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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 1 month ago

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What are your theories about Skully? I have seen many say that he is dead, others say that he has been trapped by the book for a long time. And recently I saw that they said he is the narrator of the book. Personally I think he's trapped but I can't say for how long yet, but it's strange that Grim found the book in the middle of the street.

I’ll be straight with ya, chief 😶 I haven’t been thinking about Skully theories beyond the ones I’ve seen while scrolling socials. I’d like to wait a little more to see how the story plays out and see if we can glean any more suspicious details from him… Or maybe my brain’s still too scrambled from the high of pulling L*ona on my first 10-pull and it isn’t working properly, who knows—

I think Grim finding the book in the middle of the street is just a convenient plot point to get the story rolling? Sort of like how for the Stitch event everyone was conveniently gathered in the library to look for books. The students for this event were looking around at a used book sale (and Skully even reports being present at the same used book sale prior to being sucked into the book himself), so it was probably part of that. They might explain it later, but I don’t know if anyone intentionally planted it there. Again, it was probably a narrative shortcut.

Since I wouldn’t want to just reply to this ask with that half-baked and boring answer, here is a summary of the prominent theories mentioned in the ask and the points from part 1 that support it. After the key pieces of evidence are introduced, I will give my thoughts and point out some questions I feel still need to be answered in later parts of the event. As they are now, I don’t think any of these theories stand strongly on their own without that missing information being filled in to complete the narrative.

“Skully has been trapped in the book for a long time” theory:

This theory posits that Skully has been trapped in the book for far longer than the NRC boys have. In fact, he’s from the very distant past.

This theory assumes he entered the book intentionally or by accident but stayed because he’s such a Halloween otaku.

We see the NRC students getting sucked into the book from modern day Twisted Wonderland… but we have no guarantee of when Skully was sucked in.

Skully speaks in a very formal way, sometimes even moreso than Jade (I won’t get into the specifics here, but an example would be that he uses honorifics for everyone, even those his own age). He also uses the suspiciously archaic form of I (wagahai), which you rarely see in modern Japan.

Weirdly enough, Skully knows who Jack Skellington is (and Jack is known in the village where he claims to come from), but no one else in Twisted Wonderland does. This could imply that Skully is SO old that Jack Skellington was completely forgotten by history.

Skully comes off as a loner and isn’t comfortable talking about his school life. Under this theory, such behavior could be read as concealing secrets about his past and true origins.

I think the most damning evidence people point to for this theory is that even though Skully knows what magic is, he doesn’t seem to know what a magical pen is, and he doesn’t own one either. From Lilia’s School Uniform vignette, we know that magical pens had different forms over the years based on changing trends, so maybe Skully is used to magestones being different in design or not using magestones at all.

He doesn’t know who THE Malleus Draconia is, which is an oddity.

Variants of this theory sometimes place Skully as an old NRC or RSA student; if Skully is placed in NRC, a further subvariant of the theory assumes he was sorted into Ramshackle before it fell in disrepair.

“Skully is dead” theory:

Similar to the first theory (key carryover being that Skully is from the past), but assumes Skully is dead, either from being killed by something in the book or his spirit lingering in the book somehow after death in the real world due to extreme fanboying over Halloween.

His spirit may feel unfulfilled or have regrets (which is how a ghost forms i Twisted Wonderland), and so remains as a ghost that becomes most tangible on Halloween die to heightened magical energy. The latter piece of lore first stated the first Halloween event, but Malleus suspiciously reminds the audience that Halloween is “the one day a year when ghosts from the other side visit the world of the living” this event.

Some phrases he uses are… odd. For example, he uses “moshi” as a greeting instead of “moshimoshi” (which is much more common). The use of the former is connected to a superstition about ghosts who may spirit you away if you respond to someone calling out a single “moshi”.

He gets excited when the NRC students mention they know Halloween. This detail could be attributed to Skully being a Halloween otaku, but some have suggested that maybe he got excited because he’s from an era in which Halloween has yet to exist, hence his surprise when others already claim to know it.

“Skully is the book’s narrator” theory:

Exactly what the title of the theory says.

I think this one largely comes in part from the opening scene where Skully is in a black void and seems to be speaking to someone as if beginning a story about Halloween.

Him generally being a fan boy about Halloween and the founder of it can also ready like a creator that’s WAY too much into his own creations. He also has kind of the chunibyo energy for this.

If Skully is the narrator, then it makes sense why his promotional artwork shows him by default in the sketchy storybook style + Nightmare Suit (provided by the book). He IS the book, so this would be his “default” look.

A variant of this theory incorporates the previous two. Basically, it assumes Skully became the narrator after being sucked in a long time ago and/or dying and his spirit being infused into the book.

I think these theories make the most sense if like… “stacked” or combined with one another. However, they still leave a lot of questions unanswered, especially if we only consider the first (and what I believe to be the most popular) theory. If Skully has apparently been trapped in the book for much, muuuuuch longer than the NRC students have (again, assuming him being dead is not true), it raises various issues. For example:

… What was he doing this whole time while trapped in the book??? Did he just wander the woods?? It sounds like he never visited Halloween Town and potentially meet his lifelong idols UNTIL the NRC students arrived. He never opened any of the holiday doors even though they’re the one “different” thing in the woods? So Skully was literally being the forest boogeyman for generations and generations???

How does time and aging work in the book versus irl? Because like… why is Skully still so young looking even though he’s supposedly trapped in the book for hundreds of years or even longer than that?

If he were from that long ago, his vocabulary and attitudes would be way more different than what we see right now. For example, there was definitely prejudice towards magic in the past, as well as the usage of derogatory terms like “witch” and “wizard”, yet Skully doesn’t speak like this or express any behaviors to indicate he is used to being scorned for his magic.

Almost 700-year old Lilia clearly remembers magical pen designs over the years as well as the discrimination mages faced. This implies Skully would not only have to be 700+ years old, but even significantly OLDER than that, old enough to the point where literally no one recalls any information from that era. This is hard to imagine given Twisted Wonderland’s modern capabilities (for research), its reverence for historical figures, and… oh yeah, the race that lives for literally hundreds of years at a time that can probably recall those Jack Skellington stories. The only reason I can think of for why Jack was censored and forgotten is… simply not passing down the story through history, similar to how Briar Valley never passed down the stories of what happened to Maleanor, even in history books. This still means a few generations of ALL fae agreeing to not share what is ultimately a harmless story about the founding of Halloween. Why though?? It’s nowhere near as serious as what happened to a prominent political leader.

If Skully was trapped in the book for so long, how does he know about Foothill Town? He specifically mentions it as well as the used book fair going on there (which is how the NRC boys got sucked into the book in the first place). Foothill Town and the concept of used book fairs couldn’t have existed the thousands of years ago as the timing of the theory seems to suggest. Unless he somehow knew about what’s going on outside of the book from within it? But nothing indicates that.

RSA students don’t use magical pens for combat, they are shown to use swords. Likeswise, we see other mages using non-magical pens to attack, like staves. Maybe Skully is just from a country or school that doesn’t use magical pens to channel magic and instead uses another conduit.

I don’t think we should necessarily default to NRC or RSA for Skully’s school. There are many smaller arcane academies out there, such as the unnamed one Vargas went to. It’s possible that Skully attends one of those other schools.

There are also obvious points against the other theories. For the “he’s dead” theories: ghosts supposedly cannot handle physical objects, so how did Skully handle the book, especially outside of Halloween and magic school grounds? Idia also uses archaic terms (something the characters also point out), so it could be an otaku thing rather than indicating Skully’s age. For “he’s the book’s narrator” theory: while the Nightmare film has a narrator, book narrators have not yet been established as “a thing” in this type of event. Furthermore, how is Skully, a resident of the book, able to know what’s going on in the outside world?? The Halloween Town residents are able to glimpse into the human world using a pool of water in the center of their community, but it sounds like Skully has never been to Halloween Town before.

So really 😅 I don’t buy the current theories unless all those points get clarified or resolved first. There’s still too little to go off of, I think…

dbjsbaibqkakw I probably talked for longer than I should have on the topic, but 💦 I hope you found this useful as a summary + my thoughts on those popular theories :DD

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prurientpuddlejumper · 4 years ago

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Hopelessness of Wanting

Part 2 ->

Frederick Chilton x Reader

remember that request on @raulesparzaconfessions asking for Chilton being evil & angst??? and I said I would never do that to my poor Frederick darling? WELL I DID.

Warnings: Darkfic! NSFW. Noncon (nonconsensual blowjob), doctor-patient sexual abuse, past child sexual abuse, angst, self-loathing Chilton. Part 2 will contain suicidal thinking. This is honestly so melodramatic. I apologize to everyone on my tag list.

1k words

If anyone had been outside women’s wing cell 4B, they would have heard a wet choking sound. If they were among the less jaded of the staff, they might have investigated, but that sort of altruism was quickly extinguished here.

The occupant of this particular cell was named Julianne Barker. From three to fourteen years of age, she was sexually assaulted by first her father, then her brother, and then by dozens of men who paid fifty dollars for the privilege. At fourteen, Julianne picked up her father’s shotgun and shot him, her brother, and two other men in the house point-blank as they slept.

That was how she came to live at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

A blue light flashed rhythmically from inside the cell. The choking noises, slurping and gurgled, seemed to almost follow the rhythm of the lights.

Julianne was a docile patient. Without access to firearms she was harmless, and for the last ten years claimed to have no memory of the violent act at all. Her entire memory and very sense of self was a scrambled mess.

That was why Dr. Frederick Chilton began treating her with hypnotic therapy, to pull those buried memories out of her. It was meant to help her recovery. That was his intent, at the outset.

Wet noises were now accompanied by rustling fabric, audible if one were to stand just outside the door. Shaking breaths grew steadily louder. The brief screech of chair legs on the floor as a hand gripped it for support. A low moan rose above it all, a guttural cry that faltered and trembled in time with the steady, wet sucking. Choking. Slurping.

It was an accident—that was important for you to understand!

Dr. Chilton’s voice cracked as he lost control, his hips driving forward—an unconscious mistake—to be met with gagging, sputtering, as his broken scream echoed off the cell’s bare walls. And then the only noise was panting. The screech of the chair again as he slumped back down upon it and wiped his brow. Finally, he cleared his throat and tucked himself back into his pants. Sat up straight.

In a smooth, authoritative voice, he said, “Waking now. You’re waking in a quiet room. Safe. Calm.”

It was an accident—the first time it happened. Julianne did not only relive her memories when put under hypnosis, but fell into a full regressive dissociative state. Chilton had not been expecting the willowy young woman to suddenly get on her knees and begin unbuckling his pants.

And yet, when he realized that he was alone… that he had sole access to the security tapes and the guards would look the other way… he did not stop her. Neither did he do anything to force her! Never wove his fingers through her yellow hair or bucked into her mouth. Everything she did was her own volition.

That was how he justified it to himself.

Acting out traumatic memories could be therapeutic in many circumstances. It allowed her to take control of her past. It was exposure therapy. At best, he was helping. At worst, she never remembered or knew what was real. Always enjoyed their “sessions.”

That was how he justified it to himself.

He knew it was sick. But what did it matter? He had given up ever finding a real relationship. Hannibal Lecter turned out to be a serial killer. Will Graham was running around Italy chasing him. Neither man ever returned his admiration. Chilton had given up entirely on love, himself, and the dull pretense of morality.

He would never get to fuck the mouth he truly wanted—never see the lips he pretended were parted around his cock anywhere but his imagination.

You would never desire the old, scarred doctor—the autocratic, pompous Dr. Chilton, twice-maimed and hated by his own staff.

Might as well take it where he could.

***

As he opened the door to the cell, his heart leaped into his throat and he barely caught a yelp before it burst in its humiliating high pitch from his mouth.

“Oh! Dr. Chilton! S-sorry, I didn’t know you were in a session!” you stammered.

The perfect lips he had been picturing now parted in surprise. Your eyes shone like the sun. He forgot to breathe. Then the shame of what he’d done came crashing back, and the way you, in your perfection, avoided looking at his face—his scar—pierced him.

“You forgot to check schedules? Again?” he chided, voice cold as the dead thing in his chest.

“No, sir! I mean—”

“It’s fine, Dr. Chilton. You’re the one who’s supposed to be in his office right now, according to your own schedule.” Nurse Clerval strode into the hallway behind you, white sneakers silent on the stone floor.

Your face lit up for your rescuer—that bright, innocent smile that was almost always present (the exception, of course, being when he was around). Clerval had a soft spot for protecting you. All of his staff seemed to. Who could blame them? The newest nurse, like a lost puppy, who hadn’t yet lost your shine as everyone in this dismal place eventually did. It only drove home his own loneliness, and the hopelessness of wanting you.

“How careless of me,” Chilton said before rolling his eyes directly at you. “Fortunate you have friends to speak for you.” He got a twisted pleasure from watching your smile fall again.

It was the best he could do, he thought as he limped away, the tension on his abdominal scar acting up. If he couldn’t have your light for himself, he could at least stomp some of it out so it wasn’t taunting him all the time.

He knew that was no justification, but what did it matter?

He was filth. The only reason he survived Miriam Lass’s bullet was to suffer more on this Earth—he knew that was the truth, because he didn’t deserve to be spared. It wasn’t a miracle. It was justice.

He simply hadn’t suffered enough yet.

You were everything he was not, thrown in his face to torment him. Always so kind, and full of life—a sunflower standing tall above a garden of thorny roses. Loved by all. And he coveted you for himself. Needed you like rain. But beautiful creatures always turned their faces toward the light. You would never cast an eye down to him—the thorniest vine whose petals had all been stripped away, never to bloom again. He was lost in a place of shadows you would never see.

• ● • ━━━━━─ ••●•• ─━━━━━ • ● •

Tags: @beccabarba / @itsjustmyfantasyroom / @thatesqcrush / @dianilaws / @permanentlydizzy / @mrsrafaelbarba / @madamsnape921 / @astrangegirlsmind / @neely1177 / @onerestein / @dreamlover31 / @stormtrooperofficerbrowneyes / @barbasimp / @storiesofsvu / @welcometothemadxxhouse

Just ask if you wanna be added (or taken off after being exposed to whatever this was XD)

#frederick chilton #Frederick Chilton x reader #this will be a short series (was going to be a oneshot but I wrote this much & was like... post.)#dark fic #I don't think Freddy would actually do this??#but I also don't... not... think that he might #my writing

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fictionalnormalcy · 3 years ago

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TBWASN Ch. 23

The Boy with a Strange Name

Rating: Mature (Graphic Depictions of Violence)

Fandoms: Fusion of the How to Train Your Dragon books and animated franchise

Additional Tags: jaded protagonist, modern day AU, moving somewhere new, fitting in, making friends, additional DreamWorks characters, back to hometown

Summary: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III has lived nearly seventeen years of life. In the span of those years, he’s moved twelve times. Five of those years his mother was alive. Then a tragic accident left Hiccup in the sole care of his father, Stoick Haddock. Berk was where he had been born. That much he knew. Over every, single, move his father put him through, it wasn’t until he reached sixteen years old that Berk was the city in which the father finally decided to plant roots. At least, that was what he claimed. After years of being victimized at each school he attended, Hiccup was determined to keep a low profile at Berk High. His past is intent on preying upon him, deciding that Berk was perfect place to come back into the light. However, like all good things that came to him, there was always something to drag him back down into the pit of despair. A dormant secret, tied into his family history, was ultimately brought into the light when Hiccup settles on Berk. A secret tied with guilt and tears, and it all goes downhill from there. He discovered what his father truly did those long stretch of years, and finds he has a gift that had been nonexistent for centuries.

Ch. 23: They’re Filming Today

She’d been texting him all week. Responses that came almost immediately as soon as he’d pressed send. All he could think about when he’d pick up the phone to read the message is how he had hardly ever done this with anyone. He had received emails before, but the sender would keep it strictly to classwork and asking for progress on their commission. No one asked him what he’d eaten for dinner, or what his plans were for break. No one had ever cared.

The thought did linger for a few days as to what Astrid’s intentions were. Wondering if the teenagers here were more elaborate in their targeting. Get to know their victim before pulling out the rug from under their feet. He had heard negative opinions from the Meatheads about Berkians. Saying that the families that had lived there for centuries had ice in their blood. He’d heard they were manipulative.

Although, Astrid had been so kind to him these past few weeks. Kindness he’d hardly ever experienced. Inviting him out for coffee, offering to escort him, giving him the new lock, trying to introduce him to her friends. Even if she was part of a welcome committee, it was a nice feeling to relish in. Today, they were even doing a phone call. Something he only ever did with Gobber and his grandfather. Was this something real friends did? Get to know one another and see what their interests are? Try to give advice where it’s wanted?

And it wasn’t used for blackmail or way to taunt in public? They returned to school on Monday, if she was indeed playing a role, she had the next two days to cause something come the new week. But he kept asking himself this as well: was Astrid Hofferson someone capable of offering someone up for ridicule?

“Have you given any thought to whether or not you’ll take part in Camicazi’s show? I know you’ve at least had a chance to read the script.” She asked.

“Yeah I’ve read it.”

He couldn’t really believe that he’d been offered to partake in this kid-led show. He bet that was very important to Cameron. She seemed to be taking quite a gamble with the new kid.

"So what do you think of the character?"

"Have you read the script?"

"Yeah well I am in the show. Everyone sees each other’s lines. I mean yours and my character are going to the same school, we're bound to meet."

"Hmm. I dunno, this Maddox guy is a bit of jerk." He grimaced.

But his environment's changed. As did mine. Several times.

"His world really got flipped upside down." He admitted.

"Camicazi told me to ask you this, but do you think you can play him? I mean, can you envision yourself in the eyes of Azadani?"

"I guess so?"

"She's been telling me to ask you," He heard her draw in a slow inhale, "but she needs your answer if you're really willing to participate."

"She said Saturday." He adjusted his position in the chair.

"Well the gang was talking the other day, and Eret pointed out how you can't just be dumped into the project. It wouldn't be fair of others who worked for their roles. He got the writers in agreement. If you give a yes now, there can be an audition tomorrow."

"I do have to audition then."

"And everyone is in acknowledgement of Camicazi's bias. She is the creator, and firmly believes you can play the part. But there still lies an issue. None of us have seen you act. So before you're planted in front of a camera, she and Heather will see beforehand if you can act."

"That sounds fair."

Although thinking back on it, he recalled that Cameron had said he looked exactly like how she pictured her character. But it was one thing to look the part, it was another to be able to express this character who felt wronged by the world and was bitter toward those he interacted with.

"Your answer?" She asked hesitatingly.

"Umm I'll do it."

Keep reading

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mywinestainedheart · 6 years ago

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Depression, Anxiety and … Cigarettes?

I’m not a smoker.

I know this because I take three drags then let it burn to the butt between my fingers. Sometimes it dies before I even take those three drags because I’m not pulling hard enough. Other times I put it out myself and get back to that same stick a week later.

I hate the taste. I usually eat something or wash my mouth out with toothpaste to get rid of it. I hate the smell. I wash my hands three times, toss my jerseys into the washing machine and hang my head over the bathtub for a conditioner-rinse to douse all traces of the scent.

I’m not a smoker.

What I am is a heartbroken, social media stalking, recently-diagnosed-with-depression twenty-eight year old woman trying to quell the anxiety she’s, apparently, been living with since her teenage years. Childhood bullying and molestation sob-stories aside, I always knew there was something functionally wrong with me.

Online descriptions of depression will detail a broad list of symptoms that essentially claim everyone in the world to be depressed. Sleep disorderliness, apathy, agitation, lack of concentration, poor appetite etc., etc. By that standard, my whole first year class at uni was depressed, so I never thought much of it. Besides, this would happen in bouts. It was never consistent. I’d experience an odd wave of anxiety that would come out of nowhere, but hang out with my smoker friends and feel fine for the next five to ten minutes. The next day, that anxiety might even be gone. I would have breakdowns and cry about feeling ugly, vapid and worthless, then eventually sober to no sense of feelings at all. I tend to overthink and get angry very easily. Someone cutting me off in traffic can have me ruminating over it for the rest of the day. I prefer to keep to myself, yet I’m constantly seeking distractions. In childhood it was imaginary worlds through Barbie dolls, in adulthood it was sex. Happiness would come and go, but pessimistic thoughts about myself, my life and my chances of finding love in a partner the way it seemed so easy for all my prettier friends were an ever-present influence on my psyche.

People will tell you “just snap out of it”, “think positive”, “thoughts become things” and, my personal favourite, “choose to be happy”. Well, gee! I never thought of that, clueless Life Orientation teacher who has probably never stepped out of her comfort zone within the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Imma just wake up tomorrow and tell myself to be in a better mood.

I had learned to exist in this way: Feeling empty and, fittingly, not having a name for it. Feeling sad and not having a reason for it. Overthinking and comparing myself to every girl who walked into the room because I believed that everyone else could see how much lesser than I was compared to her too. I would come up after brushing my teeth to stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and wonder what it would be like to just not exist anymore.

We used to live in an upmarket housing complex in Johannesburg. People who lived in this area are usually well off. They aren’t thought to have problems, and yet, we had a neighbour whose husband shot himself in the complex park. Years later, I heard of a former high school classmate of mine who shot himself in the middle of the street in the same area.

It got me thinking: People who are only occasionally sad, like me, don’t frequently envy people who had the gall to commit suicide, do they?

The first time I went to a psychiatrist was because I broke down in front of my mother the night before. My heart was bleeding from a breakup I hated that I was going through. This man insisted that I “didn’t deserve him”, but the twenty-four-year-old yuppie he used to go to school with, for some reason, did. He picked her over me and he’s happy with his choice. Put that on top of an entire existence of feeling lesser than, and I realised I was a ticking timebomb.

I was toying with the idea of suicide and noticed that the only thing holding me back was a fear of the unknown.

These thoughts are not new, by the way. I’d been having them since childhood. The one I entertained the most was standing behind the kitchen door with a knife to my chest, so that when someone swung the door open, the blade would push through my ribcage. Obviously, this would not be as simple in execution, but I was nine and it was a fantasy. Give me a break.

Upon hearing that I was thinking of killing myself, my mother chortled and told me “you’re behaving like a teenager”. That response would be the number one reason I have never spoken about my deeper feelings with my mom before this. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to love, it was that she didn’t understand that someone like me required a different type of love. A child might not say so because they themselves don’t know what it is, but there will always be subtle signs of a mood disorder. In hindsight, I’d displayed a number of them, but I was dismissed as being anti-social, sullen or attention-seeking.

“I’m just so tired,” I remember saying, choking on my own tears.

“Of what?” My mother demanded. She couldn’t understand what I could possibly be talking about. You’re only twenty-eight, you have a roof over your head and both parents that love you. You have a job. We’ve given you a car. You have freedom. You have friends. What on earth could have you crying like the world was coming to an end?

“Everything,” I said. Because that was the truth. I was tired of everything. I was tired of waking up every morning and remembering that the man I loved had chosen someone else over me. I was tired of driving for an hour every day to get into town, passing everything that reminded me of him and the breakup (including him and his new girlfriend in the middle of traffic). I was tired of going to a job that was adding nothing to my career, tired of budgeting a pathetic salary. Tired of waiting on my father and his promises that he was setting me up on a different career path, tired of eating the same food everyday (if I even remembered to eat). Tired of smoking cigarettes with my cousins cause I felt like if I was failing this badly at life then I may as well smoke up and hope for cancer, and I was absolutely exhausted with the idea that I had lost my twenty-four-year-old niece; a bodacious lover of life who’d existed on a seemingly never-ending vibration of confidence and positivity, to a senseless car accident, but here I was, still breathing.

Someone who deserved life was cemented in the ground. I woke up every morning wishing we could trade places.

The psychiatrist let me talk for a few minutes before diagnosing me as depressed and suicidal. Considering multiple factors and incidences I’d described in session, she said the depression has been there my whole life and that my break up was the lit cigarette that rolled too close to the leaky-gas pipe in my identity, causing this implosion.

Note, I’m not blaming my ex for my mental instability. How could he have known if I didn’t know? I’d had my suspicions, but, like my mother; telling him would have likely amounted to him (initially) dismissing me as being dramatic. What he saw as a “crazy” display of raw insecurity was probably the starter flames of this inferno. Again, not his fault, but he was certainly a contributor, and I find myself struggling not to resent him for that. But that’s a blog post for another time.

The psychiatrist prescribes me anti-depressants, some other drug that causes drowsiness, and orders to me to eight months of therapy with a nice woman she recommends in the area I live now. All I’m hearing is money, money and more money. I can’t afford any of this on what I make, and my dad is a businessman whose entire income is dependent on deals. Sometimes we have more money than we know what to do with, other times we’re so broke that there’s a negotiation between toilet paper and breakfast cereal. At twenty-eight, I’m officially jaded with the financial instability I grew up in, so I dismiss the idea of therapy entirely. Why start something only to stop because we can’t afford it anymore? Besides, I’d apparently been living with this raging beast my whole life. Surely, we could find a way to co-exist once again? Like Venom and Eddie Brock.

I say thanks but no thanks to the medication and go home with a mother who suddenly has a whole new understanding of me. She’s attentive when she talks now, and says ‘I love you’ before she hangs up the phone. Confessing my diagnosis to my father shouldn’t have felt embarrassing, but it did. I hated that he might now see me as weak. I was the one child he didn’t have to worry about. I had a sassy attitude and a smart mouth. I was assertive in my speech and tolerated no bullshit. I could hold my own against anyone, and I knew he was proud of me for that. How would he perceive me after I admitted that I’m not as strong as I pretend to be?

The truth? No different. I was still his daughter. The only change I noticed is that he looks at me when he talks to me (more attentive, like my mother) and makes a point of using my family nickname when he says good morning, hello or goodbye. He’s also trying harder to make sure his planned career path for me falls into place, but I’m no longer holding my breath.

As for me and my revelation of my diagnosis? Like I said, I always knew that there was something functionally wrong with me. I just have a name for it now. I’m still battling with the ideas of death and how I would do it. The running fantasy now is one I usually entertain before bed about slitting my wrists and sliding into a bathtub. Morbid, I know, but it’s the only way I can seem to find sleep these days: Thinking of no longer existing helps me transition into a state where I no longer exist for a little while. I’m not about to slit my wrists any time soon (besides, my pain threshold has a limit. If I were going to kill myself I wouldn’t pick a method quite so agonising and messy), but I recognise that these are not healthy thought processes. I do think I need therapy. After all, you have to learn how to love yourself before anyone else can love you and all that, right? I want to overcome this. I want to see progression in my life and my career. I don’t want my ex to believe he dodged a stagnant bullet the next time he bumps into me—or give him the satisfaction of knowing he was the catalyst of my failure.

I want to be happy.

So as I take my third drag of my last cigarette of 2019, I pray to a Deity I have a shaky belief in and tell myself that this is my rock bottom. It can’t possibly get any worse from here.

Or can it?

I suppose only my next move, and time, will tell.

#Depression Anxiety MentalHealth Scared Heartbroken

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donnerpartyofone · 7 years ago

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honestly don’t even bother reading this, but

so look, everybody knows i’m too old to be on this stupid website, but can any of you millennials or whatever explain to me whether or not “try not to gasp” is now, or has ever been, a real thing that real people say to each other? lemme back up on a minute: i get abnormally annoyed with advertising of almost any kind. more to the point, i take it extremely personally, to an irrational degree. just the thought that somebody thinks they know how to force me to buy something sends me into a mindless rage, almost no matter what it is. the problem is that i’m hypersensitive to the way that an advertisement describes me, their target, as a person. it assumes that i lose my goddamn mind at the sight of an adorable baby with a gently sarcastic adult VO, or a high school graduation with swelling arcade fire-type music behind it, or a musclebound jock suspended in a bubble of his own sweat, or a dumb-looking broad with humongous knockers, or whatever. every time i see something like this, attached to the idea that i’m gonna pay money for whatever is associated with this imagery, i just feel like somebody is calling me a fucking asshole right to my face. i have no ability to distance myself from it, or keep in mind that ads represent a net cast as wide as possible, trolling for the lowest common denominators. i actually have this reaction to almost anything with a promotional aura around it. like, i don’t just *hate* bad music for the way that it sounds; when i hear bad music, i start to picture what kind of person i’d have to be to actually like that music, like what kind of mind i would have to have in order to perceive the signals coming from the bad music as pleasure, and then i start to imagine the ideal circumstance under which the bad music is playing, and i imagine myself at some gigantic horrible fucking rave or whatever completely filled with the kinds of dumbasses that the music is reaching out to, and i just feel like maybe i’m going to die of humiliation just from listening to the music for one second, and like i shouldn’t let anybody call me out as a stupid fucking piece of shit on this level, but i don’t know how to like...get revenge or whatever, so i just stew in my own loathing. so anyway, i have the same type of problem with clickbait. i look at the grainy, poorly cropped stock photos and read the deliberately half-formed sentences, and i start imagining exactly how stupid and tacky i would have to be to actually click on one of these things. it’s not even the fact that they’re like 80% extremely poisonous sexual garbage, and then 20% some melange of laughing at fat ugly people, positing violent disasters as jerk off material, or just making totally unreasonable claims--you know, that you’ll die of shock forever if you look closely at whatever is inside the one single pixel they’ve circled in red buried inside a boring arbitrary frame from Disney’s Hercules or something. (the circled secrets are possibly the worst; it’ll be like an already pretty horny picture of a barely-clothed woman, with a red circle in the middle of her elbow and the caption will go YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND FOR ALL ETERNITY WHEN YOU SEE THIS ONE SMALL DETAIL, and i’m like, what could the person who wrote this even HOPE that i will think? are they gonna show me all her germs after the jump? like am i gonna click on the picture hoping a dick pops out of her elbow and sings By a Waterfall to me? what is this shit even about?) the thing that pisses me off is the assumption that this content seems to make about me, the viewer. most obviously, it assumes that i’m frantically worried about which forgotten child actors are fuckable now, or which morbidly obese reality stars are fuckable now, or which ugly celebrities are fucking hot people now...or like, what happens when a duckling meets a puppy for the first time, which apparently i *will not believe*. but there’s this whole other thing--the “try not to gasp” thing. clickbait doesn’t just think i’m such a dumb piece of shit that i’ll click on these things, but it thinks that i am so mortally fragile that i will GASP. it thinks my entire respiratory system will spasm helplessly when i see what hermione looks like now or whatever (as if that isn’t current, heavily circulated information). there’s some guy on the other end of this picture of haley joel osment that he got off reuters, going, TRY NOT TO GASP WHEN YOU SEE WHAT HE LOOKS LIKE NOW! ARE YOU READY? BE CAREFUL THOUGH, YOU MIGHT GASP IF YOU LOOK! YOU SHOULD TAKE A BREATH BEFORE YOU CLICK ON THIS PICTURE! OR HOLD YOUR BREATH! OTHERWISE, A KIND OF BREATHING MIGHT HAPPEN, WHICH IS NOT THE KIND OF BREATHING YOU NORMALLY EXPECT! YOU MAY LOOK AT THIS PICTURE AND GASP, AND THEN THINK TO YOURSELF, “MY GOODNESS, I GASPED! I DID NOT THINK THAT I WOULD GASP! I THOUGHT, IT IS OK, I CAN GUESS WHAT HALEY JOEL OSMENT LOOKS LIKE TODAY, SURELY HIS FACE WILL NOT MAKE ME GASP. BUT I WAS WRONG! I GLIMPSED HIM, AND BREATH RUSHED INTO MY MOUTH, MAKING A LITTLE SOUND LIKE ‘GASP’! OH MY GOLLY, I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD HAPPEN TO ME, THIS GASPING! WEATHER.COM WARNED ME TO TRY NOT TO GASP, BUT THEY JUST KNEW I WOULD GASP ANYWAY! WHAT A SILLY FOOL I WAS TO EVER TRY NOT TO GASP!” like what is this? even in the world in which a person would actually gasp at something they found on aol.com, what are the consequences supposed to be of gasping? or like what do i fucking get if i DON’T gasp? every time i see one of these things, i picture a bunch of extremely virginal college freshmen squeezed onto the lower bunk of a dorm room at some parochial school bobbling all over each other in front of a gateway computer, turning koolaid red at the sight of veronica mars in a dress or something. and like...isn’t the internet all about becoming totally and completely jaded? just from the sheer speed at which shocking material circulates, to the point that it has eliminated the need for things like ogrish and rotten by now? hasn’t everybody with the internet seen at least one example of every kind of porn or accident video imaginable, even if you genuinely didn’t mean to? isn’t the internet all about how information wants to be free, so there’s just nothing remotely surprising about anything related to public figures, or videos that had their last view before vine even became a thing? who are the people who are supposed to be so scandalized by this stuff, and why do the people who actually create clickbait have such a hard time figuring out what’s ACTUALLY trending? you pretty much have to try HARDER to NOT find out what’s popular at any given moment. and yet, we still have this clickbait that seems to harken back to a world in which people might still sit through eternal buffering to ogle angelfire sites full of low res screen caps of hollywood actresses in R-rated shower scenes; a world in which the Family Computer is still a thing, and the potential harbinger of the devastating end of your personal life. MEN, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOUR WIFE IS AROUND! warns the caption under a stock photo of a young woman in a tank top, wearing a neutral expression, sitting in a park. who are these MEN whose main source of stimulation are these tiny thumbnails littered all over msn news, who can only access them in a time and place where their WIVES are lurking nearby watching internet videos over their guilty husbands’ shoulders? i bag on how arcane these things are, but i (we) see them at the bottom of fairly popular contemporary websites too, which only confuses me more. it seems to me that the target audience for clickbait is just, todd and rodd flanders, and i’m trying to figure out how these innocent flanderses of the world could even have gotten their little luddite mitts on a computer in the first place, in order to be so massively and persistently victimized by this shit. i don’t get this at all. is “try not to gasp” a real thing that real people say to each other? was it ever?

#it's not personal or anything #i'm just having a shit fit

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miss-musings · 7 years ago

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Why I want to stop watching the Blacklist (a.k.a., A Rant by Me)

This used to be my favorite show. Hands down. I would legitimately schedule things around it; I would leave events early to make sure I could watch it live; I would post about it on Tumblr and read other people’s posts the rest of the evening; I would search through multiple review site’s posts the next day.

I loved the dynamic between Red and Liz. I loved the mysteries and the little morsels of answers that we would get. I loved how, in the S1 finale, it felt like no one was safe: Meera got killed; Harold got attacked and nearly killed; Tom was shot and left for dead.

But, over the past few seasons, this show has become the bane of my TV-watching experience.

(EDIT: this post, which quietly keeps gaining notes, was written post-S4, pre-S5. So, there’s still plenty of relevant things in the post, but just keep the timing in mind.)

I would watch it, sure. But that was because I didn’t want the folks on Tumblr spoiling it for me. It was because I thought we were finally getting answers – which is what they teased us with every other week – only to feel so disappointed.

This last year, I made reaction videos for a friend of mine for every single episode. You know what one of the most commonly said things in those videos is? “Well, at least next week’s preview looks good.” Only to be disappointed in that episode, and to say the same thing about next week’s preview, and the cycle repeated itself until we actually got a half-way decent episode (which was usually some kind of finale or premiere, because that’s the only time actual shit can happen – during Sweeps Week).

Over and over again, both online and in person, I compared this to those scenes in cartoons where someone puts a carrot on a fishing pole in front of a donkey, and the donkey runs so hard to reach the carrot, only to never get there.

That’s how this show has felt the past season or two.

It’s only a shadow of what it once was, and I’m tired of it. I wish I could stop watching it.

So many other people I follow on Tumblr have said they’ve either stopped or thought about stopping. By comparison, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and the Walking Dead seemingly increase their viewership every season; the Blacklist has been NBC’s lowest-rated show in the demo for the last year, IIRC. The ratings for the Redemption spin-off were so low, the showrunners tried to pass it off as a one-off miniseries, when it was ALWAYS intended to be its own full-length show.

I understand that the show does well in DVR viewership numbers, and it was the most expensive TV show that Netflix had purchased when Season 1 was released.

But, this show continues to disappoint me. There’s hardly anything I like about it anymore. Hell, even James Spader, who’s a master at his craft, seems to be bored with it. His monologues are becoming more and more cliche, and even his amazing performances can’t save this dumpster-fire.

Its protagonist, Liz, is all over the fucking place in terms of characterization. First, she was naive and learned her “husband” had used and abused her. Then, she went to the dark side, chained him up on a boat and said she’d never forgive him for what he’d done. Then, she apparently forgave him, slept with him, had his kid, tried to remarry the guy, and then faked her death to get away with him and is now living her happy dream life with her little girl and her ‘perfect’ husband.

What happened to the dark, morally questionable, grungy Liz? What happened to the Liz who was jaded and afraid after being on the run for several weeks, or months?

She just settled down with a guy who she used to hate and she’s living the dream.

What in the literal fuck?

And, for all the time that has been invested in Liz, she has made little to no progress in her characterization these past few seasons. In fact, she’s done more of a 360. She’s right back where she started, more or less.

Why should the audience give a shit about her journey if she’s not making any progress? Why should we care that, halfway through this show, she has everything she’s ever wanted?

The side characters, like Aram, Samar, Ressler, Cooper and others are there just to serve the plot. Any time there’s a semblance of some character development or plot progression, the showrunners regress everyone back to Stage One so we can do it all over again. Aram and Samar look like they’re making progress in their possible romantic relationship? Fuck that, we’ve got to make sure Aram runs back to his abusive girlfriend and string this thing along another season! Remember when Ressler got shot, had prescription drug problems, and was in Narcotics Anonymous? Yeah, me neither.

Mr. Kaplan, who was best when she was on-screen to sass and help Reddington once every few episodes, gets pushed into the spotlight for some made-up bullshit reason that had never been discussed or hinted at previous to the “Mr. Kaplan used to work for Katarina Rostova” storyline. And while Susan Bloomaert is a fantastic and underrated actress and did her absolute best to make those scenes between her and Liz feel emotional, I didn’t really care about their dynamic at all because it felt so forced, underdeveloped, and out-of-nowhere.

Whereas the relationship that I care the MOST about – that between Red and Liz – that has been the most built-up and developed over the course of the show keeps getting thrown under the bus as Liz does the whole “love Red, hate Red, forgive Red” song-and-dance routine. She claims she agrees with Red when he tells her not to go back to Tom in Season 2… only to go back to Tom later in Season 2. She’s totally down with asking Red to help her whenever she’s a criminal on the run… but the minute her wedding gets shot up, she yells at him and says it’s his fault.

And now, as far as the Lizzington fans go, which I count myself as one of them, the show has written itself into a corner. Because all the amazing chemistry and romantic tropes throughout the show feel incredibly creepy now that Liz believes Red is her dad, regardless of whether he actually is or not. I don’t care how they try to pull themselves out of the ginormous hole they’ve dug for themselves on that one – why the hell would a woman ever end up with a guy that she once thought was her dad, even if it turned out he actually wasn’t?

And the only real way out of it is the Impostor Theory – a well-written and well-researched theory, but one that makes people have to do fucking mental gymnastics for it to work. You have to assume a lot of people like Naomi and Reddington’s former roommate from the Naval Academy who’s now an admiral, are in on it. Whereas dudes like Finch or the Director aren’t…

Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s a wonderful theory and it explains a lot. But, if it ends up being true, it means one of two things:

1) The writers didn’t plan this from the beginning and lucked their way into it

2) The writers DID plan this from the beginning, which means they have the ability to be really good writers, but then they fell into all this other bullshit – like Liz’s weird arc and other things – which really means that they’re not that good of writers; they just had the one good idea.

And if the Impostor Theory DOESN’T end up being true, in some form or fashion, that means that Red really IS Liz’s dad, and this whole fucking show – Red’s entire characterization, his relationship and dynamic with her – has been a lie. Canon can be throw out the window to rot in the sewer and fuck itself in the interim, because the writers don’t even care any more.

Which, I realize is unfair, because I know there are hundreds of people who work really hard to make this show happen, and while it’s not, like, the worst show of all time, the fact that it had such potential and has fallen so far, almost makes it seem worse than a show that was so bad from the beginning I never invested time in it.

And what makes it even WORSE is that the showrunners continue to act like this is the most groundbreaking show on television, and put it on a pedestal On High, along with the likes of Game of Thrones, The Americans, and The Sopranos… you know, actually good shows.

That would be the equivalent of the Taken director demanding that his movie should’ve gotten an Oscar. It’s like, you know it was a fine movie, and I had a good time watching it, but like, bring yourself back down to earth. Taken is okay, but it is NOT Oscar-worthy material, so get off your high horse, dude.

I guess, if nothing else, it shows that the showrunners, writers and actors are so talented that they got me to invest in the show to the point where I can’t not watch it, even though it’s fallen so far and I feel like it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be. They hooked me and got me to care about these characters and their dynamics so much that, even though it frustrates me week in and week out, I will still keep watching it.

It’s just that, now, I might be doing it with a bottle of vodka, taking shots every time:

Red has a monologue that proves James Spader is too damn good for this show;

Liz is bitchy to Red for little to no reason, while continuing to be lovey-dovey with Tom;

Ressler survives a fight or car accident or some other action sequence with no injuries whatsoever;

Harry Lennix is completely underused as Harold Cooper in an episode, because he only tells his employees to do the obvious… and literally nothing else;

Samar and/or Aram take a step back from getting together, despite hints that they’ve liked each other since Season 2.

So, bottoms up, Blacklist fans!

#blacklist #nbc the blacklist #the blacklist #raymond reddington #lizzington #keenler #elizabeth keen #harold cooper #aram mojtabai #donald ressler #samar navabi #dembe zuma #mr kaplan #katarina rostova

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toxoiddiamond · 7 years ago

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T H E B A S I C S Given Name: Elijah Anthony Mitchell Nicknames: Eli Age: 25 Birthday: December 7th Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius Birthplace: Seattle, Washington Current Location: Chicago, Illinois Speaks: English, Russian Dominant Hand: Right Education: He dropped out of high school just before his senior year and ran away from home. He’s always intended to get his GED and maybe even go to college, but he keeps talking himself out of it. Occupation: Prostitute~ Although if asked when in polite company, he’ll say he’s in sales. Vehicle: He doesn’t have a car or a license. He does a lot of walking, and occasionally takes the bus. Worldly Possessions: He doesn’t have many possessions, preferring to spend most of his money on necessities and put away the rest in case of an emergency (like if the police start to notice him standing around on street corners and he has to quickly move to a new city). Pet(s): No pets, as much as he would love to have one, since his apartment does not allow them, and his landlord is an asshole who likes to check in without much warning. There is a little stray cat he feeds whenever she shows up on his back porch, though. And maybe picks her up and cuddles her once in a while. And maybe brings her inside if it’s raining. But, you know. No pets.

A P P E A R A N C E Height: About 5’10” Hair: Just long enough to be tousled and messy all the time. Dark brown, shiny, and very soft to the touch. Facial Hair: He has a bit of facial hair, but it’s really just stubble. He usually shaves every other day. Eye Colour: Gray-blue, very striking, especially in the right lighting. Skin Tone: Pale, since he mostly only goes out at night. Clothing: He hasn’t bought new clothes for himself in about three years to be honest, so his clothes are getting pretty worn out. But he still somehow manages to look good, sort of a shabby-chic thing. He has a couple pairs of jeans, several t-shirts, and a couple of jackets that are both far too thin to be functional in Chicago winter weather. Distinguishing Marks: A long, faint scar on the right side of his shoulder/chest from getting attacked/mugged when he was seventeen. He doesn’t like to talk about it, and will change the subject if anyone asks about it. Face Claim: Sebastian Stan Alternative Universe: Hooker AU

H E A L T H Physical Health: It could be better. He spends too many nights out in cold weather with not enough layers to keep him warm (plus the bottoms of his shoes are worn out, so his feet always end up wet and freezing). He also doesn’t get enough to eat, and when he does eat, it’s cheap food that doesn’t have much nutritional value. He gets sick a lot, and even when he’s not sick he kinda just feels like shit, but he pushes himself to go out almost every night anyway, because he needs the money. Physical Abilities/Limitations: He can read insanely fast—it only takes him two or three days to get through a giant book. He can run pretty fast if he needs to, but because of his poor health at the moment, he doesn’t have a lot of endurance. Addictions: None. He is not at all interested in any drugs, since he doesn’t want to completely ruin his life. Alcohol is something he only has in small doses. Allergies: Mild seasonal allergies, nothing major. Mental Health: Not very good, though it could be (and has been) worse. He’s dealt with anxiety and depression for a lot of his life, made worse by the fact that he’s been through a lot of shit. There was a time when he basically lost hope and considered just ending his life. But he decided that wasn’t what his parents would have wanted for him, that they would have wanted him to keep trying no matter how bad things got, and make a better life for himself. So, that’s what he’s trying to do, though it’s still not easy for him.

H I S T O R Y Job History: He took some random odd jobs when he was younger, anything that could get him cash in a hurry. He first traded sex for money around the time he was seventeen, and told himself it was just a one-time thing. But he soon realized it was much easier to make money being a hooker, one thing led to another, and here he is. Fondest Memories: Family trips with his parents when he was younger. All the times his mom came in to volunteer at his school/be a chaperone on field trips (even though at the time, he found it embarrassing). Helping out around the restaurant with his dad (even though they tended to bicker and argue). Worst Experiences: The deaths of both his parents. Being mugged and assaulted. His first sexual experience, which was entirely consensual, but was not good or fun in any way.

C O M M U N I C A T I O N Speech Pace/Style: If he’s not working, he’s pretty soft-spoken, stumbles over his words a lot, and doesn’t talk much, mostly because he doesn’t know what to say a lot of the time. But if he is working, he’s completely the opposite—louder and more confident, a little more pushy and authoritative. He learned the hard way that he has to act like that with his clients, otherwise he’ll be taken advantage of. Accent: American Usual Curse Words: All of them, but especially “fuck” in any of its forms.

P E R S O N A L I T Y, M I N D S E T, A N D B E L I E F S Personality Type: INFJ Sense of Humor: Eli isn’t very funny himself—he’s too serious, and doesn’t think to joke around unless someone else starts it. But it’s very easy to make him laugh. He especially likes silly/goofy humor, and likes to tease people and be teased (as long as it’s not too mean-spirited). Habits: Drumming his fingers on nearby surfaces or biting his lip when he’s nervous. He gestures a lot with his hands when he talks about anything he’s passionate about. He scrunches up his nose when he smiles really big and when he laughs. Fears/Phobias: He still gets a little sick to his stomach whenever he thinks someone may be following him, because of a couple of bad experiences he’s had in the past (one where he was mugged at knifepoint, another where a man sexually assaulted him and Eli barely managed to escape and run away before anything worse happened). As a result, he’s afraid of being followed. He is also afraid of heights; he can be somewhere high up, but wouldn’t want to look out or stand close to the window/over the ledge, etc. Strengths: He is very smart, and has a great memory—ideal for studying, though he doesn’t do as much of that as he’d like. He is also a very empathetic, kind person. As much as he struggles with money, and as little as he has for himself, he is still as generous as he can be to others when he sees someone in need. Taking care of others is something he really likes to do, though he doesn’t have much opportunity to do so. Flaws: Eli tends to be quite a pessimist, always thinking the worst about himself and always thinking the worst will happen. He is also very easily distraught, and tends to make a bigger deal out of things than necessary. Though at the same time, if something really bad does happen, he often won’t tell anyone or ask for help, even if he needs it. Hopes/Desires: He wants to go to school, and would love to eventually find a job as a teacher—although he is open to other possibilities as well. Mostly, he just doesn’t want to be a hooker anymore. Wildest Fantasy: He sometimes daydreams about having a loving husband, lots of dogs and cats, and a big, beautiful house. But sometimes those daydreams make him sad, because he’s convinced himself he’ll probably never have any of those things. Self-Esteem: Definitely could be better. His life hasn’t turned out at all the way he wanted or planned, and he can’t help but feel it’s his own fault, that he’s just a monumental fuck-up. He puts on a confident face, especially in front of clients, but he’s actually very insecure and way too hard on himself. Religion: He doesn’t care about religion, and never has.

R A N D O M Sleeping Position: Usually curled up in a ball on his side. Boxers or Briefs?: Boxer-briefs most of the time, sometimes boxers if he’s just laying around the house. Day or Night?: He honestly prefers daytime, but his job requires him to sleep a lot of the day away. Given the choice, he’d be more of an “early to bed, early to rise” sort of person. Top or Bottom?: With his clients, he’ll do whatever they prefer him to do. But his personal preference is bottom, for sure. Partying or Relaxing?: Relaxing, no contest. He hates parties most of the time.

R E L A T I O N S H I P S Closest Friend: Since moving to Chicago, he has developed something of a friendship with Lucas, his upstairs neighbor. Lucas doesn’t officially know about Eli’s profession, but he does suspect that he’s involved in some sort of shady work—however, Lucas figures that’s not really his business, so he’s never pressed the issue. Relationship History: Eli has never been in a proper relationship, despite the fact that he wants one more than anything. His line of work doesn’t exactly leave much room for any romantic entanglements~ Sexual Partners: Countless. Elijah is very adamant about always practicing safe sex though, and gets tested on a regular basis to make sure he’s all good. Thoughts About Sex: I mean. He’s been sort of jaded thanks to his past/his work. He’s had a lot of less-than-savory experiences, and has a lot of regrets, though he’s also had his share of good experiences. Overall, he doesn’t mind sex. But he doesn’t love it either, and sometimes thinks he could do without it forever and not be any worse off.

P A R E N T S Name(s): Sawyer and Evelyn Mitchell Age(s): His mother died in a car accident when she was 35, and his father died of cancer just four years later, at the age of 41. Occupation(s): His mother was a stay-at-home mom, and loved being able to stay home and take care of the home/take care of her family. His father owned a successful bar/restaurant in Seattle. Quality of Relationship With Their Children: Elijah and his mother were always very close, and he was absolutely devastated when she passed away. He was never as close with his dad, especially after his mom died—but they did love each other, and Eli did his best to help take care of his dad when he got sick, even though it was much too big of a job for him. Living/Deceased: Both deceased, unfortunately.

D A I L Y L I F E Living Arrangements: He lives in a shitty studio apartment in a shady part of town. But as shitty as the place is, Eli is still proud of the fact that he has his own place, an actual apartment instead of a seedy motel room. He’s done his best to make the place feel homey—lots of cheap Goodwill furniture that doesn’t match, a completely crammed bookshelf (along with several stacks of books that didn’t fit on said bookshelf), and tons of blankets to make up for the fact that the place is not well insulated. He keeps the place tidy, and has probably improved the value of it since moving in to be quite honest.

#character: elijah mitchell #hooker au #ship: atti/eli #character sheet

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unholyhelbig · 3 years ago

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Title: Wolf-Girl

Ship: Hope Mikaelson/Lizzie Saltzman

Summary: Lizzie Saltzman is a doctor in a small rural hospital letting another full moon pass her by, but when a car accident involving a girl who seemingly got up and walked away rolls into the ER, Lizzie can't help but follow her gut and lean on her curiosity.

Medicine was never Lizzie’s first choice. She wanted to be a designer; she never got far enough to know what kind, if her specialty would be homes plated in glass or celebrities equally as adorned in diamonds. But she wanted to be in control of something, to make a difference in someone’s life without having too much commitment and influence.

Medicine was not her first choice. It wasn’t her second or her third, but fate had a way of steering her in a direction that seemed unfathomable. Fate had the scent of blood and the sharp stinging pain of shrapnel.

Lizzie remembers the first life she saved. It wasn’t poetic or planned, but it never quite is. She had mustered the courage that her summer babysitting course instilled in her; calm, collected, concise. Even as a creamy red bubbled past a motorcyclist’s lips and splattered her face, and her collar, and her fingers, she kept going in a rhythmic fashion until the real lifesavers got there.

They thanked her, and asked her questions, and told her that she needed to get cleaned up for her own sake. A young EMT squeezed her arm and looked into her dilated eyes and told her that she did everything she could.

But when she laid in bed that night, a fan pushing soft summer air around the room defenselessly, she didn’t’ feel like she had done enough. Sweat made her skin sticky and damp, and she woke up from a light sleep thinking it was blood- a stranger's blood coating her fingertips and making them toxic in their own way.

Josie said she screamed, and her father would have agreed. But Lizzie doesn’t remember any of that, or maybe, along the way, she forced herself to forget. It took her a long while to force herself to drive again, but eventually, she did. And after that, after that summer at their house on the ocean, she had decided that she would go into medicine.

It wasn’t her first choice, not in the slightest, but she was damned good at it.

She tended to regret her choices on nights like these; full moons that hung high in the air. It pulled the tides and pulled the insanity right along with it. She had stitched up a kid who thought it was a good idea to tie the blunt end of the string to an RC car and the opposite side to a tooth not ready to come out yet. The chord of rope split his chin right open.

There was the usual influx of abdominal pain and splinters lodged deep into skin. The standard pill pushers and nightly drunks. A group of frat boys that got a little too close to the propellors on a boat, slicing the thumb clean off their leader- but they brought that in a cooler stocked fresh with beer and ice. It worked just fine.

“I took a Latin class in undergrad; Lunacy is the definition of going crazy because of the moon. Whoever invented the damn word knew what they were doing to ER workers when they were scheduled on a night like this.”

“The Romans invented Latin. Shouldn’t you know that?”

Lizzie was trying to get some sleep before her beeper would inevitably go off. She had taken off her lab coat and situated it into a little ball of fabric until she was satisfied before finally getting a chance to close her eyes.

But Jade had been antagonizing MG the whole night about the fact that Full Moons didn’t’ actually make the nights harder; what made the nights harder was the fact that they blamed every odd thing on said moon. It made the night drag on, and the first half of the next day too.

“You know what I think?” Jade went on, slamming her elbow into the glass sheet of the vending machine shoved into the corner of the break room “I think you should stop watching so many horror movies in your free time.”

She fished her prize from the bottom of the trough, the cellophane crinkling under her grasp. Lizzie didn’t’ know how old the snack cakes were, they had never seen it restocked, but it never stopped them from scarfing down the sugary treats whenever possible.

“Alright, so you explain room seven to me?”

Lizzie opened her eyes then and stared at the tiled ceiling, the lights above her head were buzzing dutifully. The nurse and Rad Tech had moved over to the only table in the room. MG picked at the second cake that Jade seemed to hand over to him.

“Dude is old as dirt, probably had a few drinks too. No wonder he saw what he did.” She shrugged her shoulders “probably tired too.”

“Oh, pick a struggle, besides he blew a 0.00 on the breathalyzer. Even if he was drunk, which he wasn’t, there’s no way to fool that thing.” He took a thoughtful bite of his snack cake and chewed.

Lizzie finally sat all the way up, her hair scrunched on one side and sleep biting at her reddened cheeks. She didn’t’ remember drifting off, but then again, she never did remember. Jade lifted her hand in a small wave and MG beamed at her, crumbs against his chin.

“What happened in room seven?” She asked, bringing her legs to her chest, the sofa in the breakroom nothing but uncomfortable and stiff. Her spine ached.

Jade waved her hand in front of her face “Car accident. Not a big deal at all. MG is just making it sound like more than it is.”

“It is more” He whined, turning his chair towards the general practitioner “Man comes in carrying a naked girl in his arms. She’s pretty banged up and wrapped in a tarp from the back of his truck.”

Lizzie lifted a brow; weird, sure, but she had taken a cooler with a detached extremity in it a few hours ago, and an intern had suggested that they warm it back up with an electric hairdryer. So after a dark glare and a moment of slamming her head against the triage desk, she regained her composure and considered this normal enough.

“Tell her what he said,” MG had a shit-eating grin on his face as he nudged Jade.

She sighed heavy and hot “The old dude claimed that he hit a dog. He said his headlights caught it at the last minute and by the time he stopped it was already under his front tires. But when he got out of his truck it was a girl. A naked girl, the one he brought in.”

“The full moon strikes again,” MG lowered his voice.

“Or he’s been holding this girl captive in his basement for god knows how long and concocted a heinous story to get the cops off his tail. No pun intended.”

The pun had been intended and she seemed quite proud of herself, licking the little bit of icing off the tip of her pinky finger. Lizzie was wide awake now, with a dull pain at the base of her spine from the springs in the sofa. She stood and snatched her lab coat from the far cushion before sliding it on. Seven more hours to go in a 48-hour bender shift.

“I want it,” Lizzie said.

MG lifted his eyebrows and shoved the snack cake, half-devoured, closer to her. She shook her head with a frown.

“Not the food, I want room Seven. I’ve been stitching up lacerations and pouring lidocaine into dixie cups for two days, if you don’t count the thumb incident, I’ve been nothing more than an intern.” She leaned heavily against the table, staring at her two colleagues.

Jade smiled and moved her finger against the side of her lip. She reminded Lizzie of a weed dealer in high school, clearly having an advantage over her with the snide look in her eyes. Lizzie wasn’t above begging, not for a case like this, not for a girl who probably had a few broken bones.

But she wasn’t interested in the victim. Not fully- she was more invested in the man who claims that humans morphed to beast but bleed the same.

“Whatever man, you can have it.” She relented “She’s the only one on my rotation right now.”

Lizzie considered that a win. She clapped the woman on the shoulder before walking towards room seven. It had gotten quiet, there was a rough cough down the hall and a mother holding a crying baby as the attending gave a shot.

But for a full moon- for something that pulled people into insanity, lunacy as MG would call it, it was quiet. She would never admit that because it was a forbidden word in healthcare, always had been. She knew that as she got to the enclosed room and picked up the silver chart. She scanned Jade’s scribbled handwriting.

HOPE M

Fractured Ulna, right side

Atypical white blood cell count

Tachycardia

Laceration, right side, temple

Lizzie tucked the metal under her arm and rapt her knuckles against the door. She didn’t’ hear anything but listened hard, before pushing the door open. The scent of blood was apparent and shrouded in sweat and antiseptic.

The lights had been dimmed but those that were shining, every other tile buzzed like a fly trapped listlessly against a windowpane. It seemed to take up the entire hospital room; the heart monitor beeped in a rhythmic fashion every couple of seconds. A certain type of nausea settled itself at the base of Lizzie’s stomach as she walked.

She had expected helplessness. Working in a hospital in the Emergency department pretty much guaranteed it. And Lizzie- Lizzie had the chance to be a hero and make up for the man on the motorcycle with cherry on his lips and a gurgling in his throat.

It wasn’t the same with this girl; this girl was pulling on a scuffed-up combat boot with gravel embedded in its rubber base. Her naked back faced Lizzie, and the orange trace of blood splattered in the shape of a map against soft skin.

A more permanent mark of a half-moon facing west was embedded on her shoulder. That couldn’t’ be wiped away. Lizzie stared, maybe a little too long, before realizing that her patient was pulling on her clothing to leave. The bruising against her sides and around her hip bones looked as if it were more than dead blood just under her skin. It looked like waves, entirely alive and moving towards the moon positioned just above.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Lizzie found herself saying.

The stranger startled and reached for the cotton flower gown that tied at the neck and again mid-back. She held it flush against her chest and stood. She winced- but that didn't catch the doctor's attention. What did was the fact that she could stand at all. Lizzie caught her eyes, green and blue and grey under the lights.

“Leaving.” She said, sizing the doctor up.

Lizzie hoped she didn’t’ look as small as she felt. She had hugged the metal clipboard close to her and studied the strong presence in the room with curiosity. She had fished a thumb out of a bucket of beer for fucks sake, she was not about to let this… this girl leave in the middle of the night when she had been sidelined by a truck.

“No, I don’t think you are.”

Hope scoffed “Really? I feel like there’s something legal here that permits me to refuse medical treatment.”

There was, But part of Lizzie thought that if she puffed up her chest enough she could get the patient to stay. They always pushed it hard, and she wasn’t about to let a pretty face and snide attitude stop that now.

“My chart says you should be dead right now.” She lifted an eyebrow, making a show of opening it, though her brain couldn’t make sense of Jade’s words while the patient stared her down. “And the man in the hallway says you should be a…. golden retriever?”

Hope laughed this time. “Man’s blind. He tapped me with his car, and I got up. Do I look like a golden retriever to you, Doc? You’ve already scanned my brain, no concussions. As far as I’m concerned, I’m free to go.”

“Go on then,” Lizzie shut the chart and stepped out of the pathway leading to the door. “But Just to let you know. That blind man is sitting right outside, waiting to grill you about the fact that you had a tail. So you can either do that, or you can sit your ass back down in bed and let me get some fluids in you.”

She frowned, pouted really. Her stormy gaze shot to the door, and then to Lizzie again. “Isn’t there a way to just… remove him?”

“Not legally.”

Hope lowered herself back down to the bed, as dramatically as she could with the soreness in her muscles. Lizzie was satisfied with that for now and watched as she toed off her boots easily, not having bothered with securing the laces.

She rushed her hand under freezing water with generic soap and slid some gloves on. She felt Hope’s stare burning a hole in her lab coat the entire time but didn’t’ give in to the pressure.

“Why do you care so much?” Hope asked when she pulled a stool up to the side of the bed, tourniquet in hand. “I mean, I know it’s your job and all, but the last I checked, a nurse could have done this.”

“You interest me. Jade rarely misses, and X-rays don’t lie. Everyone else might chalk you up to a medical miracle,”

Lizzie secured the latex around the upper part of Hope’s arm and tied it tightly. The woman flinched again, this time as it pinched her skin. She took two fingers and started to press against the unnaturally hot part of Hope’s arm until she found a good vein that wasn’t over a tendon.

“And what do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed cooling alcohol against the spot, not having started an IV in years. “A product of the full moon. The man could have been blind. Jade could have been wrong. You don’t look like you have a fractured ulna to me.”

Hope drew in a sharp breath as soon as the needle slid into the crease in her arm. Lizzie worked quickly, securing the catheter with tape before grabbing the tube that linked to the fluid bag. Hope eyed her carefully through it all but seemed to relax at the lack of prodding once the drops started to flow.

“You’re not normal, are you?” Lizzie asked, peeling her gloves off and balling them up.

“None of us are normal, Doc. Some things are just more noticeable than others.”

Lizzie didn’t’ move from the small stool that she was crouched on. It was as tall as it could go and her knees still pressed close to her chest. She felt like a child squeezed into a tiny plastic chair waiting for a non-specific orange beverage.

She watched as blood collected around the IV that she had placed in Hope M’s arm. It bubbled and hissed like black goo, but it was just blood. The same blood that crusted against her hairline and the expert sutures that Jade had applied earlier. Hope stared at her all the same, a mix of a pout and a curious frown against her features.

“I’ll tell you what, wolf-girl. I��ll forge the reports, get the old quack out of the lobby, and discharge you if-“

“If?”

“If you come back in two weeks and give me a vial of your blood. So, help me if I took any more from you tonight. Superhuman or not, everyone needs time to heal.”

“I don’t’ understand.”

“I want to study you.”

Hope laughed again, this time it had a bit of malice in it. It sounded like gravel, and it slowly turned into a wet hack. Lizzie, the doctor in her, stood and got her a little plastic cup filled with water. She gulped it down greedily and pulled in a shaky breath. “You’re being serious?”

“As serious as they come, yeah. I want to understand how a ford can hit you full force and you can walk away- limp away. It’s not just adrenaline, this isn’t a situation where you lifted a car off a baby in a fit of strength. You’re always like this, aren’t you?”

Hope narrowed her eyes and traced the plastic edge of the cup “Like what?”

“You’re a hard stick. Not because I can’t find your veins. I could do that blindfolded. Your skin was thicker, like stone.” The corner of Lizzie’s mouth quirked up into an odd smile. “You’re not human and I’ve never seen that before. So, I want to study you.”

“And if I don’t agree to be your little lab rat?”

Lizzie shrugged “Either way you’re going to walk out of here. I can’t stop you. As you said, there are laws in place against that but… let me help you, and you can help me.”

Hope shifted in the hospital bed and groaned as her fingers moved away from the empty cup and instead pushed into her ribs. She tried not to show the discomfort that rushed through her. But Lizzie could spot a prideful disadvantage from a mile away. She lowered herself back onto the stool.

“You heal fast, I get it, if you didn’t chances are you’d be jacked up on fentanyl right now, halfway to the moon or a coma, whatever you reached first. But that doesn’t mean you’re immune to pain. You’re still experiencing it now. Let me help you with that.”

Hope glowered for a moment, fingers still pressed against the sore spot in her ribs. Lizzie could have sworn there was a soft, nearly inaudible growl that rumbled in the girl's chest, but she wasn’t sure, the machine tracking her heartrate clicked steadily by and the light still buzzed like a trapped fly.

“Okay,” She said, soft and slow “Okay, fine. You have a deal.”

#hope mikaelson #lizzie saltzman #hope x lizzie #legacies #Legacies hizzie #hizzie #Hizzie fanfiction #Hizzie fanfic #legacies fanfiction

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lazytacomoon-blog · 7 years ago

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What is the most affordable insurance for an amateur athlete ?

"What is the most affordable insurance for an amateur athlete ?

What is the most affordable insurance for an amateur athlete ?

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""How much should an average home insurance policy cost, for a 3 family home in Queens, NY?""

What coverage is mandatory, what is not but recommended? Thank you for your input. Also if you can suggest an insurance broker that would be really helpful""

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hey, my pal wants to get an insurance for my car cuz i can't my self, (police reasons) we want an insurance with the lowest price, lowest of all, i don't even care if it covers me well or whatever cuz if something happens to the car i will just use the other, it is just to register it, i got 2 cars, they the same but only one of them is gonna be register, so if u know anything about insurance with a low price or not nessesary legally but that can let me register it let me know (chevy lumina 97)""

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https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/im-16-years-old-looking-cheap-scooterped-scramblerhow-cleofa-escobedo"

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fictionalnormalcy · 3 years ago

Text

TBWASN Ch. 11

The Boy with a Strange Name

Rating: Mature (Graphic Depictions of Violence)

Fandoms: Fusion of the How to Train Your Dragon books and animated franchise

Additional Tags: jaded protagonist, modern day AU, moving somewhere new, fitting in, making friends, additional DreamWorks characters, back to hometown

Ch. 11: Both is Never a Good Sign

"You said that you gave the new kid directions to the Drinkery. Why did you not offer him a ride?" Hamish asked.

"He said that he didn't want to be an inconvenience. His father would not be picking him up, and would rather walk so he could start learning how to walk home without getting lost. "

"Did he happen to give you his name?"

"Seemed very intent in keeping the information to himself. He doesn't talk much."

"I wonder why that is." Hamish muttered.

"We could ask him. He is the one sitting with us at lunch."

"I don't think we should push him. If he isn't going to open up to us, then we should just let it be. He did try to stand up for me with Astrid."

"Yet she still forced you to go to the office."

"Which I hope taught her a lesson. There are some things that reap no benefits."

"Continue yer yappin' inside, and make it snappy!" Mildew slammed on the brakes.

The both of them were thrown forward, now having arrived at the cafe. The title of the establishment was The Berkian Drinkery, one of the few coffee shops on the island. As far as Hamish knew, it had existed since before he was born. It was owned by Mr. Bucket and Mr. Mulch, and their employees were scarce. Mr. Mulch spent the majority of the day at the school since he was the World and Berk History teacher, so Mr. Bucket worked the shop most days. There were no alcoholic drinks sold in the Drinkery, and some of the drinks were of their own creation.

As they stepped out of the car Orrick unwrapped his scarf from his neck and handed it to Hamish. Upon receiving it he clutched the brown fabric in his fists before begrudgingly wrapping it around his neck and raising it so it covered his jaw. The things he did to maintain his father's reputation.

"Think we beat him to the shop?" Orrick asked.

"A car does move faster than a person."

"But he had a head start."

"Then it is more likely we made it at the same time."

"What are you going to want?"

"A latte macchiato, and a blueberry croissant. I'm going to save us a table while we wait."

There were other students scattered around the cafe, and a classmate even waved at him. There were a group of girls at another table who were staring specifically at the scarf wrapped around his neck. He sat down, taking out his small leather wallet and fingering the bills. He looked at his identification card in its slot, seeing his freckled face offering him a small smile. He found it odd that he could still smile. After nearly four years of being targeted, he wondered how his brain was motivated enough to smile. It had become instinctual, where sometimes a smile was a mere reflex.

Keep reading

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readbookywooks · 8 years ago

Text

Kaa’s Hunting

His spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are the Buffalo’s pride. Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by the gloss of his hide. If ye find that the Bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browed Sambhur can gore; Ye need not stop work to inform us: we knew it ten seasons before. Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sister and Brother, For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear is their mother. “There is none like to me!” says the Cub in the pride of his earliest kill; But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still. Maxims of Baloo All that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was turned out of the Seeonee Wolf Pack, or revenged himself on Shere Khan the tiger. It was in the days when Baloo was teaching him the Law of the Jungle. The big, serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for the young wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat the Hunting Verse –"Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth, all these things are the marks of our brothers except Tabaqui the Jackal and the Hyaena whom we hate.” But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn a great deal more than this. Sometimes Bagheera the Black Panther would come lounging through the jungle to see how his pet was getting on, and would purr with his head against a tree while Mowgli recited the day’s lesson to Baloo. The boy could climb almost as well as he could swim, and swim almost as well as he could run. So Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taught him the Wood and Water Laws: how to tell a rotten branch from a sound one; how to speak politely to the wild bees when he came upon a hive of them fifty feet above ground; what to say to Mang the Bat when he disturbed him in the branches at midday; and how to warn the water-snakes in the pools before he splashed down among them. None of the Jungle People like being disturbed, and all are very ready to fly at an intruder. Then, too, Mowgli was taught the Strangers’ Hunting Call, which must be repeated aloud till it is answered, whenever one of the Jungle-People hunts outside his own grounds. It means, translated, “Give me leave to hunt here because I am hungry.” And the answer is, “Hunt then for food, but not for pleasure.”

All this will show you how much Mowgli had to learn by heart, and he grew very tired of saying the same thing over a hundred times. But, as Baloo said to Bagheera, one day when Mowgli had been cuffed and run off in a temper, “A man’s cub is a man’s cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle.”

“But think how small he is,” said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. “How can his little head carry all thy long talk?”

“Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.”

“Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?" Bagheera grunted. “His face is all bruised today by thy– softness. Ugh.”

“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered very earnestly. “I am now teaching him the Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember the words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth a little beating?”

“Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the man-cub. He is no tree trunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what are those Master Words? I am more likely to give help than to ask it" –Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it–"still I should like to know.”

“I will call Mowgli and he shall say them–if he will. Come, Little Brother!”

“My head is ringing like a bee tree,” said a sullen little voice over their heads, and Mowgli slid down a tree trunk very angry and indignant, adding as he reached the ground: “I come for Bagheera and not for thee, fat old Baloo!”

“That is all one to me,” said Baloo, though he was hurt and grieved. “Tell Bagheera, then, the Master Words of the Jungle that I have taught thee this day.”

“Master Words for which people?” said Mowgli, delighted to show off. “The jungle has many tongues. I know them all.”

“A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then–great scholar.”

“We be of one blood, ye and I,” said Mowgli, giving the words the Bear accent which all the Hunting People use.

“Good. Now for the birds.”

Mowgli repeated, with the Kite’s whistle at the end of the sentence.

“Now for the Snake-People,” said Bagheera.

The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli kicked up his feet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud himself, and jumped on to Bagheera’s back, where he sat sideways, drumming with his heels on the glossy skin and making the worst faces he could think of at Baloo.

“There–there! That was worth a little bruise,” said the brown bear tenderly. “Some day thou wilt remember me.” Then he turned aside to tell Bagheera how he had begged the Master Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant, who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to a pool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.

“No one then is to be feared,” Baloo wound up, patting his big furry stomach with pride.

“Except his own tribe,” said Bagheera, under his breath; and then aloud to Mowgli, “Have a care for my ribs, Little Brother! What is all this dancing up and down?”

Mowgli had been trying to make himself heard by pulling at Bagheera’s shoulder fur and kicking hard. When the two listened to him he was shouting at the top of his voice, “And so I shall have a tribe of my own, and lead them through the branches all day long.”

“What is this new folly, little dreamer of dreams?” said Bagheera.

“Yes, and throw branches and dirt at old Baloo,” Mowgli went on. “They have promised me this. Ah!”

“Whoof!” Baloo’s big paw scooped Mowgli off Bagheera’s back, and as the boy lay between the big fore-paws he could see the Bear was angry.

“Mowgli,” said Baloo, “thou hast been talking with the Bandar-log–the Monkey People.”

Mowgli looked at Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, and Bagheera’s eyes were as hard as jade stones.

“Thou hast been with the Monkey People–the gray apes–the people without a law–the eaters of everything. That is great shame.”

“When Baloo hurt my head,” said Mowgli (he was still on his back), “I went away, and the gray apes came down from the trees and had pity on me. No one else cared.” He snuffled a little.

“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun! And then, man-cub?”

“And then, and then, they gave me nuts and pleasant things to eat, and they–they carried me in their arms up to the top of the trees and said I was their blood brother except that I had no tail, and should be their leader some day.”

“They have no leader,” said Bagheera. “They lie. They have always lied.”

“They were very kind and bade me come again. Why have I never been taken among the Monkey People? They stand on their feet as I do. They do not hit me with their hard paws. They play all day. Let me get up! Bad Baloo, let me up! I will play with them again.”

“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle–except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today?”

“No,” said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished.

“The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”

He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.

“The Monkey-People are forbidden,” said Baloo, “forbidden to the Jungle-People. Remember.”

“Forbidden,” said Bagheera, “but I still think Baloo should have warned thee against them.”

“I–I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt. The Monkey People! Faugh!”

A fresh shower came down on their heads and the two trotted away, taking Mowgli with them. What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectly true. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up, there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross each other’s path. But whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger, or bear, the monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts at any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they would howl and shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle-People to climb up their trees and fight them, or would start furious battles over nothing among themselves, and leave the dead monkeys where the Jungle-People could see them. They were always just going to have a leader, and laws and customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories would not hold over from day to day, and so they compromised things by making up a saying, “What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later,” and that comforted them a great deal. None of the beasts could reach them, but on the other hand none of the beasts would notice them, and that was why they were so pleased when Mowgli came to play with them, and they heard how angry Baloo was.

They never meant to do any more–the Bandar-log never mean anything at all; but one of them invented what seemed to him a brilliant idea, and he told all the others that Mowgli would be a useful person to keep in the tribe, because he could weave sticks together for protection from the wind; so, if they caught him, they could make him teach them. Of course Mowgli, as a woodcutter’s child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and used to make little huts of fallen branches without thinking how he came to do it. The Monkey-People, watching in the trees, considered his play most wonderful. This time, they said, they were really going to have a leader and become the wisest people in the jungle –so wise that everyone else would notice and envy them. Therefore they followed Baloo and Bagheera and Mowgli through the jungle very quietly till it was time for the midday nap, and Mowgli, who was very much ashamed of himself, slept between the Panther and the Bear, resolving to have no more to do with the Monkey People.

The next thing he remembered was feeling hands on his legs and arms–hard, strong, little hands–and then a swash of branches in his face, and then he was staring down through the swaying boughs as Baloo woke the jungle with his deep cries and Bagheera bounded up the trunk with every tooth bared. The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to the upper branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: “He has noticed us! Bagheera has noticed us. All the Jungle-People admire us for our skill and our cunning.” Then they began their flight; and the flight of the Monkey-People through tree-land is one of the things nobody can describe. They have their regular roads and crossroads, up hills and down hills, all laid out from fifty to seventy or a hundred feet above ground, and by these they can travel even at night if necessary. Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under the arms and swung off with him through the treetops, twenty feet at a bound. Had they been alone they could have gone twice as fast, but the boy’s weight held them back. Sick and giddy as Mowgli was he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, and the terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing over nothing but empty air brought his heart between his teeth. His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the thinnest topmost branches crackle and bend under them, and then with a cough and a whoop would fling themselves into the air outward and downward, and bring up, hanging by their hands or their feet to the lower limbs of the next tree. Sometimes he could see for miles and miles across the still green jungle, as a man on the top of a mast can see for miles across the sea, and then the branches and leaves would lash him across the face, and he and his two guards would be almost down to earth again. So, bounding and crashing and whooping and yelling, the whole tribe of Bandar-log swept along the tree-roads with Mowgli their prisoner.

For a time he was afraid of being dropped. Then he grew angry but knew better than to struggle, and then he began to think. The first thing was to send back word to Baloo and Bagheera, for, at the pace the monkeys were going, he knew his friends would be left far behind. It was useless to look down, for he could only see the topsides of the branches, so he stared upward and saw, far away in the blue, Rann the Kite balancing and wheeling as he kept watch over the jungle waiting for things to die. Rann saw that the monkeys were carrying something, and dropped a few hundred yards to find out whether their load was good to eat. He whistled with surprise when he saw Mowgli being dragged up to a treetop and heard him give the Kite call for–"We be of one blood, thou and I.” The waves of the branches closed over the boy, but Chil balanced away to the next tree in time to see the little brown face come up again. “Mark my trail!” Mowgli shouted. “Tell Baloo of the Seeonee Pack and Bagheera of the Council Rock.”

“In whose name, Brother?” Rann had never seen Mowgli before, though of course he had heard of him.

“Mowgli, the Frog. Man-cub they call me! Mark my tra-il!”

The last words were shrieked as he was being swung through the air, but Rann nodded and rose up till he looked no bigger than a speck of dust, and there he hung, watching with his telescope eyes the swaying of the treetops as Mowgli’s escort whirled along.

“They never go far,” he said with a chuckle. “They never do what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eye-sight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is no fledgling and Bagheera can, as I know, kill more than goats.”

So he rocked on his wings, his feet gathered up under him, and waited.

Meantime, Baloo and Bagheera were furious with rage and grief. Bagheera climbed as he had never climbed before, but the thin branches broke beneath his weight, and he slipped down, his claws full of bark.

“Why didst thou not warn the man-cub?” he roared to poor Baloo, who had set off at a clumsy trot in the hope of overtaking the monkeys. “What was the use of half slaying him with blows if thou didst not warn him?”

“Haste! O haste! We–we may catch them yet!” Baloo panted.

“At that speed! It would not tire a wounded cow. Teacher of the Law–cub-beater–a mile of that rolling to and fro would burst thee open. Sit still and think! Make a plan. This is no time for chasing. They may drop him if we follow too close.”

“Arrula! Whoo! They may have dropped him already, being tired of carrying him. Who can trust the Bandar-log? Put dead bats on my head! Give me black bones to eat! Roll me into the hives of the wild bees that I may be stung to death, and bury me with the Hyaena, for I am most miserable of bears! Arulala! Wahooa! O Mowgli, Mowgli! Why did I not warn thee against the Monkey-Folk instead of breaking thy head? Now perhaps I may have knocked the day’s lesson out of his mind, and he will be alone in the jungle without the Master Words.”

Baloo clasped his paws over his ears and rolled to and fro moaning.

“At least he gave me all the Words correctly a little time ago,” said Bagheera impatiently. “Baloo, thou hast neither memory nor respect. What would the jungle think if I, the Black Panther, curled myself up like Ikki the Porcupine, and howled?”

“What do I care what the jungle thinks? He may be dead by now.”

“Unless and until they drop him from the branches in sport, or kill him out of idleness, I have no fear for the man-cub. He is wise and well taught, and above all he has the eyes that make the Jungle-People afraid. But (and it is a great evil) he is in the power of the Bandar-log, and they, because they live in trees, have no fear of any of our people.” Bagheera licked one forepaw thoughtfully.

“Fool that I am! Oh, fat, brown, root-digging fool that I am,” said Baloo, uncoiling himself with a jerk, “it is true what Hathi the Wild Elephant says: `To each his own fear’; and they, the Bandar-log, fear Kaa the Rock Snake. He can climb as well as they can. He steals the young monkeys in the night. The whisper of his name makes their wicked tails cold. Let us go to Kaa.”

“What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being footless–and with most evil eyes,” said Bagheera.

“He is very old and very cunning. Above all, he is always hungry,” said Baloo hopefully. “Promise him many goats.”

“He sleeps for a full month after he has once eaten. He may be asleep now, and even were he awake what if he would rather kill his own goats?” Bagheera, who did not know much about Kaa, was naturally suspicious.

“Then in that case, thou and I together, old hunter, might make him see reason.” Here Baloo rubbed his faded brown shoulder against the Panther, and they went off to look for Kaa the Rock Python.

They found him stretched out on a warm ledge in the afternoon sun, admiring his beautiful new coat, for he had been in retirement for the last ten days changing his skin, and now he was very splendid–darting his big blunt-nosed head along the ground, and twisting the thirty feet of his body into fantastic knots and curves, and licking his lips as he thought of his dinner to come.

“He has not eaten,” said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as soon as he saw the beautifully mottled brown and yellow jacket. “Be careful, Bagheera! He is always a little blind after he has changed his skin, and very quick to strike.”

Kaa was not a poison snake–in fact he rather despised the poison snakes as cowards–but his strength lay in his hug, and when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there was no more to be said. “Good hunting!” cried Baloo, sitting up on his haunches. Like all snakes of his breed Kaa was rather deaf, and did not hear the call at first. Then he curled up ready for any accident, his head lowered.

“Good hunting for us all,” he answered. “Oho, Baloo, what dost thou do here? Good hunting, Bagheera. One of us at least needs food. Is there any news of game afoot? A doe now, or even a young buck? I am as empty as a dried well.”

“We are hunting,” said Baloo carelessly. He knew that you must not hurry Kaa. He is too big.

“Give me permission to come with you,” said Kaa. “A blow more or less is nothing to thee, Bagheera or Baloo, but I–I have to wait and wait for days in a wood-path and climb half a night on the mere chance of a young ape. Psshaw! The branches are not what they were when I was young. Rotten twigs and dry boughs are they all.”

“Maybe thy great weight has something to do with the matter," said Baloo.

“I am a fair length–a fair length,” said Kaa with a little pride. “But for all that, it is the fault of this new-grown timber. I came very near to falling on my last hunt–very near indeed–and the noise of my slipping, for my tail was not tight wrapped around the tree, waked the Bandar-log, and they called me most evil names.”

“Footless, yellow earth-worm,” said Bagheera under his whiskers, as though he were trying to remember something.

“Sssss! Have they ever called me that?” said Kaa.

“Something of that kind it was that they shouted to us last moon, but we never noticed them. They will say anything–even that thou hast lost all thy teeth, and wilt not face anything bigger than a kid, because (they are indeed shameless, these Bandar-log)–because thou art afraid of the he-goat’s horns," Bagheera went on sweetly.

Now a snake, especially a wary old python like Kaa, very seldom shows that he is angry, but Baloo and Bagheera could see the big swallowing muscles on either side of Kaa’s throat ripple and bulge.

“The Bandar-log have shifted their grounds,” he said quietly. “When I came up into the sun today I heard them whooping among the tree-tops.”

“It–it is the Bandar-log that we follow now,” said Baloo, but the words stuck in his throat, for that was the first time in his memory that one of the Jungle-People had owned to being interested in the doings of the monkeys.

“Beyond doubt then it is no small thing that takes two such hunters–leaders in their own jungle I am certain–on the trail of the Bandar-log,” Kaa replied courteously, as he swelled with curiosity.

“Indeed,” Baloo began, “I am no more than the old and sometimes very foolish Teacher of the Law to the Seeonee wolf-cubs, and Bagheera here–”

“Is Bagheera,” said the Black Panther, and his jaws shut with a snap, for he did not believe in being humble. “The trouble is this, Kaa. Those nut-stealers and pickers of palm leaves have stolen away our man-cub of whom thou hast perhaps heard.”

“I heard some news from Ikki (his quills make him presumptuous) of a man-thing that was entered into a wolf pack, but I did not believe. Ikki is full of stories half heard and very badly told.”

“But it is true. He is such a man-cub as never was,” said Baloo. “The best and wisest and boldest of man-cubs–my own pupil, who shall make the name of Baloo famous through all the jungles; and besides, I–we–love him, Kaa.”

“Ts! Ts!” said Kaa, weaving his head to and fro. “I also have known what love is. There are tales I could tell that–”

“That need a clear night when we are all well fed to praise properly,” said Bagheera quickly. “Our man-cub is in the hands of the Bandar-log now, and we know that of all the Jungle-People they fear Kaa alone.”

“They fear me alone. They have good reason,” said Kaa. “Chattering, foolish, vain–vain, foolish, and chattering, are the monkeys. But a man-thing in their hands is in no good luck. They grow tired of the nuts they pick, and throw them down. They carry a branch half a day, meaning to do great things with it, and then they snap it in two. That man-thing is not to be envied. They called me also–`yellow fish’ was it not?”

“Worm–worm–earth-worm,” said Bagheera, “as well as other things which I cannot now say for shame.”

“We must remind them to speak well of their master. Aaa-ssp! We must help their wandering memories. Now, whither went they with the cub?”

“The jungle alone knows. Toward the sunset, I believe,” said Baloo. “We had thought that thou wouldst know, Kaa.”

“I? How? I take them when they come in my way, but I do not hunt the Bandar-log, or frogs–or green scum on a water-hole, for that matter.”

“Up, Up! Up, Up! Hillo! Illo! Illo, look up, Baloo of the Seeonee Wolf Pack!”

Baloo looked up to see where the voice came from, and there was Rann the Kite, sweeping down with the sun shining on the upturned flanges of his wings. It was near Rann’s bedtime, but he had ranged all over the jungle looking for the Bear and had missed him in the thick foliage.

“What is it?” said Baloo.

“I have seen Mowgli among the Bandar-log. He bade me tell you. I watched. The Bandar-log have taken him beyond the river to the monkey city–to the Cold Lairs. They may stay there for a night, or ten nights, or an hour. I have told the bats to watch through the dark time. That is my message. Good hunting, all you below!”

“Full gorge and a deep sleep to you, Rann,” cried Bagheera. “I will remember thee in my next kill, and put aside the head for thee alone, O best of kites!”

“It is nothing. It is nothing. The boy held the Master Word. I could have done no less,” and Rann circled up again to his roost.

“He has not forgotten to use his tongue,” said Baloo with a chuckle of pride. “To think of one so young remembering the Master Word for the birds too while he was being pulled across trees!”

“It was most firmly driven into him,” said Bagheera. “But I am proud of him, and now we must go to the Cold Lairs.”

They all knew where that place was, but few of the Jungle People ever went there, because what they called the Cold Lairs was an old deserted city, lost and buried in the jungle, and beasts seldom use a place that men have once used. The wild boar will, but the hunting tribes do not. Besides, the monkeys lived there as much as they could be said to live anywhere, and no self-respecting animal would come within eyeshot of it except in times of drought, when the half-ruined tanks and reservoirs held a little water.

“It is half a night’s journey–at full speed,” said Bagheera, and Baloo looked very serious. “I will go as fast as I can,” he said anxiously.

“We dare not wait for thee. Follow, Baloo. We must go on the quick-foot–Kaa and I.”

“Feet or no feet, I can keep abreast of all thy four,” said Kaa shortly. Baloo made one effort to hurry, but had to sit down panting, and so they left him to come on later, while Bagheera hurried forward, at the quick panther-canter. Kaa said nothing, but, strive as Bagheera might, the huge Rock-python held level with him. When they came to a hill stream, Bagheera gained, because he bounded across while Kaa swam, his head and two feet of his neck clearing the water, but on level ground Kaa made up the distance.

“By the Broken Lock that freed me,” said Bagheera, when twilight had fallen, “thou art no slow goer!”

“I am hungry,” said Kaa. “Besides, they called me speckled frog.”

“Worm–earth-worm, and yellow to boot.”

“All one. Let us go on,” and Kaa seemed to pour himself along the ground, finding the shortest road with his steady eyes, and keeping to it.

In the Cold Lairs the Monkey-People were not thinking of Mowgli’s friends at all. They had brought the boy to the Lost City, and were very much pleased with themselves for the time. Mowgli had never seen an Indian city before, and though this was almost a heap of ruins it seemed very wonderful and splendid. Some king had built it long ago on a little hill. You could still trace the stone causeways that led up to the ruined gates where the last splinters of wood hung to the worn, rusted hinges. Trees had grown into and out of the walls; the battlements were tumbled down and decayed, and wild creepers hung out of the windows of the towers on the walls in bushy hanging clumps.

A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king’s elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees. From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol in the square where four roads met; the pits and dimples at street corners where the public wells once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs sprouting on their sides. The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king’s council chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run in and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play up and down the terraces of the king’s garden, where they would shake the rose trees and the oranges in sport to see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never remembered what they had seen and what they had not; and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: “There is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the Bandar-log.” Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the city and went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle-People would notice them.

Mowgli, who had been trained under the Law of the Jungle, did not like or understand this kind of life. The monkeys dragged him into the Cold Lairs late in the afternoon, and instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would have done after a long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sang their foolish songs. One of the monkeys made a speech and told his companions that Mowgli’s capture marked a new thing in the history of the Bandar-log, for Mowgli was going to show them how to weave sticks and canes together as a protection against rain and cold. Mowgli picked up some creepers and began to work them in and out, and the monkeys tried to imitate; but in a very few minutes they lost interest and began to pull their friends’ tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing.

“I wish to eat,” said Mowgli. “I am a stranger in this part of the jungle. Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here.”

Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild pawpaws. But they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much trouble to go back with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and angry as well as hungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the Strangers’ Hunting Call from time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that he had reached a very bad place indeed. “All that Baloo has said about the Bandar-log is true,” he thought to himself. “They have no Law, no Hunting Call, and no leaders–nothing but foolish words and little picking thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be all my own fault. But I must try to return to my own jungle. Baloo will surely beat me, but that is better than chasing silly rose leaves with the Bandar-log.”

No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him back, telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching him to make him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that were half-full of rain water. There was a ruined summer-house of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens used to enter. But the walls were made of screens of marble tracery–beautiful milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the open work, casting shadows on the ground like black velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he was to wish to leave them. “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true," they shouted. “Now as you are a new listener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they may notice us in future, we will tell you all about our most excellent selves." Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundreds and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing the praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want of breath they would all shout together: “This is true; we all say so.” Mowgli nodded and blinked, and said “Yes” when they asked him a question, and his head spun with the noise. “Tabaqui the Jackal must have bitten all these people,” he said to himself, “and now they have madness. Certainly this is dewanee, the madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is a cloud coming to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud I might try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired.”

That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in the ruined ditch below the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa, knowing well how dangerous the Monkey-People were in large numbers, did not wish to run any risks. The monkeys never fight unless they are a hundred to one, and few in the jungle care for those odds.

“I will go to the west wall,” Kaa whispered, “and come down swiftly with the slope of the ground in my favor. They will not throw themselves upon my back in their hundreds, but–”

“I know it,” said Bagheera. “Would that Baloo were here, but we must do what we can. When that cloud covers the moon I shall go to the terrace. They hold some sort of council there over the boy.”

“Good hunting,” said Kaa grimly, and glided away to the west wall. That happened to be the least ruined of any, and the big snake was delayed awhile before he could find a way up the stones. The cloud hid the moon, and as Mowgli wondered what would come next he heard Bagheera’s light feet on the terrace. The Black Panther had raced up the slope almost without a sound and was striking–he knew better than to waste time in biting–right and left among the monkeys, who were seated round Mowgli in circles fifty and sixty deep. There was a howl of fright and rage, and then as Bagheera tripped on the rolling kicking bodies beneath him, a monkey shouted: “There is only one here! Kill him! Kill.” A scuffling mass of monkeys, biting, scratching, tearing, and pulling, closed over Bagheera, while five or six laid hold of Mowgli, dragged him up the wall of the summerhouse and pushed him through the hole of the broken dome. A man-trained boy would have been badly bruised, for the fall was a good fifteen feet, but Mowgli fell as Baloo had taught him to fall, and landed on his feet.

“Stay there,” shouted the monkeys, “till we have killed thy friends, and later we will play with thee–if the Poison-People leave thee alive.”

“We be of one blood, ye and I,” said Mowgli, quickly giving the Snake’s Call. He could hear rustling and hissing in the rubbish all round him and gave the Call a second time, to make sure.

“Even ssso! Down hoods all!” said half a dozen low voices (every ruin in India becomes sooner or later a dwelling place of snakes, and the old summerhouse was alive with cobras). “Stand still, Little Brother, for thy feet may do us harm.”

Mowgli stood as quietly as he could, peering through the open work and listening to the furious din of the fight round the Black Panther–the yells and chatterings and scufflings, and Bagheera’s deep, hoarse cough as he backed and bucked and twisted and plunged under the heaps of his enemies. For the first time since he was born, Bagheera was fighting for his life.

“Baloo must be at hand; Bagheera would not have come alone," Mowgli thought. And then he called aloud: “To the tank, Bagheera. Roll to the water tanks. Roll and plunge! Get to the water!”

Bagheera heard, and the cry that told him Mowgli was safe gave him new courage. He worked his way desperately, inch by inch, straight for the reservoirs, halting in silence. Then from the ruined wall nearest the jungle rose up the rumbling war-shout of Baloo. The old Bear had done his best, but he could not come before. “Bagheera,” he shouted, “I am here. I climb! I haste! Ahuwora! The stones slip under my feet! Wait my coming, O most infamous Bandar-log!” He panted up the terrace only to disappear to the head in a wave of monkeys, but he threw himself squarely on his haunches, and, spreading out his forepaws, hugged as many as he could hold, and then began to hit with a regular bat-bat-bat, like the flipping strokes of a paddle wheel. A crash and a splash told Mowgli that Bagheera had fought his way to the tank where the monkeys could not follow. The Panther lay gasping for breath, his head just out of the water, while the monkeys stood three deep on the red steps, dancing up and down with rage, ready to spring upon him from all sides if he came out to help Baloo. It was then that Bagheera lifted up his dripping chin, and in despair gave the Snake’s Call for protection–"We be of one blood, ye and I"– for he believed that Kaa had turned tail at the last minute. Even Baloo, half smothered under the monkeys on the edge of the terrace, could not help chuckling as he heard the Black Panther asking for help.

Kaa had only just worked his way over the west wall, landing with a wrench that dislodged a coping stone into the ditch. He had no intention of losing any advantage of the ground, and coiled and uncoiled himself once or twice, to be sure that every foot of his long body was in working order. All that while the fight with Baloo went on, and the monkeys yelled in the tank round Bagheera, and Mang the Bat, flying to and fro, carried the news of the great battle over the jungle, till even Hathi the Wild Elephant trumpeted, and, far away, scattered bands of the Monkey-Folk woke and came leaping along the tree-roads to help their comrades in the Cold Lairs, and the noise of the fight roused all the day birds for miles round. Then Kaa came straight, quickly, and anxious to kill. The fighting strength of a python is in the driving blow of his head backed by all the strength and weight of his body. If you can imagine a lance, or a battering ram, or a hammer weighing nearly half a ton driven by a cool, quiet mind living in the handle of it, you can roughly imagine what Kaa was like when he fought. A python four or five feet long can knock a man down if he hits him fairly in the chest, and Kaa was thirty feet long, as you know. His first stroke was delivered into the heart of the crowd round Baloo. It was sent home with shut mouth in silence, and there was no need of a second. The monkeys scattered with cries of–"Kaa! It is Kaa! Run! Run!”

Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behavior by the stories their elders told them of Kaa, the night thief, who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows, and steal away the strongest monkey that ever lived; of old Kaa, who could make himself look so like a dead branch or a rotten stump that the wisest were deceived, till the branch caught them. Kaa was everything that the monkeys feared in the jungle, for none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him in the face, and none had ever come alive out of his hug. And so they ran, stammering with terror, to the walls and the roofs of the houses, and Baloo drew a deep breath of relief. His fur was much thicker than Bagheera’s, but he had suffered sorely in the fight. Then Kaa opened his mouth for the first time and spoke one long hissing word, and the far-away monkeys, hurrying to the defense of the Cold Lairs, stayed where they were, cowering, till the loaded branches bent and crackled under them. The monkeys on the walls and the empty houses stopped their cries, and in the stillness that fell upon the city Mowgli heard Bagheera shaking his wet sides as he came up from the tank. Then the clamor broke out again. The monkeys leaped higher up the walls. They clung around the necks of the big stone idols and shrieked as they skipped along the battlements, while Mowgli, dancing in the summerhouse, put his eye to the screenwork and hooted owl-fashion between his front teeth, to show his derision and contempt.

“Get the man-cub out of that trap; I can do no more,” Bagheera gasped. “Let us take the man-cub and go. They may attack again.”

“They will not move till I order them. Stay you sssso!” Kaa hissed, and the city was silent once more. “I could not come before, Brother, but I think I heard thee call"–this was to Bagheera.

“I–I may have cried out in the battle,” Bagheera answered. “Baloo, art thou hurt?

“I am not sure that they did not pull me into a hundred little bearlings,” said Baloo, gravely shaking one leg after the other. “Wow! I am sore. Kaa, we owe thee, I think, our lives–Bagheera and I.”

“No matter. Where is the manling?”

“Here, in a trap. I cannot climb out,” cried Mowgli. The curve of the broken dome was above his head.

“Take him away. He dances like Mao the Peacock. He will crush our young,” said the cobras inside.

“Hah!” said Kaa with a chuckle, “he has friends everywhere, this manling. Stand back, manling. And hide you, O Poison People. I break down the wall.”

Kaa looked carefully till he found a discolored crack in the marble tracery showing a weak spot, made two or three light taps with his head to get the distance, and then lifting up six feet of his body clear of the ground, sent home half a dozen full-power smashing blows, nose-first. The screen-work broke and fell away in a cloud of dust and rubbish, and Mowgli leaped through the opening and flung himself between Baloo and Bagheera–an arm around each big neck.

“Art thou hurt?” said Baloo, hugging him softly.

“I am sore, hungry, and not a little bruised. But, oh, they have handled ye grievously, my Brothers! Ye bleed.”

“Others also,” said Bagheera, licking his lips and looking at the monkey-dead on the terrace and round the tank.

“It is nothing, it is nothing, if thou art safe, oh, my pride of all little frogs!” whimpered Baloo.

“Of that we shall judge later,” said Bagheera, in a dry voice that Mowgli did not at all like. “But here is Kaa to whom we owe the battle and thou owest thy life. Thank him according to our customs, Mowgli.”

Mowgli turned and saw the great Python’s head swaying a foot above his own.

“So this is the manling,” said Kaa. “Very soft is his skin, and he is not unlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, manling, that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight when I have newly changed my coat.”

“We be one blood, thou and I,” Mowgli answered. “I take my life from thee tonight. My kill shall be thy kill if ever thou art hungry, O Kaa.”

“All thanks, Little Brother,” said Kaa, though his eyes twinkled. “And what may so bold a hunter kill? I ask that I may follow when next he goes abroad.”

“I kill nothing,–I am too little,–but I drive goats toward such as can use them. When thou art empty come to me and see if I speak the truth. I have some skill in these [he held out his hands], and if ever thou art in a trap, I may pay the debt which I owe to thee, to Bagheera, and to Baloo, here. Good hunting to ye all, my masters.”

“Well said,” growled Baloo, for Mowgli had returned thanks very prettily. The Python dropped his head lightly for a minute on Mowgli’s shoulder. “A brave heart and a courteous tongue," said he. “They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling. But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Go and sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see.”

The moon was sinking behind the hills and the lines of trembling monkeys huddled together on the walls and battlements looked like ragged shaky fringes of things. Baloo went down to the tank for a drink and Bagheera began to put his fur in order, as Kaa glided out into the center of the terrace and brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew all the monkeys’ eyes upon him.

“The moon sets,” he said. “Is there yet light enough to see?”

From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops– “We see, O Kaa.”

“Good. Begins now the dance–the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sit still and watch.”

He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his low humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.

Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throats, their neck hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and wondered.

“Bandar-log,” said the voice of Kaa at last, “can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!”

“Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!”

“Good! Come all one pace nearer to me.”

The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.

“Nearer!” hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.

Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.

“Keep thy hand on my shoulder,” Bagheera whispered. “Keep it there, or I must go back–must go back to Kaa. Aah!”

“It is only old Kaa making circles on the dust,” said Mowgli. “Let us go.” And the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the jungle.

“Whoof!” said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. “Never more will I make an ally of Kaa,” and he shook himself all over.

“He knows more than we,” said Bagheera, trembling. “In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat.”

“Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again," said Baloo. “He will have good hunting–after his own fashion.”

“But what was the meaning of it all?” said Mowgli, who did not know anything of a python’s powers of fascination. “I saw no more than a big snake making foolish circles till the dark came. And his nose was all sore. Ho! Ho!”

“Mowgli,” said Bagheera angrily, “his nose was sore on thy account, as my ears and sides and paws, and Baloo’s neck and shoulders are bitten on thy account. Neither Baloo nor Bagheera will be able to hunt with pleasure for many days.”

“It is nothing,” said Baloo; “we have the man-cub again.”

“True, but he has cost us heavily in time which might have been spent in good hunting, in wounds, in hair–I am half plucked along my back–and last of all, in honor. For, remember, Mowgli, I, who am the Black Panther, was forced to call upon Kaa for protection, and Baloo and I were both made stupid as little birds by the Hunger Dance. All this, man-cub, came of thy playing with the Bandar-log.”

“True, it is true,” said Mowgli sorrowfully. “I am an evil man-cub, and my stomach is sad in me.”

“Mf! What says the Law of the Jungle, Baloo?”

Baloo did not wish to bring Mowgli into any more trouble, but he could not tamper with the Law, so he mumbled: “Sorrow never stays punishment. But remember, Bagheera, he is very little.”

“I will remember. But he has done mischief, and blows must be dealt now. Mowgli, hast thou anything to say?”

“Nothing. I did wrong. Baloo and thou are wounded. It is just.”

Bagheera gave him half a dozen love-taps from a panther’s point of view (they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs), but for a seven-year-old boy they amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid. When it was all over Mowgli sneezed, and picked himself up without a word.

“Now,” said Bagheera, “jump on my back, Little Brother, and we will go home.”

One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.

Mowgli laid his head down on Bagheera’s back and slept so deeply that he never waked when he was put down in the home-cave.

#JungleBook

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kjtamuser · 8 years ago

Text

The sword comes into play.

Goblin: The Lonely and Great God Episode 13 Recap

Kim Shin (Gong Yoo) goes up the steps of the temple. Just like he did in the past. Wang Yeo (Lee Dong Wook) realizes that Kim Shin can hear his thoughts. Surprise, surprise, Wang Yeo can hear Kim Shin’s thoughts. Kim Shin comes up the steps and THINKS then says he can hear his voice. Wang Yeo watches Kim Shin comes. Flashback to the past. Present day Kim Shin grabs Wang Yeo’s throat and says “Your commanding General Kim Shin is here to see you, your majesty.” They stare into each other’s eyes. Wang Yeo asks “in the end, am I the King?” Kim Shin is filled with anger. He tells Wang Yeo that his royal decree killed his soldiers, his sister, his household, and him. Kim Shin scoffs that the countries enemies couldn’t kill him but a spoiled jealous King could. Wang Yeo has tears in his eyes as he asks plaintively “Am I the King?” Even though he wants to hurt Wang Yeo, Kim Shin can’t because Wang Yeo doesn’t remember his actions that destroyed Kim Shin’s world. Kim Shin cannot kill a clueless enemy. He sneers that it must be nice NOT to remember but he doesn’t have that luxury. Kim Shin remembers the King telling him the heavens weren’t on his side. Kim Shin scoffs that once again, heaven sides with Wang Yeo. Kim Shin looks at Wang Yeo and turns and walks down the steps and away. Wang Yeo cries, knowing he’s guilty, but not remembering his own crimes.

Excellent opening scene. Kim Shin couldn’t kill the clueless Wang Yeo. Poor Wang Yeo, he’s lost a friend and knows his past hurt the friend he just lost.

Ji Eun Tak (Kim Go Eun) looks in Kim Shin’s bedroom and Wang Yeo’s bedroom for them. But they are not in the house. The contrast between decorating styles was striking. Kim Shin’s dark and masculine lair and Wang Yeo’s simple modern bright bedroom.

Wang Yeo stands in the Buddhist temple and wonders what cowardly things he did. He cries, the pain of not knowing, hurts his heart.

To Eun Tak’s relief, Kim Shin comes home. She asks if he met with the Evil Minister. Kim Shin says he met with the Evil Minister and Wang Yeo. He tells Eun Tak to pack her stuff because they a going to Grandfather’s home. Eun Tak is agreeable. Kim Shin asks why Eun Tak isn’t questioning his decision. He asks if she knew that the Grim Reaper was Wang Yeo. Eun Tak said a deceased soul told her but she didn’t want to share the rumor without confirmation. She makes the point that if Kim Shin and Wang Yeo were fated to cross paths again, nothing would stop it. She apologizes. Kim Shin sees her reasons do not amount to betrayal and tells her to pack.

Good explanation on Eun Tak’s part. It was truthful and insightful.

Duk Hwa wants to know why Kim Shin and Eun Tak moved out. Kim Shin ignores that and tells him they’ll live in the guest bedrooms on the second floor. Eun Tak decides it would be best for her to stay with Sunny, who is struggling with her new reality. Kim Shin agrees and tells her Duk Hwa will drive her. He goes upstairs. Duk Hwa asks Eun Tak why they moved out. He says if Kim Shin and Wang Yeo fought, Kim Shin should have demanded Wang Yeo leave. Eun Tak points out that Wang Yeo had no alternative place to stay.

Kim Sun / Sunny (Yoo In Na) arrives at the house but no one answers the doorbell. She recalls Kim Shin snapping that she was protecting that idiot in the present like she did in the past. She stares at the door.

The image morphs into Wang Yeo staring at the door. Nice! He enters the house and finds that he’s alone.

Sunny asks Eun Tak where Kim Shin is. Eun Tak says that Kim Shin moved out of the house at the same time she did. Sunny says Wang Yeo is driving her crazy. Eun Tak asks how Sunny got her memory of her past back. Sunny remembers Wang Yeo kissing her. She murmurs it was in a weird way. She and Eun Tak drink together. Sunny wonders if humans have 4 lives, is she on her 4th one? Eun Tak hopes she’s on her 1st life, so she’ll meet Kim Shin 3 more times. Sunny rolls her eyes at the besotted Eun Tak. Sunny wonders why Kim Shin returned to the palace when he knew he would die. She mutters he should have saved himself and never returned.

We are all wondering why Kim Shin returned to a certain death. I look forward to that question being answered.

Wang Yeo’s co-worker, another grim reaper complains the his landlord, the lady in red, about the water bill spiking because Sunny, the water hog, moved into the building. He says it’s not fair to split the bill evenly when one person is driving it sky high. The lady in red muses that fate is cruel not thinking about the water issues at all.

Kim Shin drinks remembering the past Wang Yeo wanting him to die and the present Wang Yeo wanting him to live. Couple that with your newly found sister crushing on Wang Yeo, and Kim Shin takes another healthy swallow.

Wang Yeo’s co-worker tells Wang Yeo that he heard another grim reaper took the hand of a living person to learn their past. He wonders if it was the Special Case (aka Eun Tak). But Wang Yeo isn’t listening and must be roused to interact.

The female grim reaper who did take Sunny’s hands and saw herself next to the Evil Minister who suggested she find out her past sins, hurries along a corrider. The Evil Minister appears and asks if she knows her past sins. The female grim reaper claims not to remember herself only a Queen. The Evil Minister asks if she saw him. She confirms this. He tells her she administered his sin and her sin. We see the young King hit the medicine out of her hands. Horrified the female grim reaper denies that she did that. The Evil Minister assures her that she did indeed administer the medicine. He suggest she keep quiet about knowing his role in supplying the medicine and he’ll keep quiet about her role in administering the medicine AND that she used Sunny to find out her past. He chortles knowing he has her under his thumb.

I’m assuming the medicine is poison. Did the Evil Minister suggest the female grim reaper hold Sunny’s hand to have power over her? Why does he need her?

The Evil Minister stares at Sunny (who doesn’t see him) and says she will die by his hand once again. Wang Yeo appears and puts his hand around the Evil Minister neck. Strong move! Wang Yeo says they met 20 years ago and he was evil then. We see that the Evil Minister talked the driver into hitting Eun Tak’s mother with his car. Recall that Kim Shin saved Eun Tak’s pregnant mother which saved Eun Tak’s life. Ah ha! He had a hand in trying to stop Eun Tak from being born to save Kim Shin! Eun Tak is the key for Kim Shin! We see the Evil Minister talked the bicycle rider into creating the accident with the bus that would have killed Eun Take IF Kin Shin had not intervened. We see the Evil Minister talked the ex-husband into trying to toss Eun Tak off the roof which would have killed Eun Take IF Kin Shin had not intervened. Wang Yeo demands to know Evil Minister’s name. Evil Minister notes Wang Yeo doesn’t even know his name. He taunts Wang Yeo that he won’t be able to hurt him. He’s survived 900 years. He points to Sunny says she’ll die this lifetime too. He disappears. Wang Yeo wonders if the Evil Minister knows him.

Awesome! Evil Minister could be the rallying point for Wang Yeo and Kim Shin. I loved seeing Wang Yeo firm almost threatening to the Evil Minister. When the Evil Minister buys it, I will cheer!

Kim Shin recalls happy bromance moments with Wang Yeo. When Wang Yeo calls Duk Hwa’s phone, Kim Shin picks up. He doesn’t answer when Wang Yeo speaks. Both them them know each other is on the line. The mirror camera angle was nice. This show was quality production values.

Wang Yeo meets with Eun Tak. She draws what the sword stuck in Kim Shin looks like. Wang Yeo asks Eun Tak to return the jade ring to Sunny. He knows Sunny can’t remember him but he doesn’t want to hold onto the ring to give him an excuse to see her. He leaves. Eun Tak muses that Sunny seems to remember Wang Yeo quite well.

Eun Tak talks to Sunny who wonders if she’s sad about her past life as a Queen with a traitor brother who dies by the King’s hand or her current life where she’s alone again. She muses that even though Wang Yeo wiped her memories so that she’d only remember the happy times, she remembers it all. Therefore all the memories gives her happiness on some level. Eun Tak tucks the jade ring in her pocket.

Sunny visits Kim Shin and agrues that hating Wang Yeo in this lifetime is fruitless because the mistakes where made in the past. Kim Shin points out the mistakes are not in his past, they are in his present. He vows that when he deals with Wang Yeo, he will get satisfaction. Sunny doesn’t want him to but she supports her brother. She promises to be happy in this lifetime. Sunny seemed mature in that scene. A welcome change.

Wang Yeo is summoned by the reaper internal investigation team. They tell him they know he’s used his powers for personal business. They details his infractions erasing memories, disclosing death cards, etc. Wang Yeo thinks about all the times he’s done exactly what they’ve described. They ask if he pleads guilty. Wang Yeo does. They ask if he’ll accept their punishment. Wang Yeo will. They state that the past evil that he’s worked so hard to atone for will now be experienced again. Wang Yeo grabs his head in pain.

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Flashback…Wang Yeo is served herbal tonics by the Evil Minister and his female sidekick (the female grim reaper). Wang Yeo rejects food. The Evil Minister intones (in a voice that is grating on my nerves) that the King needs a herbal tonic. Wang Yeo (now portrayed by Lee Dong Wook) stares into the camera. He drinks the herbal tonic. The Evil Minister smiles. Wang Yeo drink the poison/herbal tonic as he draws the Queen. A maidservant brings the Queen’s jade ring and bloody gown she wore the day she died. He holds the ring, he hugs the gown and sobs. Wang Yeo walks through the village and asks who will receive the robe and ring? OMG!!! The granny (aka lady in red) tells him to give her the jade ring. She says she’ll made use of it. He gives the ring to her. He walks away with tears in his eyes. He tosses the robe on the fire. It burns. He walks away. The female sidekick offers more herbal tonic. He’s done with the painting of the Queen. Wang Yeo declares that no one ever loved him. He asks for more herbal tonic. He startles the female sidekick when he says that he knows whats in the tonic. With tears in his eyes he tells her to bring more so he can end it all.

Present day…Wang Yeo is told that he knows his past sins including his own suicide. He now has 600 years to atone for those sins. He is on probation and not on active duty. They leave. Wang Yeo weeps “I was really Wang Yeo. I really killed them.” He holds his heart and sobs “I killed myself!”

Powerful! Dong Wook nailed it.

Kim Shin sits in the Buddhist temple and wonders what to do about Wang Yeo.

Kim Shin finds Wang Yeo holding the picture of the Queen. He snatches it and declares Wang Yeo has no right to look at his picture. Wang Yeo says “I gave the sword to you. I killed everyone. I remember. I was Wang Yeo.” Kim Shin shoves him against a wall. He looks into his eyes and sternly says “you killed and killed and even killed yourself. You couldn’t protect anyone. You should have to pay for killing me with your life. My sister knew your Evil Minister realized that she was your weakness. So she allowed herself to be killed to save you!” Wang Yeo weeps that he forced the ring onto her in the past. He asks Kim Shin to kill him. Kim Shin almost mocks him for being willing to die. He says Wang Yeo can pay for taking his own life. He strides away.

Eun Tak apologizes for taking her time as she gives her the jade ring. Sunny is fine and picks up the ring musing that the regrets, sins, and emotions it held were always hers. Sunny asks why Eun Tak is fated to be involved with her brother. Eun Tak remembers Wang Yeo telling her that her fate it to kill Kim Shin when she removes the sword. Eun Tak claims she can control weather to make the world a better place. She asks why her brother became a goblin. Eun Tak claims the world needs miracles. Sunny asks about the grim reaper. The Evil Minister appears and tells Sunny that her time has come. Sunny can’t see the Evil Minister but Eun Tak can and she steps in front of Sunny. The Evil Minister tells Eun Tak her turn will come after Sunny. Eun Tak tells Sunny to bring the lighter. The Evil Minister yells that Wang Yeo was like his son but Kim Sun ruined that relationship and now she must pay. Eun Tak throws herself on Sunny. Her birthmark on the back of her neck glows and emits blue light that knocks the Evil Minister off his feet. Eun Tak slumps to the ground.

Sunny brings home and asks Eun Tak about the blue light. Eun Tak says she’ll tell her more once she talks to Kim Shin.

She lights a match and blows it out. Kim Shin’s there. She runs to him and hugs him. He hugs her too. She says she missed him. Kim Shin says he misses her too. He promises to come for her soon. Kim Shin notices her birthmark is almost invisible. Kim Shin is concerned that when she’s in danger he may not be able to sense it or her in the future. Eun Tak promises to be careful. Kim Shin asks if she ran into the Evil Minister. Eun Tak says she did but she wasn’t the target, Sunny was. Kim Shin tells her someone else will protect Sunny. He says he’ll come for her in 2 days.

Flashback to God telling Kim Shin and Wang Yeo “Fate is a question that I ask someone. The answer you must find yourself.”

Kim Shin tells Eun Tak that he and Wang Yeo must find the answer to a question someone posed them.

I wanted them to work together. I didn’t think that God’s question would be the catalyst. But I’m good with whatever gets the bromance restarted.

Wang Yeo writes that the Evil Minister died in 1097 but fled the grim reaper. Wang Yeo writes he ran into him in 1997.

Wang Yeo gives his coworker the information on the Evil Minister. He asks his coworker to handle this special case. Wang Yeo tells him that the Evil Minister has fed on evil for 900 years and cannot be easily captured. He suggest putting him on the dead list to ramp up their control. His coworker promises to take care of it ASAP. His coworkers gives him a death card for Eun Tak. He reads that she’ll die 3/14/2017 at 10:35pm from a heart attack. Wang Yeo says she’ll die in one week.

Eun Tak sees her birthmark is lighter. She wonders if the Evil Minister will kill her.

Wang Yeo tells Kim Shin about the death card for Eun Tak. Kim Shin says the day and time no longer matter. Kim Shin tells Wang Yeo that the Evil Minister has targeted Sunny. He tells Wang Yeo this time he has to protect his sister to pay back for her protecting him in the past.

Wang Yeo asks THE question we’ve all wondered about. Why did Kim Shun continue forward to the King when he knew he would die? Kim Shin states he had to tell the King something that he didn’t know. First Wang Yeo needed to know that the former King (his half-brother) showed Wang Yeo love by ignoring him. By doing that Wang Yeo was able to grow up safe from enemies and not be perceived as a threat for the throne. Kim Shin says his sister protected him and he protected his Kingdom. This is it…What Kim Shin wanted to tell the King was to take the sword and strike the Evil Minister dead. Kim Shin says he never knew the sword would be plunged into his own chest.

Kim Shin turns and has a realization. He is destined to take the sword and use it. Lightning flashes. Kim Shin turns and tells Wang Yeo the sword’s purpose is to kill the Evil Minister.

Okay, that tells us that we’ll have a big showdown with Eun Tak pulling the sword out and Kim Shin plunging it into the Evil Minister. I’m good with that.

Wang Yeo follows Sunny and watches over her. At the bridge she talks to him. She sees him. Wang Yeo is shocked that she remembers him. She tells him that he made the mistake of telling her to forget the sad and him too. She says that remembering happy and forgetting him don’t jive. He is part of her happiness. Therefore she remembers him. She asks if her dying saved him. Wang Yeo says that he missed her every day. He confesses he was foolish. Tears fall from his eyes. With the jade ring on her hand, Sunny gently touches his face says it took him a while. She confesses that she fell for him in the present too. She gives him the jade ring. She says they have to break up. She doesn’t want to suffer anymore. His punishment is to take the ring. The tucks the ring in his pocket. She says “goodbye your majesty”. She walks away tears streaming.

Goblin helps a little kid scare away bullies. Kim Shin smiles adorably as Eun Tak gives him the thumbs up. She tells him he was cool. He asks her to take a trip with him. That makes her happy. He’s happy too.

They grill out. She captures the moment with pictures. She hugs him. They chuckle. They read back to back. She moves so his head is in her hap. She strokes his hair. They smile the love they feel for each other. Goodness, they feel authentically in love! Kim Shin gives her a copy of their contract. She wonders if she has the original or copy. She goes to grab it. They tussle and giggle. She busses his cheek with a kiss. They do feel authentically in love!

Alone he reads the contract about a wish every year at the first snowfall. He cries. I cry too. He remembers their moments together and his wish to be wish her. He cries more. I cry too.

Duk Hwa is caught sleeping on the job. He apologizes. Kim Shin watches him and misses him.

Kim Shin watches Sunny satisfied that she’s happy in this lifetime.

Will he ask Eun Tak to remove the sword to he can kill the Evil Minister? He’s saying goodbye in his own way.

Kim Shin meets Eun Tak. Her smile lights up the sky. He has a favor related to the Evil Minister. Kim Shin tells her she’ll need to be brave. Eun Tak chirps that she’s the Goblin’s Bride.

Kim Shin takes Eun Tak to a roof top. He tells her she’ll need to summon him. She shows him the lighter works. Kim Shin strides awwy and come back and kisses her with passion. Folks that’s passion! Loving it! She stares at him a bit dazed. Kim Shin promises to return. He disappears.

Yep, here we go…

Kim Shin faces the Evil Minister with his sword. The Evil Minister reminds him that a sword forged from water won’t do anything to him. Kim Shin says it is time for their final battle. The Evil Minister smiles and taunts “you know where I’ll go” and disappears.

On the rooftop, Eun Tak remembers pressing the buckwheat flower in a book and Kim Shin telling her they mean lovers. When she opens the book, the flowers fly into the air. The Evil Minister appears in front of her. He smiles and says “just as I thought, you can’t see me anymore”.

Wang Yeo stares at the jade ring. He looks at Eun Tak’s death card. The death time has been updated so it is a short time from now.

The Evil Minister approaches Eun Tak. She says outloud that he waited until her birthmark was faint. She says the Evil Minister wants to use her to remove the sword from Kim Shin. The Evil Minister stands in front of Eun Tak. Kim Shin calls and tells her to summon him now. But the Evil Minister chokes her before she can flick the lighter on and off to summon Kim Shin. Eun Tak hangs over the edge of the roof with the Evil Minister’s hand at her throat. He tells her this is her fate. She manages to flick the lighter on and off to summon Kim Shin.

Kim Shin arrives and pulls Eun Tak from the edge. The Evil Minister grins. Kim Shin makes sure Eun Tak is okay. Kim Shin turns to face the Evil Minister. Eun Tak takes his sword and point it at her. Kim Shin looks at her in shock. Eun Tak tells him that she’s why the Evil Minister is here and she must die. She tells Kim Shin to strike her down with the sword. She says the Evil Minister is trying to possess her to remove the sword from Kim Shin so he will die. Eun Tak says “one of us had to die, let it be me! Strike me down!”

The Evil Minister possesses Eun Tak. He intones “This girl was right. Now either you or I will die. You will die by my hand.” Eun Tak’s eyes open and the words flow from her mouth. Kim Shin stands there. Eun Tak possessed by the Evil Minister grasps the sword.

Wang Yeo calls to the Evil Minister. He’s expelled from Eun Tak’s body and brought to Wang Yeo.

Eun Tak faints. Kim Shin keeps her hands on the sword. He pulls the sword from his body. He raise the sword int he sky. He runs the sword through the Evil Minister. The sword goes from bright orange to solid metal. The Evil Minster smiles and says “so this is how I die. But I won’t die in van, because you will die too again. Your time has come.” The Evil Minister disappears.

Kim Shin slumps to the ground still holding the sword. He looks at Wang Yeo who has tears down his face. Kim Shin tells Wang Yeo that he’ll send word that he’s died a hero’s death. The sword falls from Kim Shin and disappears.

Eun Tak wakes and rushes to him. She hugs Kim Shin crying her grief. Kim Shin hugs her as the life ebbs from him. He puts his hand on her face and says “my life has been a reward because I met you.” Eun Tak reminds him that he promised not to let go of her hand. Kim Shin says he’ll ask God for permission to come back at the first snowfall. Eun Take sobs no. She says she can’t live without him. She declares her love. He says he loves her too. He says he’ll love her to the end which is now. He smiles. She sobs. Tears fill his eyes but he still smiles. He closes his eyes. He disappears. Eun Tak sobs.

The 10th song of the OST is “Wish” by Urban Zakapa plays. Remember the lyrics? Endless love between the lovers who have separated. It’s happened. But is it permanent?

My thoughts

Effective but almost anti-climatic. Bear with me. The production was great. The emotion was there. But we’ve got three more episodes to go. It isn’t over. You know it. I know it. So I didn’t give myself fully over to the tragic moment because it isn’t permanent. Glad to see the Evil Minister go. His voice grated on my nerves.

Kim Shin (Gong Yoo) died. He almost blew it with the time space between the Evil Minister disappearing and attacking Eun Tak. I was tense then. I realized what Kim Shin would do. It was clearly telegraphed. He KNEW the sword had to be used to kill the Evil Minister. He KNEW the Evil Minister was gunning for his sister and Eun Tak. What’s a hero to do? Sacrifice himself to save those he loves. I was a bit surprised that the withdrawal of the sword was that quick and pain free. But Kim Shin was jacked on need to save the woman he loved and defeat the Evil Minister. Was anyone else surprised that the killing of the Evil Minister wasn’t a bit grander and clearer?

Was the statement that Kim Shin and Wang Yeo needed to sort out the answer to God’s question a red herring?

The moments that Kim Shin and Eun Tak shared as a couple were wonderful. These two seem genuine in their joy to be together and their love for each other. I was thrilled to see the passionate goodbye kiss from Kim Shin to Eun Tak. While I enjoy their sweetness, passion is always welcome.

Ji Eun Tak (Kim Go Eun) was willing to sacrifice herself to save Kim Shin but he took matters into his own hands. Eun Tak’s hands only needed to be on the sword for Kim Shin to remove it. That seemed like a bit of a cheat, but it was clever too. Eun Tak’s birthmark lightened up and her ability to see spirits waned so that she was unable to see the Evil Minister when he stalked and attacked her. Eun Tak was distraught when she woke up after the Evil Minister exited her to find Kim Shin felled by removing the sword. He had to die. No two ways around that. But if humans get 4 lifetimes, Kim Shin has only burned through one of them.

I feel confident that this will turn out okay. I don’t know how. I want Eun Tak to have an empowered moment where she makes a big move to reunite herself and Kim Shin. It was his turn for the grand gesture this episode. I want Eun Tak to have her moment too.

Wang Yeo (Lee Dong Wook) was penalized with the memories of his past. While it was painful and a bummer to have his repentance clock reset to 600 years, it was also a gift to Wang Yeo. The questions were gone. He knew what he’d done. He could fully feel the pain and shame for what he did. He elected to drink the poison and die rather than live without Kim Sun and the guilt that racked him.

Kim Sun / Sunny (Yoo In Na) closed the door on Wang Yeo. She said goodbye on the bridge which was the perfect place to end their relationship. A full circle moment. I liked that she wore the jade ring when she said goodbye to him.

The 11th song of the OST is titled “And I’m here” by Kim Kyung Hee. It’s perfect and we’ve all wanted this song to be released. It’s here. Recall this song from episode 5 when the mother visited her daughter’s dorm room and her daughter (now a ghost) watched her mother mourn. It’s powerful, strong, and beautiful.

Goblin Episode 13 Recap The sword comes into play. Goblin: The Lonely and Great God Episode 13 Recap Kim Shin (Gong Yoo) goes up the steps of the temple.

#ep 13 #episode 13 #Goblin #Goblin: The Lonely and Great God #쓸쓸하고 찬란하神-도깨 #Sseulsseulhago Chalranhashin-Dokkaebi

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