplified model.

Everything takes energy. And you have a finite pool of it. Eating more food does not give you more energy – your mitochondria can only work as fast as they can work. If you weren’t at capacity, then yes, food can give you a boost, but it consumes energy first because digestion is work, and if you’re at capacity, any extra calories get stuffed away as fat because extra circulating glucose is bad for you.

By the way, this is why sugar gives you a quick pick-me-up, and should probably be considered a stimulant! Sugar – sucrose, which is basically 2 glucose molecules smushed together, or fructose, which is glucose but in a different shape – supplies your bloodstream with glucose fast, with very little extra work. And it can start doing it in your mouth, because your saliva can break sucrose into glucose and your mucuous membranes can pull glucose into your bloodstream.

But as soon as you start ingesting sugar, your pancreas revs up your insulin production (assuming you don’t have diabetes, or that if you do, it’s type II and not so advanced that you basically don’t have your own insulin anymore.) Insulin, you may recall, is the hormone that keeps circulating glucose levels in your bloodstream down to the levels where the mitochondria can use all of it and there isn’t a lot extra. Extra glucose that nobody is using damages your blood vessels, making them harder and less elastic, which is why circulation problems are a big thing with diabetes, and why my feet are SO FUCKING COLD all winter, not that I’m bitter or anything.

So. You ate sugar, and your body prepared to balance your glucose levels with a lot of insulin. But then all you ate was sugar. You didn’t add fats or proteins or complex carbohydrates in any significant amounts to keep the glucose coming after the initial burst was over. So now you have all this insulin and it went and picked up all the extra glucose and now you know what? Not only is there no extra glucose anymore, there isn’t even enough to keep the home fires burning! Woo, dizzy. Low blood sugar hits the brain hard, because the brain is the energy hog, and feels any dip in energy levels before any other body systems do.

In short, you may have given yourself a quick burst of extra fuel, but in the long run, it may actually make your energy levels drop. And if you ate a substantial meal to go with that quick snack… now we have to send power to the digestive system. And that is why eating more food does not give you more energy unless you’re starving. (Or diabetic, more on this later.)

Energy Trade-offs:

You know the drill. Finite amount of energy. Many systems competing for it. Brain takes the most. So what happens when one system suddenly needs extra?

1. Complex thought shuts down.

I know you’ve experienced this. You’re overtired, or you’ve just done hard exercise, or you have eaten a big meal, or you are sick. You can no longer brain at the levels you expect. Study? Maybe, but retention and comprehension will suuuuck. Math? Probably not. Reading? Depending on how difficult reading in general is for you, maybe this is just the thing, but the topic’s going to be light and easy to comprehend, like fiction, or maybe this article here that you’re reading. Or, maybe reading’s out of the picture. Watching TV? For most people, this is ideal, but if you’re autistic and have an auditory processing disorder and facial recognition issues, hoo boy. Not that I know anybody like that, or anything.

2. Muscles need to be at rest.

Muscles don’t have to move a lot. You could be sitting on a couch. You could be laying in a lawn chair. You’re awake, but you don’t want to move your muscles because it’s hard.

When what you lack to burn your fuel is not glucose, but oxygen, you can get by sometimes. As long as there’s some oxygen. But the byproduct of making energy without enough oxygen is called lactic acid. Which is acid, and it’s in your muscles. Not good! Nobody likes extra acid in places where extra acid shouldn’t be. So your muscles burn. The good news is, the body breaks down lactic acid pretty fast. The bad news is, you may be building it up faster than the body can break it down.

Hard exercise? You’re gonna feel the burn. But you may run into this same problem attempting to walk to the bathroom if you’re very very sick, because all the energy has been re-routed to the immune system, so there’s nothing there for the muscles.

3. Consciousness itself shuts off.

The unconscious brain still consumes a lot of energy, but we’re cutting what we can, and you being conscious is not helping here. Shut down anything we don’t immediately need to use. That includes consciousness.

If you are bleeding out and there’s not enough blood in your body to carry the fuel –

If your blood pressure is low or your heart has stopped working and so the fuel isn’t moving fast enough to where it needs to be –

If your circulating glucose is too low because there’s too much damn insulin –

If there isn’t enough water in the body, so blood pressure drops because blood is mostly water –

If you have a fever, which makes all the chemical reactions in your body go kind of screwy and inefficient –

-- You pass out. You cannot remain conscious because your body has to cut services to keep the whole thing going, and this is how.

Sometimes stupid shit triggers this reaction. Like vasovagal syncope, which can happen from triggers like extreme emotional stress or the sight of blood. Like getting blood drawn (which is probably also vasovagal syncope but seems to have a more physiological basis than some of the other things that can cause it, given that it can occur in people who are absolutely cheerful and fascinated by the fact that blood is leaving their body and not upset about it at all. Not that I would know anything about that, either.)

4. Or, you are highly encouraged to shut down consciousness.

The digestive system is hard at work. There’s no emergency, per se, but this work would get done a lot faster and with less stress if you would just go the fuck to sleep. Thus, “carb coma” or what the cartoon “The Boondocks” called “The Itis.”

The immune system is busting its ass. Things aren’t so serious that you need to pass out. Falling asleep vs. fainting is kind of like shutting down your computer vs. suddenly losing power. You definitely want to go to sleep if the situation is not dire enough to require immediate shutdown of consciousness.

Your body needs to run nightly maintenance. Several systems that operate in low gear when you’re awake need to rev up, and your brain actually needs to do some shit to organize your memories while you’re not recording new ones, and extra energy is needed for the immune system because it’s doing nightly sweeps. Or something like that. We don’t really understand everything that sleep does for us, but we know that if we don’t get it:

- The pancreas doesn’t work right, resulting in getting fat and maybe diabetes

- Also high blood pressure

- Also memories are kind of shit

- Also the immune system doesn’t work too well

We don’t actually know how your brain would operate without sleep if it wasn’t saturated with the “go the fuck to sleep” chemical GABA, which is broken down while you’re sleeping. GABA does a lot of things, but in this context, GABA builds up in your body to send the signal to your brain to stop using so much damn energy and sleep already. And if you attempt to function mentally with high GABA levels… well, you can’t, okay? Your brain is full of GABA receptors that tell it to turn things off. So those things are turning off. How well does your computer run when it's in the middle of shutting down? I thought so.

(Actually we kind of do. There are chemicals that block tiredness. People who use these chemicals can function on significantly less sleep at significantly higher cognitive levels than people who are not on these chemicals. But the stuff like the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the immune system weakening… all that appears to still be happening. Sleep happens for a reason.)

5. Other systems that are highly dependent on energy levels shut down.

- Exercised your ass off? Now your digestive and immune systems have been tamped down because the energy went to your muscles. Eating when the digestive system isn’t working at full capacity results in stomach cramps or nausea. Forcing the digestive system to work when the muscles need maximum energy levels causes muscle cramps. This is why you’re not supposed to go swimming after a big meal – muscle cramps while swimming can kill you.

- Ate a big meal? I bet you are not feeling like having sex right now. Probably also not winning any chess tournaments. And don’t move around too much!

- Feeling sick? Cough, runny nose, sneezing? You’re probably not too hungry. (Especially not when you have a fever. Fevers burn a lot of energy.) You probably do not feel much like having sex. Your muscles ache and you don’t want to move around much. And you are sleepy.

- Feeling randy, baby? You are probably not also feeling hungry.

What Happens When We Game The System?

I briefly mentioned stimulants above – chemicals that artificially reroute energy levels back to the brain, improving concentration and mental acuity, at the expense of everything else.

Well, not literally everything else. Stimulants suppress pain to some slight extent, increase heart rate and blood flow, and make your muscles more eager to do work. Many people report that stimulant use also makes them horny. So those systems are in good shape too. But you know what took a hit? Your digestive system and your immune system. Now, your digestive system… you can feel that immediately. People take stimulants in order to lose weight, sometimes, because they’ll suppress your appetite. Energy rerouting to brain and muscles means the body shuts down digestion. What’s already there will get processed but let’s not add to it, okay?

You did not feel your immune system slow down and weaken. You won’t, today. But maybe tomorrow you’ll get sick. Maybe the day after that.

Oh, but you gotta work, right? The boss won’t tolerate you not coming in. So you stuff yourself full of stimulants – pseudoephedrine, dries up your nose and keeps you awake; caffeine, keeps you focused – and go to work anyway. With energy being forced away from your immune system to keep your brain and your muscles working. That’s not gonna work out well for you, now is it. You wanna pull the military off the front lines to have a parade, when you’re being actively invaded?

Keeping your brain functioning at full capacity, continuing to use your muscles, when you’re sick, will slow your recovery time, because you took the energy away from your immune system to pump it through your brain. Because the amount of energy you can produce is finite, and relatively fixed.

Oh, you can improve some things. Your blood and everything it does, and practically every chemical reaction in your body, is totally dependent on the presence of water, so stay well hydrated. Stock your body well with the vitamins and minerals you need to make all these things function. Are you getting enough oxygen, citizen? Eat food, but with the right balance of carbs and proteins and fats so that your digestive system isn’t overtaxed, you don’t end up with an insulin spike, and you’re not wasting resources. If your system lacked any of these things, then you can improve metabolic efficiency, and your energy levels, by providing them.

But stimulants can’t give you energy. They can make you feel like they did because the energy is going to places where your conscious mind can feel it… but they didn’t increase the amount of energy you have. Resources are being taken away from other areas. Your immune system is taking a serious hit right now. And you can’t feel that, but it’s gonna fuck you up later.

Brains That Have To Work Extra Hard At Basic Stuff

This is a simplified model, but: all brains are full of little modules that do things. And consciousness, ego, is actually pretty bad at most stuff. The little modules that do things are like dedicated co-processors for specific tasks. Spatial processing. Language acquisition. Basic math. Recognizing faces. Managing executive functions.

The neurotypical mind comes with a basic set of things that neurotypicals don’t even realize exist unless they study psychology or spend a lot of time with neurodivergent people, because they all have them. The thing that recognizes faces. The thing that processes sound into speech. The thing that generates speech from thought. The thing that picks up social rules. The thing that can look at letters and figure out easily and quickly how to pronounce them. The thing that tunes in to body language cues. The thing that’s always aware of how loud you’re talking. The thing that enables you to kind of guess how much time has passed. The thing that lets you control what you’re paying attention to. The thing that does basic math.

Many of these little modules need to be trained – language and math and reading don’t suddenly appear in people’s brains, they’re taught – but once trained, the little modules just… do the thing. The person doesn’t have to think about it. They no longer experience any sense of “I’m doing a thing”, it’s just happening.

Not all neurodivergent minds have these things. Many such minds have found a workaround. Use conscious processing power, not black box processing power, because the black box isn’t there, but main cortex is. You can apply intelligence to solve problems like “who is that guy, I know that I know him” and “what are the words those people are saying” and “how do I turn those letters into a sound”. “How do I keep track of how much time I am spending on this?” “How do I make myself do shit that bores me?” We use conscious mind processing power, not the much more efficient black boxes that people aren’t even aware they have.

But what happens when energy is sucked away from the conscious mind, and we’re reduced to vegetating, still awake but without the ability to perform complex thought right now?

If we’re routing skills through the conscious mind, we will lose those skills in proportion to how much we lose the ability to think in general, as energy is drawn away from the brain. And NTs, using the much more efficient black box modules, have no idea that this is even a thing that can happen. It would take far more drastic energy loss for them to lose the work the black boxes do.

Some of us have black boxes that the average NT does not have. I can do complex worldbuilding in my head when I’m so exhausted I can’t talk anymore. There are people who just know the answers to complex arithmetic problems the way most of us just know the answer to 2 times 5. Some people have advanced spatial processing coprocessors that mean they’re almost never lost, because they’re effortlessly creating a map of their surroundings any time they go anywhere, and something in their head is tracking what direction they are in and what turns they’ve made. But some of us do not. Not all of us get a trade, skill for skill. And some of us get black boxes that turn out to be kind of useless. Like, suppose a person more or less effortlessly memorizes the name of every dinosaur ever discovered. Unless they are a paleontologist, when is that going to help?

The important thing to note here is that even a small drop in energy can cause a noticeable drop in an ND’s ability to fake being “normal”, because they are using a less efficient means of computing to perform those skills, and it cuts out on them when energy has to draw down from the brain to go somewhere else.

Spoonies

People with auto-immune disorders are constantly using high levels of energy to do useless and self-destructive shit (not that they want to, but their immune system did not ask first), because their immune system is always on high alert against things like their own nervous system. Overactive immune system consumes energy; body parts taking damage consume energy.

People with cancer or other diseases that lead them to take chemo are burning a lot of energy trying to replenish vital functional cells that the chemo keeps killing. Chemo destroys fast-dividing cells… like white blood cells, and the ones in your mucous membranes, and the ones in your hair follicles. And you can do without hair, but you sort of need your mucous membranes and your white blood cells.

People with fatigue disorders might be suffering from an auto-immune issue, or they might be suffering from a metabolic issue. For instance, low levels of thyroid hormone will cause metabolic processes across the board to slow down, drastically decreasing the available energy.

People with depression might literally actually have a fatigue disorder that manifests in not having enough energy to process serotonin and dopamine correctly. Also, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are brain chemicals that do energy routing, having an effect on what the body is putting energy into. Failures to produce enough of those or at appropriate times, or spending energy breaking them down when you still need them, will screw with the body’s ability to deliver energy to the right places.

Whatever the reason, if you have a disorder that drains your energy… even if that’s all it does, even if it literally has no other symptoms, having something that lowers your available energy for your brain and muscles makes it literally impossible for you to function at the levels you would like to. Like, the same way it is impossible for a Chevy Malibu to go 800 miles on one tank of gas. The available energy is not there. Either it is going someplace stupid that you’d rather it didn’t, or metabolism itself just isn’t working well.

If you are neither a spoonie nor neurodivergent, odds are, your body’s working at a reasonably high level of efficiency already, so you can get a dramatic improvement when you find one of the few things you lack, and you fill that need. Hydrate? (Everything runs on water) Exercise? (Speeds up circulation, and fitness in general will cause your metabolism to be more efficient) Vitamins? (Sure, if you’re missing some, vitamins are real useful.)

But if the problem is, you’re pouring energy into activities society requires you to engage in but your brain cannot do them easily and efficiently, so they cost you a lot more than others; if the problem is, your body is wasting a lot of energy on an immune response to things that shouldn’t need an immune response; if the problem is, there’s a food your body can’t break down, so you’re eating enough to feel full but never getting enough energy from it; if the problem is, your metabolism is lacking something esoteric that almost everyone else has enough of, so it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s missing… exercise and hydration and vitamins will not help. Or, they may help, if you were lacking them, but they won’t fix the problem.

Expecting you to just push through a lack of energy through willpower is a total misunderstanding of how the brain and body work. You cannot do what you don’t have energy to do, and if you route energy to your brain or muscles to accomplish something that requires really pushing yourself, you are taking it away from somewhere else. Probably your immune system. So you’ll get sick. And then you’ll be even more overtaxed.

It’s amazing the degree to which ignorant people think that all bodies literally work the exact same way. (And yet many of these ignoramuses think that people of a different race are somehow completely different from them in some fundamental way. Make it make sense.) What’s even worse is the number of doctors who believe that the only way bodies can malfunction are the ways they happen to know about, so anything outside their experience is fake.

But if you understand how complex the system is and how variable the things that can go wrong with it are, and you understand the role of energy, and energy distribution, in the body, it becomes obvious. You can’t force yourself to do what you don’t have the energy to do without taking it away from somewhere else.

Weight and Energy

There is no question that it’s possible for a human to get to a place where their weight is a severe drain on their energy levels. But very few people are actually there.

Muscle is heavier than fat. But muscle does the work of dragging the weight of a body around. A body with good muscle tone – fat but fit – is in a much better position, in terms of energy production and distribution, than a thin body with weak muscles.

Fat actively helps with energy conservation in the cold. A fit fat person – someone whose musculature is strong and healthy enough that they have no difficulty moving their own weight – has reserves to burn in the event of a disorder that consumes so much energy, it inhibits digestion. (To be honest, so does a weak fat person, but they’re losing energy every time they move because they’re too heavy for their own muscles. But this is true of physical weakness in general.)

Not everyone can be fit! Exercise, if you recall, is one of those things that burns a lot of energy! If you already have very little energy, you’re going to have a very hard time exercising enough to become fit.

All of this is normal. It’s natural. It makes sense. Why would being fat automatically make you less healthy in all situations than someone thin? Being underweight is correlated with a significantly shorter lifespan than being overweight.

I’m Gonna Talk About Diabetes Here

We’re told over and over that there’s a giant health crisis among Americans of increased obesity, and this is causing diabetes.

Bullshit.

Consider this. Diabetes is a disorder where you don’t produce enough insulin, but many Type II diabetics got that way because their body massively overproduced insulin to the point where they wore out their pancreatic cells. Remember when I said insulin takes circulating glucose out of the blood stream and stuffs it somewhere safe? You know where it stuffs it? Fat cells. Doctors have been telling people that being overweight causes diabetes… when we know for a fact that diabetes is caused by insulin resistance, a condition where the cells don’t respond well to insulin, so insulin levels go up, and the body’s ability to produce its own insulin is worn down by heavy overproduction. Do the math. You had high levels of insulin production for years because your cells were resistant to insulin? Insulin stores sugar in fat cells, as fat? Gosh, I wonder if the condition that led to your becoming diabetic happened to be the exact same condition that caused you to get fat!

In a case like that, losing weight wouldn’t do jack shit for your insulin, but changing the way you eat so there’s less circulating sugar in the first place would, and this would cause you to store less in your fat cells, which would cause you to lose weight. But it’s not the weight loss that helped you. You couldn’t solve your problem by cutting calories, because calories didn’t get you into this position. High levels of circulating glucose did. Exercising super hard and going on a diet and actually losing weight – which would be hard, because super high levels of insulin storing all that sugar as fat, and yet your blood sugar is still high because your cells don’t respond to the insulin, but let’s say you pull it off – that does nothing. Maybe you see an improvement in your symptoms because eating very little produces very little circulating blood sugar… though now you’ve got some other symptoms. Namely, no energy. And any improvement you experienced is temporary, because you’re addressing a symptom, not the problem.

Doctors know that insulin stores sugar as fat. Doctors know that diabetic people with Type II generate higher and higher levels of insulin as their body tries to compensate for not responding to it, until finally the cells give up and the patient needs to take artificial insulin. And yet, somehow, we are still hearing “fat causes diabetes, lose weight and you won’t get diabetes!” There’s a disconnect here.

Overclocking

I’m going to talk about something as dangerous as fuck here.

When your body’s natural systems are not regulating your blood sugar, and so you can have greater than normal levels of sugar in your bloodstream… this can make the pie higher.

Remember I said you can’t increase your energy levels by adding more fuel, because the mitochondria can only work as hard as they can work? Well, that’s not completely true. Mitochondria can apparently work harder than that, if they have access to more sugar. It’s just that more sugar is destroying your circulatory system, resulting in damage to your retinas, the nerves in your hands and feet, your ability to regulate the temperature of those extremities, the speed at which you can grow back skin in an injury, and, oh, pretty much everything else.

Get to a certain level of blood sugar and you feel like absolute shit. But in the range between that – higher than you should be but lower than the levels you can actually feel bad in – you have more energy.

This is fucking awful, to be honest. Everyone wants more energy! Energy helps you get shit done! More energy to the brain makes your brain work better.

And you want the sugar. You want the high glucose. You don’t know that’s what you want, but you know you crave sweets and carbs, and when your glucose is high (but not too high), it’s a stimulant. You’re awake, you can focus, your mental energy is good. Cut down the way they tell you that you need to, when you’re diabetic, and now you’re sluggish and depressed.

It’s killing you slowly but not doing it is depressing and hard and the slow death isn’t causing you any significant amount of suffering, until it does, and then it’s too late.

Sugar is a drug and you’re addicted. But it’s food. There are no regulations to protect you from eating all the food you want. There is no social opprobrium in general against sweet foods or carb-high snacks. (If you are fat you might suffer from this, but thin people are allowed to eat whatever the fuck they want, and honestly if you’re fat you will probably catch shit for eating a nice big steak, which is a lot better for you if you’re diabetic than a piece of toast.)

You’re overclocking your brain, the same way gamers overclock their PCs to get higher performance. Except that when they melt their CPU they can just buy a new one. You are not buying a new brain anytime soon.

I Am Not A Doctor

I didn’t go to medical school. I did study biology at the graduate school level, but no medical degree.

But everything I’m saying is backed up by pretty much any source I look at. It’s just that the conclusions that I’m drawing, while they are logical outgrowths of the things I’m saying, are for some mysterious reason not the conclusion that people who go to medical school are drawing.

Bodies are all different. Bodies are very complicated with many interlocking systems. Many, many things can go wrong with bodies. Far more things than science is fully aware of yet. Therefore it makes perfect sense that if someone is tired all the time for no good reason, there is a good reason and we just don’t know what it is. If someone can’t easily do a thing another person can do, that is absolutely normal and expected, unless that other thing is something that falls into a range that most humans can easily do. Then all of a sudden it becomes impossible to imagine that a human couldn’t do it? Bullshit. We don’t understand the brain perfectly.

It is absolutely normal that when a person’s energy levels are high, they have the resources to accomplish things they cannot do when their resources are low. The notion that if you’re disabled, there’s a thing you can’t do and you can never do it and that is the way it has to be, is nonsensical. Yes, of course some people are disabled in that way. If you have no legs, then no matter how much energy you have, you will never have legs. But you might be a lot better able to tolerate uncomfortable prosthetics when your energy levels are high.

“If you could do it today then why couldn’t you do it yesterday?” I don’t know, Karen, why couldn’t you vacuum your carpet after you’d been working all day, when you were pushing that vacuum around with no trouble last weekend? People can accomplish more when they have more energy. Doing things consumes energy. Once your energy is consumed, the fact that it can only replenish at a finite rate means you have to wait to get more. While you’re waiting, you can’t do stuff, because stuff takes energy, that you don’t have, because you used it up on other stuff. What part of this is unclear?

Being fat is a symptom of underlying conditions in most of the diseases that it’s correlated with. It’s not that being fat is unhealthy, like losing weight would make you healthy again; it’s that it is a symptom of your disorder that shows up before the more definitive symptoms do. It is possible to improve your health by exercising and changing what you eat, and sometimes, this may result in weight loss, but it wasn’t the weight loss that improved your health. It was becoming fitter (more muscle) and eating stuff that isn’t poisoning you because some of your metabolic pathways don’t work. If you don’t lose weight, you may still be getting healthier.

(I suspect it’s actually true that being fat will damage your joints. You’re putting more of a load on them, so it makes logical sense. What doesn’t make sense is to say that being fat causes diabetes and high blood pressure when we know for a fact that overly high levels of insulin cause both being fat and diabetic, and overly high levels of blood sugar cause high blood pressure, heart disease, and general circulation problems, so. Um. All of these things come from insulin resistance? That is the problem? Not the weight, that’s a symptom?)

And sometimes, sugar is an addictive drug. If you’re feeling self-satisfied because you’re not an alcoholic, and you don’t smoke, and you’ve never taken an illegal drug, but you can’t do without your blueberry muffin in the morning and your ice cream after dinner… stop feeling superior to people addicted to illegal substances or well-known vices. The only difference between them and you is that you got addicted to a substance that will kill you but that is safe for most people, and because it improves your mood and your productivity, capitalism is more than happy to let you indulge it until you drop dead.

#alara original post #alara original writing #stand back i'm gonna try science

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yoditorian · 4 years ago

Text

lacuna- part 4

din/reader

i put our favourite idiots through the absolute wringer in this one and i refuse to apologise. it’s nECESSARY i swear.

MASTERLIST

word count: 3.4k

warnings: swears, graphic violence and injury, some naughty thoughts from our favourite buckethead so for that reason 18+ no babies thanks

The distant, rhythmic clanging echoes off of the stone staircase as he descends into the tunnels.

They’re empty, devoid of the usual flurrying activity, save for the guards that stand tall either side of the entryway. He doesn’t ask where everyone is, he doesn’t need to, the noise is enough to know where he’s going. Winding tunnel after winding tunnel, Din comes to a sharp stop after rounding a corner.

Armoured bodies spill out of the entrance to the forge, kids in and out of helmets clamouring to watch the action in the gaps between their buirs’ legs. He remembers being that small, trying desperately to see what was going on during gatherings. But he’d never seen anything quite like this.

Din shoulders his way through the crowd, watching out for the little ones under his feet, towards where Paz stands a head above everybody else. A pale, willowy man sits hunched over on his knees in the centre of the forge beside a set of armour carefully laid out on a bench. Is he a thief? The Armourer stands tall above him, ceremonial furs wrapped around her shoulders in place of the shorter, more practical ones. There’s so much sound, so many angry bodies packed into the small space, he can’t decipher exactly what it is they’re all doing there.

“What is this?” He nudges Paz, unable to take his eyes off of the man on the ground.

“He has dishonoured the creed.”

Din offers nothing in return, hoping his confused silence is mistaken for acceptance. A thousand possibilities run through his mind at breakneck speed. There are so many rules, so many afterthoughts and double meanings, he knows the newly-sworn kids struggle to remember everything from time to time. But this is a grown man, an adult who sits so shamefully in the centre of their most sacred setting. Did he kill a vod? Did he intentionally harm the ade? Did he question the Armourer? Paz, unsurprisingly, senses the question that hangs in the air between them.

“He removed his helmet, vod.”

No.

But how would- how would anybody know? How would something like that ever get back to the covert? Din doesn’t ask. He only nods, and returns his gaze to the man in the circle, while he silently prays to every deity he can think of.

The crowd around him gets louder, hurling insults and clanging their arms together in anger. Din understands the gravity of what this man has done, what he has done, but there has to be a reason. Surely, there’s an explanation. A loophole, somewhere. Their secrecy is their survival and their survival is their strength, but at what cost? The cost of your touch, of you? The cost of knowing and being known so intimately isn’t something he’d known he’d be so unwilling to pay back when he swore the creed. Din Djarin would be a lesser man had he not shed his helmet and armour for you, he is as sure of that as his creed. The creed he has broken, more than once. What would become of him, if anybody here found out?

The Armourer moves, worn metal of her tools colliding like a thunderclap, and the covert falls silent.

“Cork Gyll, you have been charged with the gravest of crimes against the creed: the removal of your helmet.”

Din can’t help but flinch as Cork does when the crowd roars again, anger and betrayal cracking in the air. He doesn’t know Cork, but his spiraling thoughts are way ahead of the game. Filling his mind with images of himself in Cork’s place, stripped of his armour and everything he knows himself to be. The taunting of his covert, of his family, echoing in his ears as though it’s meant for him. Din feels sick.

Memories of every time he’s shed his helmet for you. Every time he’s pressed his lips to yours, to every inch of you he could find purchase on. Is that why it always felt so good? An almost religious experience, the permission you give him to touch you is one he holds in the highest regard. Nothing comes close. But is that why? The thrill of breaking the code he’s lived by for a lifetime? No, he knows that’s not it. He knows it’s you that makes him feel that way, more than any rule breaking. He hates the warmth that spreads through him at the phantom taste of you on his tongue.

“Do you deny?” The Armourer speaks again, and the noise ceases.

“No, Alor.” Cork does not raise his eyes from the dust in front of him.

Anger replaces Din’s fear. At himself, at his creed, at the galaxy for being so cruel as to hold you just out of reach and deny him the only real, tangible connection he’s had since he was taken in by these people. He craves you, and everything you are, but you’re not allowed. Part of him feels like a petulant child, one of the ade denied a sweet before dinnertime. How could he be so stupid? So reckless? He should be caught. He should be exiled. He deserves it, he deserves nothing but loneliness.

“Is there reason that you should not be stripped of your armour and exiled?”

“No, Alor.”

“You will be Dar’manda. This is the way.”

“This is the way.” The words echo in chorus around the forge, as they always do. It doesn’t escape Din’s notice that Cork remains silent in the centre, head hanging low.

The clanging from before begins again, in unison this time. The younger warriors follow the elders’ lead, rhythmically hitting their vambraces together until the sound reverberates through the ground. It’s loud enough that nobody notices that Din’s own wrists barely make contact. The Armourer lifts the tray of shed armour over the forge in front of Cork, the sparks of the flames reflect harshly in the gold of her helmet. The condemned man still does not raise his eyes from the dirt.

Paz and another heavy infantry soldier step out of the crowd to haul Cork to his feet, and people start to dissipate. The show’s over, now all that remains is to serve his sentence. A life in exile. Dar’manda. Din doesn’t stick around long enough to find out what they do with him next.

He goes straight to his room, unaware of the path he treads. He can’t remember in all his time as a Mando seeing somebody actually get exiled, actually be stripped of the creed and sent away. He was half sure it was just a story told to get the ade to take the creed seriously. The guilt only digs it’s cold claws into his heart once he’s alone.

Door secure, Din all but rips the helmet off of his head. Breathe, in and out. Just like you taught him. Oh, you. Your face swimming in his memory only makes his guilt grip tighter, twisting itself in his guts until he can’t remember what he feels like without it. You’re a traitor, Djarin. He can’t tell if the grotesque voice in his head is talking about the creed or the way he’s treated you. He’s not sure it matters. Because even after all this, after everything he’s just seen, he thinks about where you might be. Whatever you’re up to, he only hopes you’re safe.

“Oh, fuck.”

Shara’s too far into the armoury to hear you call out when the guards descend.

Only a handful of them, faces all concealed by crude looking helmets, but they waste no time in splitting up to take you on. Three of them against you, they’re not the best odds you’ve ever faced. Then again, they’re definitely not the worst. You take a moment, let them try to predict your first move, until one of them gets impatient. He swings for your legs with the long barrel of his blaster, which you evade with so much ease you’re almost embarrassed for the guy. It’s less of a fight and more of a standoff. You’re cornered at the end of this dark hallway, nowhere to go. The sounds of Shara struggling against her own adversaries echo off the metal walls, and you strike.

You hit the middle guard square in the chest, splintering the weak armour, and you take the momentary panic from the others to make a break for it over his body. You don’t get far. Shara’s pained cry from the armoury stills your heart in your chest at the same moment that a stun bolt digs in between your shoulders, voltage way too high for something as delicate as human flesh. You’re out before you even hit the floor.

Your legs aren’t working like they should, muscles still jerking as the electricity works its way out of your system. A pair of guards unshackle you from the post and you hit the floor before they can catch you. Of all the ways they’ve hurt you, it’s the boss’s cackle at your weakness that makes you cringe. You’d held out for so long, stayed quiet for what feels like days, until they pulled out whatever it was that turned your blood to lightning. You’re dragged up out of the dust and back down the narrow hallway to the cell. It’s too dark in there to even see an inch in front of your face. But at least you can hear Shara through the wall.

“We’re getting out, I know it.” She’s optimistic, you’ll give her that. But you know that if you do ever make it out, it’ll be on your own. The Rebellion just doesn’t have the numbers to spare on a rescue mission for a couple of pilots who got a little too big for their boots.

“Well I’m not dying until I beat your track time, so we better.”

Shara laughs from the cell beside yours, loud and familiar, if maybe a little forced. It’s easier to join in her amusement when you don’t focus on the blood dripping down under your collar.

It’s a suspiciously easy bounty, something he’d normally pass up on. But there’d been an odd tug in his chest at the low-level puck and Din had negotiated it into his assignments from the Guild before he even really knew what he’d done. Some wannabe crime lord on a planet he didn’t care to learn the name of had set a bounty on an ex-guard, wanted him hand delivered. A deserter, he’d called him. Din pretended like that didn’t tug at his chest too.

He finds the man, oddly enough, digging up vegetables in a garden. Presumably it’s the quarry’s family home, nestled between the trees on a riverbank, and something about the way the man regards him feels extremely final. He doesn’t run, he doesn’t plead or try to fight, he simply places the bundle of freshly harvested vegetables on the doorstep and walks slowly back up the path. The bounty doesn’t say a word as his wrists are bound, nor as they start the trek through the wood towards the gang’s base.

A helmeted guard meets them at the doorway, gesturing into the dark hall, and Din only hesitates for a moment before nudging the quarry ahead of him. They barely make it into the main meeting room when a blaster shot hits the bounty right between the eyes. He crumples where he stands, Din has enough control not to flinch in surprise, and the man holding the smoking blaster splits a slimey grin. The boss, then. He points at the body, talking pointedly to his guards about loyalty and vows. It’s enough to leave a bad taste in Din’s mouth. He catches the pouch of credits thrown his way, and is ready to leave this whole mess behind him when the boss turns his attention onto the hunter.

“You have to stay for the show, Mando.”

“Show?” Was that not enough of a show?

“We found a couple of rats digging around in our armoury a few days ago, thought we’d have a little fun before they meet the same fate as our dear deserter.”

He leads Din to a small room with staggered seating above a lit area like a crude stage, clearly made for a larger audience than the six of them. There’s a single post in the middle with a woman in a dirty orange flight suit cuffed to it, blood on her face. An interrogation droid, he suppresses a shudder, is zapping her every few seconds to keep her from blacking out.

“We had the bantha-prod on the other one yesterday. Oh, the screaming.”

Unable to take his eyes off of the woman, he can’t stop himself seeing you in her place. He doesn’t even think before he’s unloaded a plasma cartridge into the boss and the four remaining guards. Din swings his pulse rifle around his body, aiming carefully, and disintegrates the droid before it can shock the woman again.

“Get your friend and get gone.” Din huffs out as he swipes the keys off of the boss and jumps down into the pit to unshackle the pilot. Her legs give out underneath her, dropping like dead weight, and for a second he’s not sure she’ll get back up. But she does, gritting her teeth the whole way.

“You think we were planning on sticking around?” She’s shaky, a little out of it for a moment before she steels herself and looks him in the eyes. Right in the eyes. It’s the same determination and strength Din always sees in you, and he knows she’ll be okay.

He leaves before the little voice in his head, the one that sounds like you, makes him do something stupid. Like stay and help the pilots, offer to take them back to their base, get sucked into a war he doesn’t have the cause to care about. Aside from one, glaringly obvious, you-shaped reason.

Shara wastes no time in ducking down the hall to the cells and getting to you. Her fingers shake when she flips through the chain to find the right chip, but the tension leaves her a little once the door slides back to reveal you curled in a dank corner. The light is harsh, after who knows how many hours sitting in complete darkness, and you’re only vaguely aware of her telling you somebody killed your captors.

“-Swooped in like a fucking knight in shining armour,” Shara laughs as she fumbles with the key to your binders, “It was crazy.”

She’s pulling you out of the cell and down the hall before you can really get your feet under you, knocking elbows and knees against the walls of the narrow space. But the logic of a pilot, a scrapper pilot, kicks in once you’ve adjusted to the movement.

“Dead guys don’t need guns, right? Might as well get what we came for.”

It takes Shara a moment to realise what you’re saying, but then she’s dragging you after her along the dim corridor. The wrong way. You have to tug on her hand to get her to slow, to point her in what you know is the right way to the armoury. You’re not sure exactly how you can be so certain, just that you know. You’ve always had a better sense of direction than her so she, at least, takes you at your word and barely stumbles in her haste.

There’s no welcoming party waiting on the landing pad for you, only a very tired looking command officer and a couple of medics, and the floodlights threaten to blind you as you and Shara lean on each other down the loading ramp. Tired, you’re both so tired.

“They’re in the cargo hold.” You manage between breaths, nodding your head towards the netting keeping the liberated armoury in place. The officer releases you to the medics at the same moment Shara loses consciousness and falls dead weight against your shoulder. The adrenaline starts to wear off as they catch her before she can hit the ground, you don’t argue when they sit you on the trolley beside her.

“What did they hit you with, Lieutenant?” A doctor you don’t recognise is in your face before you even register that you’re in the medbay.

“Forgive me if I was a little too preoccupied to ask.”

It hurts. The torn material of your flight suit is matted into your wounds, and you feel every little pull right down to your bones when she moves to lead you up and off of the trolley towards an empty bed. Even the lightest touch of her fingers around the singed edges threatens a wave of nausea. You bite it back with a grimace. If standing is this agonising, you really don’t want to find out what heaving feels like.

“Bantha-prod, looks like. Nasty burns.”

Another pair of hands guides you to lean forwards and brace your arms on the bed, and you try to remember to keep breathing while the doctor begins peeling your charred flight suit out of the half-healed burns on your back. More scars. Spots dance in your vision, blurring the world around you, and you lock your jaw up so tight to keep from screaming that you swear you crack a tooth. Even through this, this pain that seems to lick at every inch of your body, your only thought is that you want him. There’s a sharp scratch on your neck and a low groan that you think might have come from you, before the pain finally pulls you under.

Din finds no solace in the dusty tunnels of the covert, not the way he normally does. The image of Cork kneeling in the forge, enduring insults and anger and the loss of his creed without so much as a whimper. The quarry, walking from his family’s home to his death with no complaint. He’s not sure he could be that strong, that unaffected, if his treachery ever comes to light. He wonders what you would look like in the orange flight suit of rebel pilots. Maybe you knew the ones he freed, maybe he’d unknowingly saved a friend of yours. It might be the only honourable action he’s taken for years.

His lingering thought, as he finds his way to his quarters and collapses on the bed in a pile of armour and exhaustion, is how much more comfortable he is when you’re tucked into his side. Where you should be, he’s sure of it.

You plague his dreams that night, just like every night. Din sees nothing but your eyes, hears nothing but your laugh, feels nothing but your smile against his skin. He dreams about being somewhere far away with you, the way he wishes he could be. No rebels or creeds or empires, just you and him lying somewhere in soft grass watching clouds roll by. You’re wearing that old red sweater he took off of you the first night he touched you, and his armour is nowhere to be seen. He likes it that way. He can feel the warmth of you beside him like this.

But the pink-streaked sky morphs and suddenly he’s encompassed in darkness, the feeling of you surrounding him. He’s not afraid, not like when other dreams fade to black before he wakes. He knows you in this darkness, he knows himself. The sounds you make when you’re together in the dark, the heat of your mouth on him, sliding his cock past your lips. He wants this, you, for as long as you’ll let him have it. Everything you are, the smiles, the jokes, the sex, the exhaustion. The fire you get in your eyes stokes the one in his, he’s not sure who he would be without it. He could love you, one day, if that’s what you wanted. If he’s what you want. But nothing lasts, the Armourer’s voice breaks through your heady moans to condemn him as Dar’manda and you’re gone. Just like that.

Din wakes with a start. Hard in his flight suit and an even worse ache in his back. He can never see you again, a decision that leaves a pain so deep in his bones far worse than a wet dream or falling asleep in his armour ever could.

The comm buzzes late one night, weeks later.

“I’ve got a job on Akiva, if you’re anywhere near there.”

He leaves it unanswered.

TAGLIST (lmk if you want on or off the list):

@brothersdrxke @remmysbounty @aq-vetina @1800-fight-me @mandos-co @kesskirata @sarahjkl82-blog @firstofficerwiggles @keeper0fthestars @wille-zarr @rebloogggs @plants-are-better-than-humans @schreibsuchtis (tag machine broke again)

#lacuna #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian x you #din djarin #din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #star wars #fic #liz does words #obligatory prayer to the tag gods that they work #smut

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wherelibertydwells · 4 years ago

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Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of pharma giant Pfizer for 16 years, discusses his thoughts as to why the lockdown was a mistake, and why the government strategies to manage the pandemic are only making things worse.

[EDITED (for brevity) TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO]

"I’ve worked my entire life on the research side of the pharmaceutical industry, both big pharma and also biotech. My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases."

"I became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country, and I could see no reason for it then and I still don’t."

"Government’s response to emergencies is guided by the [UK] scientific group who sit together under the Strategic Advisory Group for Emergencies [SAGE]. SAGE has got several fundamental things wrong and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate, has horrible economic effects, but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly."

"SARS-CoV-2 was 80% similar to another virus called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003. When I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world, I wasn’t worried. Since there are four common cold causing coronaviruses, quite a lot of population would have a substantial protective immunity. Milkmaids never suffered from things like smallpox. The reason they had the protection was that they were exposed to a more benign-related virus called cowpox. Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cowpox. He got some of this and he scraped it into the skin of a small boy. He obtained some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox and infected the boy. Lo and behold, the boy did not get ill. And that gave birth to the whole field of what’s called vaccination."

"At this time of year, about 1 in 30 people have a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses. People exposed to having had a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses are immune to SARS-CoV-2. 30% of the population was protected before we started. SAGE said it was zero which is impossible to justify. The percentage of the population that SAGE asserts have been infected to date by the virus is 7%. A document they published in September 'Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions' says more than 90 percent of the population is still vulnerable [unbelievably wrong!]. On the percentage of care home residents who have antibodies: they picked out residents that never were PCR-positive. These were people who never got infected. 65% of them had antibodies to the virus. There was a high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the virus arriving."

"Big story in the media: the percentage of people with antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling. This was cast as a concern, "immunity to SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t last very long". Anyone with knowledge of immunity would reject that. It’s not the way immunity to virus works. That would be T cells. If the antibodies are falling gradually over time, the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling. That’s why the antibody production gradually subsides."

"Less than 40 percent of the population are susceptible. That’s too small a number to support a growing outbreak [community immunity, herd immunity]. SAGE says we’re not even close. The best science by the best scientists in the world, published in the top peer-reviewed journals, says they’re wrong. That is more than 60% of the population are now immune. It’s simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic."

"Why are we not talking about the 50% that have got T cell immunity? I believe, fundamentally, it is over. The number of people dying of SARS-CoV-2 in the capital is less than 10, so it’s down by 98%. The reason it’s down is because there are too few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify, to amplify, to get an epidemic."

"Why isn’t the media telling us that the pandemic is over? It’s not over because SAGE says it’s not. I found, to my horror, that all the way through the spring and summer SAGE did not have on their committee someone who was an immunologist."

"There is a test that’s performed where people have their noses and tonsils swabbed [PCR test]. What they’re looking for is a small piece of genetic sequence [RNA]. It’s going to be found if they were infected weeks or even sometimes a small number of months ago. If you’ve been infected and you’ve fought off the virus, you’ll have broken dead bits of virus. Over a period of weeks or months, you bring up cells that contain broken dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed. The PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus or a dead one. A large proportion of the so-called positives are what I call cold positives. They’re identifying viral RNA in the sample but it’s from a dead virus that can’t hurt them.

They’re not going to get ill.

They can’t transmit it to anybody else.

They’re not infectious.

Why are we using this test that cannot distinguish between active infection and people who’ve conquered the virus? This test has never been used in this way. It’s the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes. You would not be doing these tests by a windy supermarket car parking. It’s not suitable at all and shouldn’t be done in the way it’s been done. It’s subject to many handling errors. If this was a test being used for legal purposes, the judge would throw out this evidence and say it’s not admissible. It produces positives even when there’s no virus there at all."

"The pandemic having passed through the population won’t return. Why won’t it return? They’ve got t-cell immunity. Just because the antibody falls away, doesn't mean you've lost immunity again. That’s not the way the human immune system works."

[cont. in video]

#presented for information only #I'm not a doctor #or a scientist

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entoman-created-by-the-tallgreys · 3 years ago

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! America is Fucked !

And here's why.

Let's just look at the human body as an example for a country.

Please officers are white blood cells, and the white blood cells are attacking everything that makes up the entire body.

The military are like the heavy duty blood cells or AKA the immune system.

Dumb as hell.

The American people are the red blood cells.

The extremely sick extremely poisoned confused scattered not holding any nutrients for the body generally most of them are crowding and one place was caused heart attacks and system Then it's very little flow to the rest of the body.

And the government is the brain.

With this example going on as a metaphor I would say that the government is a schizophrenic catastrophe Trying to kill itself because of virus called the Illuminati or the 322 crossbones.

The America is completely under attack and so is the rest of the world It's extremely hard to get rid of these people because the root goes much deeper than you would ears You see the the world sits on hundreds of societies.

Underground.

You see the whole world is layered like the internet There is a surface world then there's the underworld.

And the underworld I don't mean that as the undead I mean that the world underneath the world that is the world.

That's what you find a lot of the aliens, Real Demon's, creatures, things that go bump in the night that there is the problem The root of the secrets is the underworld and the secrets of size is a place in between.

The real war is being fought underground.

There's a reason why the surface world is coming to an end It's because the humans are too stupid To understand that they're not the only life on this planet ruling things.

. . .

To make matters worse for humanity anyone that try to give them this enlightenment or open their mind like when they were child they just call you a crazy conspiracy theories and just get out of their day anyone who understands beyond the population is always mentally ill and the fraternities, Are all too happy to get rid of all the smart people so they can stay effing power.

Humans really are not smart at least they've been bread to be stupid when they were children they weren't able to be taught when they even become an adult is brain turns off and it lives their rest of it's life in autopilot.

This is why there are so many UFOs.

But there may be a few alien bases on the surface but the vast bass ultra vast majority of them are underground deep deep underground.

And how many humans do you know on the surface live underground.

Also anyone that tries to explore these kids and go deep there quickly realize who turned the f around and run like hell.

Many of them that you try to go and document these things never return some of the greatest missing 411 cases are people that go in the cave trying to investigate them for strange behavioral activity and end up going missing.

Then you see governments and the men in black pop up and say nothing was there nothing happened shut up there's nothing over there.

And of course everyone's going to ignore me is the crazy guy because the crazy guy is always the genius that no one ever wants to listening to.

😐

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chronicghosts · 4 years ago

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Why Penumbra medical technology stresses me out: a thesis

Not actually lmao but here's a barely coherent rant about why I get stressed by those filtration bracelets, keep in mind it's 1 am and this is originally a discord babble pls

Okay so: The big part about most radiation on Earth is that 99.9% of the time it doesn't actively do external harm. Well. Obvious external harm. But on Mars they have mass burning. Which is the first thing that made me go "uh?"

And this is very, very obvious external radiation dmaage, which either means Mars is fucking terrifying or means there's smth else going on. Placing my bets on the latter (Mars is indeed a hell planet, but not this way)— I'm placing bets on the burning actually being from Third degree sunburn. And the lack of healing/exacerbation of this burning is from the radiation itself not letting the body repair itself

Because what radiation does is: it sneaks its little asshole self into your blood and then starts eating away at whatever it can get its hands on. That's why chemo is such an intense thing. Because you aren't just killing the malignant cells, with chemoradiation you're getting rid of everything

And the bracelet being so small makes me question some things too because, and maybe it can be chalked up to advanced technology, modern blood filtration is a huge process, with a huge machine that takes hours to work and involves the patient having to be on intense watch and life support. Because blood filtration

A) hurts

B) leaves you super fucked up from blood loss, because even if you're regaining the blood it's removed first. It would put a massive strain on your heart and brain. This is ignoring that shock exists, too.

C) has to take way longer than the wrist filtration takes.

Like they even mention it in season two? Alessandra is like "GIVE HIM A MINUTE HE COULD GO INTO SHOCK " after Juno's lost blood got... to put it delicately, "returned".

Also, kidneys exist? Radiation breaks down protein first and I'm wondering how no one is dealing with acute renal failure yet. Just a limb atrophying from a break can strain your kidneys because of the mass protein decay. Your entire body being destroyed? Imagine the stress your poor kidneys and liver and spleen are all under.

This is why, if we chalk the time and ease of the blood filtration up to advanced gear, I am going to make the claim: the bracelets aren't filtering radiation. How would they filter it, anyway? Radiation isn't exactly something super tangible. I digress—

If they filter the proteins that would send your body into a shut down, but not the radiation, it really explains a lot.

That's also why people still die. The radiation can't be removed like some sort of parasite. They're removing the dead tissue floating in your bloodstream— no dead tissue apparent, no immune response, no organ failure until the radiation eats away at so much that you couldn't survive anyway.

"Why don't they leave?" I got asked this while rambling, and it is a good question! The answer is depressing, it's a blend of:

They'd die faster if they did. They don't have to know the bracelets don't actually remove radiation. People would probably find them anyway. AND

As far as these people know? The bracelets do work. They just don't work as they're claimed to. They extend people's lives and probably make them feel a hell of a lot better, but no matter what— they still die.

#penumbra #the penumbra podcast #my post #vespa ilkay #help this took forever to make coherent #tpp #buddy aurinko

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mangobilorian · 5 years ago

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Flight | (explicit) iii

Pairing: Mandalorian x Reader

Genre: Smut

Words: 5246

read chapter two or four

“Break my ship, and I’ll leave you on the next backwater planet.” You grit your teeth, fingers gripping the controls. The display swims before your eyes, and you’re too rattled to think straight.

“I’m trying , Mando.” The helmeted man grunts, annoying you further. You try concentrating on the task at hand, but there was too much information to parse through. What did this button do? What about that lever?

“Try harder.” You open your mouth to retort, but the collision of a small asteroid collides with the ship, hurtling Mando off his feet. The man sighs, and pushes you out of the pilot’s chair, taking back control of the Crest.

“Does that mean my lesson is over?” You pout and give him your best puppy-dog eyes, but he’s unfazed.

“Yes.” He steers the ship back to a straight course and maneuvers the two of you out of the small asteroid field.

“Will there be more?”

“Maybe.” You huff. You’ve spent about three weeks with the Mandalorian now, and conversation still runs dry. Sometimes, the silence lasts for days before it’s broken, and it’s usually you who speaks first.

At the start, you’d been too terrified to initiate anything. After all, your relationship with the bounty hunter hinged on sex and your evident lack of confidence. You didn’t mind, but you wanted something more than that. You wanted to learn how to fly. He refused, you begged, he continued to refuse, and you tried swaying him through… other means. It took one space battle, five hyperspace jumps, and a trip to Nevarro to convince Mando to teach you. So you have some use , he had muttered.

But your first lesson just flopped, which was definitely not your fault. Mando thought, for whatever reason, that flying through an asteroid field would be great practice for a beginner. A complaint rested on the tip of your tongue, but you sucked it up in indignation. If Mando wanted to be a bad teacher, then so be it. And… Maker, he was worse than you ever pictured.

He didn’t even give you enough time to remember what the controls did before launching you into the field. Everytime you got hit, he’d threaten to strand you or cast you out. If you forgot what a button did, he’d mutter a curse like you couldn’t hear it and-

Ugh. You know you’re being too angry. Too unreasonable. You were wrong to place Mando on some pedestal and expect him to be a good teacher. It’s just that… he’s so gentle when he teaches you about other stuff. Like how the body works, what he likes, what you like. So it’s hard to reconcile that Mando with one grumbling in his seat next to you. The one who successfully flew the ship out of that field and now plots the next coordinates of a planet he thinks his next bounty is on.

You can tell, by the sheer amount of bounty pucks Karga gave him, that Mando had a lot of work to do. The fall of the Empire a year prior had shocked some systems while others were left to do business as usual. In the wake of government upheaval, people who thought they were safe under the Empire suddenly had targets painted across their foreheads. And those who previously hid and ran found themselves with a blaster in hand. You wonder where Mando stood on the spectrum. Was he a mere enforcer? Working for money or maybe to leave a tragic past behind? Or did he like bloodshed and found a job to fulfill that desire? Some bounty hunters even catered to certain types of jobs. Stories of Boba Fett filtered into your parents’ tavern often enough for you to know he made a living off of the Empire. But Mando didn’t seem like the kind of person to eat at the feet of moffs.

His helmet reflects the hyperspace beams, taking the light and pushing it backwards. It’s like the way he dodges all your personal questions.

“Done staring?” Mando doesn’t look at you.

“I wasn’t staring.” He snorts, not bothering to reply. Maker, he gets on your nerves sometimes. You just want him to talk to you and that’s the last thing he wants to do. You always had someone to talk to for the majority of your life. By default, you were shy and insecure, but you had your brother, your parents, your friends at the spaceport. And now? You had one grumpy (but very hot) bounty hunter.

“If you want something, spill it. We’re almost to Tatooine, and you look like you’re going to burst.”

“I do not -”

“Save it. Now tell me.” The two of you sit in silence once more.

“Why are you so blunt all the time?”

“If you have a problem with me, I’ll drop you off when we land.” You grit your teeth. He’s always deflecting your questions. He makes every question about you and not about himself and it’s so. Kriffing. Irritating.

“I just asked ‘why are you so blunt.’ I didn’t say ‘I have a problem with you, Mando.’” He grunts in reply. As if that answers all your questions. “So you’re not going to-”

“Why are you so curious all of a sudden? You didn’t have a problem before,” he says. Mando doesn’t sound as angry as you expected. It’s like he’s genuinely interested… and well, you don’t really know how to answer him.

Why were you so angry and irritated? Three weeks with the man and it’s all bubbling up now? The time you spent with Mando is usually in pleasant silence or complete darkness, so you don't know why you decided it was “Be an Ass to Mando Day.”

“If this is about me teaching you, then don’t worry. I’ll still help you fly.” You snap your head up to him.

“N-no this has nothing to do with that-”

“Stop stuttering. I thought we went over this-”

“Stop deflecting everything-”

“Get a grip of yourself.” You close your mouth at Mando’s command. He wheels his chair to face you, and your knees almost touch his. Even though you don’t know what he looks like, you can probably imagine how irritated he is. Scrunched brows, downturned lips-

“I’m sorry. It’s just,” you breathe out, struggling to figure out what to say. “I’m… really on edge? Right now?” Mando tilts his helmet in the equivalent of an eyebrow raise.

“On edge?” He repeats. You nod, forcing a reassuring smile. Only it probably looks like a grimace because Mando sighs the same sigh he gives you when you accidentally injure yourself.

“Like I’m all jittery and stuff. And not because I just had my first flying lesson which was cool and scary and- anyway. It’s like my heart is beating too fast and I just need to do something .” The bounty hunter gives you a simple hum as if he understands everything you said.

“You’ve got cabin fever,” he says, propping a hand under a chin. At your confused expression, he continues on. “You’ve been stuck in the ship for too long and need an outlet. Flying only made you more… ansty.” You resist the urge to roll your eyes. You weren’t antsy, and Mando acts as if he can just diagnose you with whatever.

“I don’t have cabin fever,” you pout, “but if I did, how can I fix it?”

“Physical activity would do the trick.” The sneaky bounty hunter. You know he’s smirking under there. He’s trying to bait you, but you won’t fall for it.

“Like what?”

“You tell me,” he says, titling his helmet. Ugh. You’ve come to know one fact about Mando: he’s stubborn. Instead of snapping back, you resign yourself to steady breaths. Let the man look at you and see the picture of calm. You close your eyes for an extra effect.

But your stoic facade does little to placate the thrumming in your blood. You are on edge, and you don’t really know why. Cabin fever might be the answer, but you’re doubtful. You survived being cooped on your home planet even though you desperately wanted to leave. You survived managing your parents’ tavern despite hating the work there. So the idea that being stuck on a ship—something you ached to do since your brother became a pilot—seemed a tad ludicrous. And yet, the undying urge to move and do something rests in every blood vessel and every nerve cell in your body.

Maybe the answer lies in why you were so angry at Mando. He was the worst teacher you’ve ever had, but that isn’t a reason to be livid. Of course you felt disappointed at the lesson being cut short, even a little sad at the prospect of you being a bad pilot. But you held out hope that you will improve your piloting when Mando improves his teaching. That still doesn’t warrant how frustrated you were with his silence. Three weeks seems like enough time to get used to him not talking.

You respect him enough to allow him to be quiet, but you loved it when he did talk. Because when he talked, it was about easy things like the difficulties of his job. How certain criminals gravitate towards specific planets. How some bounties were better dead than alive despite the order going either way. You especially loved it when he whispered praises, little moans in your ear—telling you to be more confident and to stop stuttering. His breathy grunts when you wrapped your mouth-

Maker, did the heat in the cockpit go up for some reason? Mando had wheeled his chair to face front once again, and you had spent the last few minutes… thinking. Very hard about your situation, yet you don’t have a conclusion. Or maybe you did reach an answer and were avoiding it because of one glaring reason: you were still a virgin.

That singular thought is enough for you to visibly cringe. Thankfully, Mando doesn’t notice. From this angle, you can see the flash of Mando’s bare wrist, and almost sigh wistfully. It’s always a pleasant surprise to be reminded that Mando is Human. A peek of bare skin is enough to send a tingle down your spine. Imagine what the rest of him looks like- You air out your shirt and stand up, leaving the cockpit.

Once you descend the ladder and are finally away from the bounty hunter’s shiny helmet, you slump on the bed. With a sigh, you bury your face in your hands and just… melt. Into a blob of feelings and nervousness.

You didn’t know what to expect really. Well, that’s not true. You expected kissing then oral sex then ‘real’ sex. Instead, you received a lot of kissing and a lot of oral—seriously, Mando’s obsession with eating you out isn’t bad, just surprising— but you’re still a virgin. With a big capital ‘V’.

Some part of you wonders whether you’re the one who’s holding yourself back. That your nervousness is tangible enough for Mando to notice and give you space. Your confidence was a smattering of puzzle pieces, and Mando helped you put it together. He knew how fractured, how fragile you used to be, and probably didn’t want to push you.

Yet another, darker part of you considers the idea that Mando didn’t actually want to have sex with you. As if you were some poor girl he took pity on and decided to pleasure a little bit, but he didn’t want the emotional baggage that came with actual sex. Not that you wanted emotional baggage but-

You groan in frustration. The more you think, the more conflicted you get. It’s easy to admit—after all your inner monologues— that you’re on edge because of how much you want to jump Mando’s bones. Kriff, a look at his bare wrist was enough to get you hot and bothered. Yet the nagging fear of whether or not he reciprocates your desire still tugs at your chest. Maybe he would strand you on Tatooine. Maybe he was just waiting for the right moment to leave you without it weighing on his moral compass. He never said how long you’d be allowed to stay. Maker, what would you do if you were alone? What would you eat, where would you live, how-

“Are you in a crisis?” You snap your head up to the helmeted man leaning against the opposite wall. When did he even get there?

“W-what? No. Just thinking about my supposed cabin fever.”

“Yeah? And how did that work out?” Mando crosses his arms, bending a knee to place a foot against the wall. And he looks too damn intimidating, too wide, and much too hot.

“Um… I don’t think I have it?” He snorts in a yeah right sort of way.

“You say that but you look like you swallowed poodoo. Very attractive.”

“Do you mean that?” You blurt out, mind too fried to filter your words.

“That you’re attractive? Yeah.”

“Oh.” There must be something about your expression because Mando pushes off the wall to grasp your chin.

“You still doubt yourself?” Your lack of response is enough for Mando to sigh and nudge your legs apart. He’s fully in your space now. Mando traps himself between your thighs, but you feel like the one who’s caged in. “I thought I told you that already.”

“It’s kinda hard to stop being insecure after-”

“Well, it’s not my job to make you more confident, is it?” And those were the words you did not want to hear. He’s right; it’s not his job to help you at all, and you knew it. At your silence, Mando pushes himself even deeper into your space, leaning over you so you’re forced to look up or collide with his chest. “I didn’t mean it like that… look, if you’re going to sulk-”

“I’m not sulking. I just-” you sigh, unsure if you should stop speaking now or get it all off your chest. “Do you even want me here?” He pulls back.

“What? If I didn’t want you, you’d be long gone.”

“Then why…,” the words dry up like cotton in your mouth. “Then why don’t we do anything… more?” You gesture between the two of you. “Intimate?” You cringe at the wording, but there’s nothing else to say.

“So this was about sex then? I thought you liked it.” Just a touch of hurt lingered in his words, making guilt worm into your chest.

“I do . But we haven’t done um… ‘real sex’?” Maker, if someone stabbed you before you opened your mouth again, you’d thank them. Maybe Mando could do it.

He lets out a snort. “I didn’t initiate anything because I thought you’d be too scared. Not because I don’t want to. I do,” he says, voice tapering out to a whisper. Oh. So your fear was misplaced, and the rational part of your brain was right all along. Mando wasn’t going to kick you out, and he did want you and-

“Here,” he says, pushing you back to lie on the bed. “If you think you’re ready, we can do this now.”

“Now?” Your heart stutters at the thought, fast enough and erratic enough for you to hear it.

“You’re too wound up. Seems like the solution is ‘real sex’.” You groan in embarrassment. Well. Sure. “I’ll turn off the lights.” Mando leaves you, and everything becomes too real. You’re definitely unprepared for this moment despite craving it for the last few weeks—actually for the past month; you’ve wanted this since the first encounter in your bedroom.

The hull descends to darkness. Stars, how will this even work? You hope you don’t make a fool of yourself. Scenarios of you fumbling or messing up flash through your mind, making you cringe. How does one even ‘mess up’ at sex?

“Relax. You think too loud,” Mando says, a few feet away. You release a breath, nodding to yourself. You can relax. Just breathe in and out and-

Mando places a hand on your shoulder. “Come here.” He leans in and your breath mixes with his, hot and airy. A clunk rings by your feet, the sound sending vibrations to your head. You trace up his sides, removing his armor piece by piece. You could do this. It was all part of the routine. Just as you loosen his pauldrons and Mando drops them to the floor, he presses his lips to yours. Now this is what you were used to. The steady rhythm of his mouth, the tentative tongue already swiping past your lips.

As soon as his armor is all gone, a hand clutches the back of your neck and another makes its way up your thigh. Mando presses deeper into the kiss, forcing your head backwards as he bends further down. The hand on your thigh reaches the zipper of your pants and unzips it.

The bounty hunter discarded the glove on that hand some time ago, but worn down leather still touches the nape of your neck. Pulling away for a second, Mando tugs your pants down, and you push off the bed to allow for it to slip past your ass. Just as he’s about to reclaim your mouth, Mando takes his hand off your neck and glides a gloved finger on your lips. He doesn’t need to talk for you to understand what he wants.

You bite the tip of the glove and yank it off his hand. You drop it to the side, and pull Mando into your arms. He relents and kisses you once again. A hand rubs small circles on your chest then grasps the soft cushion of your breasts. He muffles your sound of surprise with his lips, his hands squeezing in an erratic pattern. The more he touches you, the more he enters your space, the more you lose yourself in his hazy spell. You always wonder if the blissed-out feeling usually accompanies kissing and sex or if it’s a Mando thing.

He pulls back and sinks to his knees. Nudging your thighs further apart, Mando reaches a hand up to your mouth. Without a word, you suck his thumb, making sure to get it as wet as possible. It’s messy, saliva dripping down your lips, tongue swirling dirtily. He tastes like smoke and salt.

You hear a murmur of “good girl” below you as Mando takes his finger and glides it over your center. You moan at the contact, relieved to finally be touched. He presses a soft kiss on your thigh, still gently rubbing his thumb over that spot and-

The bounty hunter takes his hand off and nuzzles against you. Without warning, he licks a stripe along the length of your now-throbbing pussy. Stars, even though he eats you out often, you still feel like it’s the first time. The same lightning that zaps through your body now is exactly like the one that hurtled through you when Mando first placed his tongue on you.

He laps at you a few more times before taking your clit in his mouth and sucking . Without his lips on yours, nothing stops a groan from escaping you. Mando presses a hand on your stomach and nudges you backward. You let him push you, and lie flat on the bed. Beads of sweat already build on your brow, the temperature of the room rising. He continues sucking, the pleasure muffling every coherent thought. Only one thing bounces around in your mind: more .

Your hands grasp at his hair, a familiar feeling, and tug. Mando simply grunts and you feel something graze the inside of your thighs. Slowly—too slow, actually—one of Mando’s fingers enters you.

“M-Mando,” you gasp, pushing your pelvis closer to him. He’s being too careful with you, and you just. Want. More.

“Calm down,” he says, but you tug at his hair harder. He begins to move his finger in and out, but it’s not nearly enough to satisfy you. After a few excruciating minutes—or maybe seconds; time seems to slow when you’re with Mando— he pushes another finger in. The sensation of his mouth on your clit, of his fingers thrusting into you, encases your head in a cloud. Lewd, wet sounds echo around the dark hull. You can feel Mando’s groans against you, the vibrations of his breath and words sending you spiraling.

At this moment, Mando is the only one who exists. He lives in your head, in your body: a puppeteer who controls every move. You can feel Mando curl his fingers, aiming for that one spot. A warm, heavy coil builds in your stomach. As Mando continues his ministrations, his torture, the coil tenses and tigthens until-

It snaps, like a sparkler on Life Day, and the darkness behind your eyelids bursts into colors you can’t describe. You gasp at the feeling, finger desperately pulling on Mando’s strands. Little murmurs of affection and praise echo from below, and you take the time to slow your breathing. He doesn’t pull away yet, and his breaths are almost enough to drive you to overstimulation. You have to plead to get him to back off.

“Ready?” You nod, then realize Mando can’t actually see you.

“Mmm, yeah,” you say, releasing your hold on his hair in favor of the sheets below. You hear a rustling of clothes, probably his pants and under shirt. He must have tossed it on the floor, leaving him completely bare. When you reach a hand out, you’re met with a searing hot torso.

Hands grab your hips and tug you forward. Something hard and blunt and warm presses up against you. Maker, this is it. The moment that’s building up for a month. The moment that exists in your fantasies at night when you try to muffle your moans, fingering yourself to the thought of the bounty hunter. The moment that you daydream about when you watch Mando pilot the Crest or clean his blasters.

You shut your eyes despite being in total darkness. Mando slicks his cock with your wetness before pushing in, just barely entering you. The slight contact is enough to send tingles to your throbbing clit, already stimulated and aching. He props a hand next to your head, and you feel the warmth of his body hover over yours.

“I’ll go slow,” he breathes out.

“Thank you,” you whisper, and Mando pushes in a bit deeper. The head enters then the rest of his twitching cock. Inch by inch he slides in, using your wetness as lubricant.

It’s… an odd sensation. He’s much thicker than anything you’ve had inside you—much warmer too. The stretch is expected, and it stings a little bit, but Mando prepped you enough. You hear little grunts from above you as Mando bottoms out. You squeeze without thinking, and Mando swears.

You feel more full than ever. It’s one thing to have Mando’s cock in your mouth and get used to the feeling of him pushing at the back of your throat, of you gasping for air in one breath and moaning around him in another. It’s an entirely different feeling to have that same cock inside of you, hard and pulsing.

“Are you… ok?” You’re more than fine, but it feels like something is missing.

“Yeah. Umm… is it supposed to feel like this?”

He snorts. “Like what?” He says, then retracts his hips a bit before thrusting into you. It feels like a blunt stab, and you gasp—more out of surprise than real pain. “Too soon?”

“N-no. Just continue.” He begins to thrust shallowly, setting a steady pace. Mando’s hand skims up your side, warm and soothing. He traces up your ribs, your neck, and settles on your face. Still thrusting, he leans down to kiss you again.

It feels a little better this way. His mouth on yours, delivering you another dose of endorphins while he takes his pleasure from you. It feels… good to be filled up by Mando. He satisfies your craving, but there’s a lack of something more . You didn’t know what to expect when you finally lost your virginity. Maybe a feeling akin to fireworks bursting in your chest or an explosion of pleasure enough to orgasm at entry alone. It seems like your fantasies were just that. Fantasies.

“Does it… feel good?” Mando asks, a nervous hint in his voice. Maker, you’ve been so caught up in your own anxiety that you didn’t think about how he would feel.

“Yeah,” you say, but you both know it’s a lie. Mando leans back, cock halfway inside. He pulls out so only the tip is in then he thrusts, hard enough for you to gasp but the feeling is different, like-

As Mando thrusts, two of his fingers rub tiny circles over your clit and that… that makes all the difference. A dam of nerves and anxiety and unmet expectations falls away to reveal the mounting pleasure beneath. This time, when you moan, it’s real.

He resumes his position above you, his arm between your bodies, thrusting at a steady pace. Every time he enters you, a bolt of pleasure accompanies the sensation. The cloud that encloses around your head when he kisses you returns, once again rendering you at the mercy of the bounty hunter.

Even with the penetration and the extra stimulation, it’s not enough. The comfortable, seductive coil in your stomach stays curled, not yet satisfied to unfurl and snap.

“M-more,” you groan. Mando presses a small kiss on your brow, and you feel him retract then push in. He goes at a steady pace, harder and faster than before. But it’s still not enough. You blindly reach up for him, desperate for more contact. Something hungry takes up residence in your body, and only one thing will satiate it.

“Please-ugh-Mando, more ,” you beg. You need more of him. Of his hand rubbing your clit, of his thick cock thrusting deeper. The bounty hunter doesn’t speak, electing to grunt instead, but he does increase his pace once more. To a pace bordering on bruising. On fucking. Now this is what you fantasized about. Not the sweet, gentle way you imagined most people lose their virginities—something that wasn’t bad, but Mando was a kriffing bounty hunter. You want him to be rough.

Instead of kissing you, a hot mouth closes in one of your nipples. In the same way he sucked your clit before, Mando pours the same energy into your breast. His mouth is wet and warm and too many of your nerves are wired with pleasure. His pace is hard enough that your breasts bounce at the movement, your entire body pliant and open for the bounty hunter.

The mouth on your chest, the finger on your clit, the bruising thrusts wreck your body to the point where you’re starting to consider how you’ll make it out alive. Mando releases his hold on your chest, opting to grasp your hips instead. His grip digs into the soft skin of your hips, and you know it will bruise.

The new angle changes his thrusts from a simple in and out to a bam-bam-bam downwards. The hands on your hips curl around to the back of your thighs and hoist you up, your lower back and pelvis rising off the bed. Wet, filthy sounds of your coupling mix with choked-off moans and gruttal groans. You grow more delirious by the moment, and you can’t even move against him.

“So fucking good for me,” he grunts. “My little pilot,” he says, pounding into you. “Feels good now, huh,” he chuckles darkly. Your brain is too frazzled to respond with anything but moans.

“You always want more ,” he enunciates with a particularly hard thrust.

You wrap your legs around Mando’s waist, trapping him in place. He can’t pull out as much, so he grinds into you instead. The thrusts are shallower but just as hard, just as overpowering as before. For a second, you wonder if you should do more but realize you don’t even know what to do. So you let Mando take your willing body, eager for every thrust, every kiss.

The pressure in your stomach picks up heat, garnering more pleasure each passing second. You grasp at his arms, nails dragging down the length of his forearms.

“S-so good,” you mewl, too lost in the moment, already drowning in his arms.

“Are you,” he huffs, “close?” You moan in reply, stomach clenching in anticipation. The smell of sweat, metal, and sex permeate the air, creating a an almost suffocating haze. The fingers on your clit speed up, losing their careful, controlled motions. It’s messier, hungrier. The almost painful tension in your belly holds out, rising and aching, greedy for a little more-

You cry out, back arching off the bed, relying solely on Mando’s hold on your legs. For a brief moment, you can’t hear anything but crashing static, consumed by the feeling of being so full . You squeeze tightly, hugging every inch of Mando’s cock. He continues shallow, softer thrusts as your pussy pulses around him, wet and hot.

Your body goes limp, and Mando sets you back down to lay flat on the bed. He thrusts one, two more times before pulling out. You still feel dizzy and disoriented, barley registering Mando jacking himself on top of you. For a moment, you hear him gasp, a strangulated sound, then something wet and warm lands on your stomach.

He continues rubbing himself until he’s completely drained, choked moans escaping his lips. You hear him move away and pick something off the floor then feel fabric wiping across your belly. In the aftermath, you suddenly feel clammy and sweaty and tired. Like all your exhaustion halted in the heat of the moment then decided to spring up on you once the high of an orgasm left your body.

Mando nudges you aside and joins you in the cramped bed. The heat his body emanates is inviting, but you’re too sweaty to even consider snuggling up to the bounty hunter. Besides, cuddling seems too intimate, too revealing. You rest in silence, feeling the lingering sparks in your veins die out, replaced by a comforting warmth. Despite being completely drained, you could also conquer the galaxy in your blissed-out post-sex euphoria.

“Good?” You turn your head to Mando in the darkness.

“Yeah. Thank you.” It’s the truth. You’ve never felt this good in your life. Losing your virginity to the bounty hunter fell short of your expectations at first, only to surge higher than you ever imagined. If someone else were to take your first time, would it feel the same? Would you be this pleased after it all ended? Or, is it all a special Mando thing? One man, whose name and face you don’t even know, providing you comfort and pleasure...

“You’ll have another lesson tomorrow,” he says. You grin to yourself. Another shot at your ambition. You don’t thank him; he understands how grateful you are for everything he’s done. So you close your eyes and try to sleep. Mando mutters something, and you don’t quite catch it. Maybe you’ll ask him tomorrow.

The weariness in your bones cradles you like a blanket then drags you under.

#mandalorian x reader #mandalorian #mandalorian x reader smut #mandalorian x you #star wars fanfiction #a way out

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sweetescapeartist · 4 years ago

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WHY SAIYANS AREN'T THE GREATEST RACE 🙊

(But Saiyans have more potential than other races.)

So here's why I disagree with Saiyans being the greatest & strongest race. Many factors have to take place in order for Saiyans to get stronger.

POWER

The strongest that full-blood Saiyans could get with the best training is SS3 levels.

Maybe Saiyans could reach higher levels without god ki if we take GT into account, otherwise, SS3 appears to be the max. A Saiyan's max attainable power with the best training could be Vegito levels of power before they get too old & are unable to fight or they die of old age.

But keep in mind that Goku said not even fusion could defeat Beerus.

Goku had to do a ritual & train with an Angel just to attain god ki. (Other races may have something similar to the ritual. Other races could also train with Angels. Like Toppo.)

Most Saiyans weren't pure of heart or righteous. SSG could possibly be achieved by very few, but keep in mind that Saiyans don't have deep training & aren't spiritual as a culture. They would not know how to get as strong as Goku had learned.

TRAINING & SPIRITUALITY

Vegeta started training hard during the android saga. His reason for training was because he saw how beneficial training was for a low-class Saiyan like Goku, who became the legendary Super Saiyan before a royal Saiyan elite could.

Its important to note that Goku was raised as an Earthling, learned Earthling martial arts & he developed spiritual insight that Saiyan culture doesn't seem to have. Also Goku trained with 2 gods (Kami & King Kai) and acquired further power to rival Saiyan saga Vegeta. He then surpassed Vegeta in power & far surpassed him in skill because of his Earthling training.

And realistically it would be difficult for most Saiyans to even achieve the Super Saiyan transformation. They would solely rely on the Oozaru transformation. A select few elite warriors/royal Saiyans might get strong enough to achieve Super Saiyan. But from what we know about Saiyan training, it would be a very very long time before they could achieve Super Saiyan. Only the Super Saiyan transformation could even be as far as they could get.

Like I stated earlier, Vegeta was motivated to train after he saw how beneficial training was for Goku (who has Earth training & trained under 2 gods). If Vegeta never met Goku, Vegeta probably would never achieve Super Saiyan. On their own, Saiyans would most likely never see benefits of such training. They are a warrior race that see death-battles as the best training.

Goku who has martial arts training focused on self improvement, godly training, & spirit control training from the Yardrats understood how to train and conquer the Super Saiyan transformation. That's knowledge Saiyans dont have nor would their culture care about.

So lets say we give a few Saiyans the Super Saiyan transformation. I don't think Saiyans would share the knowledge of Super Saiyan with each other. Stronger ones would suppress the weaker ones until Saiyan society collapses or a civil war breaks out that would result in many casualties.

Goku saw the flaws in just buffing up the muscles of Super Saiyan. Vegeta who has a lack of deep training and Saiyan thinking, he did not see the flaws. He isn't trained the way Goku is. Being a martial artist & spiritual gave Goku a huge advantage over every other Saiyan. He was able to use his knowledge to push Gohan (a hybrid with Earthling principles) to reach Super Saiyan 2 even before a full blood Saiyan could.

Yes, Goku more than likely attained Super Saiyan 2 soon after he died. & more than likely, Vegeta attained it a few years after Cell was defeated. Goku was able to discover Super Saiyan 3 only because he was dead for 7 years & was able to train. His understanding of training and not having a physical body helped him achieve the new form.

No other full-blood Saiyan can achieve Super Saiyan 3 because of the training it takes & the toll it puts on the body. Goku barely even uses it in DBS for that reason (also because they are marketing SSG & SSB instead).

SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT

Now if we go back to the point of attaining the Super Saiyan transformation, new information has told us that most Saiyans have a low amount of S-Cells; the cells needed in order to become a Super Saiyan.

Their way of life as being warriors who lived to fight all the time is why they could not build up S-Cells. S-Cells that are built up from a gently spirit (most Saiyans lack). Peaceful environments are necessary for this build up of cells. Saiyans naturally thrive for constant battle. The chances of Super Saiyan are even slimmer with S-Cells in mind.

UNIVERSE 6 SAIYANS

Universe 6 Saiyans are mostly good hearted & live much more peaceful lives than Universe 7 Saiyans. It would appear that the good Saiyans defeated the wicked Saiyans in Universe 6. So how come Cabba is somehow the first Super Saiyan? I guess Universe 6 Saiyans don't know how to train properly either.

And lets be honest, it was terrible writing how Cabba & Caulifla attained Super Saiyan. So you're telling me that not one Universe 6 Saiyan had never gotten angry over losing a close friend or family member while on the battlefield? Sure, whatever. Logically, since Cabba never saw Super Saiyan before, it can be said that Super Saiyan is either non-existent or only royal Universe 6 Saiyans have achieved it & keep it secret.

"But the tingly back thingy!"

If a tingly back was only necessary to attain Super Saiyan, then Goku, a master martial artist, should've taught that to Gohan so that Gohan wouldn't struggle so much during training to defeat Cell.

EDIT: Goku more than likely did teach Gohan the tingly back thing after Gohan became a SS. Mastered SS is not triggered by rage. The tingly back wkrks well if dont like this.

But rage is what Super Saiyan has always been activated from. We are still told that the transformations are emotional. Great anger/rage is how Super Saiyan is triggered

(DBS manga chapter 52 & information guides tell us that Super Saiyan is still triggered by rage.).

Caulifla not only achieved Super Saiyan within a days or few hours, but she achieved Super Saiyan 2 the next day! Gohan has the most potential out of all Saiyan because he is a hybrid with a good heart & had some of the best training to have. It DOES NOT make any narrative sense from all that we've learned & continue to learn about Super Saiyan transformations. And the way Caulifla got 2 transformation within 2 days belittles the efforts of Goku & Gohan for the sake of "Look! A female Super Saiyan!"

If Caulilfa can achieve Super Saiyan 2 after only having Super Saiyan for a day, why didn't Future Gohan easily tap into Super Saiyan 2 as well & defeat the androids? Such convoluted writing for Universe 6 Saiyans... 😑

Out of Universe 6's three Super Saiyans, only Kale's transformation seems reasonable because it is set up similar to DBZ Broly. Kale controlling her power within a few minutes in the anime was stupid tho... The manga handled Kake better because she never gained control of herself. But... she had enough sense not to kill opponents and drop them out of the arena... So did she have control or not? A berserker is out to kill, not drop you out of bounds so she isn't eliminated. 😓

Nevermind. Both handled Kale's Super Saiyan form wrong in different ways...

(I have a theory that Universe 6 Saiyans may actually be Saiyan/Earthling hybrids. Which is why its easier to get Super Saiyan and they don't have tails anymore. But that's a different discussion.)

BACK TO UNIVERSE 7 SAIYANS...

So about how strong a Saiyan could become on their own. I was being generous saying full-blood Saiyans could possibly get as strong as Vegito at most. That's more so something only Goku could attain. Saiyan culture & life, heart condition, lack of spiritual connection, & lack of good martial arts knowledge keeps them from growing. If they did train to get stronger then the most they can achieve would be Super Saiyan 2. The Super Saiyan God ritual would be attainable by some, but they could not absorb the power like Goku (thats because of his disciplined training) nor would Beerus allow Saiyans to keep causing havok. He planned to destroy them anyways.

And I'm sure that if one lone Saiyan achieved Super Saiyan on Planet Vegeta, Freeza would destroy the entire race out of fear. If Freeza somehow lost, Beerus would eventually destroy them.

LUCK & GENETICS

Goku, Vegeta, Broly, & Tarble were lucky and able to live different lives from the average Saiyan, be kinder beings or have their hearts changed (wouldn't happen for most Saiyans). Goku is the 1 in a trillion rare Saiyan that got the best training & he influenced surviving Saiyans to be more like Earthlings.

(But even after all the training Goku did in OG Dragon Ball, Raditz was much stronger than Goku. That means most low class Saiyans were around the same strength as Roshi & ChiChi.)

If we are generous and say some Saiyans could've achieved Super Saiyan 2 and would not try to kill each other, then they still lose to aliens like Piccolo, Krillin, Hit, Jiren, Ribrianne, Cell, or 16, 17, & 18.

Give Hit god ki and give him Angelic training to learn Ultra Instinct. He doesn't even have god ki & yet he can keep up with Goku who needed god ki to reach such power.

Broly would be the exception because he is a Legendary Super Saiyan & in a way a mutation too. But his power is uncontrollable. Imagine Broly snaped & tapped into that uncontrollable, monterous power on Planet Vegeta. All Saiyans there die within seconds.

Saiyans are very strong aliens. But other aliens are stronger or understand how to get stronger.

If anything, Saiyans have some of the best genetics & potential that give them a very high possible advantage. However, that is not a guarantee. But Earthlings & Namekians also have very high potential they can utilize along with knowledge far beyond Saiyans.

Being raised as an Earthling is the secret to Goku's power. Being half Earthling is the secret to Gohan's great power & potential. Its as if an Earthling's potential and training & a Saiyans potential and genetics are the perfect mix for a reason. Like they're branched from the same ancestor & are counterparts in a way. 🤔 (But that part's just another theory of mine.)

CONCLUSION

Without god ki, Goku loses to almost every opponent & enemy in DBS. Goku even says SSG is a power he couldn't achieve on his own. He was nearly at the peak of his power until he learned god ki.

And like I have stated, either ritual or Angelic training could be something any race could possibly utilize.

That's what I gathered from the info we've been given.

AFTERWORD

If you disagree that's fine. Disagreements aren't a bad thing. But if you say I'm wrong on something, show or cite evidence within the series (DBZ & DBS in particular) that says or shows otherwise.

All info shows us that most Saiyans would never be strong like Goku. It was luck & circumstance that Goku was not raised as a Saiyan but as an Earthling. Otherwise he would not have been unable to compete with Vegeta or Goku would've been destroyed on Planet Vegeta, killed on the battlefield, or quickly killed by someone stronger than him.

Please don't rebutt by saying things like "Well they're stonger than Earthlings." or "Their god forms are stronger than everyone else."

Those don't work.

If Earthlings trained like Goku (not like Saiyans because Saiyans don't train like that. Its an Earth thing💡) then some humans could surpass Super Saiyan 2. Evidence shows that Krillin & Tien & Yamcha have surpassed Namek saga Super Saiyan Goku. And they aren't addicted to training like Goku does. But when they do train, they make great leaps in power even without transformations.

God ki isn't something every Saiyan can learn (like Goku & Vegeta have) nor is god ki something exclusive to Saiyans. Look at Dende & Uub (DBS chapter 66). Goku being raised as an Earthling, trained as a martial artist, & training with lower gods is what aided his learning of god ki. Vegeta began to train diffetently after seeing a weaker Saiyan's results after training. Plus god ki had to be learned. I doubt Whis or Beerus would teach them if they were evil.

#saiyans #dragon ball #db #dragon ball z #dbz #dragon ball super #dbs #i like saiyans so i try my best to understand them from the resources we have

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eli-corvis · 4 years ago

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The Devil Amongst the Dead

Summary: It has been some time since the Kengan Annihilation Tournament and while many believed Ohma Tokita [The Asura] to be dead he is in fact still alive. Hidden in the Kure Village and recovering from his heart transplant performed by none other than Hanafusa Hajime [The Dissector] himself. But this story is not about him. No it’s about the Kure Clan’s strongest but most out of control member. Kure Raian [The Devil] and what would be his usual assassination contract takes an unexpected turn when he is sent to an island city with just as much crime and corruption as The Inside. This city is called Roanapur. Known to many who live there as the city of the dead.

Prologue: The Devil Approaches

[Six Months After the Kengan Annihilation Tournament]

Black sclera eyes slowly open up to see a clear blue sky. The scent of sea salt from the ocean is heavy as the sounds of seagulls can be heard overhead. “Hm, must be here already” thought the young man as he sat up from where he was laying down from. Rubbing his black sclera eyes and taking in his surroundings to still be on top of a shipping container on board a cargo ship he stowed away on. He looked around to see he was close to his destination and from a distance he saw a large headless Buddha statue carved in a tall rock and beyond that further away is a city resting on an island.

“Heh, so this is where the bastard is hiding” he scoffed to himself “about time I got here, I was getting tired of hiding on this piece of shit like a fuckn rat ” he said as he stood up to get a better view as the cargo ship approaching the island. The man on board this cargo is none other the Kure Raian. A member of the infamous Kure Clan that has been around for 1,300 year. Looking back on the events that led up to this Raian started to wonder “why did the old man pick me for this shit?. Normally I could’ve been sent off to wipe out a crime syndicate, a terrorists cell, or even some elitist asshole with enough money to hire a private army. At least those got my blood pumping.” Irritated that he could’ve been on a job that usually left a trail of body has Raian pissed off at the fact he allowed the old man tricked him into taking this contract in the first place.

[48 hours ago in the Kure Village Around a particular city, 500 kilometers away from Tokyo]

Kure Erioh the Patriarch of the Kure Clan was given an unusual commission for a contract by an anonymous client, to a place he hasn’t been to in years, Roanapur. An old Thai port in southern Thailand, where the deserters and the losers of the Vietnam War took refuge and were joined by the worst villains and criminals of the planet. Prostitutes, drug-addicts, mercenaries, killers, and psychopaths of any nationalities compose the population of Roanapur.

Erioh’s knowledge of this crime infested cesspool is limited due to only have gone there during his time as The Fang. Any useful information is hard to come by without a inside source. But luckily for him he has just the right man for the job. Having his great-grandson summoned to the main room of the Traditional Japanese house, Raian walked in and approached the head of the Clan “What do ya want grandfather?” Raian said clearly annoyed at being called upon, Erioh didn’t seem to care of his grandson's annoyance. “I got a job for you Raian, something to get you more active since The Tournament” Raian arched an eyebrow at this “well I’m not interested in whatever bullshit you got for me, get one of The Three Stooges to run your damn errands.” Raian referring to Kure Hollis, Kure Reiichi, and Kure Horio. “Their each fulfilling their own obligations at the moment. And I’m sure that this contract will not bore the likes of you, if i was to send you, their is nobody more suited for this contract, or must i send someone else take this contract.” He said while stroking his chin in thought. “Perhaps this might be that too much for you to handle you spoiled brat.”

Erioh said mockingly while giving Raian a challenging smirk. Raian returns the smirk with a murderous grin of his own. “Better watch it old man or I might just kill you right here and now” he said as he took a step closer to his elder. “You can try boy, but as I stated before, I’m not going to let some snot-nose brat kill me just yet. Besides I think you’ll find that this worthwhile if you were to listen for once, I can be sure of that.”

Erioh calmly said as he stood up from where he was sitting and headed towards the door, Raian adamantly followed right behind him. “Ever since your fight against Tokita Ohma and Hayami Katsumasa's Guardians back on Ganryu Island you have not been active in these past six months.” Erioh gave Raian a glance over his shoulder as they walk down the long halls of the Traditional Japanese house. “Yeah so what, still haven’t give me a damn good reason why I should take this job in the first place.” Raian angrily said “Patience Raian, patience. First you’ll need to be informed on your target” arriving at the back door of the house Erioh opened the door to reveal Kure Fusui.

Raian’s younger sister and the liaison between the Kure Clan and the Kengan Association, she turned around to greet her grandfather “Hello grandfather, how are you doing?” she said to while walking up to and embracing him in a hug. “Oh I’m doing just fine don’t worry about this old man, tell me how have you been my dear?” Erioh said being the doting grandfather he is known for amongst the the Kure Clan. Fusui smiled and perked up “I’m doing great grandfather, and before you ask Karla is doing good as well both in school and at home, and Mr. Yamashita though still broken up about Ohma, he’s done quite well from himself these past few months. Speaking of Ohma, how is he doing?” She asked curiously. “Oh don’t you worry my dear Fusui, Tokita Ohma is doing just fine and with the help of our secret healing techniques, he will recover in no time.”

“I’m glad to hear that” she said with a smile. “So what are you and big bro up to?” she asked just noticing that her older brother was standing there with his arms crossed. “Remember that special task i asked of you before you left?” He asked. Fusui perked up “That Roanapur job right?.” Erioh nodded “Well from what I could gather I’ve confirmed the target has been spotted there but it seems like he’s hired one of the local gangs as hired muscle, so getting to him quickly won’t be so easy, and even if you manage to take care of both of them the other gangs will most likely jump in, which will make things more complicated” she stated “Well that won’t be much of an issue, because your brother will be taking the contract, won’t you Raian” Erioh said in a taunting manner.

“You sure about that grandfather, I mean I have no doubt big bro can deal with this no problem but-” Fusui was then interrupted by her brother “Hey now the old man has been very persistent about this shit, so tell me who’s the fucker that the old bastard is sending me kill and I might just consider it.” Raian said eagerly “Oh, umm alright then.” She then pulls out a laptop from inside her bag and passes it to Raian.

Raian takes the laptop, opening it up to see the screen presented to him.

[Contract Briefing]

•Target name: Dr. Alton Blonsky

•Age: 59

• Occupation: Bioengineer/Geneticist

• Adjective: Eliminate Dr. Blonsky and destroy any and all research found and eliminate any and all who would stand between your adjective.

• Last Confirmed Location: Roanapur, Thailand

• Target Price: $50,000,000

• Target information: Dr.Blonsky is a Bioengineer and Geneticist and researcher for genetics he has went into hiding after it was discovered you was selling his unethical research on the black market for the highest bidder. Years after his disappearance sources have spotted him active in the city of Roanapur. He is seemingly under the employment/protection of the local criminal organization.

• Payment Method: Upon accepting this contract the first half of the payment will be sent through wireless transaction method of your choice. And receive other half of payment upon completion.

[End of Briefing]

□Accept □Decline

Raian closed the laptop and handed it back to Fusui. “So some mad scientist is selling trying the secret of immorality or some shit right?” Taking the laptop back and placing it back inside her bag Fusui shook her head and said “I don’t know the details on what he was working on or who’s he trying to sell his research too, all I know is that some very big players are going to be interested in buying whatever he has cooking up, so whatever he’s making it must be a really big deal.” Erioh then stepped into the conversation. “So, Raian tell me do you accept?”

[48 hours later on the Ports of Roanapur]

As the crew of the cargo ship started to unload their shipments and do an inventory check Raian snuck pass all of the of the crew without them even noticing he was there. Now heading to the main street through the docks he pulls a piece of paper Fusui has given him before taking off with all contact information he will be needing during his time here. “Don’t plan on being here long but this shit will come in handy when I need it.” He said to himself as he reads off the address for his safe house with a side note at the below saying.

“While you’re there can you do me a huge solid and pick up a modified sniper rifle I ordered there, it should’ve been sent out days ago but since you’re there you can do it for me please, appreciate it bro.

-Love your favorite sister Fusui.♥︎”

Raian could only scoff while reading the note his sister left him. “The hell does she think I am, her errand boy” reading the address the only thing it said was The Church of Violence “I don’t got time for this shit” he said as he balled up the piece of paper and placed it back inside his pocket before walking off towards the direction of his safe house.

The city of Roanapur is known for many things, one of which is being the world capital for crime and corruption, for criminals and madmen to thrive. But now The Devil has arrived, beware for the man know as The Devil has come, and he will destroys any and all that stands in his way.

Author's Note: Hey ya’ll, if you haven’t figured it out yet this is a Kengan Ashura x Black Lagoon crossover the idea kinda popped in head one day and I was like “how am I going to make this work” so days of brainstorming later I’ve my story layout but the question was who am I going to send from kengan to the den of criminals, and obviously my first choice was Raian but the i thought about it some more and thought about having Agito Kanoh, Hatsumi Sen, Muteba Gizenga, Kiryu Setsuna, hell even Tokita Niko came to mind. The setting of black lagoon takes place in the early 1990s so it make a lot more sense for Niko to be there timeline wise but after talking about it with another writer here I stuck with Kure Raian, now this is my first fanfiction, like every but that will be no excuse for my writing to be shit, like spelling mistakes or grammar errors or major OFC. I’ll do my best to stay faithful to each character. And since I’ve picked Raian for this story, I’ll be making some small changes to the black lagoon universe to fit with the world of Kengan. If you haven't noticed I implied that Kure Erioh has been to Roanapur in the past, who know I might just make a side story exploring that plot point...maybe. Ok that’s enough of me ranting for now, until next time.

#kengan ashura #black lagoon #fanfiction #crossover #kure raian #kure erioh #kure fusui #anime #manga

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spectraspecs-writes · 4 years ago

Text

Leviathan - Chapter 101

Link to the masterpost. Chapter 100. Chapter 102.

Tw - swearing, torture

@averruncusho @ceruleanrainblues @chubbsmomma @strangepostmiracle thank you for reading, you get a tag. @skelelexiunderlord thank you for support, you get a tag.

———–

I don’t get to see Mission being carried off. All I hear is a cry for reinforcements. The troopers move me, Carth, and Bastila off pretty quickly. Rather than simply search us, they have us strip down to our underclothes and force us into individual energy cells. At least the heating is decent.

We wait. For what feels like hours. There’s barely enough room to sit in the cell but I manage. Bastila is meditating. Carth is pacing in his cell. As much as he can anyway. It’s hard to feel him through the cell, but I don’t need the Force to know what’s going through his head. He’s calculating. This was never the scenario he imagined he’d face Saul in. At the very least, I imagine he planned to be wearing pants. He has every confidence in Mission to get us out, of course. He’s working ahead of that. What happens next. What happens after that, what happens after that. All the way up to Saul’s death. But he keeps getting stuck there. How do we get out. How do we get everyone on the Hawk and away from the Leviathan. And what is, from my perspective, the most important question - does he survive this? How?

When our interrogator comes, I know by the way he carries himself, it’s Saul. We all stand and face him, readying ourselves. He speaks to Carth first, with the words of a father but the tone of a scoundrel. “Carth, it has been far too long since we last spoke,” he says, “I see the recent months have not been kind in your case. I barely recognized you.”

Carth is cold. I haven’t seen him like this in a while. “But I recognized you, Saul. I see your face every night even as I promise myself I will kill you for what you did to my home world.”

Saul shakes his head. “Did you learn nothing in your time under me? As a soldier you should understand that casualties were unavoidable. This was an act of war.”

“It was a cowardly act of betrayal!” he exclaims, “Your fleet bombed a civilian target into oblivion without warning or provocation. And the blood of those innocent people is on your hands!”

“In war even the innocent must die.” Always a justification. “The Sith would not accept me until I proved I had truly turned my back on the Republic by bombing the planet.”

“My wife died in that attack, Saul,” Carth says softly, “And for that, I swear I'll kill you.”

Saul sighs. “You used to be a man of action, not of empty words,” he says, “Cling to your lust for revenge if you must, but spare me your tired threats. I've heard them all before.” He turns. Starts to pace a little. “You are an insignificant part of these events, anyway. Lord Malak is far more interested in your Jedi companions.” He crosses in front of me and Bastila and stops. “He has great plans for them.”

“We will never serve Malak or the Dark Side!” Bastila says firmly, “The Sith will be destroyed, Admiral Karath… as will you if you don't turn away from this path.”

Saul smiles. “Your words are brave, Bastila, but the lure of the Dark Side is hard to resist - or so I've been told.” He looks at me. “I wonder if your companion is as devoted to the light as you are?”

I scoff. “Seriously? You guys have sent Dark Jedi, a bounty hunter, and a Sith apprentice after me, and I’ve killed every single one of them, you think after that the Dark Side has any allure? I’m not exactly fond of working with people who’ve tried to kill me.”

“Your wit is as sharp as ever,” he says with a smirk. Which is a weird as hell remark to make given we’ve never met. “I’m certain Malak will find your loyalty to the Jedi amusing.” He runs his fingers along a control panel, while the Sith trooper who mans it watches him closely. Waiting for a command that hasn’t yet come. “The Dark Lord would probably reward me if I just killed you once and for all. But he may want to question you given the trouble you've caused him… and the history between you.”

History? “Unless Malak was a scout, you’ve got the wrong girl.”

Saul cocks his head. “You mean…” he says slowly. Calculating the same way Carth does. “… oh, this can't be true, can it? You really don't know what's going on here, do you?”

“Being questioned by a dickhead? I think I’ve got an idea what’s going on here.”

He laughs a bit. “Well, I won't be the one to deprive Malak of the pleasure of telling you himself.” I glance at Bastila and Carth, but neither of them show a flicker of awareness, either. Saul moves to the center of the room, facing us all. “The Dark Lord will no doubt torture you for information and for his own twisted pleasure. Eventually you will tell him everything. The Sith can be very persuasive. However,” he says, “Lord Malak is in another sector. It may be some time before he arrives, so I suppose I will have to fill in for him until then.” He turns to the trooper at the control panel. “Activate the torture fields.”

Oh fuck.

It starts with a small shock that intensifies over and over. It’s almost like my mind goes away, just to survive. I hear myself scream, but I don’t feel it. It’s surreal. Until the field turns off and I feel it all at once. My muscles collapse from under me. Worse than Force Lightning. But I have to stay strong. I can take it. He won’t kill me. Whatever the reason he’s far too interested in me. I can take the torture. I can take it. “I don't want them to pass out before I question them,” Saul says to the trooper, “Malak will appreciate any information I can give him when he arrives.”

“Don’t waste your breath, Saul!” Carth says, breathing heavily, “We won’t answer any of your questions!”

“I'm sure you won't,” Saul says with a grin, then he looks at me, “However, we both know your friend's loyalties have proven in the past to be somewhat… flexible.”

I manage to stand up, which is hard because I have nothing to push up against. “What are you talking about?”

Saul rolls his eyes. “I am interrogating you, not the other way around. You will answer questions, not ask them.” No need to be snippy. “It is time to put your loyalty to the test. I doubt torturing you will gain me your true cooperation. Your will is too strong to be broken that way.” So what? That torture earlier was just for fun? Definitely a dickhead. “However, even the strongest of heroes has trouble watching those they care about suffering.” I don’t like where this is going. “The interrogation will begin now. Each time you refuse to answer or give me a false answer, Carth will suffer.”

Oh God. It’s happening. Over and over again, I’ve thought, “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to Carth.” And it was always a worst case, “this will probably never happen” scenario. But now it’s real. This is happening. I… I don’t know what to do. I can take it. But I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt him. What do I do? Carth sees me. Sees my frozen reaction. He knows my face like I know his. “My pain is meaningless!” he says, “Tell him nothing!” Okay. Okay. I’ll do my best. I’ll try.

“I tire of these games,” Saul says, “Now I want answers! On what planet is the Jedi Academy at which you were trained?” No. Don’t answer. I won’t answer. Don’t say a word, Rena. “Very well,” he says when I don’t answer, “This is the price of your resistance.” He nods at the trooper.

Carth screams, and my head screams with him. My heart, my chest, my whole body. I couldn’t feel it when he tortured me before, but it’s like… I feel what Carth feels. In this moment, every sensation that ripples across his nerves sends a signal to mine. And that… watching him in agony! I can’t do it! I can’t do it, I’m so sorry!

“Enough!” Saul says, and the pain stops. I can’t do it, I can’t bear to do that to him, not again, no matter what he says, I’m so sorry. “You see what happens when you try to defy me?” He shakes his head. “This first question was a test. Obviously Malak knew the Academy was on Dantooine, and it has since been destroyed by our fleet! Dantooine is an empty graveyard now. Nothing remains but a smoking ruin and the charred remains of your former Masters!”

“No!” Bastila exclaims, “You’re lying! It isn’t true!”

“It doesn't matter whether you believe me or not,” he says, “The fact remains that the Jedi on Dantooine have been eradicated, along with any hope of someone coming to rescue you!” He turns back to me. “Now… tell me your mission. How were the Jedi planning on using you to stop Lord Malak and our Sith armada?”

I look at Carth. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I can’t do this. I can’t, I’m so sorry… “We were looking for the Star Forge.”

Bastila looks furious. I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a damn what she thinks. But Carth looks… a little disappointed. “Fascinating,” Saul says with a smug grin. I hate him. I hate him! “Tell me, how did you find out about the Star Forge?”

“Rena, for the sake of the Republic don't tell him anything!” Bastila shouts.

“Don't listen to her!” Saul snaps, “Tell me what I want to know or watch Carth suffer!”

I can’t. I can’t do it, I’m so sorry. “Bastila and I, we saw Revan and Malak searching for it in our dreams.”

“No!” Bastila exclaims, “How could you betray the Jedi like this?”

Saul grins his smug grin again. “I find your willingness to cooperate pleasing, though it seems your answers are quite upsetting to Bastila.” I hate you, I hate you so much. “Not to worry - we are almost finished here.” Then a communicator in his pocket beeps. He doesn’t look at it, but it changes his direction nevertheless. “The information you have given me has been most useful, but I fear our session is over,” he says, “Lord Malak will want to continue with this line of questioning himself.” He glances at the trooper. “I will leave you here in your cell with a small taste of the horrors you will suffer when Lord Malak arrives.” The trooper presses the control panel once again.

This is almost undoubtedly the worst day of my life.

---

I must have passed out at some point. When I come to, everything hurts. I almost feel like I’ve been burned, but worse than any burn I’ve had before.

Bastila stops me before I can sit up. “Don’t try to move too quickly, you might not be fully recovered yet.”

“I think I can handle sitting up,” I say, but I still go slowly. I feel a little dizzy. “What happened?”

“Admiral Karath had his guards continue to torture you even after you passed out,” she says.

“They tortured all of us,” Carth says, “though you got the worst of it by far. Saul wanted them to make us suffer. He's become some sort of sadistic monster.”

“The Dark Side has perverted him, Carth,” Bastila says, “Once you start down the tainted path it leads you ever further into the depths of evil. I fear he is forever lost.”

“Once a dickhead, always a dickhead,” I grunt, trying to stand up, “Dark Side, hell. I’ve never met anyone who stopped being a dickhead.”

“And Dantooine…” she says, clearly mourning, “To hear that it’s been destroyed… First Taris, now the Academy... is there no end to the killing?” She sighs. “I'd like to believe that Saul was lying to us, but even as he said the words I knew they were true. The Academy is gone. We should have felt a disturbance in the Force when the attack came. The fact that we did not is a bad sign. I fear the Dark Side is growing stronger, casting shadows our vision cannot pierce. I can only hope that some of the Jedi escaped. Vrook, Vandar, Zhar… I cannot imagine all of them being gone.” She takes a deep breath. “In any case, we have lost our one place of refuge in the galaxy.”

“None of this will matter if we don't get out of this prison before Saul gets back!” Carth says.

On my feet now. Still a bit dizzy, but on my feet. “Where is he now? Do we know?” I ask.

“He mentioned that Lord Malak was on his way,” Carth says, “I think the Admiral left to prepare for his arrival… and to report the results of our interrogation.”

Bastila sighs at me. I hate it. “I only wish you had been able to resist the Admiral's questioning,” she says, “I hope the information you revealed does not bring the entire galaxy under the dominion of the Sith.”

I scoff. I can’t believe her. “So what? I just should have let him be tortured? That’s what you think I should have done?”

“I appreciate your… feelings… for Carth. But you can't let your feelings override your judgment. Remember the Jedi code: There is no emotion, there is peace.”

Peace? Peace? I am so goddamn sick of her peace. “How dare you judge me? How dare you? You have no idea what it’s like to be put in that kind of position! What if it was Canderous being tortured?”

“I know if I had been in that position I would not have betrayed the Order and the Republic!”

“So you would have left him screaming in agony, is that right? You have no idea! I felt it! That first question? I tried to stay strong, but when he tortured Carth I felt it! I decided I could never put another person through that again, and you’re telling me that your vaunted Jedi Order means more than an actual person? How can you ever presume to have the moral high ground if you would let even one person suffer and die for an idea?!”

“Stop it, both of you!” Carth shouts at us. For him. Only for him will I let this drop. “Bastila, you-you can't honestly say how you would have reacted in that situation - nobody can! Besides, Saul already had all the information. I could tell. The interrogation was a sham. Saul was toying with us. He didn't care what we told him. I think it was just an excuse to torture us before Malak arrived.”

Suddenly Bastila picks her head up. “Did you feel that?” she says, “A disturbance in the Force.” You’re a disturbance in the Force. “The Admiral has sent his message, the Dark Lord knows we are here now. Malak is coming.”

“Well, then we better hope Mission busts us out of here before he arrives.”

#star wars #knights of the old republic #kotor #autistic artist #fiction #swearing tw #torture tw #Specs writes stuff #kotor fic #rena visz #oc #fem!revan #ls!revan #carth onasi #bastila shan #saul karath #leviathan #chapter 101

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abjectaspiringfailure · 5 years ago

Note

Hello, in your response to one of my previous asks you mentioned that rc cells functioned like the Blacklight Virus did in Prototype. If I may ask, how so? Also, on a more random note, what would you think if there were a one-eyed ghoul featured in the series who was like Alex Mercer?

Hello, in your response to one of my previous asks you mentioned that rc cells functioned like the Blacklight Virus did in Prototype. If I may ask, how so?

Sorry this took so long to get to.

So as a preface for this post, I don’t personally believe Ishida was invoking these things in a way where he thought “this is primarily meant to be seen through the lens of the original 2009 [PROTOTYPE]”, but it is an interesting coincidence. Both Tokyo Ghoul and Prototype have a unique design style, and the result is a story that if you rush through will leave you going “well I guess things are complete but uh.... what?” Which is why Tokyo Ghoul had such a vast meta community that formed, and why Prototype has an active theory crafting community given its size and relative obscurity. Both have a web of intrigue that needed to be solved to get a good grasp on the story and arguably many things of importance are said and done offscreen.

I got absorbed in going on about both Prototype and Tokyo Ghoul, so I’m going back to put this here. I enjoyed how both of these series were basically puzzles to be solved, and I think both are misunderstood (though Tokyo Ghoul moreso than Prototype). I ended up writing a lot about the similarities that pertained to the question in the sense that there were ways the virus and RC cells had some similarities, but I ended up trimming it down significantly. So uh.

DX1118 functions by rewriting the host’s DNA to replicate. In most cases, there is death via organ failure. What “failure” and “lethality” means in the case of DX1118 is varied just like it is in Tokyo Ghoul with “success” and “floppies”; although the virus kills people, it brings them back as monsters. I’m tempted to believe this is referring to the attempts to weaponize the virus in the sense of creating super soldiers; a prelude to the DX1120 variant. The one mentioned to be Redlight explicitly has a 99.999 lethality rate.

In the case of DX1118 and its offshoots, “releasing what’s already there” means activating the non-coding areas of the genome. Essentially, the powers bestowed upon those who survive the virus in Prototype are not the result of the virus by itself, but rather the virus using things inside the human genome for mutations. The human genome actually has a rather hefty chunk of it made out of viruses that infected our ancestors and stayed in their system, roughly about 4 - 8%.

I see Tokyo Ghoul humans as naturally progressing towards becoming ghouls due to RC cells and the way they adapted to the humans and influenced their genetic development. RC cells are not normal for humans, but the humans of the Tokyo Ghoul universe do not understand that because it seems to be the only thing they have ever known. An RC count of 200 - 500 is considered healthy and average. I believe RC cells are much like the viruses that inhabit the human genome; they’re something that’s been there all along in the Tokyo Ghoul universe.

I believe ghouls aren’t the result of just an entirely new species developing entirely separately but coincidentally being mirror replicas of humans down to anatomy, blood types, thought patterns, bone structures, and their ability to swap organs, but rather something that is the result of the RC cells in the system mutating them into new entities over time. RC cells, like the Blacklight virus, are very mutagenic. Unlike the Blacklight virus, I see most of these changes as being more gradual in the line of human -> ghoul.

It would go human - > human with “special investigator genes” (with RC cells that normal human levels but ghoul quality) -> human with “special investigator genes” and latent ROS genes having children with someone in the same position -> ghoul who cannot use a kagune (such as G&G) -> ghoul who can use a kagune -> ghoul with kakuja mutation genes - > ghoul with kakuja genes having children with kakuja genes - > kakuja

It’s more complex than that because of the way Ishida spread the information about with regards to ghoul and human biology. There’s also a lot of stuff that goes into that, with regards to ROS in both humans and ghouls, and stuff that I feel needs to be expanded upon. Eg stuff about the Oggai’s Frame A/Frame B divide, Nutcracker’s RC levels being listed as explicitly two separate types, kagunes and kakujas showing a consistent pattern of having traits of two RC types, Urie’s One Eye (Frame A)/Two Eye (Frame B), the Washuu breeding program, and how this all factors together (in the way I see it).

To get back to Blacklight and the similarities, I said this in the post you’re referring to, but I don’t think the Dragon toxin caused “ROS like symptoms”, I think the Dragon just caused ROS by increasing the RC cell levels of anyone it touched while introducing Washuu “born kakuja” genetics that can apparently form extra kakuhou pretty easily. Because there was so many cases, there was too many people to treat at once, and therefore they turned into ghouls. Usually, because the disease is so rare and much slower, it’s more controllable.

Shirazu’s sister, for example, didn’t have her ROS caused by RC cells from something so severe and there weren’t hundreds of thousands of other people who were infected, so Haru’s ROS was both slower and the resources to control it were more readily available.

When it comes to DX1118 and its variants, and RC Cells, I’m of the opinion that they work in different methods, but the effects are similar. Blacklight’s origin and true purpose is greatly muddled due to the way Prototype is written. Like Tokyo Ghoul, multiple pieces of information are ambiguous or outright lies.

There were many differing stories about what the true purpose of the Blacklight virus was - ranging from some type of super human serum meant to increase human strength and intellect, to a weapon designed to kill off specific ethnic groups, to some evolutionary compound meant to force the planet to change into a new being, to some form of inevitability that would have to be engaged regardless. This makes a lot of the information involved murky; this is actually acknowledged in universe as being completely intentional. The actual origins of DX1118 isn’t stated, as far as we can tell from the information given, it just sort of popped up out of nowhere.

The origin of RC cells is also shrouded in mystery. Ghouls are a worldwide phenomenon, so, logically, RC cells should be universal. Otherwise, ghouls would not be able to feed. It is also stated that a normal, healthy human being has between 200 - 500 RC cells, which implies that not having any RC cells is considered either unhealthy or abnormal. I’d speculate that RC cells themselves would therefore have to be either hundreds of thousands of years old and tied to the evolution of humans in the Tokyo Ghoul universe, or, spread like a contagion. The Washuu themselves became “born Kakujas” due to centuries of cannibalization before they even made it to Japan, and by the the time the Washuu became known as legendary human ghoul hunters, they were already almost indistinguishable from the local population and were identified as Japanese nobility.

So, their origins are rather different, but they have the same air of mystery about them, and they touch on similar topics. The methods they get used is different, but the conspiracy has significant overlap.

The way Blacklight works when it infects a host is via changing the host cell by activating the non-coding regions of the genome. A substantial chunk of the human genome is actually believed to be now dormant viruses that infected our ancestors, who survived them, and lived on to procreate. In Prototype, this translates to the virus mutating the human body to achieve superhuman abilities, in theory? In actuality, the failure rates of the virus are rather substantial. But if you reword it, 99.9% lethality rate translates to a .1% success rate.

TG;re 44

These failure rates are comparable to the original Kanou kakuhou transplantation procedure, if less survivable. (This isn’t including the 99.999% lethality variant or the one that was made to be 10x more lethal and mutagenic than that). The failure rates for the Kanou procedure are substantial, but even the failures are reminiscent of the Blacklight “Runners” that are seen moving around the city - though that feels like it’s the result of the “zombies” theme.

TG;re 1

While I don’t recall if it’s ever stated how the DX1120 virus differs from the DX1118 variants, the D-Codes work using similar logic to the Qs and Oggai. Both use the “power of their enemy” to fight back against them, rather than using technology such as firearms. The description of the D-Codes is essentially the same as the Qs. They use the virus to increase their metabolism, strength, durability, and even regenerative functions.

The effort put into this biology system seemed immense, and the way the information is sprinkled in seems very organic.

There was other stuff about similarities between Arima and Cross, Blackwatch and V, Elizabeth Green and Roma/Eto/Rize, but I feel like that’s a bit off topic from the question, and I think this would have been answered immediately had I not tried to explore all of those avenues. I tried to keep this more on topic to the question, but I feel the flow regardless suffered. This is kinda the issue I have with ghoul biology stuff that threw a wrench into the post. It makes sense when you look at the big picture, but taking it all separately and dispersing it to a single point makes it seem nonsensical.

I kind of hope that explains it better. I’m going to try to revisit the ghoul biology post and just sorta accept that it’s not going to flow as easily as a character analysis post because it’s more technical in nature and the information is scattered between hundreds of chapters.

edit:

oh wait, forgot something.

Also, on a more random note, what would you think if there were a one-eyed ghoul featured in the series who was like Alex Mercer?

I think about this concept a lot. The idea of an Alex Mercer like character unwrapping things in Tokyo Ghoul sounds like an interesting concept. When you mean like Alex Mercer, you mean an AOEG that is trying to unravel the mysteries involved, and any time they eat someone’s RC cells, they get the knowledge inside of them type of deal? Alex Mercer as he is in the original Prototype would likely work with Aogiri Tree. Alex Mercer as he is in Prototype 2 would probably become a member of the Clowns as an actual member, or one of the philosophical Clowns that end up screwing over Kaneki and helping out the Clowns, like Yamori or Chie Hori.

Prototype Alex Mercer would probably start off opposed to both the CCG and Aogiri Tree, assuming you’re starting him off in Tokyo without his memories. He seems like he’d end up getting played, set up, and gaslighted by the Clowns like Kaneki, Eto, and Mutsuki were. I imagine Mercer would quickly turn sides though once they realizes V exists and they’d probably set their sights on killing off the Clowns. tbh Mercer would probably succeed. Alex Mercer’s mindset means initially they’re going to be dancing in the palm of their hands, but the powerset means it’s only a matter of time before everything gets revealed. Dealing almost solely in deception, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation is kind of an awful idea against a guy who can piece things together and blow your entire conspiracy to pieces. This would be like a “Karen Parker” situation, only the Clowns aren’t really used to hiding so much as sitting out in the open and none of them would be strong enough to beat someone with Alex Mercer’s powerset even in ghoul form tbh.

He’d probably join Aogiri Tree and Goat in the long run, even if briefly. The story would go off the rails long before Goat would form, though.

Alex Mercer at the end of Prototype is a different beast entirely but also kinda hard to figure out; the original writer wasn’t involved with a lot of the stuff after, and the Prototype 2 Alex Mercer feels like the original got consumed by like the Supreme Hunter and it just decided to wear his skin. Prototype 2 was originally Spiderman 4 before it was reskinned to be Protoype 2 so like everything was already set up and in place and it’s obvious that Father G was Uncle Ben, Mercer was Dr. Octavius, Heller was Peter, “viral sonar” is spidersense, etc. The writer that took over apparently hated Alex Mercer, from what I was told by people who talked to the guy. Isn’t really a good thing to go into writing with. Salt towards Alex Mercer being demonized is kinda universal. Heller had some good moments, but I felt his character was wasted. Wish the game just stayed as Spiderman 4, and Prototype 2 was on the Xbox One/PS4 rather than what Activision forced Radical to do.

I guess you could say that Prototype 2 is to the original Prototype what the anime is to Tokyo Ghoul.

But, we can infer things. It’s likely Mercer would be distrustful of everyone due to the experience with the Supreme Hunter, but very unsure of themselves. Automatic opposition to the scary conspiracy group is guaranteed. There’s an automatic opposition to killing indiscriminately from a character perspective even if the game doesn’t punish you for it; by the end, Alex is even fed up with killing soldiers who aren’t commanders. I’m not sure if he’d join up with Aogiri. Aogiri avoided civilian population centers and kept their targets military in nature, yes. On the other hand, they also just told ghouls like Torso “yo, knock it off, the CCG will getcha” and they let the Clowns or ghouls like Big Madam roam free and even worked with them, even if in the later case it was related to trying to see if Takizawa would awaken Haise’s memories.

Goat is a possibility. Kaneki’s strategy of disarming the CCG would probably be something Alex Mercer would go for. I imagine he’d also just go right for Furuta’s throat. The only reason this wasn’t done in the original Prototype was because Blackwatch’s commander was on the Reagan and was shooting anyone who got close out of the sky. Canonically the WOI does confirm an attempt to just fly therw with a helicopter only to get intercepted, and Alex also mentions that when they have their conversation with the Supreme Hunter.

Most likely though, Alex Mercer would end up working with Hide’s group and helping Kurona if he finds out about Kurona’s story. Especially Kurona. She’s simultaneously after a mad scientist who turned her into a monster, and she’s also Dana’s age. I see him helping her in her quest to get back at Kanou. With Hide, Alex sorta uses any help he can get, and Hide seems like he’d find Mercer because he’s just that good.

I think they would work with Eto if Eto opened up to them but.. Eto doesn’t really open up to people unless they violently maim her, like Kaneki or Arima. She might end up becoming interested in Alex if Alex starts trying to kill her, like Kaneki, but man. That’s not healthy.

Prototype 2 Alex Mercer, like I said, would likely be on board with the Clowns, but probably only from a philosophical sense. He agrees with their surface level stuff - the world is awful, people need to be killed, nothing matters, releasing giant monsters that kill millions is hilarious, innocent people deserve to be tortured, children are fair game, cause terror for lols, work with the conspiracy that controls the world while also killing its members because that’s fun and convenient, etc. Whether or not he ends up joining them outright or being like Yamori or Horie is up in the air, but I imagine he’d not be allowed. Furuta’s very good at analysis so I assume he’d see Alex as a threat from the get go and would keep him at a distance at all times.

Most likely it would end up in some weird battle with Mercer and Furuta being the main combatants just screwing with each other using secret agents, and Kaneki’s just. Kaneki. And gets stuck in the middle of it, just barely surviving. P2′s Mercer’s “here’s free viral powers kids” probably translates to kakuho implantation that’s even more casual than Eto’s, and his ability to just fire off viral clouds everywhere would most likely translate to him having the ability to just blast Dragon toxin. Alex in P2 gyrates pretty violently between “invincible and impossibly incompetent” to “literally so incompetent he gives the person trying to kill him the power to kill him and slowly feeds him powerups while letting them ruin his plans before stepping in and immediately giving up once a single attempt to murder them doesn’t work and then decides to go back to feeding them powerups until they can kill him” so.

I’m not sure if he’d like, do what Furuta did to Kaneki and give him the power to kill him, only entirely on purpose instead of accidentally, or if he’d just. Instantly vaporize all of his opponents.

He probably gives Eto, Kaneki, and Mutsuki power ups and then goes around trying to piss them off while claiming he’d trying to destroy V and Furuta. And he would actually, really, be trying to stop V and Furuta, but also he wouldn’t be, and he’s be working with them, but he wouldn’t.

He’d go to America, kill Heller’s family, and then turn Heller into a OEG that kills him.

You didn’t mention Heller, but there’s no way he’d be okay with V or the Clowns or probably even Anteiku (because Anteiku okayed set up civilian hunting grounds). He’d also oppose Aogiri Tree for the same reasons I think post Prototype 1 Alex would, but he might work with them like he did Rooks if he saw them as useful. The moment Furuta marches out the Oggai, if it came to that, he’d probably just go right for Furuta. The only reason Heller doesn’t do this with Mercer is because Mercer is hiding, but otherwise he’s pretty keen on just going to his current target and punching them in the face out in broad daylight surrounded by witnesses. And turning a bunch of children into the Oggai and having them go around slaughtering people would definitely set Heller off.

The story would also go off the rails.

I mean if you mean a One Eyed Ghoul with amnesia running around NYC slowly unraveling the secret surrounding V’s American Branch in the form of Blackwatch and imaging a scenario? I think that would be pretty cool, personally.

TG 141

There’s a lot of potential for a Tokyo Ghoul game in the style of Prototype. A lot of the powers that work in Prototype feel like they’d feel right at home in Tokyo Ghoul and vice verse. Eg the wallrunning could be explain with kagune wallrunning that Eto and Kaneki show. You could have a spiritual successor to Cross and some overarching super ghoul investigator counterpart to Arima, but his thing would be entirely different?

TG 112, 138

Less Arima’s “this literally doesn’t make sense, how did Arima hit that attack, he’s literally not holding anything and how did he just shoot lightning out of his quinque that can’t shoot lightning when he’s got that quinque in a box I originally thought this was an art mistake but he literally just keeps doing impossible things and they’re even lampshading in the manga so wait did he pull out Narukami and put it back into the box just to troll???”

(I think ishida does stuff like this where he messes with things like this for artistic reasons in this case it entirely works and helps hit home how invincible Arima is, and I originally thought it was art mistakes but it’s not)

And more “Shinohara, but on steroids”. Cross in Prototype was a very maneuverable surprisingly well armed opponent who could take a beating relative to most other enemies you faced outside of, for example, the Supreme Hunter. Similar type of opponent but also different. Like have the guy use multiple +SS and SSS rate quinques as standard, and he’s also got an SSS rate kakuja quinque and he can take a beating because of it, too. Not that he’s unskilled; he’s very skilled, just less so than Arima. Maybe have him also be the final boss like Arima was the final boss in the original Tokyo Ghoul, but just make him an absolute monster that completely and utterly destroys people. Maybe even have it be a no win scenario to fight the guy? Have it come up that “oh well this guy right here is attacking your friends but if you fight him, you’re going to die no matter what, don’t risk it” and you have a choice and if you choose to fight him, the game switches genres to horror and you just die. Not an easy fight to die in either.

They should definitely make a game about that. Just, spiritual successor to the original Prototype and have Detwiller and Ishida just run wild with the insane conspiracy theory story and their under the radar references to their knowledge of the military, economics, Kafka, numbers, trolling, and Lovecraft.

Just make the story impossible to understand, you know? You have to find 248 different cutscenes to get part of the story explicitly, and to unlock some of the cutscenes you have to hack into the game code to pull out poems made out of ASCII images of Ishida’s art. But to get the art, you have to pull a bunch of stuff off of twitter, relatively obscure secondary material, and some of it has to be found long after the launch of the game. Like, just maybe throw a random string of numbers into an art book released a year after the game was launched and have the numbers related to the code just hidden and you just... can’t find them? But only maybe, you’re not sure.

Throw Walt Williams from Spec Ops: The Line in there too. Have him contribute. All decisions are simultaneously wrong and correct at the same time. Nothing makes sense - but it totally does. You know what you’re doing is wrong. Or do you? None of these horrors would have happened if you’d just stopped, but you can’t stop. Not now, not when you’re so close. This person you’re pursuing, they’re definitely the bad guy. You’re in the clear. You’re not being tricked, you’re not mistaken, you made these decisions rationally. Your friends are in danger, you’re not bringing danger to them.

You feel so powerful and then boom, it happens. snap back to reality. And you should have seen it coming, but you didn’t. It’s not that it wasn’t there, it’s just that you weren’t looking - you decided “I’m not going to look”. You ignored what was right in front of you for some silly fantasy and it all hurts so much and oh god, everything is burning, help help help. Why didn’t anyone listen, I feel so alone.

and then have another spinoff spiritual successor flip from tokyo to new york in a surprise twist and it turns out that you were just starring in the villains’ self insert selfcest genderbender trollfic the e n t i r e t i m e or something it’s ambiguous I guess you gotta figure it out and no one will believe you and everything is just trolling

#tokyo ghoul #prototype #tg meta #tokyo ghoul biology #quinx #blacklight virus #Red child cells.#tokyo ghoul meta #superryunosukeyuki #alex mercer #Captain Cross #Arima Kishou

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sumu-samu · 4 years ago

Text

Chapter 1

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Pairing: Bellamy Blake x OC

Genre: Fluff, angst, and everything in between

Warnings: curse words, death, blood, killing, gore, and some good old chaos

Summary: Xephyr Kane, Marcus’ adopted daughter, grew up on the Ark, but begged the council to lock her up in solitary after a traumatic experience involving her birth parents. Now, she’s being sent to the ground, on her own terms unlike the other 99 kids, in hopes to start new. But what happens when she gets down there, and nothing goes as planned? Throw in a hot headed “leader” that wasn’t supposed to be there and thing get... difficult.

A/N: Here’s the first chapter.... I hope it's okay. This thing has been sitting in my Google Drive for months, almost a year, now and it’s causing serious glitches so I need to get rid of it, but I don’t want to delete it. So, here you go. Also, if anything gets really confusing, just let me know and I’ll go through and revise it

It’s been 97 years since the nuclear apocalypse killed everyone on earth, leaving the planet covered in radiation. Now, I say everyone, but I don’t actually mean everyone, there were a few people who were able to survive. 12 nations had operational space stations that came together to form one, the Ark. It’s been estimated that Earth needs another hundred years before life is sustainable. But, the Ark just couldn’t wait that long.

“We’re sending them down to the earth,” Kane spoke to me. I sighed knowing that no matter how many people they sent down I couldn’t help. Kane would update me on status of the Ark, mainly because he knew I couldn’t tell anyone anything anyways, and because he was my mother’s best friend, he was the closest to a family I had

“How many?” I asked. I needed to go down, I may have chosen to be put in here but I can’t just sit by and do nothing.

“99, but there’s room for another-”

“I’ll go!” I cut him off.

“Xeph, you don’t have to.” He looked at me with worried eyes.

“ I can’t, I go down, and I live and do as much as I can to get the rest of you down, and not end up like Him or… I go down… and I die-”

“And don’t end up like him” this time Kane cut me off. “Okay, but you do know that this will only give us a month, engineering needs 6. And you refuse to be let out.”

“Well, you won’t float me.”

“You’re not even 18 yet, besides there’s no stopping it. It’s either earth or a mass culling”

“Don’t think like that, you know how it makes me feel” I gave him a disgusted look, “When do we go down?”

“Tomorrow.” He gave me another look. “You look so much like your mother.”

“Well, we all know that’s not how I’m turning out,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster.

*next day*

Kane walked into the cell holding a silver wristband. “It’ll read your vitals, tell us whether or not the earth is livable.” He put it on my arm and it stung but I held it in. “Be careful, you’re not like them, they could hurt you.”

“I’m not worried about that.” Two guards led me out of the cell, a bunch of kids thrashed around trying to get out of the guards hold, I walked peacefully.

They lined us up and put us on the ship one by one. Lots of people were worried, some were excited, I didn’t know what I was feeling. I mean I wasn’t really feeling anything. I couldn’t feel anything.

They got us all settled in and then It was time to launch. “Welcome back.” I heard a familiar voice say from in front of me.

“Wells what the hell are you doing here?” I heard another familiar voice, but this one more feminine.

“When I found out they were sending prisoners down to the ground I got myself arrested I came for you guys.” Wells said.

“Why the fuck would you do that?” I said bitterly before we heard a loud crash and some people screamed.

“What was that?” Clarke asked.

“That was the atmosphere.” Wells said unamused. We all heard a high pitched screech and then static.

“Prisoners of the ark hear me now,” Jaha’s voice rang out. “You’ve been given a second chance. As your chancellor I hope you see this as not only a chance for you but a chance for all of us.” I rolled my eyes

“Indeed for mankind itself, We have no idea what is waiting for you down there. If the odds of survival were better we would have sent others. Frankly we’re sending you because your crimes have made you expendable.”

“Your dad's dick Wells!” A boy yelled out.

“Those crimes will be forgiven, your record wiped clean.” Jaha continued. I just stood there emotionless. I didn’t care, hell I wanted to die, but Kane wouldn’t let me without a real reason. 4 years ago when my mother was killed and father floated I put up steel walls that no one had broken down. If anyone does, it ends badly. Love is weakness, love is feelings, feelings are weakness. That’s what I’ve been told, what I’ve been telling myself for these past years, and what I will continue telling myself until I die.

“Your drop site has been chosen carefully. Before the last war, Mt Weather was a military base built inside a mountain. It was to be stocked with enough nonperishables to sustain-”

“Check it out!” People started cutting Jaha off. “Go, Finn!” “Spacewalk bandit strikes again.”

“Check it out your dad did float me after all” “Finn,” said to Wells

“You should strap in before the parachutes deploy,” I warned him.

“Hey, you two, stay put if you want to live!” Clarke said to two other boys who started to cut their seatbelts.

“Mount Weather is life.” Jaha continued. “You must locate those supplies immediately”

“You’re the traitor who's been in solitary for a year.” Finn said to Clarke.

“You’re the idiot who wasted a month of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk.” She said coldly back.

“But it was fun,” Finn commented. “I’m Finn.” Just then the parachutes deployed sending the two boys and Finn tumbling around the ship.

“Finn are you okay?” I called out.

“The retrorockets should have fired by now!” I yelled out in panic.

“Everything on this ship is 100 years old, right? Just give it a second”

“Clarke there’s something I have to tell you!” Wells turned to her. “I’m sorry I got your father arrested.”

“Don’t you talk about my Father!” She cut him off.

“Please I can’t die knowing that you hate me!”

“They didn’t arrest my father Wells, They executed him! I do hate you!” As she said that the rockets fired, better late than never right? Ish… There was a crash and then the rocket's machine humm died.

“Listen… no machine hum.” A black-haired boy said from the other side of the ship.

“That’s a first.” The boy next to him said. All of our belts clocked and everyone unstrapped themselves.

“The doors are on the lower level.” One of the kids said.

“No, we can’t just open those doors!” Clarke said. I climbed down after some of the kids with Clarke following me.

“Hey, just back it up, guys.” A tall, dark-haired boy, with freckles, in a guard uniform said.

“Stop!” Clarke called out to him before he hit the button to open the door. “The air could be toxic.” we both made our way to the front.

“Clarke, if the air’s toxic we’re all dead anyway.” I said coldly.

“Bellamy?” A girl called from behind us. He turned around with something in his eyes I couldn’t quite explain. He started to smile as the girl made her way to the front.

“My God, look how big you are.” He smiled and she gave him a hug.

“What the hell are you wearing? A guards uniform?” She asked him.

“I borrowed it. To get on the dropship. Some one’s gotta keep an eye on you.”

“Where's your wristband?” Clarke asked.

“”Do you mind? I haven't seen my brother in over a year.” The girl said. Then it hit me, he didn’t have a wrist band because he wasn't a delinquent. This was Bellamy Blake, and his sister Octavia. His sister was locked up for literally being born, his mother was floated for having a second child and he went the rest of the year with no one.

“That’s Octavia Blake, the girl they found hidden under the floor.” Octavia lunged at the crowd but Bellamy held her back.

“Octavia, Octavia, no. Let’s give them something else to remember you by.”

“Yeah like what?”

“Like being the first person on the ground in 100 years.” Bellamy opened the door. Wind pushed my hair back, sunlight shined on my face. We were really here. Octavia cautiously stepped out, then she jumped on to the ground. There was a pause then she screamed “We’re back bitches!” Everyone ran out of the dropship.

We were all excited but there was no military base anywhere to be found. There was no way we were on Mt. Weather. I went back into the dropship to see just how much damage to the ship was done.

“Shit.” I sighed.

“What?” Wells questioned picking up one of the boys who had died when the parachutes activated.

“Comms, it’s dead. We have to communicate with the Ark.” I rubbed my head.

“Hey, I’m sure you can get it back up, you’re great at these things.” He put his hand on my shoulder. I pushed it off with a little more force than I meant to.

“I can try but it all looks really beat up to me.” I sat down and started looking at everything.

“Nothing a star engineer can’t do. Now, I’m going to go and bury the dead.” he said somberly.

A minute later I heard a deep voice from behind me. “What are you doing?” It asked.

“Comms is dead, I’m trying to see if anything is salvageable.” I sighed.

“And?” The boy pushed.

“Fried, completely dead. No way in hell I can get it back up. There's a few wires that survived but everything essential… is ruined… meaning-”

“No contact with the Ark?” He asked. I finally turned around to see none other than Bellamy Blake.

“None, but not like you mind.” I said.

“What? What are you talking about?” He gave me a stern look.

“1, not scared of you, don't test me. And 2, I know everyone's story here, everyone but yours. Meaning you did something just to get onto the dropship. I was also told only 100 kids were sent down, counting you there is 101, meaning there's a stowaway, the ark wouldn’t have sent a guard let alone one so young, so.... Connecting the dots I assume you came down just to get off the Ark?”

“I came down for my sister.” He said bitterly as we walked away.

I gave up on the wires and decided to get outside. When I went out I saw Clarke with a map. “we‘ve got a problem. The communication system is dead, There's a dozen panels missing, wires are fried. I can’t fix it.” I shook my head.

“Well all that matters right now is getting to mount weather.See? Look.This is us.” She pointed to a circle on the map, “This is where we need to get to if we want to survive.” She drew a line across it to where Mount Weather was marked.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Wells came up behind us. She gave me a saddened look, I gave one back to her. “You’re father.” He nodded sadly.

“Ah cool a map.” A scrawny kid with goggles came up behind us. I recognized him from Farm station but I couldn’t remember who he was. I kinda wanted to forget everything about Farm Station. “They got a bar in this town? I’ll buy you a beer.” Wells pushed him away.

“You mind?” He said in a threatening tone.

“Hey,hey,hey! Hands off him, he's with us.” I turned my head to see the one person I really wish I hadn’t. John Murphy, the asshole of the century. The ex who decided he wanted nothing to do with me after what had happened with my parents. Recon he didn’t know what exactly happened just that they are now dead. The idiot who decided to set part of the Ark ablaze for the thrill. Can I get a break please! I gave him a look of pure hatred, and he gave me one back. He hated that Marcus had taken me in, that I could look at the guy who got his father floated as a father. Well I really couldn’t, I was pretty pissed at him, we don’t have the best father daughter relationship.

“Relax.” Wells put his hands up in surrender. “We’re just trying to figure out where we are.”

“We’re on the ground. That not good enough for you?” Bellamy sassed.

“We need to find Mount Weather.” Wells started to walk towards him, “You heard my fathers message, that needs to be our first priority.”

“Screw your father.” Octavia cut him off. “What, you think you're in charge here? You and your little princesses?”

“Don’t call me that.” I lunged for her and Bellamy almost came after me if Clarke hadn’t held me back.

“Do you think we care who’s in charge? We need to get to Mount weather, not because the Chancellor said so, but because the longer we wait, the hungrier we’ll get and the harder this will be.” She said to all of the kids around her.

“How long do you think we’ll last without those supplies?” I asked. “The human body can go one month with out food as long as you’re properly hydrated, and only 2 weeks without water before we start dying of dehydration and starvation, and in between that you start to feel as if you wish you were dead because the starvation is too much.” I explained.

“We’re looking at a 20 mile trek, okay? So if we want to get there before dark, we need to leave now.”

“I got a better idea,” Bellamy said to her, “you three go, find it for us, let the privileged do the hard work for a change.” If Clarke wasn’t still holding me back I would have ripped his face off.

Damn it! Stop! Don’t think like that! You think like that you become him, you can’t you can’t you can't.

I tried to calm myself down, the more violent I become the worse I get.

“You’re not listening!” Wells shouted. “We all need to go.” Murphy came up and shoved him.

“Look at this everybody, the Chancellor of earth.” Everyone laughed.

“Murphey!” I yelled. He ignored me.

“You think that’s funny?” Wells asked. And then in one movement murphey swept Wells off his feet sending him to the ground with a crunch.

“Murphey!” I screamed louder, he still ignored me.

“No but that was.” Murphy stated. “Alright.” They both stood in a defensive position ready to fight. The other kids started to shout fight, I was yelling at them to stop. No one was listening, but no punches were thrown as finn came and stood in front of Wells blocking him from Murphy.

“Kid’s got one leg, how about you wait till it's a fair fight.” He told Murphy. And with that John backed down.

“Hey spacewalker!” Octavia walked towards him, “Rescue me next.”

Clarke and I walked away trying to figure out how to get to Mount Weather, while helping Wells with his leg.

“So Mount Weather, when do we leave?” Finn asked.

“Right now.” Clarke said. “We’ll be back tomorrow with food.” She said to Wells

“How are the three of you going to be able to carry enough for 100?” He asked, Finn turned around and grabbed the two closest people he could.

“five of us, can we go now?” Clarke nodded her head.

“Sounds like a party, make it six.” Octavia walked up to us. It was kinda obvious she was only coming along for Finn but hey, we need as many people as we can get.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Bellamy walked up to her.

“Going on a walk.” she shrugged him off her.

“Hey,” I noticed a crack in Finn's bracelet. “Were you trying to take this off?”

“Yeah so?” He shrugged.

“So this wristband transmits your vital signs to the ark, take it off and they’ll think you're dead.”

“Should i care?” Finn rolled his eyes.

“Well I don’t know, do you want the people you love to think you’re dead? Do you want them to follow you down here in two months cause they won't if they think we’re dying.”

We walked off into the woods, “So, what happened with you? Why’d you get sent down here Council Girl?” Finn asked. I gave him a cold stare for multiple reasons. 1 being that name he gave me, 2 being that he referenced the fact that Kane is my technically adopted father, and 3 because it was none of his business. I just ignored him and walked faster.

“Hey, guys would you try to keep up?” I called back, Clarke was the only one who was keeping up with me.

“Come on girls, how can you block all this out?” Finn smiled

“Well its simple, I wonder why haven't we seen any animals? Maybe it’s because there are none, maybe we’ve already been exposed to enough radiation to kill us. Sure is pretty though, come on.” Clarke continued forward

“Guys wait up!” one of the two boys called out

Who are you two?” I asked.

“Oh… I-I’m Jasper this is-”

“Wait… Jordan? Jasper… Jordan?”

“Uhhh… yeah…?” He was confused as to how I knew him.

“M-Monty?” I faced the other boy who too became confused. It took him a minute but then his face lit up with realization.

“Xephyr?” Monty smiled at me.

“Xephyr!” Jasper shouted and ran to me and gave me a hug. “You left the farm station so long ago… where… where did you go?”

“Let’s just say i’m not Xephyr Cole any more-”

“Yeah, now it’s Xephyr Kane isn’t it?” Finn said.

“Shut up you ass.” I rolled my eyes.

“Clarke motioned for us to come over to her quietly and then pointed at some animal, it was a deer. It was amazing… until it turned towards us. The thing had one and a half heads. Freaked out we kept walking.

“So, bellamy?” Finn asked me with a smirk.

“What?”

“Oh, like you didn’t see the way he was looking at you.” He chuckled.

“He’s… there’s something bad about him, he's a pain in the ass and I can already tell.”

“And how do you know what someone is like just by one conversation?” He asked me.

I stopped dead in my tracks, “Cause I dated John Murphy.” I continued walking, eventually taking the lead.

“You know what I’d like to know,” Finn started. It seemed very obvious out of the six of us he was the most vocal. “Why send us down today? After 97 years? What changed?”

“Who cares, I’m just glad they did. I woke up rotting in a cell and now… i'm spinning in a forest.” Octavia said.

“Maybe they found something on a satellite.” Monty suggested. “You know, like an old weather satellite.”

“It wasn’t a satellite. The Ark is dying.” When Clarke said that everyone paused “With the current population level there's 3 months left of life support, maybe 4 now that we’re gone.”

“So that was the big secret they kept you locked up to keep? Locked you up in solitary, floated your old man?” Finn asked her

“Her father was the engineer who discovered the flaw. He thought people had a right to know.” I said

“Council disagreed, my mother disagreed, they were afraid that it would cause panic. We were gonna go public when wells-”

“What? Turned in your dad?” Finn jumped in when she went silent for a while.

“Anyway, the guard showed up before we could. That’s why today. That’s why it was worth the risk, even if we all die, at least they bought themselves more time.”

“But it’s still not enough. Engineering needs six months and they now have only four. The council pushed it off forever and then people started getting symptoms.” I said.

“They’re gonna kill more people aren’t they?” Monty asked. No one responded.

“Good after what they did to me I say, float them all.” Octavia walked in front of all of us. She started taking her clothes off.

“Oh damn, I love earth.” Jasper chuckled. She walked to the edge.

“Octavia what the hell are you doing?” Clarke yelled. She just looked back with a smile then jumped. We all ran to the edge to see a river.

“Octavia, we can’t swim.” Monty called out.

“No but we can stand.” She stood up.

“There's not supposed to be a river here.” Clarke said with confusion.

“Well there is.” I laughed and followed Octavia. Everyone else started taking their clothes off.

“Octavia, Xephyr, get out of the water.” Jasper warned us. We looked behind us to see something moving. It grabbed Octavia, she screamed as she went under the water. The tail end had hit me right in the abdomen knocking me down underwater, my head had hit a rock, I tried to stand back up but for some reason I couldn't. I could feel my leg split open on a rock. After what felt like forever I felt someone pull me out.

“Xephyr!” Clarke called out. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?” I opened my eyes and groaned.

“Octavia?” I looked over to see Jasper holding her, the only other one who was wet was Finn, meaning he was probably the one who pulled me out.

“Xephyr. She’s fine can you hear me alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Night had fallen not too long after. I stayed awake as long as I could but I eventually gave in.

I stood there, over her dead body, my best friend, Clarke dead, gutted, and I was covered. Covered in blood, her blood, a knife in my hands. I couldn't feel anything. I didn’t care. But for a moment there I felt a small amount of joy.

I woke up in a sweat and screaming. Everyone was looking at me. “Xephyr? Was it?” Clarke asked. I just nodded.

“What was it?” Finn asked.

“No, nothing lets just, lets go” We went back to the river where finn found some vine we could use to swing ourselves over.

“You wanted to go first now stop stalling.” I rolled my eyes.

Fin was just about to go when Jasper stopped him and said he wanted to go. He waited a while before he went, as he tumbled to the ground we held our breath.

“We are appogee!” We all started cheering. “Come on clarke you’ve got this!” He shouted. Then he held up a sign that said Mount Weather.

“We did it! Mount Weather!” I screamed. We all cheered again… until… a spear was launched into Jaspers chest “J-J-Jasper! Jasper!” I screamed.”Jasper! NO!” Octavia pulled me down. “We’re not alone.” I said with fear.

#bellamy #bellamy blake #bellamy blake x oc #bellamy x oc #bellamyblake #The 100 #the100 #x oc

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