#i thought about crafting one or getting a model boat

[mossymandibles]

Happy to announce that Kraw will be getting a bonafide boat design soon. I’m finally happy with the outside side view at least…

Just gotta work on the interior now :’)

[lillywillow]

Blessed by a Goddess

Summary: You had never felt secure about your body but when you meet a renowned artist, you suddenly start to feel more beautiful than ever

 Word Count: 1633

 Pairings: Artist!Loki x Chubby!Female Reader

 Warnings: Body insecurities, mild nudity

 Being a plus-sized woman in the modern world could be cruel. Everyone seemed to have certain ideas on how you should look or dress or make ‘helpful’ comments. That’s why you took solace in the art world. Looking at all those fuller figured women from days gone by… it sometimes made you feel like you were born into the wrong era. You would see people admire the works of Ruben but when they turn to look at you, it was completely different. Oh, how you wished you could be one of those paintings.

…

 Recently, you had heard about an art exhibit that was being put on at a nearby gallery. You had heard many wonderful things about the artist so you decided to go. As you walked around the gallery, you were in awe of the many wonderful things on display. Most of the works were Nordic inspired. There were intricately braided chains to make exquisite necklaces. Clay models of long boats with finely crafted designs on the sails. Tapestries depicting various Viking tales. The thing that struck you most about them the most is that every woman in the works, whether they be painted or clay, were all plump. You were admiring one of the pieces when you heard a voice behind you speak.

 “Breathtaking…”

 You turned to see the artist himself smiling at you. Loki was every bit as handsome as he was in his pictures. He circled you, looking at you with the same level of reverence you were looking at the artwork with.

 “Yes, I do believe I have found my next masterpiece,” he softly smiled with a thoughtful tone.

 “E-excuse me?” you stammered.

 “Forgive my musings, my dear. It isn’t very often I see such beauty in real life…”

 “You must say that to all the girls,” you muttered, feeling your face heat up.

 “No, not all of them. I seldom find true beauty such as yours… I would love to use your likeness in one of my next pieces, if I may. There is no pressure if you decline,” he explained, handing you a business card.

 You took it and barely had a chance to introduce yourself when Loki was called away by an art blogger who wanted to speak to him about his current exhibition. He kissed your hand and bowed to you before walking away. As you looked at the card in your hands, you wondered if you should go through with being a model for him. It was obvious from both his works and the way he looked at you he had a certain healthy respect for plus sized women… and the people here saw the beauty of his pieces… but could your really do it? Could you put your likeness out there for the world to see and to be admired like they were? You decided, you would have to get to know Loki a little more before you committed to anything.

…

 A few days after the exhibition, you decided to stop by Loki’s studio. You felt butterflies in the pit of your stomach as you waited for the door to open. Once again you felt nervous as a handsome, golden-haired man answered.

 “He-hello, I’m Y/N. I met Loki a few days ago at his show,” you explained, wringing your hands.

 The man smiled warmly and welcomed you in.

 “You must be the goddess my brother met!” he exclaimed.

 “G-goddess? I’m sure he must say that to a lot of women…”

 “Not at all! My brother respects all women of course but when it comes to putting them in his art… he can be very selective… Forgive me, I have yet to introduce myself. I’m Loki’s older brother, Thor.”

 Thor led you inside to where Loki was sitting at his desk working on his sketches. When Thor announced your arrival, he looked up and smiled at you.

 “Welcome,” he beamed. “I’m so glad you decided to come. Please, take a seat.”

 Loki offered you a comfortable looking chair to sit in.

 “Can I offer you some tea?”

 You accepted and Loki busied himself making a pot for the pair of you.

 “Thank you for inviting me,” you stated, taking the cup he handed you.

 “My pleasure,” he smiled, sitting in the seat near you.

 “I… I’m not quite sure if I feel ready to pose for a man I just met,” you stated.

 “I completely understand. I’m still happy to see you again,” he softly smiled.

 Loki seemed so kind and genuine.

 “I… I wanted to ask you… What made you decide on me?” you voiced after a while.

 “Growing up in Asgard, there was a goddess by the name of Freya. I always thought she was so beautiful with her soft curves… to be perfectly honest, I felt a little intimidated by her and I could never work up the courage to ask her to dance…”

 “When I first came to Midgard, I would see women with similar figures to her and I had often wondered if Freya had blessed them with her beauty… I could see it everywhere. In the Italian Renaissance paintings, in that actress Marilyn Munroe… I find it sad that in modern times, that beauty was lost and rejected so I try to keep it alive in my art…”

 You couldn’t help but smile as you listened to Loki speak. His words made your heart beat faster like no man has ever done before.

 “Wow, Loki… you certainly have an amazing view of women…” he breathed.

 “I meant every word I said,” he softly smiled. “I also meant what I said before; I truly do believe you would make a stunning work of art but if you do not feel comfortable, there is no pressure to pose.”

 “Thank you for being so understanding… I think… I think I would like to but… I’m just not ready yet. I would like to get to know you a little more first.”

 Loki nodded and agreed this would be the best idea. He was pleased you were considering posing for him but also wanted to respect your boundaries.

…

 Over the next few weeks, you spent a lot of time with Loki, spending hours talking about various subjects. Through so much conversation, it began to feel like you had known him your entire life. When you came to the decision to pose for Loki’s art, he went out of his way to make you feel comfortable. He gave you a robe to wear in between sketching, kept his studio warm enough so you wouldn’t be chilled and gave strict instructions that anyone who wished to speak with him while he was working had to knock and wait until he answered the door.

 Loki spent hours sketching you from every angle. Not once did you feel uneasy under his intense gaze; in fact, it was quite the opposite. He made you feel more beautiful than any of your past boyfriends ever made you feel. Once Loki had finished creating all the sketches he needed, he promised to contact you for the grand unveiling of his next masterpiece.

…

 A few weeks had passed since Loki had sent you away to work on his sculpture. You understood he was busy working so you didn’t take it to heart when you didn’t hear from him in a while but he did send Thor to keep you updated on how he was going.

 One day, you received a personal invitation from Loki to his next exhibition. You were both nervous and excited to see what he had done with all the sketches he had created.

 On the day of the unveiling, you were more nervous than anyone. In just a few moments, the whole gallery would see what you try to hide from the world. Every stretch mark, every dimple, every roll and curve everything that made you feel insecure would be on full display. Behind you, you could hear some nasty whispered comments about you but that all went away when Loki found you.

 “There you are, darling,” he smiled, taking your hand to kiss. “Come along. I want you to be by my side as I show the world how beautiful you are.”

 You had to admit, seeing the looks of shock and jealousy on the faces of the ones making the horrid comments made you feel great. Loki walked you to the front of the room in front of the covered sculpture.

 “Everyone… there is someone very special I would like you to meet,” Loki announced, calling the people to attention.

 “This is Y/N. My muse, my goddess and the inspiration behind my latest work…”

 Without further notice, Loki pulled the sheet off the sculpture. As you gazed upon the piece for the first time, you couldn’t help but tear up a little in joy. The figure was as gorgeous as the works of yore. You felt as beautiful as Venus herself. People started talking animatedly about the sculpture and cameras started flashing.

 “Of course, this is incomparable to the real thing,” Loki smiled at you.

 Before you could stop yourself, you kissed him. Loki was a little caught off guard but slowly kissed back, holding you close once the shock wore off.

 “So… will you continue to be my muse,” he breathed once he pulled away.

 “Of course, I will,” you smiled.

 Loki was a truly masterful artist. He could make you feel beautiful in a room full of people. With him, all those insecurities melted away. You were his goddess.

[dsdatingdramas]

The airport pick up

After a positive experience at our favourite bar Mcsteamy suggested we meet for dinner the night he arrived back from his boys weekend across the ditch as it required a night in transit in my city.

When I received a text from Mcsteamy noting that his flight was delayed I offered to pick him up, I know this is girlfriend level service on the second date but I do love a trip to the airport. After requesting his flight details so I can stalk his plane on flight radar, I arrived early, because on time is late. I sat at the look out spot in my car watching the planes fly in.

After watching his plane land I debate if it will be weird or cute to let him know that I watched his plane land “welcome back to Auckland! Let me know when you’ve got your bag and I’ll pull round” I text “did you watch me land you stalker?” He replies.

I see his smile beaming down the pick up zone, I love the way his whole face lights up when he smiles, it pulls all the way to his eyes. I get out my car ready for another firm and snuggly hug. I hurriedly remind him not to put his bag in my boot and apologise once again for the mess that is my car! After exploring my chaos with his eyes he pulls out lip balms and hair ties from my centre console “very handy” he smirks “you’ll never know when you need 4 claw clips”.

He told me he loved boats whilst we were chatting recently and I had already dreamed up a beautiful date at the marina over looking the harbour bridge. “Shall we go for a walk” I smile, he thankfully obliged.

After experiencing my very Auckland driving and apologising for my very lacklustre navigation skills, we arrived at the marina. After driving around copious car parks multiple times because I didn’t like the vibes of any of the available parks, I felt obliged to just pick one before Mcsteamy deemed this the end of our dating experience. Pulling haphazardly into a small car park with a Ute parked half way into I decide to reverse with my frustration in tow, leaving a lovely wee dent from my wing mirror in back panel of a late model Ute. Fuck. Mcsteamy helps me to craft a note and I kindly request that he place it in the Ute to prevent me from internally combusting with embarrassment.

We stop for pictures of the harbour and both comment on the beauty of the city and the sunset. We go for a walk making light work of the chatter and he effortlessly calms the nerves that were firing around my brain about the Ute, about this date, about what this date will think about the Ute. We walk like magnets, continuously filling the space between us to create what we both thought was discrete contact with the other, I loved the sense of safety and warmth he brought me as both our hands met.

We decided to break for dinner and agreed that the Golden Arches were calling our name, I was secretly very excited as McDonald’s has just released adult happy meals, but I had to play it cool.

We ordered our meals separately on the kiosks and took them to the car to chomp, the chat flowed easily and he broke the contact barrier purposefully with a hand on my leg. BRB melting.

I drove him to his car and as he hopped out of the car I was much to forward with the contact and went in for a kiss he reciprocated with much surprise written all over his face. Fuck. He giggled and apologised for his surprise. I’m tired he noted. Oh shit, I thought. When he had gathered all his bags and loaded them into his car he came back to say goodbye properly he lent over the car and kissed me properly and left me with a hug. I debated if the secondary kiss was pity but was met with a don’t be silly when I messaged him about it later.

We agreed over text that we really enjoyed one another’s company and planned a third date.

A few days later I noticed his messages became more and more sparse so I asked what the go was… “if you were my soul mate I think we’d know by now”

No more Mcsteamy.

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black: For A World Without Gold - Chapter 5 is now live!

In this chapter... shit gets real. Like, it's even more real than was thought previously possible, with a new fight scene and the introduction of an Anti-Knight Saber powersuited-cyborg kill team, all in the winding decks of a cargo ship lost at sea. That kind of real.

AG Fabrikraft: A wholly original megacorporation I drew up for this fic, one of several that will be a part of the Concern. To exposit in here without expositing out in the main fic, Fabrikraft is a cross-Scandinavian industrial titan, funded with the last of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund's oil money (petrochemicals are barely used now for, like, anything unless there's political reasons to keep them around) to make a giant focused around industrial, commercial, and consumer-grade additive manufacturing. There might be a bit of Chinese money in there, too, the same way the Chinese own Volvo IRL, but if there is it's laundered through too many intermediaries for anyone to tell. Most people in the 2060's know Fabrikraft as a sort of bastard cross between IKEA and Walmart, rapidly printing and assembling anything a consumer could want on-site or in the comfort of a consumer's home. Furniture, appliances, toys, weapons (print-a-gun vending machines are a depressingly common sight on American streets), feedstock-based food, things like that. Nothing as complex as a Boomer or even a neuromorphic computer, but Fabrikraft tech is used pretty prolifically in light industry to build parts of a whole. More and more, creators and inventors are turning to Fabrikraft's ManaCast network to provide blueprints for objects and gizmos to people around the world - from my CAD system to your CAM system, basically. The big catch is that Fabrikraft owns every blueprint uploaded to ManaCast, no exceptions, and as such they will copy and genericize anything developed by smaller organizations, then promote their own cloned products to kill competitors. Since their business is based on turning the ethereal into the physical, they're behind serious IP restrictions on digital content worldwide. No competition is allowed. So... yeah. That's Fabrikraft. Hopefully they're a cleverer Evil Megacorp business model than the kinds that usually populate cyberpunk settings.

A Brief Note On The Lagoon's Construction: I never did cover this, did I? Well, I'm covering it now, to detail that the Black Lagoon in this timeline is not a century-old WW2 Elco torpedo boat. However, it fulfills a very similar function by virtue of being a slightly larger Fast Attack Craft from World War Three. So! The Black Lagoon. A Halcyon-class Fast Attack Craft with light-stealthy features, a fancy fiberglass-and-armor hull, and two main weapons: An eight-shot HASh-M missile launcher, and an anti-air / anti-drone swarm laser gun. It was originally meant to be a cheap, semi-autonomous way to deliver ship-killing missiles into the heart of Chinese naval fleets around the Pacific Rim, either acting as an escort for bigger ships like cruisers and carriers or to damage the bigger ships on the enemy's side. In other words, it filled the same function as a WW2 Elco torpedo boat, but with more range and more survivability. Now, how did Dutch get his hands on one of these? Who knows. I've got secret backstories planned out for pretty much everyone of note except Dutch for this fic. Man's a goddamn enigma. Too bad.

Aaditri Nath: This a Bengali name, IIRC, with Aaditri being a derivative of the name of the goddess Lakshmi. Nath is just a surname. I think. I don't remember what exactly what was going through my mind beyond 'find a good Bengali name for this ship' for... reasons. You'll see in the next chapter.

More Details About the Space Development Bubble: Yeah, this is a sci-fi plot beat I'm pretty proud of, inspired by old-timey financial crises such as the South Sea Bubble, when the sinewy structure of capitalism was still mutating and evolving with a mix of a certain kind of technocynicism. So, since there's no real room to exposit on what happened in the mainline fic (though I had plans to do so in previous abandoned projects), let's go for it. So! It's after World War Three, and the financial system where Chinese and American debt (government bonds) are the bedrock of the global financial system is kaput. Both empires have spent nearly five years fighting each other to a bloody standstill and accelerating climate change beyond reasonable limits (while also making it clear that fossil fuel infrastructure is infinitely more fragile than renewables, so the one good thing that comes from the war is accelerating the death of petrogarchy), and no one wants to trust their money. So now there's a big void in the global financial system, and even if Cold War Two is gearing up, and even if Belt and Road / IMF financial imperialism is no longer really feasible, there still needs to be a bedrock guarantee in investor portfolios. What to do? Enter the Space Public Development Corporation, a semipublic / semiprivate conglomerate of space agencies and aerospace companies, washing their wartime excesses with Muskian 'planet's fucked let's go to Mars' rhetoric. Given nearly a trillion in seed funding, they propose a simple plan to get even more money to build a fully-fledged Lunar Colony by 2069, a fully-functional Space Elevator a little before or after that, and Lagrange Point O'Neil Cylinders by the end of the century. Armstrong Bonds: Invest now, and within decades you'll have your money back in kind, ensured by orbital manufacturing and asteroid mining's infinite bounty. So once earnest space exploitation (not exploration lol) starts to pay dividends to some people around the 2050's or so, the SPDC becomes an inadvertent anchor of the global financial system. And once the SPDC becomes dependent on GENOM for Boomer labor for orbital and lunar development, that just extends GENOM's power. One could track this, so it's said, by the way Anchorpoint went from an industrial town, a megastructure disguised as a city, to a city with luxury and financial districts for the rich and powerful to enjoy the promise of the future. And then, on July 20th, 2069 - a century from the lunar landing - the grand opening of the Lunar Expo and Tranquility City is bombed. The entire colony just goes up. What follows is a secretive week known as Orbit War One, a mess of battles between the SPDC's assets and rampant Boomers hellbent on disassembling those assets. The lunar massdriver is almost hijacked to Moon-is-a-harsh-mistress major Earth cities; the skeletal Lagrange point space stations go down for the count; satellites both military and civilian are vaporized. In other words, trillions of dollars in investments are just gone. And it gets worse, because then a cascade of leaks reveal how behind schedule and over budget most of the big development projects are, how many lies have been told, how the SPDC has become one big pyramid embezzlement scheme. Suddenly Armstrong bonds are worthless, the cyberpunk equivalent of the US or China defaulting on their debt in the present. Suddenly deflation is starting to set in, because there is no other stable anchor for hyperfinancialized capitalism. Suddenly a lot of people don't have the money they were promised. Why do I like this as a plot point? Because I think cyberpunk writers dealing with megacorps seem to think that megacorps and quasifeudal capitalism are a stable, unmovable system. It isn't. Witness the 2008 crash, witness Japan and now China's real estate bubbles, witness any number of points where faith in capital's wisdom lead to collapse.

Sail Kite: This is a real thing, launching giant parasail-shaped kites out into the air to 'sail' the titanic cargo ships that are key to the delivery of goods in our globalized world, and thereby reduce their emissions.

Huginn / Muninn: Avimorph 'drones' are basically birdlike Boomers that can hover like hummingbirds despite their size, replacing quadcopter drones everywhere. Huginn and Muninn are Nene's surveillance drones that she uses to scope out an area if the Sabers have 'prep time', to borrow a phrase from Batman fans, named after the ravens that sat on Odin's shoulders, from Norse Mythology. Nene named them thus not because of any connection to the Nords, but out of sheer chunni energy. Awhile back, by the way, I had a very stupid idea: Fujoshi Nene. "I have written half a dozen friendfic doujins about Leon and Daley, they have sold impossibly well at Neo-Cyber-Comiket, you cannot stop me."

The Anzio: Yes, 20mm Vulcan anti-materiel rifles are real. No, a real-life Anzio would not be the kind of thing you could run across a slippery deck with, they're fuckin' huge and I mentally scaled them down to the size of a Barrett fiddy-cal for this fight scene. I am genuinely sorry for this inaccuracy, but the scene still works regardless. I think. I might be wrong. I have been wrong about my own writing before, ask anyone who's ever read Divine Patronage.

The Zombie Squad: So! Here we have the Evil Knight Sabers Be Like moment, framing a Sinister Squad of Supervillains who can oppose the Sabers so that the Saber-oriented fight scenes aren't just fighting various teams of Boomers. So let's break them down. First off, the name came from one of my favorite Chapo Trap House episodes, where they review Stallone's Cobra, a film where the Super Cool Cop Man is on something called the 'Zombie Squad', which in turn was inspired by spec-op-ish squads of Belgian police who would practice vigilantism. Nasty stuff, but cool to the 80's attitude of 'why don't the cops just kill all the bad guys'. Yeesh. But the name takes on extra dimensions here, not just because of the ancient Egyptian god names (the pantheon is called the... Ogdoad, or something like that? I forget) referencing a culture obsessed with death, but because, in case you haven't noticed, all the ZS members refer to each other as corpses of one sort or another. Now, as to the identity of each squadmember? I'll reveal them bit by bit, trickle by trickle, but I'll give you a hint for now: No Member Is An Original Character. That's right, they All Come From Crisis And Lagoon Genre-Adjacent Properties, If Not The Properties Themselves. Moreover, They Have All Died Once. The hunt is on. See if you can figure out who's who! Message me if you know! Or just hang out in the BGC Discord where I'll probably spoil it all very aggressively.

Squad Suits: Heavily based off of this image from the Bubblegum Crisis EX RPG expansion, which itself used pre-production concept art willy-nilly:

Anyway, take away the tread feet and specialize each mech a bit and that's the approximate size and shape of a Squad powersuit.

Piledriver Weapon: I have not played Armored Core 6. Yet.

Ba Xing Chong: Yes, that is a reference to the gun you get when you kill Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077, the homing explosive-slug volley gun that might as well be a minimissile launcher, which it essentially is here. And, yes, it's mounted under something very close to the MK.31 HMG from Cyberpunk 2077, although not really that. Intersections with CP2077 / 2020's world and BGC2069 are, as evinced by my two abandoned projects Witch of Tranquility and Handful of Dust, still very much present here. Ugh, I need to orphan or delete those projects someday, they're a mark of immense shame for me.

Koko Hekmatyar: Whoo boy. I've set myself a challenge here. That's right, folks, Jormungand's Koko Hekmatyar, charismatic arms dealer, megalomaniac, and probable shotacon (ick), is one of the main villains of this fic, the shadowy face of GENOM's involvement with the sinister plot to take over Roanapur! And that's right, folks, I haven't seen Jormungand and don't really plan to anytime soon, because it looks somewhat drab as an anime absent Koko! But look. Plenty of Lagoon fics will drag Koko into their shenanigans just for funsies. Bullets, the fic I reviewed so highly awhile ago, just throws her in there like that to make more jokes, mostly at her expense. So is it a big deal if I throw her in there to perform the role of maniacal antagonist? I don't think it is. We'll see more of her in chapters to come, though. Make no mistake about that. Her goals are her own, and her power is unmistakable. She might have left Daddy's company, but she still wields forces that can level nations and lesser empires.

I should also mention that Chapter 6 might not come out until after my usual monthly posting deadline, just so people aren't surprised. I had plans for the chapter, wrote a great deal of them, then scrapped them when I realized they didn't work, so now it's back to the drawing board. Ah well.

[the-firebird69]

It's all sorts of people who have ideas it sounds like there's a pretty good if you take a tuk-tuk no pun intended it's a took and you made it four wheel and increase the turning radius to almost zero turn radius you haven't touched and that's why they drive them it's ridiculous you would have a tuk tuk and you beef it up a little you put some suspension and you can carry and heavier loads and of course it's not going to be too long has to turn around and Ally's or back out back in and fit between things and it's small and good for Europe and it's good for Asia they have a small vruck like that but the front end sticks out. He's thinking Briggs & Stratton and Coleman and I agree. And for some reason Harrison Ford thinks that this lobster type look boat which is really more of a modified v would sell everywhere at ridiculous numbers we started making them in sales or not great and they're not going anywhere and he says I work with my hands and I thought everybody would want one but really we thought about it later and he's looking at people's faces when they see it and that's how he knows that we studied a little what it is is they like to look they like how it works they like how you can get on and off it without trouble I'm like a pleasure craft pleasure craft you have to kind of use your belly and really this thing you can put a stair or we can make it with a stair and he says you can make it with a stair that turns around you lift it up and turn it around and it could go in and we like that it is way to do that we like what he's saying it's a good idea and it would be outside of the hall it's just a stare and we are going to do that cuz this is a hassle getting off and on boats you can have a rail and the rail be removal for work but boy these posts would sell like crazy so he's seeing the look and people like it it's like this cutting cabin is much less of a hassle you can stand up and you can operate controls you can move around it's a hassle in a cuddy county you can't go anywhere you're stuck sitting there and you can't move around the boat when you're trying to swim and stuff with these things you can walk around the side of it it's small we have a 15 ft model that we're making and it's a mold and we're making a bit rugged we're not making it very but it's cheap and he says we should make like a real cheap one and then say oh my gosh and then make it like work better and I said no then I said maybe they said I think so then I can make a small one it'll be real cute and work pretty good but if you make it cheap it works half decent it'll sell everywhere and then you can upgrade it a little for not much money otherwise it won't sell that much just got an idea so we're going to try and make it the cheaper one it works a little less well and it's not a sturdy but it works great I mean it'll last for 20 years with heavy use so if we could go ahead and do that another thing is he's trying to fix the smoke detector doesn't know what's wrong with it it might be the battery but he thinks it's got some stuff in it or whatever and that's what it is. So moving on and the lawsuit is taking effect and these guys getting arrested because they're refusing to pay people we're taking advantage of the situation and we're going out to be the free Intel and finally he's got to eat some but really it's going okay he's got his exhaust fan in and the guy next door has to go I put in the report he just won't let anything alone and he's obsessed for some reason and we're going to go after him and right now I've never seen anybody like that about our son and daughter and he's got to pay for it he doesn't know anything about them doing anything using any of his facilities he's not case but then that's what he says so people are after him for it

Thor Freya

[ladysternchen]

It took me ages and ages to do it (big apology for that), but here goes: Ereinion sat with his arms wrapped tightly around his legs as he watched Círdan craft little ships, tiny enough to fit into his hand, yet worked out in so much detail that they looked just like real vessels. Each of them would start out the same, and then Círdan would change little details here and there, some noticeable at once, others so subtle it needed the shipwright’s explanation to see. Ereinion had watched his foster father for a while now, but not been able to bring himself to ask what he was doing- so many of his thoughts were still on his old home, on his father, his mother who was now dead. It seemed almost like a betrayal to them to concern his mind with something  so mundane as these toy-ships. An alarming thought came to his mind- did Círdan craft those boats for him? To get his mind off things? He did not want to be distracted only to have his despair come crashing back over him by nightfall. Ereinion was so immersed in his thoughts that he did not notice the young elf approaching until he came to sit next to him, a harp on his lap. The elf smiled apologetically at him, saying:  “I hope I do not disturb you, young lord, but I tried out a new way to tune my harp and I want to see if it goes as well with the rushing of the waves as I thought it would.” Ereinion blinked. It would never have occurred to him that anyone would tune their instrument in accordance to the sea, but he supposed it made sense, as the constant ebb and flow was as omnipresent in the Falas as the mournful cries of the gulls. “Not at all.” he managed to say at last, remembering that he was likely meant to answer. The elf smiled again and started to play softly, and Ereinion was caught by the music almost against his will. It spoke of a longing of the heart, both sweet and bitter at the same time. Círdan seemed to have noticed, too, as he looked up from his boats to smile at the elf.“That is a fair tune your playing!” he called, and Ereinion saw the young elf blush.“Thank you, my lord.” They all lapsed back into their own preoccupation after that, but as the elf stopped playing at last, Ereinion could not keep his curiosity at bay any longer.“Do you know what he’s doing?” he asked bluntly, and his companion looked up in surprise.“Lord Círdan? Why, crafting models for his ships, I suppose. His quest for building a ship that will reach Aman is ever on his mind, and great a toil it is, too. But the ways of shipwrights and mariners must seem strange to you, of course.”Ereinion nodded.“Quite. I never knew anything about ships afore I was sent here. Why do they all look like seabirds?”The elf smiled gently.“Swans, young lord. There is an ancient legend concerning that. Do you want me to tell you?”Against his earlier resolution not to be distracted from his misery, Ereinion was intrigued, and so nodded eagerly.“It is said that when Lord Círdan was a young child, in ancient days, when the elves still dwelled by the starlit shores of their first awakening, years uncounted before the making of sun and moon,  he and his cousin would craft little boats together, that they would set afloat upon the waters of Cuiviénen for their amusement. One day, a current took their ships, and loathe as the boys were to give their toys up, they followed them, finally catching them way out on the waters, where large round boulders formed little islands and a causeway far into the lake. There they sat, resting after the chase and rejoicing in the retrieving of the boats, when a storm gathered about the lake. Soon the waters were in an uproar, and waves washing over the boulder upon which they sat, and the young lords were in gravest peril. Then, suddenly, they noticed that their boats were gone and in their place sat two great swans, their eyes shining with light, and their necks adorned with bracelets of silver and gold. They allowed the children to mount their backs, and carried them safely ashore, near to the dwellings of their parents. Thus Lord Círdan and King Olwë were saved. But as they turned to thank their mounts, they found only two little toy ships, much changed to what they themselves had crafted. They now had the form of swans, with little pearls for eyes. Ever since, the ships -I hear on both sides of the sea- of the Teleri are shaped like swans.”The elf fell silent, and Ereinion sat lost in thought. The swanships of Alqualondë… how often had he heard the term, spoken in hushed voices, a synonym for their doom. He knew the story behind it, remembered the self-loathing and regret in his father’s voice as he told the tale of the kinslaying. It strangely moved Ereinion now to think that once upon a time, the idea of the design of those ships had come from the playful crafting of two innocent boys. He was so deep in thought that he did not notice the elf biding him farewell and leaving, nor that his place was taken by none other that Círdan himself.“Your mind is bothered, my son.” said Círdan gently, tearing Ereinion from his thoughts. He nodded, lost for what to say. Círdan seemed not to mind, as he clapped him on the shoulder, saying: “If you have no other plans, I shall need your opinion on my new ships.”Ereinion looked up to see his foster-father’s eyes twinkle with the mirth of mischief long gone by and wondered if he had heard what the young elf had told Ereinion before.“I am no mariner, lord!”Círdan chuckled.“All the better. I do need unbiased eyes.”Ereinion followed him, and when he crouched down again next to Círdan and his assembly of little ships, he could have sworn one of them had winked.

17: myths & Falas

Challenge accepted ;-) Give me a little time, and I'll see what I can do. :D

[spacedlexi]

I gotta ask, where did Clem get that jacket! Also it would seem like a good choice of upper body wear protection as other than literal metal, it’s a good protection during an apocalypse as leather is one of the toughest materials that someone can wear, which is why bikers wear them.

Anyways, I absolutely love the style and I assume, and correct me if I’m wrong but is that a walking stick in clem’s hand? Also did they craft a second bow or am i just having a brain fart as it has been a while since i last played TWDG, with my main memories usually being Violentine moments.

My final thing is that i love how you put the pin clem gets after going on Violet’s stargazing date? Imma just call it a date. I often see art that don’t really include the pin or just use the orange pin Violet can also give Clem. Amazing art btw! Love how you show that Clem and Violet can both kill you while also being dorks in love.

i think after everything died down with the delta fight, the kids would eventually make their way back there to scavenge for any supplies that survived the explosion. it was a huge boat with enough supplies to last a large group of people a decent amount of time (we know the delta home base isnt exactly close). i think the kids would be able to scavenge quite a bit of stuff, and its where clem picks up the new jacket. ive mentioned it in one of my past replies but i think clem wouldve taken to heart jane telling her that she needs a nice leather jacket for protection. ive also mentioned before that clems s4 jacket being a denim biker jacket made no sense because bikers dont wear leather for nothing... she deserves her cool leather biker jacket. i think she wouldve gotten excited about a find like that

and yes it is a walking stick :) she cant use crutches forever so once the kids make her a prosthetic i think she'd start picking up the habit of collecting a few nice branches as walking sticks. i like to think she'd have one for hanging out around ericson, and one for being outside that she coils barbed wire around (i got the idea from her i think road to survival? model? where they put barbed wire around her crutches and she used them as a weapon i thought that was a cool idea but again she cant use those forever). ALSO i think she'd still remember the story lee told her about his dad using his cane around the store so i think it would give her some form of comfort. i think she'd use her cane around ericsons the same way lees dad did around the drug store

also yes there was another bow at ericsons that both violet and willy have used. violet only used marlons bow a few times shes mostly seen with the other one and it seems when she doesnt have it willy does. im not sure if any other character is shown with it (idr which bow is used when hunting with aasim)

also how could i forget the pin 🥺 i cant Not draw it and im very mindful about it. its just so cute that vi isnt really into arts and crafts but made it for clem anyway 🥺. like did she go back to her room that night and just stay up making it. im sure she couldnt sleep after everything that happened. and with the way shes always so hard on herself for not saving everyone, and when she tells clem she wont let minnie get her (or aj or anyone else), i think the pin is a bit of a symbol of vi being prepared to do whatever she needs to to keep them safe. and i like to give post s4 clem and vi matching pins since it seems to be their Thing

[korasonata]

So, the original plan was to do these quotes until Joe and Cleo finished their models, which was half accomplished during this stream (yay Cleo!). Question is should I still continue these after Joe has finished his model, or have we had enough now? Favourite moments of Joe and Cleo model stream part 7! Link to the video is below and time stamps are above each set of quotes!

Link: https://m.twitch.tv/videos/1155955572

—

00:32:05

Joe: This is our weekly paper craft stream. I’m joined today by ZombieCleo, who you can find at—

Cleo: Hiiiiiiiiii!!!

Joe: — twitch.tv/zombiecleo. You don’t need to type the “hi” in the middle. Although it is adorable, and so I wouldn’t blame you.

—

00:56:25

Cleo (in response to someone saying they like Hershey’s chocolate): I mean you can like the chocolate. It’s ok to be wrong. It’s fine. You know, you can—

Joe: A certain amount of the other person being wrong is to be expected in any relationship.

Cleo: Yeah! Look at my relationship with you, Joe.

Joe: Yeah, I mean we’re— we’re off the charts for that.

—

01:01:15

Joe (changing into his chroma green tank top): We can’t have people seeing my torso.

Cleo: Oh you know, yeah you— you are a cryptid.

—

01:02:04

Joe (doing a face camera expansion): these chains I’ve forged in life are about to begin pulling me down to the deep below! Enter the Jhoooooooost!

Cleo: Can I just point out that “life” was very southern. At that point. (Heavy southern accent) Life.

Joe (heavy southern accent): Life.

Cleo: Laaaaaffe

Joe: Liiiiife *both laughing* These chains I’ve forged in—

Both: laaaaffe!!

Joe (heavy twang): Pullin’ me daaan to the deep behlooow!

—

01:07:16

Cleo (in response to Joe having a laughing fit): And that is one of the rare times where Joe has a complete, absolute giggle fit on stream

Joe (still laughing): Ok I’m sorry, but “puritans go home” is the best thing to put on anything worth— ok im gonna start making a— ok. (Serious) Im gonna start making an actual checklist cause, um, (actually writing down a checklist of things he’s taking to his parents for thanksgiving) ok thanks—giving twenty twenty—one. Ok so, salad cream.

Cleo: *wheezing*

Joe (reading list): “Puritans go Home” icing on pie…Um, you know let’s just throw iron brew in there. Why not! Irn-Bru and vodka!

Cleo (laughing): Sure! Why not!

Joe: Yeah. Well, so, my maternal grandmother was Scottish and—

Cleo: oh I’m sorry.

Joe: —so I think my mom would get a kick out of Irn-Bru. As like “oh! Here’s something from the old country!”

Cleo: *physically wheezing* from the old country!

—

01:29:43

Joe: Oh, it’s really fun. Did you know that a bunch of people on Tumblr care a lot about how tall each of us are?

Cleo: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, oh man I’ve been spreading information and taking weird height pictures with people at conventions for years. It’s like— *Cleo laughing* I’ll intentionally like stand on things or like, uh, or like stand in such a way that you can’t tell I’m crouching, so people are like “Ok, so Joe’s like taller than Bdubs but shorter than, uh, like— Stress or something. It’s like how does that happen?!” *trying not to laugh* Because I’m screwing with you.

—

01:31:11

Joe: See that’s the thing is— is sometimes people think things are about power. I think they’re just about being obnoxious.

Cleo: I mean, you think most things are about being obnoxious which is why it’s a power move for you. Cause being obnoxious is your power move. It’s where you’ve got the most power, Joe.

Joe: Hm, that makes sense.

Cleo: Sometimes I do. I try not to when I’m with you, because— it’s easier.

Joe: Yeah. You don’t wanna give me any actual like workab— or usable intelligence.

—

01:42:47

Joe (reading chat): I’ve been on Hermitcraft since season one— yeah. That was only like 10 years ago though.

Cleo: I’ve been on Hermitcraft since season 2.

Joe: Yay Cleo!

Cleo: Which was only because Joe asked me to come on, or pu— vouched for me.

Joe (genuine): Well I am glad you joined.

Cleo: I mean I was— I was at the point where I was just like “is this what I wanna do for the rest of my life? Should I just go full ham into teaching?” And, uh, then you made that offer and I thought “well, I’ll see how it goes”. And it did quite well for me. So…you know.

Joe (quietly): I am so glad

Cleo: You are the reason why I’m still doing Minecraft content.

—

01:44:19

Joe (reading chat): Attasked says “Only you can judge whether you’re hot” no plenty of people can tell I’m hot, Graved. It’s— pretty blatantly obvious. You don’t— you don’t have to be good at judging to be able to tell. Like, that’s not an only me thing.

—

02:00:54

Cleo: You ever have those moments where you’re just questioning your choices in life?

Joe: *having a breakdown* Moments!

Cleo: *cackling*

Joe (through tears): I’m sorry, you’re just the best Cleo.

Cleo: *laughing, but genuine* Awe, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to depress you today!

Joe: No it’s— *inaudible sobbing* Today—

Cleo: *dying*

Joe (quietly to himself): Is this is frame? Sorry, I was cutting this out of frame. My bad.

Cleo (still laughing): I like how everyone’s just sort of gone quiet and gone “…is Joe ok?”

Joe: nOO!!!

Cleo: We’ve established that Joe is not ok.

Joe: But I’m really good at it!

Cleo: *spitting out her drink*

—

01:49:52

Joe: Let’s go down the Mississippi, Cleo.

Cleo: I mean, that I think we could probably do. Let’s go down the Mississippi, Joe.

Joe: yay!

Cleo: On a flimsy raft.

Joe: Yeah, we can actually— there’s a lot nicer boats now though. Like—

Cleo: I mean— yeah, but do we— do— you know…it’s the Huckleberry Finn experience.

Joe: I mean, here’s the thing, is if you actually came here and I was like “Cleo, let’s go to the Mississippi River and go down the river a few miles”. I think you’d be more likely to actually say yes if I had an actual boat lined up than if I had a flimsy raft.

Cleo (excited): If it— if it— if it makes you feel better, I— I would do the flimsy raft. Like, hands down. It seems more fun.

Joe (realizing that she’s serious): I— you say that, but I don’t think you’ve seen the Mississippi River. Like, the problem is it’s full of these giant barges these days, the wakes of which would just throw your raft over.

Cleo (dead serious): I can swim.

Joe (attempting to compromise, completely lost as to how he has somehow managed to be the voice of reason): Ok…Alternatively we can go down a smaller river…In a raft…

—

02:04:43

Joe: Sorry, I’ll stop monologuing. Uh, but yeah sorry I was in the process of—

Cleo: I’LL STOP MONOLOGUING! Yeah, yeah that’s gonna happen.

Joe: yeah, I’ll- I’ll say I’m gonna stop monologuing and I’ll warn you that-

Cleo: And then he just continues

Joe: -that Cleo you should probably be ready to start talking sometime in the next 8-12 minutes.

—

02:15:26

Joe: Oh, I need to get a green screen suit jacket. Um, I realized. Cause I got the green screen, um, uh dress shirt. That I wear under existing suits, but I don’t have an actual like green screen suit.

Cleo: I— I am always amused by your definition of “need”

Joe: My definition of what?

Cleo: Need.

Joe: Need.

Cleo: I need a green suit.

Joe: Ok, I’m sorry Cleo, the people need me to get a green suit.

—

02:30:23

Cleo (reading chat): “Joe-Getters and Go-Getters” yeah, Joe’s not a Go-Getter, he’s a Joe-Getter. Which is infinitely worse.

Joe: You say being a Joe-Getter is infinitely worse, but you also frequently lament that you get me. So, maybe you’re a Joe-Getter. Have you considered that?

Cleo: I am a Joe-Getter. I do get you, Joe. Which is terrible. It’s— It’s a trauma, actually Joe, I’ll have you know.

Joe: Yeah, comprehend me and despair, Cleo.

Cleo: I looked too deep into the abyss. The Joe-byss, sorry.

Joe: Thank you, yeah we’ve got a brand. Always be branding.

Cleo: *giggling* A.B.B. - Always Be Branding.

Joe: That’s not an infinite void of despair. That’s an infinite void of—

Both: Joe’s despair.

—

02:34:31

Joe: Let’s just leave it at don’t push me off a roof. Like *laughing* I feel like anything I could add to that would undermine the overall theme of just encouraging people to not do that.

Cleo: Um, let me put it like this. I always had the capacity. Always. But! I never acted on it, Joe.

Joe: Mhm, yeah thank you.

Cleo: …yet…I’ll try not to.

Joe: Yeah. And— and also keep in mind Cleo, I mean, given, you know, how well we’ve managed to work together over the last decade. Even if you did push me or throw me off a roof. *grinning* What makes you think that you’re not coming with me?

Cleo (slightly proud): That felt like a threat. It felt like a threat. I’m not gonna lie.

Joe (through giggles): Yeah, that was the, like— I spent 90 seconds figuring out how to revise that so is it was not blatantly like a violent threat.

Cleo: I mean…yeah, I think— I think— I think between the tw— it— it’s a mutual aggression pact at this point.

—

02:51:53

Cleo (holding up seemingly two identical pictures of turret towers): Am I— am I going actually insane? Are they not…the same turret?

Joe (examining pages on screen): …y—you know there might be…subtle differences that, uh, a— you know, skilled crafts person would find unavoidably blatant. Um…I make no such claim Cleo.

Cleo: Good, because, you know…trauma…Yours, not mine.

Joe: *laughing* yeah I was gonna say. Trauma as a verb. I’m just gonna trauma you.

Cleo: *laughing* I’m gonna trauma you so hard right now.

Joe: Yeah, if you don’t calm down and agree with me.

Cleo: If you don’t agree with me, that’s— that’s your mistake.

—

03:38:48

Cleo (about authors): just be careful who you like and just recognize the faults in any media that you do like. Just don’t imagine that everything’s perfect, because it’s not. Just be open to the fact it’s not perfect.

Joe: The only perfect media is YouTube videos produced by ZombieCleo.

Cleo: Fact.

—

04:00:34

(Having finished her model)

Cleo (tiredly): No booshes. No booshes. I know it’s got places for booshes, but I don’t want to do booshes because…there’s a limit.

Joe (currently in the United States): Yeah. Well, now you can come over here and help me Cleo, is what chat’s saying.

Cleo: Ok.

Joe: Go help Joe hold this stuff he can’t glue.

Cleo (Currently in England): Hang on, hang on. *rummaging on desk* What do you need? I’ve got lots of things, what do you need?

[webofpassione]

Sea Salt and Sunshine

Bucciarati x Reader

Content Warnings: NSFW Content, AFAB Reader, References to Polygamy

***

A spray of sea salt crashed against the bow of the yacht; a breath of coolness on an otherwise sweltering day.

You stretched out your legs, basking in the sunlight and tilting your face to the sky. A gorgeous and unending blue rolled above you, unobstructed by clouds. Overall, it was the perfect day to be lounging on a boat in the middle of an ocean in the utmost tranquillity. And the best person to share it with happened to be at your side.

You turned your attention to him, pulling your sunglasses down just a little to absorb his peaceful demeanour. It was a good thing his eyes were closed, you thought. Their hue would put the view to shame.

When you said as much, the corner of his lip turned up into a knowing smile.

“Bruno,” you hummed. You went back to lounging on your towel. “This is perfect.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

You were both dressed to impress with Bucciarati having exchanged his usual suit for an almost nautical look with a fashionable hat to match while you donned your favourite bikini (your coverup having been lost soon after setting foot on the boat).

It was a private date, he had told you. Just the two of you enjoying each other’s company and getting some much-needed relaxation. Honestly, you were surprised to not have found somebody hiding below deck.

“I do want to apologise for involving you with our business,” Bruno mentioned, referring to an event from a few nights ago. “From what I heard, it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

“It wasn’t anything worse than what I would hear in a bar anyway,” you told him. “Don’t worry about it. Besides, we both agreed when I got involved with any of you that I was going to get dragged into this in some way or another.”

He made a slightly irritated sound, not really meaning to but unable to stop it from slipping out. “I guess I was hoping I could change that.”

“I wasn’t hurt Bruno and I actually had fun.”

He opened his eyes to give you a knowing look.

You could feel a slight blush creep along your cheeks so you sat up, hoping to blame it on the sun. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you. I’ll join you in the cabin soon.”

The yacht was a rental but Bucciarati had chosen it for its luxury. Its cabin was beautifully crafted with anything you could have ever wanted. You opened the fridge and grabbed something at random, wincing a little when your arm brushed against the door. Your skin felt a little raw, undoubtedly thanks to the harsh sun.

It was almost midday you realised with a glance at the clock. Popping your head out of the cabin, you told Bucciarati the time and asked if he cared to join you for lunch.

He waltzed with the grace a model, as he often did when he was feeling comfortable.

“I think you’ll enjoy what I managed to organize,” he said. “It was freshly made this morning.”

The dish he had gotten was a variant of baccalà but you couldn’t tell exactly what had been done to it. It was delicious, melting on the tongue and exploding with flavours. You probably weren’t enjoying it as much as you should have been despite this.

The majority of your focus was on Bucciarati. His expressions, the way he sat in a carefully constructed pose. He was relaxed but there was something else being hidden there.

“This has been the best day,” you said. “But I have to ask why?”

He smiled and took a sip of his wine. “Sometimes I enjoy a little more isolation. I haven’t done anything like this for you before and I think it’s long overdue.”

You glanced around the sleek cabin. “I didn’t know you had a boating license but I probably should have guessed. I’m starting to realise there’s very little that you can’t do.”

He inclined his head to the side, a knowing and proud smirk appearing. “You flatter me a lot.”

“You’re an easy person to compliment. It must be hard having so much going for you.”

Bucciarati laughed but it wasn’t one of his real ones. You were starting to learn the subtle differences between them. There were the playful chuckles and his polite coughs but those weren’t difficult to notice. The underlying meaning to his laugh was only there when he was around the gang.

He was never fond of being considered infallible. Sometimes you wondered if he mistook your praise for putting him onto a pedestal.

“You’re not perfect,” you said, watching the curiosity flicker across his face. “But you’re pretty brilliant. I often feel a little out of place surrounded by so many beautiful people every day. When I go out with Leone, he gets checked out more than I do.”

Bucciarati chuckled at that. “I have the same problem. I put so much effort into achieving the look I want and he can wear anything and pull it off perfectly.”

“I hate to break it to you but you can do that also,” you mentioned.

“Perhaps but I’ve never quite tried it.”

You finished your lunch and made a show of stretching, appreciating the attention that roamed across your body as you did so. “Take a swim with me?” you asked.

The ocean was lovely and warm with few waves. With nobody else for miles around, you could just relax and enjoy the water. The company certainly didn’t disappoint with a shirtless Bucciarati drawing your attention from the moment he joined you.

You smoothed your hands over his shoulders when you swam closer, wrapping your arms around his neck and pressing close. His skin was like silk beneath your own.

It wasn’t long before flirtatious comments turned to light touches. Bucciarati’s fingers found the clasp of your top. He undid it smoothly, throwing it back onto the boat before playfully squeezing your breasts. You hummed and joined your lips in a soft and salty kiss; his taste tinted with the flavour of the sea.

A cloud drifted across the sun and you parted with a whisper of, “Do you want to move to the boat?”

“We just got into the water,” he teased. “Let’s not rush things.”

You raised an eyebrow but relented, detaching yourself from your partner and floating away to play in the small swells. Taking a deep breath, you sunk beneath the surface and drifted for a little bit.

You let out a surprised giggle when soft and cool lips pressed against your own. Bucciarati traced your hips before you both came up for air. Laughter filled the air along with playful splashes and unexpected tickles. You ended up swallowing more sea water than was healthy and your throat burned by the time you pulled yourself back onto the deck.

Still, your smile was giddy and you dragged Bucciarati down with you as you lay on your back. His face was haloed by the sun, little drips of water landing on your face as he hovered above.

You pulled him into a sweet kiss, relishing in every part of him.

Your heart picked up speed as he lightly played with your breasts. You dragged your fingers down his back before tracing his tattoo with your nails. Not hard enough to leave a mark but hard enough to feel him shudder slightly. There wasn’t a need for you to look at it, your eyes dragged across it every day.

His thigh slipped between your own. You couldn’t help but grind down against it, a tiny whine escaping as you did so.

He moved away slowly, licking at your bottom lip as he did so. “We should move into the cabin,” he suggested. “It’s far more comfortable in there.”

Agreeing, you both made the short walk while somehow losing what remained of your clothes.

The cabin was outfitted with a small table, a tiny kitchen, but most importantly, a comfortable bed with white linen. You pushed Bucciarati onto the sheets, crawling over him and trailing kisses over every inch of his body.

He ran his fingers up and into your hair, his soft sounds serving as the best kind of encouragement.

“Do you want to mark me?” he asked when one of your kisses to his neck lingered.

You did. The temptation to leave your mark on his throat was great and you made your point clear with a little lick just above his collarbone. “May I?” you asked.

He hummed as though thinking about it, holding you in a state of anticipation. “I don’t see why not. It’s not like the others don’t know why we’re out here.”

You shuddered at the knowledge. Their expressions and comments had given it away but having it confirmed was something else entirely.

He let out a breathy sigh when you started working a dark bruise into his neck. His vocalisations only got louder as you moved lower.

You followed the lines of his tattoo until you could gently nip at his thigh. His sun kissed skin was just so beautiful where it contrasted with the soft white of the sheets. You continued your attentions across his hips until he tugged lightly at your hair, lifting your head so he could make eye contact with you.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, running his fingertips along your jaw. His thumb slipped past your lips and pried your mouth open. “Are you going to show me just how talented you are?”

You let out an embarrassingly needy noise, panting around his hold. He released you with a soft smile that you gladly returned.

With your eyes locked on his, you leaned in and ran your tongue along the underside of his cock. A soft moan fell from his mouth, his eyelashes fluttering as you did so. You wrapped your lips around the head, hollowing your cheeks and sinking down slowly. The noises he made were sweeter than any music.

The hand tangled with your hair acted as a gentle guide. You swirled your tongue, dropping down rapidly until his cock hit the back of your throat. He groaned loudly, head rolling to the side.

His taste was addictive. A sweet and salty flavour that wasn’t obnoxious yet still managed to stand out. You tried to time your bobs to the rocks of the boat – a steady rhythm that had Bucciarati groaning

It wasn’t long before the heat between your legs grew too intense and you pulled off with a soft pop.

Bucciarati opened his eyes to watch you creep up, eyes filled with want. He was quickly becoming dishevelled; his hair sticking to his face, the slightest flush on his cheeks.

Little red marks littered his chest and neck, marking your steady path. You kissed each one on your way up until you were straddling his hips. Grinding down, you relished in the unabashed moan that escaped him.

You didn’t want to keep teasing him for much longer. It was only making you feel empty.

When you sank onto him, you whimpered quietly, the sound feeling louder than it actually was. His hand drifted to your hip and held you in place for a few seconds, your body flush to his own.

He brushed circles onto your waist as his eyes drifted higher, clearly enjoying the view. You trembled slightly. The desire to move was growing but Bucciarati had you pinned with his expression alone. His slow exploration felt like torture, especially when he propped himself up and shifted inside of you.

“Be patient,” he teased.

You bit your lip and tried to keep your composure. He found every sensitive part on your body as though he had a map. You whimpered. The feeling of having him inside you was intoxicating. Dizzy with desire to move; to demand any kind of friction or satisfaction.

Bruno turned his hips and you cried out a little as the unexpected movement pushed him even deeper. He smirked, pleased with your reactions. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t you want to wait?”

“Please,” was the best response you could formulate.

“Since you asked so nicely,” he hummed. Immediately you started to move but his hand held your waist fast, the pressure keeping you down. “Slowly.”

It took every ounce of self-control that you had to lift yourself up at a steady pace. Going back down was almost painful.

You tried to breath to calm your pounding heart and desperate mind. It didn’t take much though before your focus was only on the sensations of his cock and the way it fit so perfectly within you.

The hold on your waist warned you when you were getting too fast, forcing you to slow back down again. It wasn’t fair how quickly you turned into a mess when Bruno just watched you with the occasional noise.

“A little more,” he said and you jumped at the opportunity, rolling your hips as you sunk back down in a smooth movement before he could stop you.

A deep groan escaped from his chest but his grip turned bruising, holding you tightly against him.

“I said a little,” he pointed out, his voice taking on a sharp edge that had you melting. It made you want to please him in any way he needed. The ache within your core was burning but you felt a pang of regret for not succeeding your small test.

Apologetically, you began moving at the pace he had wanted, allowing your noises to slip free and show him how much you enjoyed his presence.

“We’re going to need to work on your patience,” Bruno mused, reaching up to push a stray hair behind your ear. You leaned into the touch, mouth falling open just a little as you tried to focus on the right speed.

“Take what you want.”

It was an order and you jumped to obey.

The pace turned sloppy and fast as you rode him, grinding down hard with every thrust. You leaned forward, gripping at his shoulders and at the sheets. His low and breathy sounds matched your own, a chorus of beautiful noise surrounding you like a fog. Any thoughts fled your mind as you neared your peak.

His name was the only thing you could say; the syllables disappearing into a moan before they could properly escape.

Your movements lost all elegance and pacing. The only thing your mind wanted was taking in as much of the man in front of you as you could. He was still guiding your movements, trying to time them to his own thrusts.

But even he was struggling to focus.

You could see Bruno was close as well. His lips had parted, little pants escaping them as he stared up at you. He was barely holding onto his composure.

It wasn’t long before he fell over the edge, a beautiful whisper of your name rolling off his tongue. The expression he made, combined with the warmth spreading through you was enough to bring you to your own high.

Rolling waves of pleasure pulsed through your body, leaving you gasping for air as though you’d near drowned. Your entire body trembled. It was almost too much and you fell onto Bruno’s chest, your limbs turned to jelly.

He smoothed a hand over your hair slowly. “I was hoping to see your face,” he said.

“It’s nothing special,” you assured him.

“I’m going to see that for myself,” he said. In a flash, you found yourself on your back, dark hair framing your face and crystalline eyes shining into your own. “After all, your control will only get better with practise.”

[lucifers-favorite-pen]

How The Obey Me Brothers Would Do in a “The Forest” AU

Fandom: Obey me

Pairings: None

Warnings: Swearing, idiocy, mild gore

The Forest was just released for the new Oculus headset, and Levi could NOT pass up this opportunity. However, it’s just his luck he got his hands on a cursed copy of the game, and ended up sucking the House of Lamentation into the game! Here’s how our favorite boys faired in the universe of “The Forest”

Lucifer:

Is pissed.

Bitches about it heavily

Is irritated that he has to find and wrangle a digital son now as well as his siblings. 

Would definitely help everyone else build a little shelter before nightfall, but would be grumbling about how much work he has to do at home and how far behind this would put him. 

Doesn’t let MC lift a finger and is 100% a mother hen the whole time. 

Seems inconvenienced by the whole cannibal thing, until he realizes magic doesn’t exist here and he has to use his melee fighting skills to kill them. Skills that are a little rusty...

Teams up with Beel to be the camp dads and take care of everyone

Super paranoid about the stability of the walls and the house at the beginning

Dies from eating a poisonous berry. He didn’t know he could be affected by poison in this game.

Over all, does his best to keep everyone alive, and feels really bad when someone dies. 

No longer feels bad when he learns that the worst thing that happens is you lose all your stuff and you respawn. 

A solid 7/10 job. Probably dies a few times due to someone else being an idiot, but is a pretty good survivalist when push comes to shove. 

Mammon:

Is also pissed

He was in the middle of counting the grimm from his latest modeling gig when he was sucked into the game.

Bitches and moans with/at Lucifer, but tries to build and maintain a shelter.

Who’s Timmy?

I don’t think crows exist in the game, but seagulls do and they all land on his fingers and he makes friends with them.

Is very upset when one of his brothers kills a bird for food or to simply carry around its head as a trophy. 

Sees cannibals and tries to trade with them with the grimm he has in his pockets.

Dies on sight.

Now when he sees or hears cannibals he screams and cowers behind MC 

When they go away or the screaming stops, he stands up straight and dusts off his jacket “Psh, I wasn’t afraid! I was trying to comfort you from behind! YOU were the one afraid”

After a while in the game, he gets his shit together and honestly kinda kills it. 

This is the avatar of greed, you know he is going to gather and horde so many valuable resources and then guard them with his life. 

“Mammon I’m hurt please stop hissing at me and let me have the medicine bottle”

*hiss* “You can have ONE pill and ONE pill only”

Over all, the definition of “They had us in the first half ngl”

8/10 for managing the group’s food and resource stores so well and only dying a fuck ton of times. 

Levi

...oops?

Feels quite guilty, but is also secretly pumped to immerse himself in the game.

Was extremely skilled at this game IRL and tries to explain how it works to everyone else, but they’re all so pissed and no one��s listening.

“That’s fine, who would want to listen to a yucky otaku like me anyway!” 

Magic doesn’t exist here, but that doesn’t stop Levi from yeeting himself into the ocean and turning into a giant sea monster while his brothers complete the game. 

They don’t want his help? They don’t want to know that the cannibals can’t swim and that they’ll be safer if they build a boat and live in a boathouse on the water? Fine. Then Perish <3

That goes for Timmy too, fuck that kid. 

Doesn’t want MC to suffer tho, so he’ll kill a few sharks and throw them up over the wall with his tail. (I’m assuming that if the game is released for Oculus Rift that they will get their shit together and also make sharks edible)

Is having a grand time taking over the ocean. 

Will sometimes go to shore to visit MC. Everyone is confused as to where he has been and how he is thriving. He just smiles and jumps back in the water.

10/10 strats. Never once dies. Tells everyone what they were doing wrong and how they could have had it easier when they beat the game and are back IRL out of spite.

Satan

Angy

Is throwing things in their spots while building the shelter, but is still helping

Spawns in with the book he was reading in his hand.

That book is eventually stolen from his grasp in the night and used as kindling for the fire.

Lucifer explains that if he didn’t steal his book they all would have died. 

Satan does not give a fuck

“Use the kid’s stupid fucking drawings you dipshit!”

“I can’t they’re story items!”

Goes on a rampage and kills so many deer, effectively feeding the group for a week.  

Sees the cannibals for the first time and thinks “same” 

Pretty good fighter and pretty resourceful when it comes to making armor and weapons. 

Outfits MC with the all of his prototypes and tells them to go run at a tree

“How do you feel, MC?”

“Like I ran at a tree with a deer skin on my chest”

“Interesting”

Very upset at the whole no magic thing, but will work with it.

Over all, 7/10 job. Dies a couple times from cannibals and the other monsters, but makes it to the end.

Asmo

Oh dear. 

Oh dear this sweet summer child. 

“Why are we looking for this child when he’s so ugly?”

Is distraught and so very upset this is happening to him. Cries variations of “woe is me” for the first five hours of game play

Does not help build a shelter

Does not help gather food and resources

Does not help period. Only whines. 

Sees cannibals sprinting and jumping towards the shelter and pushes Lucifer in front of him

“Take him! I’m too pretty to die!”

“HEY!”

What follows after the first three days is a slow decent into madness. 

Ends up butt ass naked for the majority of the game because the clothes he spawned in with were ripped to shreds and “No animal skin clothing in this world is good enough to adorn my perfect body”

Starts speaking to the animals and becomes friends with all of them like a Disney Princess. 

The animals come to his aid when he lets out a specific shriek that calls them to his side.

Spends his time weaving flower crowns for MC, his brothers, and his animal friends. 

Everyone knows he’s snapped when Beel brings back the dead body of a cannibal and Asmo dips his dirty little finger into an open wound and wipes the blood on his lips. 

“I just love this shade! Don’t you?” 

5/10 job. Dies multiple times from trying to befriend hostile animals, but also has an army of woodland creatures at his disposal by the end of the game.

Beel

Bro you know this mans is about to make this game his bitch

Spawns in with a cheeseburger.

Eats the cheeseburger.

“I have a son?”

“I HAVE A SON :D”

“Where is my son?”

Honestly the thought of Beel in this game is so sexy like I’m simping so hard rn 

Grab your water skins and buckle up bc it’s about to get thirsty up in here y’all

A shirt? Beel doesn’t know what those are anymore

He crafts one of those shoulder harnesses out of hide and bone and sticks a bone shiv thing on the forearm 

Don’t mess with this demon when his dinner and his family is on the line.

Is not afraid of anything except the death of his loved ones.

Cannibals? Nah, dinner.

Other monsters? Nah, dinner. 

Full shirtless lumberjack mode with Lucifer, and later Mammon, when cutting down trees in the forest. MC is drooling. 

Definitely makes a game out of how many trees they can all chop down before giving up.

Plays knuckle bones with Belphie and MC using real knuckle bones. 

Doesn’t want to share his food with the others but will if they didn’t get anything to eat that day. 

Chef Beel. That’s it that’s the post. 

10/10 job. Only dies once throwing his body over Belphie’s sleeping one to save him. 

Get’s annoyed when he finds out Belphie was fake sleeping

Very sexy. Would watch. 

Belphie

Nah dude no thanks 

Alexa play “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

Alexa play “Billie Jean”

“And the kid is not my son”

Get’s so fucking pissed when he finds out he can’t sleep without everyone else deciding to sleep too so he just lays down with his eyes closed and hopes for the best.

Doesn’t help with anything unless someone asks him to

Even then he’ll roll his eyes like brat and slowly do it

An actual sloth

No like he clings to MC and Beel like a sleepy sloth 100% of the time

He can’t find any cows and is sad so he settles for the local deer instead. 

Fake sleeps through most of the whole thing, paying monster and cannibals alike absolutely no mind. Beel will take care of it.

Freaks the fuck out when Beel dies on top of him and goes into a rage and kills everything in sight. 

Very sweet reunion when he realizes that they just respawn.

No longer pays death any mind and continues fake sleeping. 

0/10. Virtually useless. 

Masterpost

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

How does his boat change direction?

His career summary is key to getting noticed. But his IG account is all about him as an actor, not as an author.

If his goal is to move away from acting (his profession) and he prefers not to be an actor, he has to be ready to face whatever might come his way. Certainly, one thing is clear, being an actor, it was worth it once he gained a steady audience of 3 million followers, which he will never repeat into his new pretentious persona, believing he is an author ✍️ when he is not. Hiring a ghostwriter to write his book and compile an almanac, there’s no such thing as a writer's idea. It makes him look like a snobby person.

He pretends to be an intellectual, but does not learn or explore texts so that he can maximize his talents and expand his skills (if he has any under the sunlight)

He overlooks the obvious. You never become a dumb buyer when you get rich quick. He considers that having things makes him feel better. Not only that, but he has only renewed his emotional waste.

Intellectuals are people who read, think, learn every day of their lives because they need to; They can’t even conceive of not nourishing their brain as much as their bodies. It involves a lot of critical thinking, reading, research, analysing. He is also certainly very passive in that matter!

The reason he aspired to call himself “bestselling author” is because it increases his credibility and “personal brand.” He pretends to establish as an intellectual. Despite he supposes better get writing…😳😂 He’s able to convince that he not only wrote a book, but that the market has judged it to be better than other books out there (delusions of grandeur) It’s a status symbol, one of that cashes in on the prestige of one of man’s oldest past-times. At last, He had acquired this coveted title for himself.

If he has to do a job that doesn't align with his chosen career path, he’s going to be limited in terms of what he can do as an actor. How he communicates with others, whether if it’s through speech, influences how others perceive and evaluate him as a professional.

His ability to articulate his thoughts and ideas has a direct correlation to how he persuades others 🙄 an honorary doctorate didn’t convince anyone. Giving an academic qualification to him when he hasn't studied and done the course. I think it’s fairly clear. Well, that was ironic. That was making him sound ignorant.

Everybody remembers his university speech 💭 at the University of Stirling 🎓 badly prepared and self-promotion. Sam disrespected graduates and faculty at the Institution. He didn't inspire students or contribution to the university, not a role model.

If he’s still not sure about whether he wants to be an actor anymore or not, here is some clear sign that he’s just dragging his fans along and whatever relationship with his acting career has now is going nowhere. An alert to the Royal Conservatory of Scotland who trusted him and now he must prove that he is worth something.

😕 But, if he wants to act, stopped being obsessed with fame because he is more interested in being famous than practising his craft. He always seems slightly agitated, as if there’s something going on. He really is jumping off a moving train!

“I don’t approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying ‘Shucks, I ain’t no actor – I’m just a bridge builder or a gas station attendant.’ If they aren’t actors, what the hell are they getting paid for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it.”

Humphrey Bogart

[alottanothing]

Left to Ruin: Chapter Nineteen

Summary: Nouke shares concerns with Kahmunrah’s freedom. Ahk learns of potential enemies and finds comfort from the woman he loves. 

Previous Chapters

Word Count: 7360

Warnings: Little angsty, little smutty but not terribly explicit--18+ only just to be safe

Tag List: @xmxisxforxmaybe, @r-ahh-mi, @theultraviolencefan, @hah0106, @rami-malek-trash, @diasimar, @sherlollydramoine, @flipper-kisses, @ivy-miranda-2390, @txmel, @sunkissedmikky, @concentratedsassandcandy, @babyalienfairy, @edteche2​ (Let me know if I missed you, or if you would like to be added to the tag list) 

A/N:  Long chapter this week! And it’s spicy towards the end! That doesn’t mean there’s no plot, there’s defiantly a shift in our dear pharaoh’s world that will carry through to the end, so YAY for that. This is also were I took some major historical liberties for the sake of my plot; so forgive me on that... Thank you to all of you who left comments or gifs or fun tags last week, you guys are the best. Hopefully the tags work on this chapter, I went through and readded them, if not, I’ll just reblog it again with the tags. Sorry tumblr doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with me. (There’s also a chance this will get flagged because of my choice of photos in my moodboard, hopefully not...but we will see). Once again as a disclaimer, I am not an ancient Egyptian expert and google only knows so much. So yeah, I took so historical liberties while writing this to make my life easier, but tried to keep it as “authentic” as possible

The mid-afternoon sun was high overhead, beating against the sands with sweltering golden rays that—even with the breeze—were beginning to slip into an acutely unbearable heat. Ahkmenrah, however, didn’t mind it.

The ardor of Ra’s rays upon his tan skin tingled with an effervescence that made him feel alive. Most of his days were spent confined in the halls of his great palace, shielded from the warmth as he went about his responsibilities as king. His childhood was rich with memories under the sun and against the capricious desert winds; and every day the pharaoh counted the hours until he could bathe in that luminous golden glow—even if it was only for an hour or two.

That afternoon had been auspicious; in that, the usual noise and obligations of his daily routine stood at a plateau. There were so few civic duties to see to in the throne room that just as Ahkmenrah had made himself comfortable in the garish chair, there were no other appointments to see to.

It was a relief Ahk chose not to take for granted. The previous six months were riddled with visitors—noble men and women—who came from near and far to shower their new prince with pleasantries and gifts. Each was a well crafted, almost wholesome, pantomime: a show of allegiance with the hope to somehow gain the infant's favor. It seemed ridiculous, but the king and queen played host as they were expected to for them all.

The last of the guests had left that morning on their boat or in caravans, traveling back to their home along the Nile. It felt good to be rid of them. All that remained for Ahk to see to with his kingly persona was the council meeting; even that would be simpler than hosting nobles. He looked forward to an easy briefing.

With the promise of a simple meeting on the horizon and a lax morning behind him, Ahkmenrah took to the grandest of the palace gardens (the very same he’d entertained droves of guests the night Nouke became his queen). The significantly quieter grounds offered a pleasant backdrop as he strolled leisurely along the sandstone footpaths with Kahmunrah at his side. Ahk preferred the serenity to the chaos.

Sharing walks with Kahmunrah had become something of a routine when their busy schedules would allow such a liberty. Each venture lent a catharsis that embodied all the evenings they shared together in the cells, and the lack of bars only seemed to amplify the abreaction of their conversations. Even when most of the topics they spoke of were political matters, the words they exchanged were meditative.

Often, Merenkahre joined them, adding his two cents where he felt was necessary, but mostly he seemed content to simply enjoy the jovial company of his sons. Although the former pharaoh never said it outright, Meren's demeanor was filled to the brim with joy, made evident by his immovable smirk. It thrilled him to see Kah free of his anger just as much as it thrilled Ahk.

In three months of freedom, Kah became a model brother and advisor. The years of over-aggressive solutions gave way to thoughtful guidance that Ahkmenrah knew his brother had always been able to formulate if he were to move past his anger. Only twice had Kahmunrah offered a less than ideal solution to a problem, and each time he caught himself to quickly remedy the blunder with an apology and an appropriate fix. Habits were hard to break and Ahkmenrah chose to be lenient, letting each folly pass with mild scolding.

Somehow, it was working; his brother was finally his brother. How strange it was for the pharaoh to think of all he held: an empire in his hands and a crown on his head. He had his parents—loving and wise—who strove to guide him through every day of his life. He had sisters who loved him, each of whom he loved dearly in return. Kahmunrah now looked upon him with respect. Sekmenrah, his son, was happier and stronger each day. And most of all, Ahkmenrah was blessed to fall into the arms of the woman he had always loved whenever he wanted.

Bliss couldn’t even describe what he felt. Blessed even seemed too rudimentary; though, in his heart, Ahk knew, his life and all he loved was a blessing. They were each of them gifts given to him directly from the gods themselves, and everyday Ahkmenrah prayed his thanks.

Merenkahre elected not to join his sons that particular afternoon, choosing, instead, to spend the hours before duty summoned once more with his wife.

The casual air of the palace fostered a calm that Ahk held on to gladly. With a limited list of duties to see to, there was very little for the pharaoh and his brother to discuss as they strolled through the grand garden, but Ahkmenrah was happy for the quiet company all the same as he thought dreamily of all the gifts his life held.

Their meditative promenade stretched into the early evening, and soon; Ahk's stomach grumbled in protest—tired of the walk and demanding food.

Kah grinned with a slight chuckle at the obnoxious sound and offered to escort his brother to the West Garden where the pharaoh took most of his meals with his queen.

The walk back through the palace was short and spent in amicable silence. Immediately a frown fought to turn Ahk’s lips, missing the sun against his face, but his smile came quickly once they reached the garden he loved and Ra’s golden columns once more warmed his skin.

Nouke was seated in the shade of a towering palm tree as she noshed on a plate of fruits and slices of bread laid upon the table in front of her. Her escort of Medjay and a single maidservant stood reverently nearby; a professional indifference painted on their features. The queen held the tiny prince in her lap, his wispy dark curls dancing in the breeze as he happily gummed his fist, making faint cooing sounds.

The picturesque scene worked through Ahkmenrah with a dizzying surge of glee, causing his lips to part in a radiant smile and his usually mindful gait to fumble as he descended the steps into the garden. Nouke watched his charming blunder with a chuckle and greeted him with a supremely more radiant grin that almost made him stumble again seeing its beauty.

The delight on her face waned however when the queen caught sight of Kahmunrah trailing a step behind her husband. She did her best to mask the sharp distaste, but Ahk caught it anyway.

After three months with no cause for alarm, Ahkmenrah had hoped Nouke would see Kah as the man he’d become rather than the one he used to be. Ahk understood her distrust, it was justifiable. Still, he longed for her to let go of the past, the same way Kah learned to do.

“My love,” Ahk bent to greet his queen with a long kiss before placing a gentle peck to the top of his son’s head, and seated himself across from them at the table.

“Hello, love,” she hummed, once again casting him in the light of her radiant smile, making a point to ignore Kahmunrah completely.

“We missed you,” she mused, gently combing her fingers through Sekmen’s curls adoringly. “Didn’t we, my little prince?”

As if he’d understood, Sek cooed loudly with a chuckle and reached across the table towards his father. Ahkmenrah beamed and reached too, until his son’s tiny hand wrapped around one of his fingers.

“I always miss you both whenever I’m not with you,” Ahk said marveling at his family.

“Well,” Kahmunrah announced and the suddenness made Ahk jump having forgotten his brother was still there. “I will leave the king and queen—as well as the little prince—to their meal. There are a few things that require my attention before the council meeting.”

Ahkmenrah’s brows knit together, wondering what business Kah had that didn’t concern the pharaoh.

“It’s trivial, brother,” Kah answered vaguely, reading the look of puzzlement on Ahk’s face, and waved his hand with a dismissive flair signaling the end of that particular thought.

“Until tonight's meeting,” he bowed to his younger brother, and again as he addressed Nouke. “My queen.”

She turned her head to ignore him until he laid a gentle pat to the top of Sekmen’s head as he spoke, “Nephew.”

Kah bid them all with another bow and made his leave without another word. Nouke’s eyes watched him go with a predatorial intensity—a lioness protecting her cub—as the once relaxed lines of her body suddenly became rigid and fierce.

Ahkmenrah had difficulty quelling the discouraging sigh that escaped him; perhaps not all aspects of his life were without tension.

“I’m sorry,” Nouke said quickly, some of the fire draining from her expression, however her distrust was still palpable.

“You don’t have to apologize," Ahk promised as his eyes fell to the table.

For all the wrong Kahmunrah had done to him; he'd done worse to Nouke. The wounds he inflicted upon her were worse than most, and time may never be enough to heal them. Ahkmenrah longed for peace in his family, but he feared Nouke would never be able to find that peace.

“I wish you would have ordered Medjay to watch him,” she expressed as gently as she could.

“To spy on him, you mean. “ Ahk did his best to swallow the abrupt influx of frustration regarding the topic; he didn’t want it to bleed into his tone and spoil their evening together.

Spies were deceitful, no matter how useful, and he wasn’t going to betray his brother’s trust like that.

“If spies are what it’s going to take to keep you safe—to keep our son safe.” She countered, fire engulfing her tone, making it clear that Ahk had unsuccessfully masked his own ire.

The pharaoh’s eyes rose from the surface of the table to watch the little boy in his wife’s arms; so small and innocent, once more gnawing on his balled fist. Sekmen was blissfully untainted by the evils of the world, and Ahk wanted him to stay that way forever.

Ahkmenrah sighed again, this time in defeat of his own principle; he would gladly become the master of deceit and lies if it meant Sekmenrah and Nouke would be safe.

“I know how long you have wished Kahmunrah to be your brother—that was one of the only things I remember you wanting as a boy.” Nouke’s tone turned soft, and she reached across the table to take his hand with a smile.

“Just promise me, Ahk.”

He met her eyes hearing the urgency and plea in her tone.

“Promise me you won’t let that childhood wish blind you.” There was a glimmer of doubt manifesting in the mist glistening in her eyes, as though she feared he would disavow her request.

Ahk placed his other hand over their joined one, meeting her gaze with a soft intensity he hoped was telling of his vow.

“I promise.”

The mist dissolved in her eyes as relief cast a lightness over her features. All the tension that threatened to sully the air between them drifted away the moment his promise passed his lips.

The remainder of their afternoon progressed quickly with a flurry of tender touches and musings of the youth they shared in the garden in which they sat. By the time duty beckoned the pharaoh back into the halls of the palace, Ahkmenrah’s heart was feather-light and beating with loving fervor as he made his way to the council chamber.

The levity of the evening was snuffed out much too quickly.

Something ominous hung in the air of the council chamber; something thick and rotten and odious. It was a sense that, in all his years, Ahkmenrah had never had the misfortune of experiencing. It clung to his skin like a greasy film, and he could feel its urgency in the abrupt way all the whispers hushed the moment his advisors saw him. Their sudden silence was entirely too loud.

Ahk could see it—whatever it was—in the collective of their dark, unblinking eyes; every pair laden with such dismay, they effectively dissolved all the remaining joy left for the pharaoh to anchor himself to.

Ahkmenrah froze only a few steps over the threshold, finding the dense air to be an invisible web difficult to maneuver under such scrutiny. His father alone seemed immune to the force that plagued the atmosphere, looking more pensive than usual.

“Why do you all look so forlorn?” Ahkmenrah asked in a careful tone he hoped wasn’t telling of his swiftly growing concern.

He wanted a quick answer, one that would rapidly thwart the anxiety brewing in the pit of his stomach. Instead, he was met with a wave of shared glances that swept around the long table, moving from man to man, making it obvious no one wanted to impart the unmistakably bad news.

Their mutual hesitance only made the situation feel more grievous and Ahk tightened his jaw, reinforcing his kingly façade. How fitting it was to have a day of carefree whim close on something portentous.

Finally, after he gauged all the men with an imploring expression, his father spoke.

“Please sit, my king. There is much that needs to be discussed.” Merenkahre’s features were guarded and difficult to make out. The only clue Ahk could derive from his father's face was the deep, ever-ponderous crease on his brow, indicating that something in the realm was, indeed, off.

Without a word, Ahk fixed himself at his usual place at the head of the table and gave a nod and a wave of his hand for them to begin their briefing.

The meeting progressed as it usually did, normal business of the crown that was dealt with every day; examined and discussed thoroughly, before moving on to the next issue. Everything felt tedious with something looming threateningly out of sight. All the new—old—topics brought to attention only delayed whatever lurked in the shadows of the room, and time felt frozen because of it.

By the time the unknown issue was brought to the light, Ahk’s nerves felt keenly exposed and on fire; his fingers all but clawing at the surface of the table.

The man who stood to speak was much older than most who sat on the pharaoh’s council. He was slender and his skin was wrinkled all over. His head held no hair, but his gray eyebrows were long and wiry and telling of his age.

Ahkmenrah had known him since he was a child; Merhet had been the Grand Consul for two pharaohs: Merenkahre, and Merenkahre’s father. When Ahk was crowned, the old man stepped down to allow Meren to take his place to help guide his son. Ahkmenrah repaid his loyalty by granting him the seat as Consul of Thoth; the pharaoh’s procurer of whispers and wisdom to help benefit the whole of Egypt.

How such knowledge came to Merhet; Ahk was unsure: spies—he figured, and the notion made him sigh.

It was rare Merhet had cause to speak, which usually meant all was right in Egypt's corner of the world, and when he stood from his chair, the pharaoh felt his stomach churn uneasily.

“Speak your peace, friend,” Ahkmenrah encouraged kindly when the man met him with a questioning glance.

Merhet bowed respectfully before he spoke. “My king, as your Consul of Thoth, it is my duty to inform you of happenings within your great empire.”

Ahkmenrah nodded, imploring him to go on with an attentive stare.

“I am sorry to bring you a troubling report, but it seems there are whispers of a possible uprising in the nation to our south.”

Ahk swallowed the lump that grew in his throat quickly before it could choke him and kept his sight focused on Merhet.

“The Nehesyw?” he asked calmly.

Merhet nodded. “Yes. As you know, it is from them that we mine our gold and a few other precious resources…”

The pharaoh’s eyes glanced tentatively, suddenly all too aware of the number of riches in only that room.

“…it seems they are tired of most of their land's riches coming to Egypt,” Merhet concluded.

Ahkmenrah’s focus fell to the wood grain of the table as his mind began to flood with thoughts of dread. The only promise to come from revolution was suffering, no matter what outcome was reached; someone would be made to suffer. Of all his duties as ruler, war, and waging it were the ones he feared most.

“These are just rumors,” Merenkahre said sternly, dispelling some anxiety. “My friend, you had us all under the impression that the Nehesyw were already taking up arms against us.”

Ahk’s blinking eyes turned to his father, seeing the calm air of his features and wished he could harness a fraction of that resolve.

“From who was it you heard these rumors?” Ahkmenrah asked, mimicking his father’s steady tone.

Merhet shifted uneasily where he stood, and his eyes scanned over all the men at the table, lingering on Kahmunrah as he thought.

“My—uh—network, your majesty," he said vaguely.

A somewhat irritated simper twisted onto Kah’s features; displeased by the answer.

“Your network? Please, elaborate.” Kah’s tone was harsh, but softened when he added, “Help us to understand.”

The room turned its collective eyes to Merhet for an answer.

“Merchants," he said quickly as though he’d made it up.

“Merchants?" Ahkmenrah repeated, eye's narrowing.

Something else felt off; like there was a piece of his story he was keeping to himself. The idea made the atmosphere even more unsettling, but in a different manner that was equally as foreboding.

“Yes, my king.” The old man nodded, this time sounding more sure. “They are employed to bring goods directly from the Nehesywian markets to the palace. They returned this morning with these whispers.”

Merhet’s eyes looked shamefully away from the pharaoh, clearly, there was more he wanted to say but feared to.

“What else?” Ahk demanded firmly but without aggression.

The Consul of Thoth met the pharaoh’s intense gaze for only a moment before his head fell again, apologetically.

“Forgive me, my king. But the Nehesyw also speak of you. They say the pharaoh is weak, and so must be his nation.”

Weak?

The word screamed in the back of Ahkmenrah’s mind until it grew so loud all his other thoughts were scoured away. Only one other person had ever claimed him to be a weak ruler, and the pharaoh’s eyes settled upon his brother. Suddenly, Nouke’s words and distrust began to scream just as loudly in his mind, and Ahk’s stomach twisted with knots.

Kahmunrah sneered, “Enough of this,” and ordered Merhet to sit back in his seat; coming to his brother’s defense in a timely fashion that deterred a bit of Ahk’s trepidation.

“Kahmunrah is right; I've heard enough,” Merenkahre stated with a finality that split the discomfort of the room.

“These are rumors,” he stressed, engaging every man at the table with intensity. “We will treat them as such, and nothing more.”

He turned to Merhet, kindness softening his eyes as he spoke. “We will look to your wisdom to keep us informed on these whispers—should they grow; we will move forward. Until then, I urge you to gauge them without panic. We could have started a war today over mere speculation.”

“Could we fight them?” Ahk asked, genuine curiosity and a tangible sense of dread driving the question past his lips.

His father’s stormy eyes shifted to him as he considered the answer carefully—the hesitation alone seemed to be the answer. If his reply was more than yes, then the answer had to be no.

“The Nehesyw are a savage people, their armies know no order. Were they civilized, they could take this city in a matter of days. Men, women, and children are all trained to fight, they outnumber the soldiers here at the capital three to one. But, they lack discipline, which is their downfall in the field.”

Ahkmenrah did his best to absorb all the information his father threw at him, unable to articulate a reply as his mind did its best to make sense of everything.

War—the word loomed like a dark cloud in his head making all rational thoughts veiled and difficult to find. The idea of blood on his hands was one that instilled him with such shame and remorse, tears were already threatening to swell in his eyes.

However, on the opposite side of the scale sat his people and his family; potential victims for their potential invaders. For them, Ahkmenrah would fight endlessly to protect all he cared about, no matter the consequences. He would endure a thousand battles, spill rivers and oceans of blood if doing so meant keeping them out of harm's way.

“Perhaps we should shore up our defenses as a precaution?” Kahmunrah suggested.

Before Ahkmenrah could respond, Merenkahre shot down the idea, “No.”

Ahk threw a quizzical look to his father.

Merenkahre had taught him many lessons: how to strategize war, however, was not one of them. Had Ahk been wiser in his youth, he would have urged his father to impart such knowledge to him, but he didn't, and now he felt lost. The pharaoh was at the mercy of those smarter than him.

“It would be unwise to do so,” Meren said, looking to his oldest son. “If word were to travel that the capital is gathering forces—that could be misconstrued as an act of war. It is important to carry on as usual.”

Merenkahre turned his sights to Ahkmenrah, “That is what a wise king would do.”

Ahkmenrah nodded quickly, wholly unfit to argue.

Kah sounded an irritated huff as his face contorted into a familiar guise Ahk could recall much too easily. Again, Nouke’s distrust drifted into the front of his mind, the sudden bout of alarm tightening the knots in his stomach.

He has changed. He is a better man. He is my brother.

Ahkmenrah took a slow breath as his mind repeated the chant in an attempt to alleviate the sour feeling in his gut.

He has changed. He is a better man. He is my brother. 

***

The journey back to his chamber was one Ahkmenrah ventured countless times: a brief, pleasurable trek through open breezeways by lush gardens and through artful corridors that, on most days, treated him with a jubilant soulfulness that made all the worldly pressures seem to fade away. However, as his feet moved across the stone floor on that particular trip, he found the scenery did not coddle him as it usually did.

The newfound—dreadfully precarious—weight he carried on his shoulders wilted his regal posture, his head hanging pensively. He knew it was going to take more than a meditative walk to remedy his spirit; a notion itself that added to the burden upon him.

Ahk let his steps fall slower until his pace was more of a tired shuffle than a kingly gait as he fought to compel the tension out of his muscles and the anxiety out of his heart and head. He didn’t want his concern to bleed into the hours he devoted to his family while duty slept—those were joys he was most unwilling to sacrifice.

By the time he found himself at his chamber doors, Ahkmenrah wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse after his lengthened stroll. Or, perhaps, he found himself in limbo: stuck somewhere between the two, which was hardly encouraging.

“Goodnight, my king,” Kamuzu bid him with a bow.

He didn’t turn to leave right away, instead, the king's guardian lingered, watching Ahkmenrah with a parental vigilance that fostered a glimmer of comfort.

“Thank you for another day of loyalty. I bid you rest well, my friend,” Ahk told him with a half-smile to show his gratefulness.

The Medjay bowed once more, and as he left, Ahkmenrah caught the tail end of a similar grin on Kamuzu’s features. The exchange was quick but heartened enough to combat some of the pharaoh’s dismay.

As his hand lingered on the door of his room, Ahk took in a deep breath to help bring him peace and bid both the Medjay standing guard a goodnight as he entered.

The air of the chamber almost instantly drove that peace home. It was like stepping into a dream; the atmosphere was light, not suffocating as the council chamber had been, and Ahkmenrah filled his lungs to compacity over and over until he became lightheaded and high from the clarity.

Only a few of the wall torches were lit, their luminescence casting a calming glow over the space that was warm and inviting, helping the pharaoh relax. He stood soaking in, and savoring every delicate sense until the encumbrance of the past few hours drifted away.

Quietly, Ahk rid himself of his ornate accessories, placing his crown upon the table at the center of the room, leaving the majority of his gold and incrusted garments in a heedless pile. His spirit lightened with every layer he shed until all that remained was his belt and shendyt.

For a moment, he reveled in the freedom—the feeling of being wonderfully human—without the glittering raiment to remind him of the woefully burdened god-king he was.

As he stood, tiny snores caught his ears and prompted his lips to curl into a smile. With a glance, Ahkmenrah found his son fast asleep in his cradle under a protective beam of Khonsu’s light. The sight instilled the pharaoh with eagerness, drawing his feet across the floor in fluid movements until he stood crib-side, utterly captivated by the beautiful boy he and Nouke had created with their love.

Sekmenrah stirred, his chubby arms and legs stretching, but too deep in his slumber to wake even when his father swept an admiring finger over the boy’s soft cheek.

The amount of love in Ahk’s heart for his son was entirely too much to comprehend. He was certain his destined path was not to be pharaoh but to be a father. Being a father meant more to Ahkmenrah than any crown or any empire in the whole world.

A content sigh fell from his lips as the last of his worry dissolved into a tingling warmth that spread throughout his being, soothing his body, mind, and soul. He always found tranquility in the sanctity of his chamber, with his family.

He lingered at his son’s side, watchful and admiring, until a breeze caressed the bare skin of his back and shoulders, bringing with it the faint scent of lily, myrrh, and cinnamon. The fragrance tickled his senses with allure and pulled his smile tighter across his face, recognizing the perfume his wife favored.

Ahkmenrah spun to find her standing on the balcony, gazing out over the city with her back to him. She too had rid herself of the finery that made her a queen, leaving only the colorful linen of her dress, cinched at her waist with a simple gold braided rope. Wind tussled her long, dark hair and the light fabric she wore, causing it to hug each of her curves in such a way that made the pharaoh’s mouth water.

Nouke was radiant under the silvery luminescence of the moon. Each time Ahk gazed upon her, his heart skipped, and he was rendered breathless—dizzy with affection. He glided effortlessly to her, hypnotized by her silent siren call. And when he wove his arms around her, pressing into the strong line of her back, Ahkmenrah was certain he’d never felt more at peace.

With a heartened hum, he nestled and cherished her closeness. At that moment, the world stood still while the edges of reality blurred into a fog until they were the only two beings in the entire universe.

Ahk buried his nose in the hollow of her neck, letting the fragrant smell of her skin, and its softness under the tip of his nose infuse with his senses. His lips came to rest on that nectary hollow, unable to quell the need to kiss her sweet-smelling flesh. He hummed again, profoundly content.

“I missed you,’ he mused pulling her closer as he laid more kisses across her neck and shoulder.

Nouke hummed too as her hands came to rest over his, tilting her head to grant him a wider canvas to paint with his tender lips.

“As have I, my king,” Nouke murmured as one of her hands reached to grasp and tangle in the curls on his head.

Ahk purred, emboldened by the gesture, and the tug she gave caused a pleasurable warmth to shoot through him.

His hips rolled against her rear, an involuntary reaction to the fire pulsing in his veins, but his queen responded with another soft yank to his curls and a wanton sigh that encouraged every movement. Ahk drew his tongue over the taught column of her neck, suckling the skin behind her ear until she sighed again.

“The council kept you from me longer than usual,” she said idly as the undulation of her hips met his until his body froze with the reminder of the reality beyond the fog.

Nouke’s hand left his scalp, falling to cradle his arms wrapped around her.

“Is everything alright?” There was concern in her voice, and for a moment Ahk was too lost in the way her fingertips swept calming patterns over his skin—coaxing him out of the darkness she’d blindly summoned—to answer.

“For the time being," Ahkmenrah decided on, not wanting to ruin the tranquility he felt with Nouke in his arms.

She spun lithely in his grasp, never severing their closeness to look at him with smoldering amber eyes filled to the brim with compassion.

“Ahk…” she said imploringly, resting fingers along his jaw as her eyes searched his for reasoning of the shadow that plagued him. “Tell me.”

As much as he wanted to forget about the situation that threatened Egypt for a while longer, the pharaoh could not keep things from his queen.

“There have been rumors from the south. The Nehesyw talk of rebellion.”

The furrow on her thin brows pressed deeper with concern, and her hands fell open-palmed to his chest as he continued to hold her close.

“Rebellion?” Though she did her best to hide it from him, fear danced like flames behind her eyes.

A pang of anguish bit into Ahk seeing that frightened flash.

“Do not worry, my love,” he assured her in as light of a tone as he could manage, tucking stray locks of hair behind her ear. “For now, they are simply rumors. My men are keeping their ears open for changes should they come.”

A frown turned her lips to match the fear in her eyes, “Is there nothing more being done?”

Ahkmenrah sighed, wishing there was more to put her at ease.

“Kahmunrah suggested we shored up our defenses here in the capital, but my father said doing so may make us appear to be readying for battle, which in turn could provoke them.”

Nouke’s focus grew distant, but her thoughts drifted over her features clear enough to witness in the light of the moon. Finally, she nodded, her fear becoming only a smolder.

“Your father is right.”

“I hope so.” The pharaoh could hear his own uncertainty as he spoke. “He is far more knowledgeable when it comes to matters such as these.”

Ahk paused to consider all that he had learned, and not learned, as Nouke wove herself around him in a tight embrace. Instinctively, his arms enveloped her in return.

“Even my brother understands these matters better than I,” he admitted, suddenly feeling every ounce the weak king his enemies thought him to be, and he tightened his hold on Nouke.

They stayed wrapped in each other’s reassuring arms for a long while until the edges of reality began to blur once more, and the previous levity settled into the atmosphere. Nouke pulled away first, just enough to meet his eyes.

“Speaking of your brother, I have been thinking about what we spoke of earlier.” She took a deep breath to steady herself, as though what she was about to say warranted more effort than normal.

“You know I trust you completely.” She swallowed and took one final breath. “So, if you trust Kahmunrah, then perhaps it is time I learn to trust him as well.”

The look in her eyes betrayed her heartened tone. The air fell thickly silent between them as a knot formed in Ahkmenrah’s stomach. The gaze with which she held him begged for him to let her recant.

Ahkmenrah had so longed to have unity within the whole of his family. Nouke knew that—he knew she knew that. She stood willing to disregard her own prejudice and learn to trust a man she so strongly detested for all he had done to her family, all out of the love she harbored for him—a true testament to that love. It was selfless, which made it undoubtedly greedy for him to let her walk a path she only thought she could weather. It was wiser to continue as they were.

The pharaoh was torn; his words stained his tongue, unable to come out, as his mind was suddenly too overworked to process any more uncertainty.

“Okay,” he whispered finally.

The moment he spoke it; he was only too aware of how weak his one-word reply sounded fumbling from his lips. Even worse was the tangible disappointment in his queen’s eyes when she smiled at him. It was a momentary flicker—a blink, and you’ll miss it moment—but Ahkmenrah caught it, and his heart sank.

“I love you,” she reassured him after a moment of more melancholy quiet.

The smile she held then was genuine and comforting, and Ahk matched it.

“I love you,” he echoed, and she kissed him until all the uncertainty left them both.

The pharaoh drew his queen closer, letting the tips of her fingers press into his chest, drowning himself in every sensation of her until all the wickedness of his day was burned out of his mind. The billow of her breathless cry over his moist lips prompted a chill, encouraging him, and Ahk threaded his fingers through her hair to hold her in place.

He kissed her slowly and without urgency, and Nouke mimicked the lazy give and take; as if to memorize the very essence of the tender moment—the taste, the feel, the passion. Both were completely present for the methodical play of the other’s lips as their dance built to a perfect crescendo.

Nouke leaned into her king like he was the air, and she was gasping, and he was only too willing to grant her everything she desperately needed. The glide of his tongue over her plump lower lip caused her mouth to open with a hungry sound Ahkmenrah muffled with his own. His hands drifted from her scalp to explore every curve—his lips and tongue still drinking languidly from her giving mouth.

Her hips were soft under his fingertips, and they lingered there, pressing possessively, before scaling the ladder of her ribs—each rise and dip subtle under the thin fabric of her gown. Mentally Ahk counted each bone as his hands worked towards her breasts. Eagerly he palmed their new fullness, filling each hand as he stopped to squeeze them gently before continuing on until he found the straps fixated loosely on her shoulders.

His mouth moved to the angle of her jaw, suckling the hinge he cajoled a soft moan from his wife’s lips, and again when he artfully guided the top of her dress from her shoulders. The blissfully wanton sound caused his features to crook into a prideful smirk against her warm flesh as he blazed a trail of kisses down her stately neck.

Nouke’s breath hitched with a shaky whimper as the night air prickled over her chest in a wave of goosebumps upon the sudden exposure. Her body acted of its own volition, arching into him, and the feel of her breasts against his chest made the pharaoh’s cock twitch with anticipation.

He wanted her—he always wanted her. How long had it been since he truly had her? Buried himself deep inside of her until there was nothing but stars left to color both of their vision? It felt like ages.

When her hands found his scalp once more, the tips of her fingers massaging and scratching and pulling, he groaned from deep in his chest as his mind clouded with a lustful need. Ahkmenrah’s hand traveled to find her breasts, pausing only a moment to once again delight in their new fullness, wonderfully unobstructed by the fabric of her dress.

As his lips latched to her collarbone, he pinched the pert peak of her nipple between his second and third finger, grinning as her lewd cry met his ears. Hands tugged firmly in his hair in retaliation and Ahk bit the rise of her clavicle to keep from moaning too loudly.

Heat pooled lower, blood rushing to his center with every soft groan and accompanying gentle friction.

A shiver worked through his queen when the tips of his finger danced up her spine as he guided her backward until they bounced against the wide rail that kept them from falling to the garden below. The moment their eyes met, a lecherous smile pulled at each of their features. Without need for a demand, Nouke wrapped her arms around his neck as he easily lifted her onto the flat, stone wall.

Her legs locked around him, pulling him against her for a searing kiss that found her gasping. When their lips parted, Ahk’s kisses continued in a line down her throat and the center of her chest, sweet but sloppy. His tongue swept at the underside of her breast, trailing over her nipple and all the way to the base of her neck, provoking her to sound a moan that Ahkmenrah felt vibrate through himself.

With his hands and mouth (and no small amount of enthusiasm) he mapped every part of her exposed flesh: from the lobes of her ears to the middle of her abdomen where the rope at her waist kept the rest of her gown from falling away. He knew every sweet spot that never failed to coax a flurry of sinful sounds past her kiss swollen lips; every dip, swell and curve were an instrument he had mastered with avidity and loved more each time he played.

Nouke’s nails scraped over his shoulders, leaving marks he would wear with pride come the morning before trailing to fist the curls on his head once more—pressing his face firmer against her chest.

She arched against him—gasping—when he rounded a nipple with his teeth, before laving it with his tongue. Her nails scratched down his back and against his shoulder, every part of him she could reach. And when his eyes met hers, he found fire: a raw, unguarded lust in them that sent a wave of arousal straight to his groin.

“Ahk…” she breathed into his mouth as she pulled him to her lips again.

The cry of his name wasn’t a question, but a wanton demand that saw him reaching under her dress in search of her sweet center. He beamed with an arrogant delight when he found the skin of her inner thighs slick and coated with arousal.

She was quick to kiss his smirk away with her own pompous simper, her hands working down the lean plates of his body. The hunger of her kiss he matched with equal vigor and desperation. As he drank from her lips, the heat of her skin increased and exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance that was profoundly more intoxicating than any oil or perfume.

They moaned each other's name in a worshipful praise, both craving the inexplicably euphoric closeness of becoming one, yet; neither was willing to cease the pleasurable teasing.

When his hands drifted closer to her heat, her hands swept further down his torso, the slow build causing him to strain the fabric of his shendyt. He could feel Nouke’s fingers working to untie his belt, the involuntary sweep of them against his aching hardness making him hiss and bite his lip. The pharaoh’s entire body was on fire and teeming with anticipation as both their fingers inched closer, ready to offer pleasure and relief.

Then, a fussy cry from inside their chamber sobered both the king and queen almost instantly.

Ahkmenrah’s breath caught on a bereft huff, cursing with a ragged exhale. Nouke sighed too, with a soft, lorn chuckle, drawing her husband's head against her chest to soothe his obvious disappointment.

“I couldn’t get him to nurse before I put him to bed,” she confessed, sounding just as dissatisfied as he felt.

“He’s probably hungry.” Her lips moved against his scalp as she spoke, punctuating each word with a gentle kiss.

“Mmm, I’m hungry too,” Ahk quipped, and he felt her lips smile.

“Later, my love.” Nouke held his face in her hands looking deep into his eyes. “Later.”

Ahkmenrah steadied himself with a long breath, listening to his son’s cries grow louder. It was a few minutes before either of them worked themselves out of the haze well enough to move again.

“I’ll go and get him,” Ahk said, throwing Nouke his most charming smile and kissed her in parting.

Despite the interruption, the pharaoh grinned at his fussy boy, whose tiny arms were flailing and begging for attention. The moment he spoke the boy’s name; big blue eyes stared up at him, wide and inquisitive as his sobs faded into soft whimpers.

“How dare you interrupt your king,” Ahkmenrah scolded gently as he picked up the boy. “A prince should know better.”

Sekmen’s whimpers turned to coos as Ahk sauntered back to the balcony.

“You get that from your mother, you know. Your rebellious spirit.”

Sek smiled at his father’s comment, a tiny chuckle parting his lips, as though he’d understood his father’s teasing.

“When was I ever rebellious?” Nouke retorted with a playful tone.

Ahk bit his bottom lip as he smiled, “I can think of a time or two.”

Nouke rolled her eyes fondly and reached for the bundle in Ahkmenrah’s arms, “Come here, my little prince.”

Sekmen cooed happily as she snuggled him to her breast.

The pharaoh found he could do nothing but watch; lips curled into a dreamy smile, completely overcome with love. Nouke had always taken his breath away, but under the veil of midnight, with their child in her arms, she was the most achingly beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes upon.

“What?” Nouke murmured when she caught him admiring.

His reply didn’t come right away, instead he paused to sweep a delicate touch through his son’s hair.

“I just love you both, so much.” His mind was suddenly fraught with the dreadful outcomes of war.

“The thought of losing either of you…”

“Don’t,” Nouke stopped him firmly, running a finger along his jaw, tilting his chin, so he could share her gaze. “Whatever these rumors or threat grows to be; we will get through it together.”

A glimmer of sadness and fear sparkled in her eyes accompanied with a seriousness he understood.

“Because I can’t lose you either, Ahkmenrah. I simply cannot.”

“You won't."

Once the prince was nestled in his bed, the king and queen made love, and made love again; then after they had made love once more—quiet and passionate and without thought—then, like how the sun sank into the horizon, they fell into a deep slumber free of dread and quandary.

Next Chapter-> Chapter Twenty: Blinded

[kbstories]

Deconstruction

de·con·struc·tion (n.) The act of breaking something down into its separate parts in order to understand its meaning.

To Trafalgar Law, trust has never come easy.

(Or: Luffy does his thing and Law recovers.)

Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Trafalgar Law Needs A Hug, Recovery, Nakamaship, Luffy Being Luffy, Minor Canon Divergence

Set between Dressrosa and Zou but Sanji is there because the author mixed up the canon timeline woops. Content warning for references to suicidal ideation (in the context of Law’s plan).

***

The coffee is good, Trafalgar Law thinks as he follows the wood grain pattern of the Sunny’s dining table with zero interest. His eyes itch like there’s a sandstorm raging between cornea and lid; Law is certain they’re swollen something fierce too, and can’t bring himself to care. Fuck, his head hurts.

Another sip, and Law’s lips twitch into a frown. Scratch that, the coffee is fantastic, and isn’t that another entry on the ridiculously long list of things-to-resent-Luffy-for. Admittedly, this particular dose was administered by Strawhat’s cook. Luffy-by-proxy, then.

Never let it be said that Trafalgar D. Water Law can’t be both a master strategist and a petty asshole.

Cigarette ever-present between his lips, Sanji regards him with something-like-sympathy. The look doesn’t stick around, there and gone while he prepares enough food to be considered a light lunch on the Thousand Sunny, and a veritable feast anywhere else.

Sour mood or not, Law can appreciate the space he’s given. Unlike a certain someone, most Strawhats know to leave him the fuck alone when Law asks for it.

With a porcelain click, a plate is placed next to his half-empty cup of coffee: It carries a colorful assortment of cut fruits and two onigiri, perfectly shaped. The portion is small enough not to challenge the loveless marriage Law has with his appetite, and the glass of water that follows is served sans the usual snide commentary.

So much for that.

Law glowers at Sanji but the cook has already moved on to the dozen other dishes in varying stages of preparation, and to have a staring contest with Sanji’s back would be, well, childish. And unproductive.

The past few weeks – and yes, it’s weeks and not years or decades as his overtaxed nerves will have him believe – have taught Law a great many things. How much he appreciates wonderful concepts like privacy and personal bubbles, for example, and that the Sunny is a parallel universe where those things simply do not exist.

Oh, and also that food is not to be wasted, or else.

Thus, Law doesn't. He eats, and a quiet breath makes it out of his mouth that is only partially the annoyed sigh he intended. Because the food’s fucking delicious, and his stomach decides to stop hating him because it’s his favorite, and the headache that’s been shadowing his every step since he woke up eases just like that. Suddenly, the mother of all emotional hangovers dims and for the first time in hours, Law can think.

Sanji smiles like he knows it, too, the bastard.

Weeks of this bullshit and he’s at his limit, defenses shot, walls badly patched up and crumbling regardless. Law blinks and groans, presses tattooed fingers to closed lids in a desperate bid for the moisture building there to fuck off already.

And he’d thought he’d cried himself into a desert just yesterday. A naïve assumption to make, on a ship populated by sentimental idiots.

“Luffy finally got to you, huh?”

Oh, Law does not want to talk about it. The crux of the problem is that he wasn’t raised among thieves – at least, not entirely – and with the empty plate in front of him and the pleasant tingle of caffeine in his system, politeness dictates some form of reciprocation. Bepo would be oh-so-proud of him, if…

Well. That thought is added to the pile of others he pushes far down to be able to function.

So Law mumbles, “That’s one way to put it”, a fleeting glance over the rim of his cup ensuring that yup, that damnable glint of kindness is back in Sanji's eye and this time it's going nowhere. Law’s shoulders draw up so tight they might as well be made of granite, as rigid and unyielding as he wants to be. Strawhat made quick work of that illusion, too.

“Listen, cook–”

“You really think you’re the only one?” Sanji interrupts him calmly, a statement-turned-question for Law’s sake, and Law shuts up and watches the other smoke for a few, tense seconds.

Tense for him, at least. Sanji looks like he does this every fucking day, leaning against the counter with his back straight and his legs crossed at the ankles and his words piercing past all pretense like he’s the one known to wield swords, not the other way around.

Law just gives him a look. Sanji chuckles and turns his head to blow out the smoke away from him; in return, the doctor spares him the comment about deadly habits that he’s probably heard from Chopper a thousand times anyways.

“Well, you’re not. Luffy pulled that shit with every single other person he’s decided to befriend, so we’re all – pardon the pun – on the same boat here.”

“…Everyone?”

Even Zoro? is the real question here, because Law can imagine pretty much every Strawhat losing it eventually (they’re an overly emotional bunch even on a good day) but somehow his mind blanks at their first mate. And Nico Robin, while he’s at it.

There’s a particular sort of glee in Sanji’s gaze, then. “Everyone. Captain’s a charming little shit, and he hates seeing someone being sad on his ship. With that fucker Mingo gone and”, he gestures casually at Law’s… everything, and Law glares, “it was only a matter of time, really.”

“I see”, Law says but he doesn't, not really. Even after sailing with him, fighting with him, bleeding with him, Luffy remains an enigma and ultimately unpredictable. Law taps a rhythm against the edge of the table, catches himself doing it, stops.

“I don’t know how you stand it.”

What he means is the incessant laughter, the constant interruptions, the Hi Traffy! and What are you doing, Traffy? and Traffy, play with us! and You’re funny, Traffy! – yet all he thinks of are intense brown eyes and a starburst scar and Luffy’s voice, quiet with sudden sincerity:

Don't you know? You deserve to be happy, Law.

Law misses the flippantly dismissive tone he was aiming for by a nautical mile and then some. He winces, looks away with a huff; there’s no way Sanji can miss the rough honesty in Law’s voice, obvious and crimson-red like a target sign, pointing to the parts of his soul left aching and raw.

All Sanji does is shrug as if to say, you get used to it, and he extinguishes his cigarette and picks up the plate and leaves the cup with a pointed look. The cook returns to his craft and just like that, Law is off the hook again.

Oh.

His coffee is cold by now but he finishes it anyway, downing the rest like a shot of liquor. Carefully, Law returns the cup to the counter next to Sanji’s elbow, and his murmur of thanks is accepted with an easy-going smile.

Law’s motivation to step outside and face the day is fractured and hazardously taped together at best. There is no reason to delay it any further: It’s a miracle the galley hasn’t been invaded already, especially with the smell of grilling meat wafting all over deck at this point. Law will take whatever his pitiful sense of luck will grant him.

That is, until he taps his hat in parting, opens the door and promptly stumbles over Monkey D. Luffy, captain of the Strawhat Pirates and recently-assigned commander of an extensive fleet, as he loses balance and rolls into the room with a dumbfounded look of surprise on his face. Law stares as it is swiftly replaced by a delighted smile.

“Oh, hey Tra–!”

With a flash of blue and the dull flop of a book on wood, Law disappears.

*

The sun is dipping towards the horizon and painting everything in vibrant reds and gold when Law decides to stop avoiding Luffy.

It’s a bizarre amalgamation of factors that leads up to it: Nico Robin’s look of mild curiosity as he appears in the library without warning; the fact Law has already dug up and read every book that is even tangentially related to any of his interests (and those that aren’t, too); a rare sense of yearning to feel the wind on his face and to watch the sea as she tosses and turns playfully against the Sunny’s hull–

The sea is out there, however, and so is Luffy, and were his self-control to slip any further, Law would shudder with the nervous energy that tingles in his veins at the thought.

The truth is that Luffy is brilliant. Perhaps not book smart like Law or as mechanically gifted as his shipwright or his sniper – people and emotions, that’s what Strawhat Luffy knows better than anyone, and it’s fucking terrifying. By his own design, Law is more lies and deceit and meticulous strategy than he is a person; it’s what carried him from being a child-beyond-death all the way to Dressrosa, the island-that-would-be-his-grave. It’s the one element that didn’t change in a plan he revised and adapted a million times over the years.

And then Law shambled Luffy out of the air and Luffy smiled at him and they set sail again and there, with all escape routes barricated by endless blue, the man dedicated a whole week of his life to go look for what’s left of Trafalgar Law in the aftermath and just... No.

A real shame that the ally he chose turned out to be allergic to plans. And common sense, and doing things in reasonable amounts, and– He sighs, a tired little noise that is lost to the uncaring backs of countless books.

Yeah, this is getting ridiculous.

Thousand Sunny can rarely be described as quiet by any definition. Stepping out on the quarterdeck, Law is met with the idle cries of sea gulls high above and the fluttering of the gaff sail as it turns to catch a lazy breeze. The sight of a napping swordsman, a sun-bathing model, and a skeleton delicately partaking in afternoon tea with a reindeer really shouldn’t register as anything other than bat-shit insane. He finds himself immediately losing parts of the habitual scowl he keeps on his face, and once again he has to wonder what kind of forbidden magic the Strawhats wield to simply do that.

No matter. With steady hands, Law tucks the tips of his hair under his hat – it’s gotten rather long, without Penguin around to cut it – and makes his way across deck, side-stepping Zoro’s comfortable sprawl with an ease born of practice.

The same ease with which he ignores the mumbled comment of “Fucking finally”, as much as it makes his stomach churn. The notion that everyone on the ship knows is not a comforting one.

Your crew is waiting for you! Are you gonna give up on them, too?!

You don’t know shit about my crew, Strawhat!

Then again, a screaming match between two captains in the small hours of the night can hardly be categorized as ‘stealthy’.

Framed by the sun, Luffy is a proud silhouette atop the figurehead of his ship. His legs are crossed, hands hooked under his shins as if to limit the amount of excited twitching to be done; boundless energy slips through the cracks like the glow of a firefly held between two hands. Law huffs a breath, shakes his head. A botched attempt at holding back but an attempt nonetheless. He can respect that, at least.

The unwritten agreement among the Strawhats is that this spot, it’s Luffy’s and Luffy’s alone. The man claims no other luxury on his own ship – which contains a captain’s cabin, Law checked with the cyborg on that, it’s just that it’s used for storage because Luffy-bro doesn’t like sleeping alone, you know? – and there hasn’t yet been a situation which required contesting that.

Thus, Law hesitates just outside the invisible circle drawn around the Sunny’s wooden mane. And, while there’s little doubt the other can track his approach, he knows he owes him for the tactical retreat earlier in the day.

“Luffy.”

Law’s tone is neutral, expression marginally softened by the clear relief in Luffy’s reply of “Traffy!” that comes with a glance over his shoulder. The grin that follows may be the only predictable thing about the guy, and Law can’t find it in himself to begrudge him for that.

“Come up, come up! I wanna show you something.”

For once, he walks instead of using Room. There’s nothing to replace himself with up there except for Luffy’s hat, and (the expected outcome of his big plan aside) Law doesn’t actually have a death wish. Step by step, Sunny’s head reveals a breathtaking view that only a handful of people have seen: From end to end, the line between sky and ocean disappears in the purple-pink swirls of twilight and a world that stretches on to infinity below their feet. Up here, a universe of possibility is within reach for those courageous enough to try.

No wonder Luffy adores it so much.

Law sits next to him with as much grace as he can muster, one knee pulled close to his chest and disregarding the painful twinge from his side where the nerves of his arm have yet to fully reconnect. His gaze remains on the horizon for a while longer, soaking up the sight befitting of a king.

“So that’s why you’re always up here.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah! It’s cool, right?” Luffy snickers, patting the polished wood under them like one would a well-behaved dog. Or lion, in this case. “Sunny’s the best. But that’s not it. Look!”

Law throws him a measured glance to see what he means and gets stuck on the scrap of paper cradled in Luffy’s hand with care, inching straight ahead. “Nami says we’re getting close”, Luffy tells him, voice radiating warmth and giddy anticipation in equal shares. “I can't wait to see them all again!”

Bepo (Bear), it says in Law’s own writing, with a miniscule scribble of the Heart Pirates symbol next to it.

“That’s...”

His train of thought is derailed by the sudden longing wrapping around his heart, there and impossible to push aside. Law misses his crew, misses Bepo’s stupid apologies and Ikkaku’s stern reprimands and the hopeless blush Penguin and Shachi share when a woman merely acknowledges their presence. In hindsight, the months without them seem unbearably lonely, bleak and shadowed without the cozy togetherness of his family and the comforting hum of the Polar Tang all around him.

To Law, giving that Vivre Card to the Strawhats was the last bit of reassurance he needed to make his plan a reality – a wordless promise for them to find his crew and tell them it worked, perhaps some final words, if he got lucky enough to utter them. Now, after, it takes all his resolve not to snatch the precious paper away and never let it out of sight ever again.

He snaps himself out of it in time to stay exactly where he is, opening his mouth without the faintest idea where to begin putting it all into words, but by that point Luffy is already showing him his palm, offering Law everything he holds dear without asking anything in return or even a shred of hesitation.

A captain without a crew is sad and lost. Don’t you know? You deserve to be happy, Law.

In that moment, it doesn’t matter how vulnerable and exposed he felt the night before or that Luffy saw– Law takes the Vivre Card back and holds it up to his eyes, barely blinking as the paper wriggles impatiently between his thumb and index, surrounded by the tender colors of dusk.

“I... When? Tomorrow? The day after?”

“Tomorrow”, Luffy nods and it’s the tone he makes promises with, filled with determination and the courage to dream. He leans back on his hands, says, “Told ya we’ll take you home”, the smile on Luffy’s lips now soft with fondness.

It's an unfamiliar comfort, to watch the sun disappear knowing dawn carries with it a brighter future. For the first time in years, excitement bubbles warmly in Law's chest. Humming, he quietly admits, “Yeah, you did.”

Then Law laughs, rusty and a little awkward, and feels freer than he ever has.

[halfelven]

Thank you so much! 🥰 Yes, I have a few ideas for some of them, but! I’ll go with the ones I usually use

Gandalf: still a wanderer, no one knows what he does for a living or how he can turn up out of the blue with a bunch of fireworks or souvenirs from other countries when no one knows if he has a job or really any money. no one has ever seen him purchase anything and he always just lives with friends

Aragorn: park ranger! he keeps people safe and has three border collies who are search and rescue dogs (he gets into politics later in life to push for environmental regulations and more social programs)

Boromir: he studied politics and was a swimmer in college. now he works an unpaid internship and lives with his brother in an attic apartment off campus because he wants to get away from their father, even though his room is untouched and waiting for him in Denethor’s home

Gimli: he’s one of the world’s best smiths and has a huge online following for his crafts. he went to university to study philosophy and is working on his masters

Legolas: he’s a social media influencer/youtuber. he studies biology and sustainable agriculture! he and Aragorn hunt for cryptids and ghosts in his videos sometimes :)

Frodo: he’s been in school for ages and no one knows what he’s studying he takes so many different classes. he’ll graduate with like three majors and two minors and go on to graduate school and will probably wind up a professor so he can stay in school forever

Sam: gardener! he’s studying sustainable agriculture too and is in most classes with Legolas. they stay up late studying and eating snacks

Merry: he’s a bit of a party boy at school, but he’s studying political science

Pippin: this baby boy is in high school and wants to study theatre

Elrond: he’s a world famous surgeon and occasionally concert pianist and also a composer. so beautiful and successful that you’d hate him if you didn’t love him

Arwen: she is a self-taught fashion designer who studies sociology, political science and sustainability in a self-designed major

Elrohir: he is studying marine biology. he wants to take a study abroad program to the most remote place in the world he can go to for a study abroad program

Elladan: he is studying pre-med and wants to be a pediatrician

Celebrían: she works at her father’s boat building business. she’s a sailor by heart

Gil-galad: a.) he doesn’t die b.) he inherited a great deal of money in his youth and is known as a philanthropist c.) he also sails d.) he thought about politics but ruined any shot at it by the scandal of being in a polyamorous relationship (dating Elrond who is also married to Gil-galad’s cousin. whatever, they make it work) e.) he is now a famous writer, co-writing many books with Elrond because Elrond’s a good writer too on top of the whole surgeon/musician/being pretty deal

Galadriel: she’s a psychiatrist with many ground-breaking ideas and research

Celeborn: designs and builds boats. he always smells like wood shavings

Denethor: he’s a high ranking politician 

Faramir: studying philosophy. he lives with Boromir and is bffs with Gimli (and Legolas, by extension)

Éowyn: in college on a football/soccer scholarship and has no idea what she wants to do with her life besides kick men’s balls really hard. undeclared major

Éomer: lives at home and runs the stables. posts a Lot of shirtless pics on horses

Saruman: he was a psychiatrist and switched into politics and business after when he realised how ‘simple it is to control people’

Thranduil: model/philanthropist/fashion icon/photographer/loving father. famous for his benefit parties and starting personal wars with politicians and ceos. does Not Care what you think. has a collection of his favourite death threats printed and bound

Bilbo: shhh he’s a burglar

[musingsofawannabewriter]

Can I Be More Than The Person I Have Become?

Here I am again. Once every few months, sometimes years I get that urge to put pen to paper or in this instance finger to keyboard.

When I was little reading my mom’s Jodi Picoult, Danielle Steele or Avon romance novels I felt inspired. I wanted to write a book people would cherish and love. Then I read Purple Hibiscus and then the doubts came.

Purple Hibiscus is one of my favorite books ever and the author Chimamanda is an inspiration to me. But the doubts came because I believed I could never write a book as amazing as Purple Hibiscus, that stirred so many emotions and feelings in me that with each rereading makes me discover something new. It didn’t help that Chimamada is that perfect Igbo first daughter who has a first degree and not one but 2 MA’s and speaks fluent Igbo.

My admiration for her was tinged with a lot of jealousy. I am an Igbo first daughter, that can barely speak/understand Igbo despite growing up in Nigeria most of my life, I only have a BA in Law, I failed spectacularly at a Masters programme that from the start I only applied to because I thought it was expected of me. 

There are so many flaws in myself I could spend hours picking on but won’t for the sake of bringing down the mood of this article/opinion piece. Despite feeling I could never measure up to CNA I still chose literature as my elective in my GCSE’s and WAEC exams. Had an A for both and was the best student in class for the former. But I still felt like a fraud. I understand English, I speak it but the technical rules stump me sometimes. Like the semicolon… No matter how many times I can’t seem to retain when it applies. I suck at writing dialogue because I am always confused where to add the apostrophes and commas. Subject verb agreement, well I stumble my way through and hope for the best which has worked out okay so far.

I used to write in notebooks fervently in Secondary School. I would craft stories which would get passed around different students and their compliments and eagerness to read my words fueled me. I was going to be a writer maybe.. Get my first degree in Law then a Masters in Creative Writing. Maybe after becoming successful I’d be the next Michaela Coel adapting my work to the screen to great critical acclaim.

Well let’s just say reality hit hard, no punches pulled whatsoever. I left my sheltered Nigerian boarding school after graduation to go to the UK full time for my A Levels. First mistake was spending my years pocket money in under 3 months. Second mistake was essentially being mute for my first year of school. I have always been quite reserved and find it hard to talk to people. Going to a full boarding school meant I saw my classmates almost 24/7 so bonding and socialisation was inevitable. Well with A levels only having 3 subjects to study and it being a day school meant I could go a week without speaking to anyone except the lovely lunch ladies in the cafeteria.

If I am being honest I wasn’t used to interacting with white people and felt self conscious about my accent so it was a perfect storm. 

Then the whopper…I have always had a complicated relationship with food. Since I was younger my weight has fluctuated heavily. It didn’t help that my mom was one of those slightly bigger women who decided to become a gym addict and drop all the weight. A lot of her insecurity from being bigger rubbed off on me, directly and indirectly.

Having your mom take you to exercise classes at 13 hurts. Having your mom be so happy to see you lose so much weight because the food at your boarding school sucked hurts. Having people complimenting your mum and asking how you're related to her cuts even deeper. Every stab at my heart at confidence got buried deep. In school, I would restrict my eating by spending breakfasts which I hated asleep in class, would skip a few lunches then binge at dinner times. This had the effect of keeping my weight stable.

Even then my mom still criticised my weight. When I look back at my size 12/14 self in secondary school who was gorgeous, a rage fills me. I was so beautiful but with zero confidence. I hurt so much and wish I could go back in time for a few minutes to tell myself I was worthy of being liked, by others and myself.

Eventually being away from my mom, the safety of my boarding school friends and siblings made it easy to seek solace in food. I was in the UK, I was living in student accommodation and for the first time in my life I had a debit card. I spent hundreds of £s a month in takeaways. Then I spent over £100 on diet pills which made me feel ill. In under a year I went from a size 14 to 24 to my mothers horror and mine. I didn’t know about the body positivity movement or Tess Holliday. I only knew that my mom was angry and sad and worried I would die in my sleep one night.

In almost a decade, that has been one of her mantras when talking to me about my weight. That she can’t bury her child and she’s afraid one night I will sleep and not wake up. In her mind its concern, but the way she says it feels like emotional manipulation.

Reading back there’s a lot of mother bashing going on, but it is not intentional. Some people are besties with their mothers and I prefer a more distant relationship. We will eventually get to the daddy issues but that will take some tears and a while before I can go into that.

I crave the catharsis of writing. The word vomit and jumbled feelings in the pit of my stomach. It helps me see myself as that idealistic 16 year old with a heart full of dreams and hopes. Not the current dried out husk I think I am now. I think of my future in abstract terms.

I don’t see a family, mortgage or dog. I just see myself barely existing. I feel this with a resigned calmness. Then I have my internal spiral of being to shortsighted and hasty in writing my life off at 25. I read tweets about people finding first love in their 30s, going back to school in their 40’s and getting into their careers in their 50s. Then I hear that voice in the far corner of my mind whispering, do I even want to make it to my 40’s…

And I answer back quietly that I really don't want to make it to my 40s. I’ll maybe hold on till my parents die so my mom doesn’t lord it over me that she had to bury her child and not the other way around. But some nights I really don’t want to be alive. Some nights I wish I was never born and just like clockwork the tears start. Those tears that I hold in and the dark thoughts I numb with the stimuli of food, YouTube and now K dramas.

For the past few years, I have made my Other World. This Other World is essentially a parallel universe. In this universe I have no issues with food, I have an incredible metabolism that means I can eat virtually anything without guilt. I make friends my first day of college and join so many student societies and actually participate. I push myself in school and get into my mother’s dream of a Russell Group. I choose LSE though she wishes I chose Queen Mary. I work hard, join the Law Society, meet a lovely British Nigerian with a great background, we date a few years and get married. I get a Masters in Creative Writing and have an amazing blog which gets adapted to a critically acclaimed series and I am fulfilled.

Sometimes my Other World self changes. She is the daughter of millionaires who is a genius, polyglot and fighter of social justice. I can sing, know martial arts and take the movie world by storm. Other times I am just pretty and living a simple but happy life. I know in my heart that these are just fantasies and sometimes I wish I could be like Buffy in that episode of BTVS and stay stuck in that Other World fully. I’m sure you’re thinking about my family who I’d leave behind. My response is I can’t miss them if I never remember I had them.

I am the first daughter, the Ada. My parents though flawed always tell me I am a great role model for my siblings. I am seemingly still a virgin, don’t drink, do drugs or rock the boat too much. And I feel even worse. I feel guilty that with all they have sacrificed that they have been stuck with an average daughter and by upper middle class Nigerian standards, if that even exists, a sub par Ada. I feel defective looking around and seeing others in the peak of their careers, vetting engaged, building houses for their parents. I am still afraid of driving!! I can’t even get that basic skill down.

4 years post LLB, no LLM to at least lessen me not being a lawyer and stuck in a customer service role almost 3 years now. I know I am at fault for not making the right decisions. Not applying for the grad jobs or vacancy schemes in time. Being so down and depressed I wouldn’t leave my room for days and weeks at a time. Failing all my LLM modules, adding back all the weight and more after boot camps with my parents, not having enough savings and having an even worse accent after almost a decade in the UK.

My self-deprecating joke I tell is that my sister is the multi talented one, my brother the smart ambitious one and as my parents say I have a big heart. That essentially my parents would say my thing is having a big heart, like that ever helped anyone build a career. I thought if I couldn’t write then I could maybe study Social Work. That got shot down by my mother and I was persuaded to go into the path of Law for University. I applied for Social Work Schemes and got rejected multiple times over multiple years. I was too scared to sink my own money to self fund a Social Work Masters in case it became another LLM fiasco. SO now I have made Teaching my next career goal. I am resigning myself to it the way Henry the 8ths spouses and mistresses must have whenever he wanted to bed them. Powerless and without a choice. Then I think that’s  false equivalency and my pain could not be on the level of the pain they must have endured.

So many feelings, deep thoughts and memories flow out when I get the writing urge. I will likely never actually share this in full for obvious reasons except maybe anonymously. These few pages have jumped through quite a few time periods and experiences. My thoughts aren’t always linear and that ties in with something else I acknowledge but haven’t been serious about. I legitimately think I have ADHD and/or BPD. Watching the diagnosis episode of Crazy Ex Girlfriend by the amazing Rachel Bloom shone a light on feelings and behaviours I have had for a while. Maybe that’s why from the first episode of the show I was in love. She was stuck in the past, holding onto Josh who represented a time in her life of happiness. She had cutaways to magical musical numbers involving herself and the people around her.

The ADHD comes from following iconic black women on twitter who were outspoken about their diagnosis and bringing focus to how black women were being underdiagnosed. But then I think maybe I want to have ADHD as an excuse for the failures in my life and with the current NHS waiting lists I may not get a formal diagnosis for a while. So for now I manage and exist.

I like being honest in my writing. Exposing those dark parts of myself that I let fester in the recesses of my heart and mind. 

[softcoregamer]

DRAGON QUEST XI S: ECHOES OF AN ELUSIVE AGE - DEFINITIVE EDITION

I've never played a Dragon Quest game before, so all I had to go on with this game was the pretty looking graphics and charming character art by the Dragonball guy, which- combined with having a hankering for a JRPG, a genre I haven't played since probably the Digital Devil Saga games (minus an abandoned most-of-the-way-done playthrough of SMT3 and a partial of one of the Megadimension Neptunias) was enough to sell me on it. I'm having a tough time determining if it was worth it.

(spoilers)

The story starts off very weak. Your glowing hand marks you as the chosen one, you have to collect glowing orbs to defeat the dark lord. It's like the story of a generic videogame you'd see in the background of a movie. They do throw in a little novelty to keep you on your toes- you present yourself to the king and he throws you in the dungeon, you go back to your hometown and travel back in time for some reason- but I really never warmed to the setting. It's just a collection of cliches and cute gimmicks, like the town of people who speak in haikus, the town of people who speak in rhyming couplets (you're stuck with these people for the bulk of the exposition at the start of act 2, which is a nightmare) and the town of- ugh- Italians. There's no sense of these places being places. It's just a nice pleasant fairytale kingdom of the kind that's normally mentioned in Snow White or whatever as the place the handsome prince comes from, except here you spend dozens of hours trudging through it looking for glowing tree roots and orbs. The big problem in Gallopolis is that the sultan's son isn't brave enough for god's sake. Acts 2 and 3 pick things up, and there's some neat reveals- I like that the lil red star you've been seeing in the sky right from the start was the stain of the original hero's failure to slay the villain, literally hanging over the entire setting all this time. Also the annoying act 1 scene where you get handed the name of the villain and an orb quest in an exposition dump is retroactively improved by the fact that the exposition isn't quite correct. Act 3 reintroducing time travel and actually being thoughtful about it was welcome as well, but sadly that has the effect of making you redo story points you already did since, logically, you're back in time to where you haven't done them yet. Sometimes this comes across as getting a do-over to get a more positive outcome for something that previously ended more tragically, in keeping with the way time travel is explained in-universe as essentially reloading an earlier save (and, as revealed in the end, continuing in a separate save slot). The 8th party member's act 3 quest is a standout here. In reading discussion of the game I've seen people insist on referring to this character as 8, presumably to preserve the plot twist of his existence, so I guess I'll do it too. But more often than not, act 3 quests consist of just doing the same stuff as act 2 again, in a somewhat more curt manner. This sticks in the craw after so much of act 2 already consisted of just doing the same stuff as act 1 again. The party members aren't much better, for the most part. The first three people you meet all say "ah, you're the Luminary, I was sent to help you" and there isn't much to them beyond that for a long time. Sylvando has a lot of personality, which is probably partly why he's become the game's big meme character, but it gets grating and he is insanely trite. The Dark Lord takes over the world and purges the unclean, and Sylvando's overriding concern is that he wants people to laugh and smile more. It's like he takes advantage of the fact that I need him for his boat to get my goat by acting like a fucking teletubby. Things pick way up when you meet Rab, and the 8th party member is genuinely really good. Even the early-game party members end up having their moments (Erik's backstory was pretty fun) but the game really doesn't put its best foot forward with these characters. Not that it needs to; for the first few I was just glad to be getting some help in combat. The combat is excellent in this game, when it gets going. I played with the "draconian quest" tougher enemies mode on, and I turned it off right at the act 2 end boss. The difficulty curve flowed really well this way, with act 3 enemies not feeling noticeably less tough than "draconian" act 2 enemies. The abilities and spells you get are carefully balanced so that it's very difficult to put together a perfect 4-person party, you're always missing something. This means the fact that you can change your line-up midfight isn't just a nice quality of life feature, it's a potentially vital mechanic. They tread a fine line where sometimes needing to swap people out during the battle doesn't mean the characters themselves feel useless; everyone is capable of some extremely tough stuff. And on the other end of the scale, enemy damage is heavy enough that buffing your attack and using big-damage abilities vs healing or defending can be a properly difficult choice; a heavy hit or a big heal at the right time can turn the tide of an entire battle, as can your big hitter suddenly getting put to sleep or your healer getting knocked out. Again, this is all with the caveat that I had "draconian quest" on for the first 2/3 of the game, from what I've heard combat without it is insanely easy. My big gripe with the combat is that there's very little in the way of tooltips. What's this enemy's magic resistance? Does my Sap have a better chance of landing if I up my Magical Might, or does that just increase spell damage? Does Oomphle affect Quadraslash? If I increase my agility will it go up by enough that I can take my turn ahead of these enemies? Does agility even do that? Does using abilities and spells mean I go later in the turn order vs generic attacks and defending? You just have to guess at all this; the wiki has some info on enemy stats but I don't know where they're getting it from other than datamining. There's an entire bestiary with almost no useful information which is functionally just a model viewer for all 700+ enemies. The only way to know anything is to experiment, which I guess at least adds some purpose to combat when you've filled out the bestiary for an area but still have to grid encounters- which will be required at some point, because fighting is the only way you get xp and money. There is also too much RNG. Critical hits being rare and certain attacks having a chance to cause Confusion or whatever is fine (although I'd prefer for attacks which are labelled as having a chance to inflict status effects to actually inflict the status effect way more often than they do) but why the fuck does the resurrection spell have a 50% success rate? Under what possible circumstances would I be using that spell other than needing my dead teammate back right now? Same for all the abilities on the skill tree that say "doesn't connect very often, but when it does it can cause a critical hit" OK that "CAN" is telling me that this ability which doesn't often connect won't even necessarily crit if it does. Why would I choose this ability? To handicap myself? How is this going to help me defeat the Timewyrm? All that said, when the combat is good it's really good, and whenever I lose a fight I'm thinking "I can win that next time if I do XYZ". The 2D battles are much less fun because the pace is much slower and there are no cute animations to liven it up, but it's always satisfying when the "flash" of an enemy taking damage becomes the "flash" of them disappearing, and you know you have slayed yet another blob. Non-combat gameplay is a mixed bag. The early-game fun of running around looking for new enemies to fight and fill out the bestiary wears off hard once act 2 begins and everything is either a reskin or a glowing-eyes "vicious" version of something you've already fought, and many maps are fairly sparse with just the odd treasure chest and locked door to liven up your path to the next area. That said, there are also several areas and dungeons which make a minigame out of traversing them; the Eerie Eyrie and the Battleground were standouts for me. Especially the remixed version of Eerie Eyrie you go to later on, where you get a flying mount to ride around. Crafting is surprisingly involved, with a whole minigame around it and hundreds of recipes to find all over the place. In most cases you can just use money in lieu of ingredients, which means minimal farming is required to get a lot out of the system, and the recipes with ingredients that can't be bought feel special instead of bullshit. In terms of items and recipes there really is a deluge of content- there are recipe books all over the place, with new ones available even in the last couple of maps that open up in the entire game, and there's an undeniable cookie-clicker rush you get from getting better at crafting and taking something you could barely get to +1 all the way to +3. I play games like this as a magpie, accumulating items with nice pictures and effects that make me do a 😲 face, and DQ11 certainly delivers. This even extends to character advancement, with Hidden Goodies incentivizing picking skills you might not want otherwise, and entire new skill trees opening up as quest rewards.

Overall, DQ11 is a good combat system with loot and progression systems that are well-executed enough to feel rewarding after 100 hours, all wrapped up in a style and tone that is not up my alley at all. A good litmus test for how much you'd like the game is probably: watch this scene and if you think it's the most epic thing you've ever seen then Dragon Quest 11 is for you.