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whumpywhumper · 4 years ago

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Consequences

There is a section before this that I’m finding impossible to finish, but there’s nothing that would make this impossible to understand. It’s a lot of world building/story building, but hopefully you guys like it? I literally live on feedback so drop me a note :)

It’s set in the Investigation section of the timeline, following New York Part 2.

Masterpost

Tagging: @misspelledwitch @insanitywishes @imagination1reality0 @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @voidwhump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @captivity-whump @liliability @muumimafia @fanastywhump @elisabethrosewrites @unsure-but-alive-752 @jeverest00 @texdoeshalo @quirkykayleetam

I legitimately would not write without the hype of these three ladies: @0idril0 @rosesareviolentlyread @walkingchemicalfire

TW: Some medical talk but let me know if I need to add a warning

V***V

“This is my least favorite part of this job,” Clint sighed as he looked over the amount of paperwork that was still waiting for review in the impromptu command station.

“Yeah, I find myself missing my TAC suit and a stand off when I’m facing a mountain of paperwork,” Ben mumbled around the pen between his teeth.

Clint chuckled, looking up as the door to the conference room opened.

From the corner of his eye, Clint caught Ben’s frown as Kincaid entered the room, immediately catching something in his partner’s demeanor that concerned him. Kinciad’s normally genial face was solemn, and Clint got a bad feeling himself as he caught the concentrated smell of antiseptic and multiple sick persons over something warmer, softer.

“You okay, sweetheart?” Ben asked, straightening from the folder he had bowed over, nodding at the doctor that followed, the flap of air from the man’s white coat explaining the smells that had concerned Clint. “What happened?”

Kincaid swallowed, walking robotically as he moved to sit next to his lover, who only became more concerned, dropping his pen and reaching for his hands. “You guys need to hear this. Go ahead, doc?”

Raising an eyebrow at the doctor, who was shooting him a quizzical look, he nodded his greeting and held out a hand. “Nice to meet you, I’m Clint.”

“Right, sorry Clint,” Kincaid huffed, rubbing his hand through his hair. “This is Dr. Decker, Dr. David Decker, he’s the head of the team on our John Doe. David, this is Clint Erickson, a consultant we’ve brought in on the case. He’s been read in, and we've already been given carte blanche by the social worker, so you’re free to give him any information like you would us.”

Dr. Decker took his hand in a firm grip, the tall, willowy man giving him a tight smile. “Good to meet you, you guys mind?” he asked, motioning toward the table.

“Not at all,” Ben murmured, his arm tight around Kincaid’s shoulders. “What’s going on, David?”

Setting the chart he’d been carrying under one arm on the table, the doctor sighed as he took the weight off of his feet, hissing as he stretched his legs. “Nothing good,” he answered, looking at Clint, “as Kincaid just informed you, I’m the lead intensivist treating the John Doe that was brought in. We are treating him for critical injuries, chronic sickness, and long term abuse. He’s been in one-on-one ICU care.”

He turned his gaze back to Ben and Kincaid. “I’m going to be blunt now, and I’m sorry cause I know how you’re taking this, Kincaid. He’s not getting better. He’s getting worse, a lot worse.

“When he was admitted, he was unconscious and in rapid decline. He was incubated in the field—“ he nodded to Kincaid and Ben, “—because he wasn’t able to maintain his airway. He was rushed to emergency surgery as soon as he arrived.

“Apparently, some fucking amateur of a surgeon attempted to make repairs following penetrating and blunt force trauma, but, with his lack of healing, those repairs didn’t hold up to the transport. Since the emergency surgery, we think he’s begun bleeding internally and has required transfusions to try and keep ahead of it—he’s just too weak right now for a follow up surgery so we’re trying to maintain without more invasive measures.”

David sighed, flipping open the chart and staring at the information there. His eyes didn’t move like he was reading, just looking through the information like he could find answers. “His labs are looking worse with each draw, he’s having unexplained seizures, and he’s just not healing the way that he should be. He’s going into organ failure, and he’s septic.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, David swallowed, not as unaffected as he wanted to project. “There’s only so much stress and pain that a body can take, and we don’t know how long this guy was held in that place. Nothing we’re doing is helping, and I don’t know how long he’s going to hang on like this.”

The doctor’s words rang in the following silence of the little room, both of the detectives leaning heavily on each other. Clint felt like he’d swallowed ice, the cold sitting heavily in his stomach.

“Fuck...” he muttered, hand rasping over his beard. He’d been doing this a long time, but it never got easier to rescue someone that wasn’t going to be able to enjoy their freedom again. That he couldn’t help.

“Look. . . I know I’m not supposed to know what’s going on here, what you guys are investigating. But there’s only so many fangmarks I can look at before I draw a whole hell of a lot of conclusions.” He huffed, re-crossing his arms, and glared at the chart in front of him. “None of the others brought in had this many, and—” he grimaced out the next words, “—you only work in this field for so long before you hear some rumors about ‘vamps and witches.’

“I can feel it, there’s something—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—supernatural going on, and I don’t know how to treat it. I’m fumbling around in the dark here trying to treat symptoms without the knowledge base to help, without even the knowledge base to know how what he went through affected him, and he is too sick for this.” He pressed his lips together, flicking his eyes up to catch Ben’s.

“Can you help me?”

Clint sighed as the two detectives turned to him, the doctor’s gaze following with barely a blink of surprise.

Of course, just when I would call Markus.

“The witch that I would normally contact about this has. . . passed away,” he said, rubbing his hand through his hair, “but let me call someone who might be able to help. Do you mind talking to someone else?”

David shook his head after a confirmatory nod from the two detectives. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Clint thumbed it open and pulled up Evan’s contact.

Putting the call on speaker, he left it to ring on the table, hoping the vet wasn’t too busy to take his call. After a few interminable rings, he answered.

“Hello?” Loud rustling accompanied the greeting, and Clint could hear the yips and barks of the clinic.

“Evan, it’s me.”

“Clint? What’s up? You okay?” A door slammed in the background, and the animal noises cut off.

“Yeah, man, I’m fine. In New York working a vamp ring, I could use your know-how.”

“I mean, sure, but I’m not sure what I could tell you about vamps that you don’t already know...?” The beastmaster trailed off, confusion plain in his tone.

Clint grimaced, avoiding the other’s concerned gazes. Evan wasn’t going to like this next part.

“It’s not really the vamps I need your help with, man. There’s a witch here that got caught up in the ring, he’s not doing well, and I need—“

Evan cut him off before he could even finish, anger making his voice snap over the line.

“No, Clint, damnit, I’ve told you. I’m not trained for people, I’m a damn vet—“

“Evan, listen—” he tried to break in, but the other man wasn’t to be deterred.

“—I don’t need that responsibility, and I don’t want it. Did you even listen to what Deanna or Illyn had to say?”

Clint sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. He really didn’t want to get into this in front of three practical strangers, but the beastmaster was adamant about not treating people unless absolutely necessary. “Deanna won’t take my calls anymore after Markus—none of his coven will—and Illyn isn’t educated enough or in a place to be of any use in this situation. If anyone else would get back to me right away, I would be calling them, not you.”

His friend was silent on the other end of the line, and Clint suppressed a strangled growl. “This guy is literally dying, Evan, please.”

A huff answered his plea, and Clint could practically see the other man’s face creasing into a pained frown. “Goddamnit,” he muttered, “fine, but you owe me.”

Something released in Clint’s chest, and he let out a shaky breath. “Thanks, man.”

He turned to the other men in the room, trying to give a hopeful smile that was probably more pained than anything. “You’re on speaker phone; I got two detectives here with me and the lead doctor on the case. Hopefully they can answer any questions you got.”

David introduced himself without any more preamble, repeating what he’d just told Clint but including more technical jargon than he had with him or the detectives as laymen. He listened with half an ear as Evan asked questions of the doctor, Ben and Kincaid filling in what they’d deduced about the witch’s captivity and treatment, the majority of the wolf’s attention set on what kind of hell the guy had gone through.

Evan’s voice pulled him back from imagining the guy’s broken body and the reactions of his family if they were ever found.

“So, let me set this out: this witch was fed on vociferously by a vamp; held above ground, away from the earth, in a concrete box with no sunlight for who knows how long; critically injured and ill; and, now, he’s not healing.”

“That about sums it up, yeah,” Kincaid deadpanned, a dark look on his face.

“Was there any evidence of iron use?”

Clint felt a cold hand grab hold of his sternum, and he dropped his head down, scratching his nails down the back of his neck. “Oh shit,” he hissed, a growing realization dawning, “I should’ve thought of that.”

Evan hummed in acknowledgement. “Probably, but there’s a reason you always called me or Markus after you’ve found someone. Treatment isn’t your area of expertise.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Ben cut in, the three men leaning forward with identical looks of agitation.

“It sounds like, on top of everything else, he’s going through something commonly called magical exhaustion.” The vet had his educator’s hat on, his calm voice rumbling through the speaker in tinny waves. “It doesn’t always happen, but a part of a witch’s physical make up is magic. If they use too much without the opportunity to recharge then they can get really sick. Depending on the severity, it can be fatal.”

Clint continued for him when Evan hesitated over a sigh. “In a case like this one, where the witch is being given the opportunity to recover without interference, then you have to be on the lookout for something that’s blocked that ability to do so.

“Iron, cold wrought iron, is like poison to a large number of supernaturals. It’s in all of the fairy tales: for example, it can burn a Fae like a motherfucker and makes controlling a were’s shift or were-state...let’s just say, problematic.”

Clint suppressed a snarl at a decidedly unpleasant memory, his eyes flashing a very brief yellow. He felt a stab of contrition when David flinched backward in alarm, his eyes widening, and pulled himself back with some difficulty before continuing.

“For witches, it interferes with their ability to naturally produce or access their magic, and with such a critically injured witch, one who was trying to cope with long term trauma and magic drainage, shrugging that block off would’ve been an astronomical impossibility.”

If he’d even wanted to, Clint thought darkly.

“So it’s like he’s not producing the chemicals his body needs,” David interjected, still giving Clint a wide side-eye after seeing his eyes change, his fingers drumming on the table. “How do I fix it?”

And that was the real question, wasn’t it? God, what he wouldn’t do to have Markus or his coven’s help.

Evan’s sigh was like static over the line. “It would be too much to ask if you found his grahm anywhere, wouldn’t it?”

Catching the twin looks of dejection from the detectives, Clint shook his head as he answered. “You’d be right about that, Evan.”

“Damnit,” the vet cursed. “The only thing I can think of is something I would recommend for one of my patients—get him in nature, bury him in dirt and sunshine and hope that it would break the block down.”

Like he could sense David’s horrified expression, Evan cut off the doctor’s objections. “I know that’s not possible in this case, so I’m going to recommend the next best thing. Get a house plant, one of those that has a really strong root system, and bury his hand in it. I bet you his magic will latch onto it, maybe it’ll help. If his room has windows, give him as much natural light as possible.”

Clint heard Evan shifting in his seat, a small, sad laugh coloring the line. “I guess you guys don’t let animals into your ICU wards, right?”

“I’ll authorize whatever you think might help,” David corrected, “I already told these guys, but we’re out of our league here, and we all know it. These nurses are protective as hell, and this guy has no one but our boys in blue here and an overworked social worker. If I don’t do something to try and help cause I’m scared of administration then I’ll face a damn mutiny.”

“In that case, get a therapy animal in there. Familiars are a real thing and witches use them for a reason—it won’t be as effective as if it was this guy’s actual familiar, but it won’t hurt.”

Ben and Kincaid shared a look before the latter opened his mouth. “I’ll give Justin a call, and have him bring in Delta. She’s well trained enough, and he seemed to positively respond to her when he was conscious.”

David nodded his assent. “Olivia’s a hard-ass about her being on the floor, but she’ll feel better about Delta than any other animal.”

“What about getting him a grahm?” Ben asked. “You mentioned finding his, surely we could get one for him.”

Clint and Kincaid were already shaking their heads.

“Too personal to each individual witch,” Clint answered, “A healthy witch can channel through someone else’s grahm, but I doubt it would do more than muddle the waters for someone in this guy’s position.”

Humming in affirmation, Evan explained. “I mentioned this guy’s grahm because it might have acted like a jump start, but anything this witch wasn’t involved in making or wasn’t made specifically for his magical pattern might hurt him, and you can’t get a read on his magical pattern if he’s not producing magic.”

Silence reigned at this information, the catch-22 of their situation not settling well with any of the people in the room.

“That’s all I can think to do right now,” Evan stated after a moment, frustration evident in his voice. “I’ll give Deanna a call, see if she’ll give me any more insight.” He didn’t pause before continuing, not giving Clint the opportunity to cut him off, even if the other men heard it. “She’s hurting, Clint, but she doesn’t actually blame you for Markus. She won’t refuse to help this guy just cause you’re working the case.”

Evan knew him too well, but even his words didn’t do anything to soothe the pang of hurt in his chest, his guilt resurfacing. “Thanks, Evan,” he said, voice rough, “let us know if you find anything out, okay?”

“Yeah, man, I’ll let you know.”

David didn’t stick around for much more discussion after the line went dead, walking out of the command station with a mission in his step.

Ben and Kincaid were silent for a few minutes though, leaning into each other’s spaces. A string of envy wrapped itself around Clint’s ribs, pulling tight. What wouldn’t I do to give Nico a hug right now?

Clint sighed, ruffing up the back of his hair as he pulled out his phone. “I’ll send Holland a text updating him on John Doe’s condition and what Evan recommended. Kincaid, you update Justin, I think the faster we get Delta in here the better.”

Nodding, the younger man pulled his phone out and started typing. “He and Delta should be on their way back in, I’ll let him know to hurry.” His face twisted on his next words. “Man, I can’t get the image out of my head-“ he looked at Ben, eyes sorrowful, “-when he was petting Delta. . . “

“Yeah. . .fuck, this case sucks.”

Eyebrows furrowing, Clint cocked his head. “You said that he was conscious at one point, you weren’t able to get a name out of him?“

They both shook their heads, starting to pull more files over to work on. “No, he was too sick,” Ben answered. “Tried to talk, started coughing, and his vitals just tanked. It couldn’t have been ten minutes later, when we were getting him in the ambulance, that he stopped breathing on his own and we had to intubate.”

All three of them sighed, shaking their heads as they tried to shake the depressed atmosphere. It would be a good time for a dark joke, the life blood of career law enforcement, but he couldn’t find the energy.

Turning back to the transcript he’d been reading when David came in, his phone buzzed as Holland texted him back. He cracked a grin as he read the message. Trust Holland to not disappoint. “You old bastard,” he chuckled.

Ben made a quizzical noise, glancing up from a morbid photograph of blood streaked concrete.

Clint held out the phone, grinning wildly at the man’s snark. “Holland asks if he needs to pick up any essential oils on his way back. Apparently his wife really likes Blue Chamomile before bedtime.”

Ben grinned as he took the proffered phone, reading the text from Holland before shaking his head and dismissing the notification. “He just likes to be contrary, you know that.”

“Yeah, I know.” Clint leaned back, crossing his arms behind his head and stretching. Closing his eyes blissfully as the tension released in his shoulders. “Stubborn old bastard will be doing this from the grave.”

“This looks like a fun crowd, these your friends?”

Releasing the stretch, Clint blinked his eyes open in confusion, and saw Ben examining his home screen. An uncomfortable curl of sadness turned over in his stomach, but he smiled and nodded. “That’s the group back in Louisiana. We got Markus’s coven and the rest of the pack together for a going away party. It was a good time.”

Ben paused as he examined the photo closer, turning the screen away from Kincaid’s curious gaze and shaking his head. The edges of his perpetual smile formed into a frown on his next question.

“. . . Clint, didn’t you say your witch friend, Markus, was . . . gone?”

“Yeah, uh. . . yeah he is.” Heart sinking in his chest at the unexpected question, Clint swallowed past a sudden lump, words coming carefully. “He. . .uh, he went missing several months ago in Massachusetts.”

Hands shaking, he took the phone back from Ben and doused the screen, placing it face down on the table. He felt his shoulders try to hitch up around his ears, but he forced them to relax as he curled his hands around themselves. “We knew, uh. . . fuck,” he muttered, already feeling some tears forming on his eyelashes, “we knew that he was taken—violently taken. He called Illyn, said that he’d been shot. That he was scared.”

Kincaid frowned with him, a sympathetic hand tapping the table between them. It made the wolf smile, sure as anything that he’d been welcomed into these men’s pack; that knowledge was a comforting weight fitting snugly around his heart.

Clint cleared his throat, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, and breathed out slowly. His talk with Holland was too fresh for this conversation, but it didn’t help anything to pretend it didn’t happen. Plus, he felt like these guys deserved to know after the discussion with Evan. They’d pull him out of it if he got too low or distracted to help with the case.

So, he forced himself to continue.

“We could never pin down who took him. It’s an unusual M.O. for a supernatural to use a gun like that but. . . there just weren’t any other leads.“

Fuck. . . fuck, it’s such an unusual M.O., and I still can’t find a goddamn suspect. Still haven’t found him. What kind of fucking investigator am I?

What kinda friend?

I’m so fuckin’ sorry, Markus.

“Did it have to be a supernatural?” Ben drew Clint back from his spiral with the question, putting a stilling hand on a confused Kincaid’s shoulder as he gave him a warning look.

Clint huffed a strangled laugh, looking down at the table with a humorless smile. “Yeah, yeah, it woulda had to have been. One ‘a the few things Markus told Illyn was that he had to use a lot of magic to get some distance. Markus is. . .” he sucked in a pained breath through his teeth, “was, a very powerful witch. Even though he didn’t have his grahm on him, it woulda been hard, damn hard, for some supernatural to take him if he had the opportunity to use his magic. No way a human could have.”

Ben nodded in the corner of Clint’s vision. “That makes sense, no idea what kind of supernatural did it?”

Clenching his jaw around the residual anger at Illyn and himself, Clint shook his head. “By the time I was called in, the scene was 40 plus hours cold. I couldn’t even be there for the first week, I was in Montana wrapping up the investigation on a child-trafficking ring. Roxanne, the friend I called in to investigate, suspected a vamp, but she couldn’t get much of a read on the scene with that much decay and the foot traffic that came through it. All of her leads eventually ran cold.”

Both officers grimaced, knowing intimately how difficult it was to investigate a scene like that, putting together the pieces of his guilt. Clint shared a commiserating smile with both of them before studiously examining his thumb nail, continuing the story.

“Illyn,” he sighed, the gust of air shimmying the papers on the table, “Illyn was able to get a brief limited-telepathic link within the two days after he was taken. All she got was that he was in pain and that he was being kept in a concrete room with fluorescent lights. She stated that he couldn’t have been 50 miles from where he was taken at the time of contact, so that’s where we concentrated our search. There wasn’t any further contact.

“We never found a body, but with the violence of the attack, the amount of pain that he was in. . . “ He felt a shudder crawl down his back, his esophagus trying to curl up into a knot before he could clear his throat. He kept his gaze locked on his hands, not wanting to see the looks on their faces. “Statistically speaking, even in a normal case, it’s unlikely that he would have survived this long, but a witch of his caliber. . .”

“They don’t tend to last very long when they’ve been taken within the supernatural community,” Ben finished for him. Clint nodded, biting his lip, fighting the urge to rub at his face. “Clint. . . Do you mind if I have a second look at that picture?”

“Nah, ‘course not.” He slid his phone back over, not quite feeling the bewilderment growing in his stomach at the request.

He watched Ben pick the phone back up like it was a bomb, taking a deep breath before tapping the screen. He nodded to himself, biting at his cheek before turning the screen toward Kincaid. “Tell me what you see, Kin’,” he all but whispered.

Clint froze as he watched all of the blood drain from Kincaid’s face.

“Oh, fuck. . .”

#Markus/Lucien Series #medical whump #hurt/comfort #aftermath of captivity

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redantsunderneath · 3 years ago

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VAL and BILLIE EILISH: THE WORLD'S A LITTLE BLURRY

I shouldn’t be allowed to watch documentaries. All that any documentary seems to be about (at this point, to me) is the relationship between itself and the truth. I don’t know if it’s 2000's reality TV or that one time I watched Capturing the Friedman’s and Waco: The Rules of Engagement back to back that broke me, but what interests me isn’t the subject matter but standpoint epistemology of the thing. These two docs are very different, diametrically opposed in almost every way, but both are defined by the ways in which the text struggles against reality. Val is about an old man who used cameras (himself) to capture his entire life as he pretended to be someone else on film. He is infirm, occluding his laryngotomy tube to talk, and his handlers try to manage his naps around meet and greets where he sells the shell of the person he once was for the fans who still care. It’s forbears are archeological dead celebrity docs that try to find the elusive star at the center (Robin Williams, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse) and those about reclaiming memory (Alzheimer Project, Waltz with Bashir) but it’s just… he’s the cameraman and he’s still shuffling around. Closest comparison (minus the age part) is probably Kid 90, which was being cut at the same time. This doesn’t get at how weird this is, though. He used to make movies with his brother, who drowned during a seizure and haunts the movie (he would put up his brother’s drawings in shots on film sets, the talks about or around the event constantly). He often hands off the camera to people so he can be seen in his world with complex instructions (when I walk off, focus in on that speaker so when I go onstage you will hear my first line) and when the camera hits a mirror he lingers (as in the video of his newborn baby). He seems to always be performing, an aspect of life we are all familiar with by now but less common when this footage was taken. His wife is uncomfortable on camera, usually mugging or hiding, and you get the feeling the distancing from his life is intentional as he focuses on internal transformation away from ego resolution, but he still needs to be seen, his sense of self tied up in an object permanence issue. The movie is structured as someone trying to sort through memories of their life and come to terms with them, although the memories in this case is a small warehouse full of video tapes and film canisters. In his current life he can only communicate with difficulty and tries to convey reaction with meaningful-but-of-what glances and gestures. Effacement by time and looming death drench the whole enterprise - when his brother dies he says his father “lost his charisma” (just contemplate that). His current simulacra of celebrity makes him feel like a ghost, signing “you can be my wingman anytime” multiple times for people who this means something to. So he brings up the footage and tries to reconstruct his life (his credit as cinematographer is both funny, touching, and chilling). This thing is full of interesting moments. He is doing a line reading of Hamlet at Juilliard and Peter Kass stops him to ask where the performance is coming from. He responds that he has never considered killing himself which causes Kass to explode, insisting that no-one in the history of the world has not had that thought. This seems to rob us and him of a potentially revelatory moment as Kilmer seems different, spiritual in an unusual way… maybe the reason why he never thought of that was more interesting than that point. His entreaty to Marlon Brando to tell him what his earliest childhood memory is is responded to by Brando asking for him to rock his hammock with repetition of the question only yielding feedback on the rocking until neonatal-fat Brando’s satisfaction at being rocked seems like an answer. The argument with John Frankenheimer who does not want to be filmed is something else. The major things going on are here are being haunted vs feeling like a ghost and an arrested Lacanian mirror phase that complicates his intersubjective context, with the karmic

self-assessment of who he is trying to chill in the middle. The filmmaking knows this and orients itself as a process of evaluating memory where what is true seems elusive, heavily edited, and hall-of-mirrors-like. The question of what is performance is a subconscious struggle. Conspicuous in their absence are his own feelings on his decline beyond the fact that he “doesn’t believe in death,” real insight into his marriage (and breakup, other than an allusion to his method acting Jim Morrison being a problem) and relationship with his kids (who are around all the time, but seem like Sixth Sense characters), and the fact that he’s a legendary asshole on set. This last is, like, the one thing everyone knows about him. But you can sort of sense this stuff secondarily, right off the edge of the screen and in him relentlessly projecting onto his parents. The real crux is the study of a man who never feels seen, but tries to become so by disappearing into someone else, who needs recording devices so that he can capture himself properly, all controlled performance; someone unaware of his own loneliness brought about by not being very good at making himself available because his “self” is externally resolved and constant inner transformation masks the unformed nature of his ego at rest. The film accomplishes this by allowing him to reveal what is absent by his preoccupations and bearing witness to his deflection mechanisms, so that he is no closer to knowing himself but, by being manipulated in a way we can see the frame of, we kind of get a glimpse. Good experience, wish there was more Christian Scientist material (that seems like an angle of understanding the film wasn’t interested in). Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is about a young girl who is followed by cameras capturing her entire life as she pretends to be herself on stage. She has a Simone Biles flavored psycho-physical compromise that everyone tries to “handle” while she sells herself as the person she isn’t to fans who care, at least right now. This is in the tradition of Truth or Dare mimics that seem de rigueur for female pop stars. Closest comparison is Miss Americana. This movie feels made by spreadsheet to contain scenes to develop the official narrative of an in-her-brother’s-room, in her suburban parent’s house, sui generis composite genius who is on the edge of mental unfitness trying to be as normal as she can in this crazy merry go round called fame. The obviousness of the put on is diffused by the relative lameness of the pieces. In some respects this is the typical documentary “look for the cracks for insight” play, but it is consciously using that as a tool too and doing it badly - the manufactured insight escape moments largely ring false. This comes off as a Zoom background era counterfeit, a series of YouTube clips where Markeplier or whoever lets the mask slip a little in the most forced bit of unbiddenness possible. There is a boyfriend who feels like a story mandated version of “from Canada.” But the interesting thing is the way it recapitulates the way modern pop is put together, not by writing, not by spontaneous “feel your way,” but by putting bits of ideas together and trying to emulate form. There are a lot of moments in the film that feel like they could have been real, but the non-actors were asked to do another take and can’t quite nail it. It actually has such a boner for produced casual that it is pretty much allergic to authenticity, which is quite a thing for a documentary. The major things going on are here are grappling with whether she brings anything musically to the table (the brother seems like the musical force, she’s afraid her voice is bad, they make a point to show her idea notebooks as work product), her wish to only perform if she can give the fans her best show (possibly her version of just wanting to call in sick, understandable) is at odds with her being the center of a machine that has to move, her as a product of a not entirely with it older parents who gave their kids an open creative runway

and now are instrumental in managing her as a resource that is tricky to work with, the work being her and her brother dicking around and making magic happen, and an attempt to paint her as a Beleiber who now is on the the other side of the fan dichotomy. Development of her style, arguably her #1 thing, is sort of left as her telling a video director “I drew this bleeding eye woman, can we do something like this?” and sort of suggesting through letting her point around that she is a de facto co director. At times, it feels like a try at icon forging that someone wanted to fail, but it is probably just the high school conception-to-production level tat ultimately comes off as a larger indictment of making a movie like you make modern pop music - overdetermined manipulation of flimsy elements without a satisfying ethos, that looks too be an insubstantial assemblage of spliced pieces that live of die by their stickiness. But it begins to feel, more and more, that it’s about how non-exciting pop stars can be as people and that a narrative that people respond to can kind of die if you show that’s it’s just work and somewhat normal people trying to be a piece of an illusion. It’s this partitioning away of the hyperreality and an attempt to show the official story acted by the sausage makers trying to pretend the banality is just crazy man. Where Val is a simulation of an habitual performer considering who they actually are selectively sorting their life and failing to confront the loneliness of age and death (more elusive to them than us), this is obvious hoax unintentionally (?) revealing the fabricated nature of the image-music industry by way of demonstrating the strangely normie creatives, green-yellow ombre or no, can’t be arsed to summon a proper freakout (the whining seems authentic, though). Music videos may lie to you, but the official story is strangely correct - kids living in mom’s house cobble together catchy stuff and pull off pop stardom due to social media age production savvy and a little zeitgeisty imagery, it’s just everyone is well adjusted if stressed and someone’s only donning the costume of the online archetype of a specific kind of girl. Val uses the constructed nature of these narratives as a tool wielded in the open to suggest the inner working of a mind failing to be honest with itself while the other is interesting in its transparency and failure to convince us of the loosely conceived fiction, leaving reality apparent as bong resin. Baudrillard would have liked this one more, probably.

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bluesey-182 · 5 years ago

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We Have To Stop Meeting Like This– Chapter 4

holy shit i did it, i finished chapter 4. what?! oh my god.

important notes on this chapter, please read: so as some of you may know, I have a seizure disorder and it’s been getting out of hand again lately which is part of the reason this update took so long. i’m saying this because i needed to vent about my frustration and it ended up being in this chapter in the form of a character having a seizure. i know it doesn’t have anything to do with the story but, hey, it’s my fic. it should be noted that because my seizures are a result of trauma they present differently than a typical epileptic seizure, so the writing in this is drawing solely from my own personal experience.

I hope you enjoy this chapter because (while incredibly difficult) it was a lot of fun for me to write.

Here is chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three, as well as the link to the fic on ao3.

Jude was not a fan of Sundays. Sundays meant family dinner, which meant seeing her adoptive father (Vivi’s biological father) which always resulted in a screaming match between him and Vivi. Sundays meant seeing their judgemental step-mother who was convinced the twins would corrupt her son who Jude knew from experience was not as innocent as he seemed.

Sundays meant dressing up and proper behavior and bit-back anger and–the oldest and most tiresome charade of them all–pretending like she didn’t know that no matter what she did, Madoc would always be at least a little bit disappointed in her.

This Sunday, however, would be made worse by the fact that Jude was not talking to Taryn after the previous night’s events.

She had, of course, confronted her twin about her weasel of a boyfriend (as well as about the fact that Taryn had left Jude in the dark about the existence of said boyfriend) when Taryn returned home early in the morning. Jude raged to her sister about Locke playing games with them, expecting her sister to take her side and hate the manipulative prick as a team, and watched with satisfaction as her sister cringed away from her words. She had believed, for a moment, that Taryn now hated Locke just as much as she did and together they would destroy him. (As you do with your sister.) But then Taryn had simply said, “I know.”

Jude was speechless for a long moment. “I’m sorry, you what?”

“I knew what he was doing,” she admitted, “he wanted to see if I was loyal enough to stick with him even if he messed with you, and if I could be trusted not to tell you whatever he asked me to keep secret for him.”

“Taryn, do you seriously not see how fucked up that is?!”

“He’s just a little weird.”

“Weird?! He’s straight up a freak! How could you let him do this to us? How could you do this me?”

Taryn’s face was turning red but she refused to look Jude in the eyes. “Don’t call him a freak.”

“So you’re really just gonna take his side on this, then.” It was a question, though Jude didn’t say it like one.

“He’s my boyfriend.”

“And I’m your sister! Are you serious right now?!”

“Jude, stop.”

Jude’s anger was boiling over and choking her. She did as Taryn asked, but only because she was too angry to think of anything else to say. She stormed out of the room and slammed her bedroom door with enough force to rattle the doorframe.

Hours later as the two were getting into the Jeep to go to their dreaded family dinner, Jude still refused to speak to Taryn.

They pulled up to Madoc’s large estate in silence. Before the car even came to a complete stop, Jude was hopping down from the passenger seat and stomping up the walkway to the front door. She let herself in, kicked off her shoes, and went in search of Vivi while Taryn tried to catch up.

Jude found her oldest sister playing video games with her half brother Oak in his expansive room on the first floor. Vivi flashed her a quick smile before returning her attention back to the screen. There was a lot of aggressive button smashing and shouting from the both of them and it was clear they had no attention to spare for her. Still, Jude leaned against the doorframe and watched until GAME OVER flashed across the screen.

“You know,” Jude said as Vivi finally turned her full attention on her, “you could have at least given him a chance to win this time.”

Vivi flashed her teeth in an evil smile. “Nope. I was the undefeated champion against you and Taryn in every game we ever played and now I have to be the undefeated champion against Oak.”

“You were only undefeated because you were a cheater.”

“Was not!”

“Hm. And what do you call all the times you tripped Taryn in every race we ever ran?”

Again Vivi flashed that wicked grin before rising from the bean bag currently consuming her on the floor. “That,” she said, “was an accident.”

Just then Jude felt the presence of someone else joining her in the doorway and looked over her shoulder to find her step-mother Oriana eyeing her suspiciously, as if Jude’s proximity to Oak had tainted his being already. With an inward groan, Jude forced herself to face away from Oriana before she could see her eye-roll. Vivi gave her a sympathetic smile that felt more like pity.

“Dinner is almost ready,” Oriana said.

“Already?” asked Vivi.

“Yes, well,” Oriana was not looking at Jude in a way that was obvious she wasn’t looking. “The twins were late.” This time Jude did roll her eyes in full view of her step-mom and Oriana noticed it. “Come, Oak, let’s get cleaned up for dinner.”

Jude moved out of the way as Oak skipped passed her into the hallway with his mother in tow, leaving Jude and Vivi in the vacated space.

“Spill,” Vivi demanded once the two were out of ear shot.

“What?”

“Something’s bothering you. Spill.”

“I’m fine.”

“No. You’re not.” Vivi closed the space between them, pulled Jude the rest of the way into the room, and closed the door. Nevermind the fact that this wasn’t either one of the bedrooms. Against her best protests, Jude was still pulled down into one of the bean bags on the floor as Vivi moved the second one to face her. “Talk to me,” she said more softly this time.

Jude told her everything. By the end of the story there came a knock on the door. As if summoned by the use of her name too many times, Taryn peeked her head around the cracked open door.

“Madoc wants you guys in the dining room,” she mumbled without looking at Jude.

“Sure thing, Beetlejuice,” Jude shot back.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Jude shoved passed her twin rather roughly and tried to bury the pang of guilt that arose when her sister stumbled into the wall upon having her balance thrown off.

Madoc was already at the table when Jude entered the dining room. Oriana sat beside him with her back perfectly straight to the point of it looking uncomfortable, but that was Oriana–a perfect portrait of propriety. Oak, on the other hand, was throwing bits of dinner roll at the dog lying on the floor beside him. The dog didn’t seem to mind as it caught the food out of the air time after time with perfect accuracy, much to Oak’s delight.

Following her entrance came Vivi and Taryn. Their heads were bent conspiratorially but whatever words were being exchanged quickly cut off upon their arrival to the room. While Taryn slipped passed Jude with her gaze set determinedly to the plush carpet, Vivi looked at Jude with an expression that promised they’d be talking later.

That should be fun.

With a huff, Jude threw herself down into the seat beside Oak at the table and quickly became the new target of his food throwing. Oriana pretended not to notice.

“Oak, that’s enough,” Madoc ordered. The boy immediately stopped, though Jude saw him sneak another piece of bread under the table for the dog. “Stop feeding Bosco table food, too.“

So he had noticed that after all.

Oak deflated ever so slightly but not before Jude caught the flash of his adolescent smirk.

"Now, shall we eat?” Madoc asked, though it wasn’t a question. As if they had been waiting by the closed kitchen door for a queue, the cooks Madoc employed (he was that kind of rich) swooped gracefully into the room with trays of food. Plates of chicken and bowls of some kind of soup were set before all of them, as well as central platters of roasted vegetables and potatoes. All of it was fancy and unnecessary and Jude found herself wanting to just eat McDonald’s instead. At least then she wouldn’t have to deal with family dinner night.

While Madoc attempted to wade through the usual topics of conversation–how is school going? what’s new in your lives? have you been taking care of yourselves? yada, yada, yada–the girls responded with only mild interest while shooting glances at each other across the table. Vivi, either being oblivious to the awkwardness or simply not caring, only shoveled food into her mouth happily while occasionally throwing food back at Oak when he attempted to get it into her water glass.

“Alright, that’s enough.” The abrupt clatter of Madoc’s silverware against his plate brought Jude suddenly out of the fog she’d been stewing in since dinner began. Madoc leaned back in his chair in a show of false calm and he darted his calculating gaze between the twins. “Talk."

When neither girl supplied a response, Madoc raised his eyebrows and leaned forward to steeple his interlaced hands on the table. "Talk,” he demanded louder.

They began speaking at the same time. Their voices collided together and fought for dominance as Jude raged about Taryn’s betrayal as well as her douche of a boyfriend, and Taryn yelled about Jude’s disrespect for said douche of a boyfriend. Vivi and Oak watched with amusement, Oriana pretending nothing was happening as she continued to eat, and Madoc narrowed his eyes as the girls turned their words from him to each other.

“-so disrespectful!” Taryn shouted.

“I can’t believe you’d do this to-,” Jude shot back.

“-just jealous!”

“-is a massive prick! Why can’t you see that?”

“Shut up, just shut u-!"

Finally, Madoc broke up the shouting with the clearing of his throat. Though it wasn’t loud, it was a sound the girls had grown familiar with over the years and they quickly lapsed into silence. "That,” he said calmly but authoritatively, “is quite enough of that."

"You’re the one that asked,” Vivi grumbled under her breath.

“What was that, Vivienne?”

“I said you’re the one that asked. You can’t tell them to talk and then decide they’re done right after.”

“Really? You’re giving me the attitude again tonight?"

"I don’t recall ever stopping."

As with every previous dinner the two quickly dissolved into an argument. Vivi resented Madoc for running off when he found out their mother was pregnant with Vivi, and she resented him even more for only deciding he wanted her after their mother was killed in a car accident along with Jude and Taryn’s father. Years of anger still had no resolution and so the two fought nearly relentlessly.

Completely ignoring the volume already rising in the dining room, Taryn began shouting at Jude again. The noise from all three voices crowded in her mind and her anger and frustration continued to build. She hated these family dinners, hated the years she spent in this house, hated that Vivi could treat Madoc like shit and still have everything handed to her while Taryn and Jude had to claw for every ounce of respect and attention from their adoptive father, hated how Taryn had hurt her, hated how Locke had used her. Suddenly the room began to grow warm. Tremors started in Jude’s fingertips and spread up her arms. Taryn was asking if she was listening to her. Vivi was mocking Madoc in the way of a child, throwing his own words back at him. Madoc was telling her to stop acting like a child, Oriana was telling Oak to go to his room as he continued to throw food from the table at the dog. And then–in a single heartbeat– the voices stopped making sense.

Jude vaguely processed the sound of Bosco beginning to bark as the old familiar feeling like her brain was turning to ice and melting down the side of her face finally made her realize what was happening.

"Fuck,” she whispered.

Oriana scolded her for swearing in front of Oak just as Jude collapsed to the floor and the seizure pulled her under.

——–

Sometimes the worst part of a seizure was the reaction from everyone else afterwards. It also didn’t help that this was Jude’s first seizure in over eight years.

When they returned from the hospital Madoc announced that Jude would not be going home. Instead she was forced to stay at Madoc’s where he could keep an eye on her in case she seized again and, although she tried to protest, Jude was in too much pain to win an argument over it.

She hated being babied. Hated how she was hardly allowed to get up to use the restroom without Madoc jumping to his feet thinking she was going to collapse right there. More than anything she hated having to sleep in her old room that she had spent so many years trying to get away from. The room had that odd feeling of belonging to someone else. She hadn’t slept in this bed since she turned 18 three years ago but she could tell everything was still regularly cleaned. This was her room, but it also wasn’t.

The Jude that slept in this bed wept for her parents every night for years. The Jude that slept in this bed fought for Madoc’s approval before realizing she’d never get it. The Jude that slept in this bed used to lay side by side with her twin sister on most nights, talking and laughing and crying until they fell asleep. She was not that Jude anymore. This was not her home.

Finally, after hours of Madoc watching her like a hawk, he relaxed enough to let her be alone. She collapsed onto the old mattress and stared up at the plastic stars glued to the ceiling above. Every part of her hurt. Parts of her she didn’t know could hurt were aching in a constant, throbbing pain. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to be in her own apartment. Instead she was here.

Madoc didn’t let Jude leave the next day. Nor the next. By the third day she was losing her mind. She was fine, she insisted–but Madoc refused to listen. She was under his watch until he was sure she wouldn’t have another episode, but as the hours went by it felt like he would never be convinced.

——-

Jude was going stir crazy. It wouldn’t be long until she started climbing the walls.

She had to get out of here.

Thankfully her chance at escape came around when Oriana insisted on Madoc accompanying her to pick up her customised dress for some event or another they were attending in the near future. Oriana, having her odd dislike of Jude, insisted that the trip be a couple’s only outing. They seemed to take forever to put their shoes on and find the keys and do all the other BS that came along with leaving the house, and by the end of it Jude was ready to shove them out the door and lock it behind them.

Finally, blissfully, they left. For the first time in days Jude found herself alone and free–now she just had to get out of this infernal house. She ran up the stairs two at a time to get to her room and dove for her phone before she realized she had no idea who to call. She didn’t want to talk to Taryn or go home after everything that had happened, Vivi would be just as bad as Madoc watching her and treating her like she would break, she didn’t have many friends. She did not want to discuss the events of the last few days and anyone who knew her well would ask about it.

There was one person she could call… Someone who wouldn’t know enough to see something was off and pester her about it, someone who probably wouldn’t even care anyway even if he did notice something was off.

Stealing herself, she scrolled through her contacts until she found the one he had put into her phone and clicked CALL before she could change her mind.

The phone rang once, twice. By the third ring Jude was starting to lose her nerve and was about to hang up when she heard the other line go live.

“Hello?” His voice sounded sleepy, like he had just woken up despite the fact it was nearly four in the afternoon. She tried to ignore the way her stomach fluttered at the gravel of his morning voice.

“Uh, hi,” she said lamely

There was a long pause and she imagined him pulling his phone away to look down at the odd number on his screen before he finally said, “Who is this?"

"It’s Jude.”

“Oh,” she heard his voice shift into a lighter tone, though she couldn’t place exactly what else she was hearing in his words. “Well, hello there. I see you finally called me.”

“Yeah, I just thought I should probably check in on you and make sure you haven’t crashed into anything else lately. You know, for public safety reasons.”

His laugh was immediate and unrestrained. She heard rustling on the other end of the line like he was sitting up in bed. “I’ll have you know that I’m a perfectly adequate driver when I want to be.”

"I don’t believe that for a second.”

"Ouch. That hurt me, dear Jude. I have been wounded to my core.”

"Oh please, you don’t have feelings.”

Cardan laughed again. It definitely didn’t make something in her chest flutter.

“So why are you really calling?” Jude would deny till the end of her days that her heart didn’t sink a bit at the thought that perhaps she was bothering him, that perhaps the other night was a fluke and he didn’t enjoy her company enough to see her again. That maybe she shouldn’t have called at all.

But what did she care, right?

“Uh,” she started again, “Well I think you should buy me some fries again.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Because you clearly have money and I’m hungry and if I have to be in this house for a second more I’m going to set the curtains on fire.” She hadn’t meant to be so honest with that last bit but there was no taking it back. Her cheeks heated.

“Interesting,” he said with no indication to his thoughts on the matter. She cleared her throat in the long silence that followed and was about to hang up when Cardan finally spoke again.

“Alright,“ he said, drawing out the word. "I’m also hungry, so I’ll meet you at the diner in an hour."

“Uh, actually… Could you pick me up?”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll die in a fiery accident with me behind the wheel?” He teased.

“Terrified. But I don’t have a ride.”

He chuckled on the other end of the line. “Fine, I’ll see you in an hour still.”

She tried to suppress a smile. “I’m sending you an address now.”

"And Jude?” he said as she was about to hang up the phone.

She brought it back up to her ear. “Yeah?"

There was a drawn out pause like he was considering his words. For a moment Jude wondered if he had hung up already and she had just imagined his voice. But then he said, quietly, like a confession, "I’m glad you called."

Before she could say anything, the arrogance had slipped back into his voice as he teased, "It’s a relief to know that I’m still irresistible.”

Jude barked a laugh that surprised even her. “Intolerable, more like.”

“Keep telling yourself that, dear Jude.” And with that he hung up the phone.

——–

An hour and a half later–turns out that along with being a terrible driver, Cardan was also not punctual–a dented BMW pulled up in front of Madoc’s house blasting some indecipherable music that was quickly turned down as the car rolled to a stop. Through the windshield Jude could see Cardan lean over and pop open the passenger side door with ease.

Must be nice to have long arms, she thought to herself because, owing her official height to just under five feet and three inches, she would have had to crawl into the passenger seat to open the door from the inside. Needless to say she would not have looked as graceful and at ease as Cardan had.

“I hit a cat on the way here,” Cardan said in way of greeting as Jude bent her head to duck into the car. At his words she froze in horror. The bastard had the nerve to laugh at whatever expression was on her face and suddenly she remembered why she hated him. “I’m kidding,” he laughed.

“You’re an ass.”

“So you’ve told me. Now are you going to stand there halfway out of the car or are you going to get in?”

Jude made to answer when headlights down the street caught her eye. “Shit,” she breathed as Madoc’s car began pulling into the drive. Quickly she hurled herself the rest of the way into the car and slammed the door. “Drive.”

“What’s going on?”

“Drive, Cardan!”

He floored it without further questioning. That is, until they were a few blocks away from the house. “So you wanna tell me what that was about?”

“I didn’t want to deal with my dad.”

“Ah, I see,” he replied in a way that said he really did see. Jude studied his face for a further reaction but found only a carefully blank face. Too late she realized she had stared for a second too long and Cardan’s lips quirked up in a smirk. Heat flooded her cheeks as she quickly tore her gaze away and stared out the window. Ignoring the awkwardness she was feeling, or perhaps not sharing in it, Cardan simply turned the stereo back up to near deafeningly volumes and began to sing along horribly. She turned to inform him he had the musical talent of a dying seal when he flashed his eyes in her direction in a conspiratorial sort of way–he was singing that bad on purpose in an attempt to make her laugh.

Well too bad. He’d have to try harder than that.

With the music up so loud she almost didn’t hear her phone going off. If it hadn’t been for the vibration of it she would have missed it entirely. Cardan apparently noticed it too for he reached for the stereo to turn down the volume but, seeing the caller ID flashing on her screen, Jude waved his hand away and rejected the call from Madoc. Though he didn’t say anything, Cardan raised his eyebrows at her before returning his attention back to the road.

“Wait, is this guy saying he’s the original loser?” Jude inquired as she finally started processing the ruckus playing through the speakers.

“Yes, he is. And if you have a problem with my music then you can take it up with my assistant.” With this he motioned his hand towards an oddly shaped skeleton figurine balanced on the dashboard–his assistant, apparently–and the volume, much to Jude’s irritation, increased even more as Cardan took a sharp, heart-stopping turn into the parking lot of the diner while simultaneously cranking the radio and head-banging.

Jesus Christ, she was never getting in a car with him again.

The car came to a stop off kilter in a parking space and Jude quickly vacated even before the engine was turned off. Cardan soon followed through the driver’s side window. Like the first time she saw him do it, Jude gave him a weird look over the top of the car and he reacted with only a wicked grin.

“It’s charming,” he said, indicating the window.

Jude rolled her eyes. “It’s something.”

The inside of the diner was surprisingly empty. When the hostess approached Jude and Cardan at the door she explained why. “Sorry kids,” she rasped with a voice that was clearly deteriorated after years of heavy smoking, “we’re closing early tonight. We’re not seating anyone else.”

“Oh, no problem,” Jude responded automatically even as her stomach rumbled in protest. Through the corner of her eye she saw Cardan’s eyes flick towards her stomach before jerking back to her face as he tried to suppress a laugh. Apparently the sounds of her stomach were louder than she thought.

Once back outside Jude was trying to console herself about the failed attempt for food when she felt Cardan’s hand gently grasp her arm. She spun around, confused, but instead of looking at her he was looking at something over her shoulder.

“How old are you?” He asked out of nowhere.

Jude was confused as all hell but answered, “Uh, twenty-one. Why?”

“Because we,” he spoke while backing up towards the car, “are going to the bar.”

“And what if I don’t want to drink?”

“Then I will get smashed alone while you eat bar food.”

She hesitated while weighing the pros and cons of the situation but as her stomach began to rumble again it was decided that bar food was better than no food, and drunk Cardan couldn’t be all that more annoying than sober Cardan, right?

Jude got in the car.

——–

In contrast to the near empty diner, the bar was packed. Given that it was a Wednesday night it would have been surprising had the bar not been located in the center of a college town. Cardan managed to snag a high-top table in the middle of the room as soon as they entered and proceeded to order a complicated drink order that Jude followed with a request for nachos.

“You sure you don’t want anything to drink?” Cardan asked as the bar waiter wrote down their orders. “Your mood when I picked up was practically shouting for a mixed drink.”

Jude stared him down, contemplating his words, while he watched back with a crooked, lazy grin pulling at the corners of his beautiful mouth. “You know what?“ She answered in challenge to his look. "Fuck it. I’ll have one of whatever he ordered, please,” she directed this last bit to the waiter because she could, in fact, use a drink after the events of the last few days.

"Oh darling,” Cardan teased with his low sultry voice. “I don’t think you’ll be able to handle what I’m drinking.”

Egotistical dick. “Stop being an ass."

Cardan simply winked when Jude rolled her eyes at him. Oh, how she hated how her heart skipped a beat.

When their drinks were delivered minutes later Cardan took his glass and threw all of its contents back in a single go. His eyes, still holding whatever challenge they had issued between them, held steady to hers until his drink was gone. With a clatter he slammed the glass back onto the tabletop and leaned forward with his chin cradled lazily in his palm, elbow on the table, eyebrows raised in anticipation of her response.

God, she really did hate him. Leaning across the table so their faces were inches away from each other, she whispered, "I hate you.” Once again his mouth split into the wicked grin and, before she could second guess herself, she took her own glass and took a hearty swallow of the foul drink. Fire shot down her throat, closing off her airway for an uncomfortable second, before the liquid settled in her stomach like a burst of flames, but she refused to give Cardan the satisfaction of seeing her choke. Instead she returned his raised-browed look across the table and set her features with stubborn determination.

After a moment, Cardan laughed. It was the most irritating response he could have made and yet the sound of it made the liquor dance in her stomach.

“You’re something else, you know that?” His voice was playful. Still, the words rubbed her the wrong way.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She growled defensively.

Cardan leaned back with his hands spread out in surrender, though the grin on his face took away the effect of the action. “You’re the scariest person in any room and you’re not afraid to make sure people know it."

Was she the scariest person in any room? It was some comfort to know that she gave off "don’t fuck with me” vibes. Still, she didn’t know how to respond to Cardan’s words. So instead she saved herself from having to respond by taking another shot of her drink. Somehow it burned more the second time. She coughed.

“God how can you drink this shit?” She asked once the coughing fit subsided. Cardan, on his part, laughed through the whole thing.

“I’m a trained professional.”

“Sounds like a pretentious way of saying you drink too much.”

“Maybe so.” A shrug. “But you can’t prove anything."

"Oh yeah?” She waved the waiter back over to their table and requested two more drinks–never mind the fact that her glass was still a quarter of the way full. “If you get drunk faster than me then you’re obviously all talk.”

“Jude, are you challenging me to see if I can outdrink you?"

Instead of a verbal response Jude narrowed her eyes at him and tilted up her chin. A burst of laughter came from deep within his chest.

"It’s your funeral, then."

——-

Hours later they were several drinks in. Jude was teetering on the edge of wasted. Cardan, on the other hand, was putting his money where his mouth was and was only slightly tipsy. Jude hated to lose.

"So, Jude,” Cardan started conversationally, “do you have a last name?”

“No it was stolen by faeries.” She slurred only slightly.

“Oh, you little liar,” he purred.

“You little… prick. How are you not drunk?”

“I told you.” He jammed his thumb towards his own chest. “Professional.” In spite of his otherwise carefully composed behavior his arm slipped off the edge of the table when he tried to lean against the surface. Jude laughed, a bubbly but taunting laugh that she would never have made while sober.

“So you are drunk!” She didn’t know why but this brought her a great sense of victory.

Cardan frowned down at the table like it was personally responsible for his slip up, making Jude laugh harder until a few small snorts escaped. “Perhaps a bit,” he muttered.

“Did you eat all my nachos?!” Jude gasped as she became aware of the empty plate sitting in the middle of the table.

“No, I’m afraid that was all you.”

“Liar.”

“I don’t lie."

"No?"

"Nope.” That grin that had been making Jude’s stomach flutter all night returned to his face where–she thought–it belonged.

“Prove it,” she challenged.

“How?"

"I don’t know. Tell me a truth.”

“My name is Cardan.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m a little bit drunk."

"I can tell.”

“And you’re beautiful."

At that Jude was completely caught off guard. Trying to recover quickly before he noticed she stammered, "Well… now I know you really are a liar."

"And why is that?"

Was the bar getting warmer? “Because,” she started but realized she was too drunk for this question. Hoping he was also too drunk to notice her avoiding the question Jude drank the dregs in her near empty glass so she wouldn’t have to answer. When she finally worked up the courage to look back up at Cardan he was smiling at her. This smile was different than the others. It was the smile of someone who didn’t know they were smiling–completely unrestrained and goofy in nature. The bar definitely was getting warmer and Jude’s face was on fire.

“Duarte,” she said into the silence.

Cardan was appropriately confused by this random outburst and (sadly) his smile slipped as he furrowed his brows. “What?”

“You asked if I had a last name. It’s Duarte.”

“Jude Duarte,” he tried it out, dragging her name out in a way that felt like a caress. “Hello Jude Duarte.” His smile came back. “I’m Cardan Greenbriar. Would you like to dance with me?”

“What?”

“Dance with me.” This time the smile that came back to his face was the cocky one she wanted to slap off his face. Or, possibly, do other things to get it off his face. “I promise not to step on your toes.”

Jude felt at a loss. She looked around her at the other patrons of the bar. At this hour everyone else was just as drunk–if not more so–than her and Cardan. They were shouting and moving around and throwing things at each other and paying absolutely no mind to the two of them. Still. “No one else is dancing.”

“And?” When she spun her head back around to face him he was again leaning on the table with his chin cradled in his palm. Watching her with the single-minded focus of a cat. He was challenging her. But something in his eyes made her heart flutter.

Fine. She wasn’t going to back down from another challenge. “Fine.”

A crooked grin much like the Cheshire cat’s dominated his face. Without a moment’s hesitation he was on his feet, taking her hands, and pulling her up with him. Before she could process anything, Cardan had her in his arms, his face inches away from hers reeking like alcohol as his breathing got heavier, pupils blown wide while he looked into her face. He really was quite tall and having to tilt her head so much while this intoxicated was making her dizzy. Without thinking, she rested her head against his chest as they danced to the song playing too loudly over the bar speakers.

“If I let go, would you hold on? Would we fly?” Sang the song.

Cardan rested his head on top of hers. The feeling was both pleasant and overwhelming and she had to close her eyes to keep from falling.

“Why were you upset when I picked you up?” The words were so quiet, spoken into her hair like a secret, that she almost missed them.

“What do you care?” She murmured while lacking all of the challenge she’d been using all night.

“I’m not a complete ass, you know.”

No. He wasn’t.

“Is it safer if we just say that we tried?”

“Family dinner ended in a trip to the hospital.” She shouldn’t have said that.

“What?” The alarm was clear in Cardan’s voice as he put enough distance between their bodies to see her face. But she didn’t want to explain and she didn’t want to look at him when his eyes were that full of feeling. Didn’t want to analyze what was in that look. More forcefully than intended, she pulled their bodies back together and wrapped her arms around him to keep him in place this time.

“And I’m stressed about school.” Although this wasn’t a complete lie, it had nothing to do with why she had been upset. It was only a way to steer the conversation away from her confession. “Statistics is kicking my ass.”

When he laughed it was low and she heard it from where she had her ear pressed to his chest.

“Are we laughing at the danger? Are we dancing after death?”

“I can help you with that tomorrow after classes.”

“No, it’s okay.” By now her words were nothing but a whisper.

“Nonsense,” his replied softly. “We’ll meet at your place.”

Too drunk to protest anymore and too desperate to pass the class, Jude reluctantly agreed.

“Are we laughing at the danger? Are we dancing after death, you and I?”

As the song came to its end Jude disentangled their bodies. The heat spreading in her cheeks made it difficult to look him in the face. Her eyes settled instead on his throat. “It’s late.” She pulled out her phone in a desperate need to have something to do with her hands. The screen announced there were four missed calls from Madoc and two messages to punctuate it. Not bothering to see what he had said, she shot him a text saying “i’m fine i’ll call tomorrow” before slipping the device back into her pocket. “I should get home.”

“Let me walk you?” Cardan asked tentatively.

They walked back to her apartment in silence. Whether it was from their drunken state or something else, the silence wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Halfway to her building Jude shivered from the chill wind and, without much thought, Cardan shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The fabric consumed her both physically and in its warmth. The world was swaying. Jude tipped to the side a bit before Cardan reached out and righted her.

Upon the arrival at her door Jude turned to lean against the wood while she faced Cardan. His hair was a mess from the wind and from running his hands through it. His eyes shone from the alcohol and she imagined something else. He was beautiful and she couldn’t deny it. Also undeniable was the feeling inside her of want. She wanted in a way that almost scared her. The words slipped out of their own accord–embarrassing in their obvious meaning, “Would you like to come in?”

Cardan gave her a small smile–but it was sad. Taking a step closer to her he reached for her hand and brought it to his lips. All it was was a gentle brush of lips against knuckles but it felt like so much more as his eyes never left hers.

“Ask me again when we’re both sober,” he said softly.

And he was gone.

——–

songs mentioned in this chapter:

in the car they were listening to original me by yungblud and dan reynolds, and they were dancing to dancing after death by matt maeson.

#omg okay im finally done with this chapter #jurdan #jude x cardan #the cruel prince #the wicked king #the folk of the air #jurdan au #my writing #text post #okay to reblog

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arcadianambivalence · 5 years ago

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World on Fire, Episode 3

December 1939

After the invasion of Poland, the newly declared war seemed to ground to a halt. The nervous calm of the autumn of 1939 led to the war’s nickname of the “phony war.” As Nancy describes it: “There is simply a feeling among the allied forces that the inevitable will never come to pass.”

In World on Fire, British forces stationed in Northern France fill their time with digging, minor spats, and talk of home. Because of his class, Harry has been set up as an officer, but his sergeant seems to be better suited for the job. While Harry tries to be a friend to the men, Stan speaks plainly and gains their respect. Wanting to help Poland but winding up in France, wanting to protect the Tomaszeski family and having to leave them behind, wanting to fight but digging trenches instead, Harry feels listless and useless once again.

(Read more)

Conversely, Tom is still at the bottom of the pecking order in the Navy, and he bristles at the strict order of life at sea. To supplement his income, he gets his peers to place bets on when the ship’s canary will lay an egg, but he runs into trouble with a crewmate named Henry. Crewmate Vic confiscates the money from Tom. Then the ship goes on red alert. Tom rushes into the skirmish with enthusiasm until a hit from the German battleship knocks him off his feet, kills Vic, and blows off Henry’s arm. All personal disputes are set aside as Tom helps Henry to his feet.

Heavily damaged but still afloat, the Exeter is a smokestack gliding across the water. Tom retrieves the betting money from Vic’s body and gives it to Henry. “This doesn’t make us mates,” he protests. He has a reputation to uphold (with whom? Himself?).

In London, Douglas is desperate for news about Tom as the idea of peace grows fainter by the day, especially with news of the sinking of the Admiral Graf Spee. Robina is starting to reassess her opinions, too. Despite calling herself not much of a mother, she can see that Jan is miserable at school. Her words of encouragement ring hollow even as she says them: “And that’s what you do in this life, you get used to it. And it makes you a better person. Eventually. Resilient, at least—a quality much undervalued.”

But the immediate ostracism does not make Jan resilient, and Robina quickly changes her tune. She marches Jan up to the other schoolchildren and stands up for him with a long speech about how everyone in Jan’s family is fighting Hitler and deserves their praise.

(I’ve only had Jan for a day and a half, but any boy who attacks this fine young man must be on Hitler’s side!)

Ludwig, a member of the Resistance, encourages Kasia to use her position as a waitress to observe the occupying German soldiers. If anyone tries to flirt with her, he says, she could lure the soldier to the bombed-out corner of the city and avenge her mother. Kasia attempts to do this with a soldier but gets scared and lets him go at the last minute.

That soldier is Klaus Rossler, and his parents are terrified that they will lose both children to the Nazi Regime. After Hilde’s seizure last episode, the Rosslers believe she will be taken away to an institution like a neighbor’s son once was. Concerned for Hilde, Nancy investigates the institution and makes a horrifying discovery about its state-sanctioned euthanasia program under Dr. Voller. She confronts the doctor, but he tries to justify the program with Social Darwinism. She refutes him with “Human progress is driven by our capacity to look out for those who are weaker than us.”

Nancy shares her findings with the Rosslers: first the parents receive a letter asking for consent to institutionalize the children, and if they don’t reply, there is a second letter and a threat that the child will be taken away. If the parents still refuse, they will be committed to forced labor and their child taken anyway. The final letter is a death certificate. “There is no treatment, only murder.”

But knowledge comes at a cost. Nancy’s act of investigating the institution may very well draw attention to her and the Rosslers. Uwe Rossler is furious and forbids Nancy from contacting them again, but he too could have stirred up suspicion at work today. He interrupted a fight between two workers and refused to deliver any kind of punishment for the women involved. One worker tries to pull rank with her status as a Party Member and is unhappy when that does nothing to sway Uwe.

No good deed goes unpunished anywhere. Konrad and Grzegorz continue to run for their lives, but now they have two factions to evade. I mentioned in my review for episode two that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, too. Because of the time jump between episodes, the news of a second invasion is left off-screen (one of a couple of revelations I wish we had time for), but Konrad and Grzegorz are well aware that everyone they meet could turn them in to one side or the other.

A farmer catches the two men as they sneak through his land, but instead of denouncing them, he gives them a warm meal. This act of kindness doesn’t last for long, though, when a Soviet truck pulls up with a couple of suspicious soldiers. One soldier in particular takes his time inspecting the house while Konrad and Grzegorz hide in the cellar below.

Just like in episode one, Grzegorz fights back a nervous coughing fit. Just like in episode two, the encounter ends with shocking violence as the soldiers murder the farmer and his family.

Compared to all this, the reunion of Lois and Harry seems trite (compared to anything, the back-and-forth with Lois and Harry seems trite!). Not even an episode has passed since their separation, so the arrival of the ENSA troop Lois happens to be in at the camp that Harry happens to be in doesn’t even feel like two long-lost lovers meeting. It just feels convenient.

Finally free to make her own choices without thinking of her father and brother, Lois is all smiles for the troops (who are more than happy to see her too!). Shocked by this side of her, Harry flips his shit and punches a soldier Lois is flirting with. But, class and rank being what they are, it’s the poor soldier who is apparently in trouble for the fight.

But enough has happened in the few months apart to make Harry wonder if the two can be friends again, even though he decked her date. And enough has (not) happened for Lois to realize that she’s pregnant. (I guess an episode-long subplot involving this discovery and Lois coming to terms with it wasn’t as important as Harry’s emotional baggage...)

To complicate things further, Robina realizes that Harry and Kasia are married.

That night, Harry confides his situation to Stan, who casually suggests that the war has done him a favor. At the thought that Kasia could be dead, Harry flips his shit again.

There’s no one to punch, so wasting ammunition and scaring some owls will have to do.

For all the flack I’ve given the love triangle, though, it does serve a thematic purpose. Harry’s sense of guilt and obligation for Kasia and Lois is emblematic of the conflict felt by many soldiers. At one point, Lois asks him “Why are you here?” and he immediately begins to list his grievances about his inability to fight on the front lines for Poland.

Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, but no major combat occurred for several months. Meanwhile, Britain began to shift its focus to its own shores and the threat of their own German invasion.

The feeling that Britain abandoned Poland is symbolized by Harry’s separation from both Kasia and Jan, and his concern for his own country is symbolized by his relationship with Lois.

When writing World on Fire, Peter Bowker chose his characters carefully, each one drawing attention to a different aspect of life during World War Two: refugees and civilians whose lives were upended by war, partisans who resisted, collaborators who didn’t, soldiers who went to war willingly (or unwillingly), and the cross-section between these areas.

Lois and Harry can worry about their love lives because they aren’t in danger every second. Nancy can investigate the euthanasia program because as an American journalist, she is given looser restrictions than German civilians. Robina has the freedom to (publically) change her sympathies with relative ease after meeting Jan, but the Rosslers or the Tomaszeskis are too busy trying to survive unnoticed to dare that. Douglas is able to talk of peace because he is not personally at war (yet).

So when Kasia witnesses the brutal beating and murder of Ludwig, her decision to actively involve herself in the luring and killing of a soldier, and the way this is framed as the death of Kasia’s own innocence, opens up other moral questions for viewer. What makes that soldier different from Klaus? And if the answer is “Nothing,” then did Klaus deserve to die, too? If all Germans are the same, then what does that make Hilde? Robina sympathized with the British Union of Fascists, so why are we supposed to care what Jan thinks of her now? And if Nancy has certain freedoms afforded to her as a guest in Germany, why doesn’t she do more? And finally: if I were in the same situation as any of these characters, what would I do?

With the spring of 1940, the phony war was over, and Germany invaded Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.

Notes:

The battle Tom survives is called The Battle of River Plate, which places this episode in early December 1939. Christmas decorations are visible when Nancy goes shopping and when Robina celebrates Jan’s birthday as other clues for dating the events.

One of the women in the fight that Uwe breaks up uses “Jew” as a slur, which unfortunately would have been one more way to dehumanize and debase Jewish people.

Lois is carrying a Hitler puppet at the start of the episode. I wonder how that routine goes.

…And is it bad that I’m still holding out hope for a Connie subplot?

Further Reading

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/specialfeatures/world-on-fire-s1-ep2-history-images/

#world on fire

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sebthesnipe · 5 years ago

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The Dreamer by Whatwashernameagin an Analysis? Part 3

All portions:

Chapter 1: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4

Chapter 2: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4

The Dreamer

@whatwashernameagain

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Reminder: Spoilers under cut!

If we pick up where we left off, Logan talks about The Dreamer’s/Roman’s vision of the future ‘where everyone could live in love and harmony, and humanity would grow into its glowing, gallant potential, coexisting in friendship with nature and respecting the planet while creating a world fir for fairy tails’. “Why would no one see that [The Dreamer] was clearly delusional” (Whatwashernameagain)? Can anyone say… Foreshadowing?

I know I haven’t made it to chapter 2 yet but I need to bring this up so… If you haven’t read Chapter 2 yet then skip this bit.

*****CHAPTER 2 SPOILERS****

Once again, Roman’s character portrait is gaining more depth with this paragraph. In Chapter 2 we learn that Roman really does see the future this way. The knowledge has a sense of innocence that Logan obviously finds annoying but adds yet another endearing quality to the hero. I won’t go into too much detail about Chapter 2 but the foreshadowing here is quite lovely and shouldn’t be ignored. Logan calls Roman delusional for his vision and he truly is. With everything that we learn in Chapter 2 we see just how delusional the hero really is. But its not only for the future… his delusions go far deeper, involving his family, his duty, his team… I’ll stop there. You’ll just have to read my analysis of Chapter 2 when I eventually get there.

Now back to our regular scheduled programming…

*****END OF CHAPTER 2 SPOILERS*****

Okay… so this next para…. Oh man… So many thoughts…. “Despite his illogical argumentation, [The Dreamer] had somehow kept him from some of the more drastic measures [Logan’s] supercomputer suggested would be necessity for the continued well-being of all – much to the computer’s ire” (Whatwashernameagain). So, I really want to use two types of literary theories here… one being reader-response and the other bordering psychoanalysis. In other words, more Freud stuff. Don’t worry I’m not going to go into too much detail this time.

When I read this para all I can picture is the left and right side of the brain, which is really what Roman and Logan are aren’t they? I’ve briefly touched on the fact that Logan and Roman are polar opposites complimenting themselves before but… this para makes me consider it in a different way. Roman is acting almost like a conscious here; providing a line to draw when Logan starts to get out of control. Roman is the reigns that are yanked when Logan goes too fast. He keeps the Logical side in check. Fitting. Poetic. Perfect. Love it, Eva.

And… This super computer has so much Sass… Must be Remy. XP

With the introduction of Remy we get another burst of the light hearted humor that comes with his personality. Eva balances the character well, in my opinion. Remy is supposed to be a supercomputer with some sass but writing a character that is a computer can be difficult. I really would like to spend some time discussing Remy but I am afraid that I can’t go into to much detail. Remy in this scene is more of a support character, and there isn’t much to go on at the moment… Of course, knowing Eva, this will change in the future. I am sure he has plenty to say about Remy as the story progresses. As it stands Remy makes for a good comic relief and fantastic transitional device, pulling the reader from Logan’s thoughts back into the present to help the story move on.

**I’m going to pause here for a moment. While analyzing the entrance of Remy I grew curious about a few things and decided to ask her. I am going back to edit this in because while writing this portion of the analysis I felt as if I was missing something. Why did she choose Remy specifically to be the supercomputer and how does it play into any of this? I knew there had to be a reason, but I hadn’t managed to figure it out. So, I asked. Here was her response:

“So I absolutely thought about why I wanted Remy as the computer. Computers are associated with cool predictability and lacking emotional competence and stiff, predictable speech patterns. Everything Logan already is. Especially this computer, who has to calculate the highest odds- the value of human life - has to make extremely cold and emotionless decisions. He would have escalated Logan’s crusade dramatically had he behaved exactly like Logic at its worst and purest moments. And their conversations would have read like Logan talking to his Mini me. He had to break up that stereotype because we already have a human trying to operate like a computer. If the calculation of our actions through utilitarian predictions are possible (which I believe they are) the reverse - the creation of unique and emotionally capable A.I.s needs to be taken into account soon. Though Remy is not part of the deliberation yet, his ability for human emotion demands he be included. He makes that demand by being essentially the most human of all of them and I will go into (too much) Detail when it’s time for his arc.”

When she told me this I was floored! I knew that she put more deliberation into her writing than most, but I had never really expected this. That sounds as if I underestimated her but that isn’t the case. I knew she had considered it or I wouldn’t have asked but… Well this is just so beautiful… I suppose there is a reason she is such a fantastic writer… And this people, is one of them. Absolutely stunning, Eva. **

We jump back into Logan’s thoughts within the next paragraph. Remy accused the man of not ‘giving an f’ about what he says. He states that he attempts to follow Remy’s advice without prejudice. “However, whenever he endeavored to put those plans into action or even considered it, something made him hesitate. It was like a bug, hindering his rational thought process. A pesky pop-up window halting his deliberations and muddling his convictions with banal platitudes and illogical rambling” (Whatwashernameagain). I LOVE this paragraph!

So, the imagery here is fantastic. Eva uses a wonderful simile that really catches Logan’s personality. But I’ll have to get into that in a moment. I want to touch on something else first. We know that Logan is driven by Logic; he is Thomas’ logical side after all. That being said, it has been discussed within her Keep Him Safe fandom that Logan is/maybe autistic. I think that it is very fitting for Logan to be autistic (though this may be due to the fact that I am autistic as well). The thing is… and I really wish I had the source for this, but I don’t know what I’ve done with it and can’t for the life of me find it again. I am sorry. Anyways, if we look at this logically Logan is thirty years old (thought Eva may change that but the Logan in Sanders Sides is thirty because Thomas is thirty so I’m going with it); Which means that he grew up in 1990s. There wasn’t a lot of treatment for mild cases of autism in the nineties. In fact, it wasn’t until 2013 Autism Spectrum disorders were classified in DSM-V (History of Autism Treatment). Even if children were diagnosed before then, most cases in the 1980s and some in the 1990 used ECT, which involves passing small electric currents through the brain to intentionally trigger a brief seizure (History of Autism Treatment). These seizures are supposed to be hypothesized to change the brain chemistry in a way to reduce mental health symptoms (History of Autism Treatment). ECT is still used in some cases of autism today, though it is rare (History of Autism Treatment). Why is this important? Well, I am 27 years old. I grew up in the same era of Logan. I am also autistic so believe me when I say that /if/ someone tried to get Logan treated as a child he would have been subject to countless medications, off the wall treatment plans and subject to so many misdiagnoses that eventually he would have simply folded in on himself as we’ve seen him do throughout this work. On top of that, when he eventually came off of the treatments, he would had molded himself to avoid them at all costs becoming cold and driven by logic, blocking away as much of the emotional side of himself as he could and thus becoming the Logan we know today. This defense mechanism would obvious move into his adult years. I don’t know if this is Logan’s history in this work, this is merely speculation, but I am quite fond of the idea and historically speaking it is entirely possible.

**Author confirmed Logan is autistic**

I explain all this because if a person tries to block out emotions that are core to the very existence of a human being than what happens? Well, the example Eva gives, that’s what; “He attempted to follow the disgruntled computer’s advices without prejudice. However, whenever he endeavored to put those plans into action or even considered it, something made him hesitate” (Whatwashernameagain). Logan obviously tries to be as cold and calculating as his computer but despite his efforts, the fact remains… He is /not/ a computer; and he never will be. No matter how logical you try to be… no matter how much you block out your emotions, they will turn up here and there and there is NOTHING you can do to stop them. It is part of the human condition. Which brings me back to the simile I mentioned.

“It was like a bug, hindering his rational thought process. A pesky pop-up window halting his deliberations and muddling his convictions with banal platitudes and illogical rambling” (Whatwashernameagain).

This simile reinforces my hypothesis, but I still can’t say that it is true. Regardless it does show the struggle between Logan’s desire to be cold and calculating and his humanity; even basically describing himself as a computer (I’m pretty sure Remy would have a few things to say about that if he knew). He describes his humanity as a bug, or a virus, a pop-up messing with his head. Or… Could it be that it’s not his humanity that’s bothering him at all… Maybe it’s something… or someone else….

He states that this virus is “muddling his convictions with banal platitudes and illogical rambling”. For those of you about to look up the definition of banal platitudes, I’ve already done the work for you lol. It basically means clichés. So… clichés and ‘illogical’ rambling? Sound like anyone we know? Maybe a certain Dreamer? I talk as if Logan’s pesky humanity and The Dreamer are two different issues entirely but they are not. Roman seems to be a symbol of Logan’s unwanted humanity; something he both needs to define himself and hates because he wishes he didn’t need it. It is quite a wonderful use of symbolism and philosophical structure, beautifully executed. Someone once told me that a superhero is only as good as its villain. I believe that has some truth to it and vice versa. What would Batman be without the Joker or The Riddler? But it also poses the question… What would we be without our humanity. What would good be without bad? In life we define everything as a comparison. If you try to describe the color red you wouldn’t be able to because they can not compare the color to things that are red. In a world without bad, we wouldn’t recognize the good and in a world without good, the bad is just life. Would it be the same if the Utilitarianist didn’t have The Dreamer? If Logan didn’t have Roman?

This an actual concept in the literary world known as the dialectical method. “The dialectical method of analysis begins with particular sense data (knowledge of a single object). But such focus on a particular object of knowledge immediately invites reflection on what the particular object is not. It is not a concept or idea or category. We look at the legal system, for example, and see a law, but to understand a particular law fully we need to know what the principle or idea is that makes it a law" (Rivkin, Julie). While it doesn’t exactly work 100% for Roman and Logan in this instant, it basically mean that one thing is only defined by comparing it to another. But that is for another story…

A good writer makes their reader want to ask questions, to learn more… we see that here without a doubt.

I mentioned that the ‘banal platitudes and illogical ramblings Logan mentioned that were distracting him could be Roman and the next line confirms that theory: “The Dreamer was intruding on his mental solitude increasingly often with the memories of his wide eyes, predictably shocked at learning about the Utilitarianist’s latest plans, before determination lit a fire in his green eyes.” I’m sure his eyes are not the only thing crossing Logan’s mind… As I said before, Roman is a good representation of Logan’s conscious here, with a subtext of attraction that is ever present when it comes to his thoughts about the hero. Logan goes on to describe Roman’s banter once more but this time… there’s something a little different to his words.

“His voice was like a constraining vice around his chest, forcing him to remember his outraged claims of rightness and kindness and chivalry and peace – foolish banalities standing in the way of real benefits for the world. And yet his arguments kept resurfacing in his mind, playing like a broken record. Hopes for unity and joint efforts and belief in humanity’s solidarity and such naive nonsense. Data had proven the probability of success for his hopes at about 8%. A waste of time” (Whatwashernameagain).

8%.... 8%... Of course, Logan would know that! He talks about this hero getting in his way and messing up his plans but when it comes down to it the constant reminder seems to point to one thing… (Besides denial and attraction which we’ve already covered) Jealousy. Logan obviously isn’t jealous of The Dreamer’s popularity or social status, he doesn’t have a care for though things. No, the thing Logan is jealous of is hope. Let’s think about this for a moment. Sure, Roman is the symbol of hope for the country but that’s a different kind of hope. No, the thing that Logan continuously points out is the man’s ignorant hopeful view of a future that is almost impossible… Well, 92% impossible anyways. Logan is autistic… he is driven by logic, pushing down all his emotions as best he can because they are inherently bad… at least that is what he was conditioned to believe; you can’t push down just the bad emotions, its an all or nothing type of deal if you’re trying to be the most logical being you can be… Which means all the good emotions went with them… Logan doesn’t feel emotions like most people… like Roman…

I’m not saying that he doesn’t feel emotions, being autistic can sometimes mean you simply don’t feel emotions the same way as others. Plus, it makes sense for Logan to suppress them… ANYWAYS, I’m getting sidetracked. My point is that a lot of times when you struggle with something like that (or even depression (since ‘numbness’ can be a symptom of depression)) it can be quite difficult to see others enjoying emotions that you are incapable/not use to feeling. It is possible that this might be the case with Logan. Roman’s hope for the future, despite complaining of his naivety, is something Logan covets. It is something he probably respects, though he’d never admit it. I’m sure he no doubt calculated the statistics of Roman’s future to prep for his next argument but also because he was just a little bit curious as to how likely it really is. I even doubt he would actually tell Roman he only had an 8% chance of succeeding because he doesn’t want to see disappointment on those beautiful features; he’d probably just tell him the chances were slim… Though Roman would no doubt be one of those guys that would respond to ‘Fat chance’ with ‘I have a chance; and its fat!”. Of course, the next paragraph confirms my thoughts on Roman’s reaction to the information and once again reinforces Logan’s thoughts on just how handsome The Dreamer is.

The thing I want to draw attention to next is another opinion of Logan’s. Eva writes from his POV “Thankfully, many of his actions were far too advanced for a simple mind like the Dreamer’s, which afforded him the ability to work in peace. The threat of law-enforcement was hardly severe enough to warrant his attention. Still, he had interrupted his work and caused critical failure to several of his more drastic plans” (Whatwashernameagain). So, this brings up a number of things we were not privy to beforehand. First, it paints the dynamic in a bit of a different light. It brings our attention to the fact that Logan doesn’t see the man as the sharpest tool in the shed. We learn in Chapter 2 that that isn’t exactly the reason behind it all but Logan, of course is not privy to this… yet. Once again, we see Logan have a bit of a superiority complex, though I doubt he means to or even realizes it. In society today, knowledge is power, and Logan has a lot of it. His view that Roman is less intelligent puts him lower on the power scale and therefore beneath him. This reinforces the same imagery offered earlier in the story, calling Roman a ‘thorn in [Logan’s] shoe’ and the fact that Logan is not happy being attracted to him. On the opposite side it also reinforces just how adorably innocent Roman is.

I LOVE this next bit! Logan mentions that he had not made Roman a target despite Remy’s insistence and explains his position of the subject: “he was trying to be useful in his own way. Criminals and terrorist attempting to profit of the system’s flaws or praying on the weak were an issue the Utilitarianist was aware of, even if he had little time to devote to such matters as we worked on the grand scheme of things. Pedophiles were most deplorable, yes, but Remy could not devote his processor power to chasing every single individual. They had brought two sex-trafficking rings to light with the help of their white-hat-hackers and had, by making the addresses of the offenders’ public, dealt with a lot of them indirectly, yet a single kidnapping was a too small variable to devote any time to” (Whatwashernameagain). So far, we’ve seen Logan move from frustration, obsession, denial, attraction, respect to envy… now we see… understanding? While some may think this is a bit contradictory, I would have to disagree… In fact, it makes complete sense that Logan would accept and understand Roman’s heroic persona. Afterall, the two of them share the same goal, they simply go about it in two different extremes.

Logan wants a better world where things like corrupt governments are nonexistent and every person can walk to their car at night without having to cling to their pepper spray or keys so desperately. Granted, he is attempting to accomplish this on such a large scale that it will not happen anytime soon, but the intention is still there. In his mind, the end justifies the means and therefore the Utilitarianist was born. Roman wants the same world, granted there are a few more rainbows and most certainly more glitter in his vision but it is the same none the less. The only difference is Roman’s sense of morality stopping him from doing something as drastic as Logan does. I think Logan sees this and though he considers the unwillingness a type of weakness he can see that Roman has a use and therefore has value (just as the utilitarianism principle suggests). In fact, in a way, Roman is assisting Logan in his goals, though it is a very small way. He is basically taking care of smaller crimes while Logan attempts to handle the big guns. This, of course, paints their dynamic in a bit of different light; Logan being the brains while Roman fumbles about and makes his job far more difficult that it needs to be. Think of it like Pinky and the Brain, or Dexter (from Dexter’s Laboratory) and his sister DeeDee (Is my age showing?). Within the next two paragraphs

Logan talks about the hero saving a young girl and the ‘almost-admiration’ that he had felt for the hero who was basically doing something Logan was incapable of; which reinforces the analysis. A small snippet of their interactions is seen for the first time; Roman lecturing about every life counts and using power for good; Logan making a smart-ass comment in return and blasting him off the oil rig with high pressured water. This is actually quite a beautiful scene because it shows the rivalry (despite Logan’s complaining) is filled with more of a playfulness than actual malice. It is obvious that Logan doesn’t really want to harm Roman and vice versa. It makes for a very soft moment for the reader, warming them a bit.

The playfulness continues through the next scene. Logan reminisces about a moment when Roman’s ‘incompetence’ managed to get him captured by another villain. There is a lot to read during this scene so I will try to be brief (I am trying to shorten these parts while also moving a bit quicker through the work, so I don’t bore you guys too much). Logan states that “only Remy had managed to piece together his whereabouts after Logan had mentioned his failure to appear in front of a camera for a solid two days. Leaving him to die in the hands of such an individual might have caused a significant amount of unrest and subsequent danger to the public” (Whatwashernameagain).

First off, do you really pay Roman so much attention that you notice when he’s not there to brighten your day? Of course you do. I’m sure he would love the attention if he knew about it. Anyways, the last sentence provides more insight into what I have previously said about Logan’s recognition of Roman’s usefulness. He states that Roman’s disappearance would cause unrest and subsequent danger to the public. While, he may be making excuses, according to Remy, he does recognize this to be try and it is. If the public discovered The Dreamer was gone crime would spike, people’s hope would disappear causing them to lash out in fear and over protectiveness; everything Logan was working towards wouldn’t necessarily crumble but would no doubt be slowed. Which brings me back to the whole dialectical theory thing from earlier, which I won’t bore you with again. Just know that everything is related to something else in meaning, including Logan and Roman.

Love the light humor of Remy calling Logan his ‘computer-world-interaction device! LOL! Aside from the light humor, the interaction is a good resource in rounding out Remy as a character. It offers the reader a chance to understand that Remy needs/wants to interact with the outside world, to experience what it is to be apart of society outside his connections with the internet… Don’t we all Remy… Don’t we all… It develops Remy into the AI he is supposed to be rather than the image of a computer we originally had.

“Saving the Dreamer from his own incompetence was not a concession to his naive beliefs. No, certainly not! If anything, his wailing and warbling had caused Logan a headache as he’d dragged him out of the bunker, arguing the whole way” (Whatwashernameagain).

Logan SAVED Roman?! I love this. Irony at its finest! The villain saves the hero. Poetic justice! It also paints Logan to have a heart, though he denies it, which is quite nice too. Too bad Roman has no idea that his initials are carved in the ice around said heart. Best part is, we actually get to see a small snippet of the argument between the two: “’Uhhng you’re such an impossible motherf- um motherboard! Because you’re like a computer! Cold and emotionless!’ [The Dreamer] wailed, narrowly avoiding uttering a vile insult in his frustration. He prided himself on a hero’s impeccable manners, after all” (whatwashernameagain).

So, this snippet does a lot of things for Roman’s persona here. It provides him with the sass we hadn’t seen from him yet, giving him a bit more personality and a small bit of his POV which is a first in the story as well. We also can see the stark contrast between his and Logan’s frustration. Roman loses a bit of control in his frustration and almost curses; while Logan’s frustration, while intense, was still controlled almost to perfection (minus the one time he almost got caught because Roman got him to argue with him). His calm cool demeanor rarely cracking. Roman, as we see here, however, is the opposite, wearing the emotion on his sleeve and allowing it to flow freely rather than being bottled up and locked away like Logan attempts to do.

“Why had he cared to save this man after all? Not because of the softly uttered gratitude he’d finally muttered as he’d bundled him into an intimidated police officer’s car or his wide, awed eyes as he’d materialized out of the shadows of his cell, perfectly adjusted to the darkness in his neck-high sleek, black suit and high-tech mask that made him resemble a nimble, black cat. Or the way his expression had morphed into a knowing, almost warm smile before their differences had made their tempers rise once again” (Whatwashernameagain).

Okay, first off… Lets look at the structure here. This is another thing I love about Eva’s writing. I’ve mentioned time and time again, her ability to transition from one POV to another seamlessly but she also does it with timeframes. We’ve seen it a few times now, but this is probably the most obvious one which is why I waited until I got to this point before bringing it up. Before this para we were reading a small snippet of the arguing as Logan dragged Roman to safety. Now, we see Logan deposit Roman into a car and then BAM! Back in the cell he had been being kept in. The best part is that it is done so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t even really think about the fact that they are jumping back and forth in this timeline, they are simply able to piece it together as if it was all one piece… absolutely beautiful…

This para also gives a small insight into the humanity in Logan I had mentioned before, the humanity that only seems to come out when Roman is around; thus, reinforcing the fact that Roman /is/ Logan’s humanity. It also is a reminder of Logan’s denial but who is paying attention to that anymore?

Logan mentions the ‘softly uttered gratitude’ that Roman mutters as he was bundled in the car; making me wonder just how often Logan is thanked? Probably never… It is no wonder it was something of note here. It is like feeding a steak to someone who is accustomed to instant ramen: Surprising but not unwelcomed.

He also talks about Roman’s ‘wide, awed eyes,’ the look turning into a ‘knowing, almost warm smile.’ This is another example of how Eva manages to catch emotions so beautifully. This is also a wonderful example of Reader-Response theory as well. She mentions the physical reaction that Roman has at the appearance of Logan, but she leaves everything else up to the reader to fill in the blank… to shape the story. Still, she gave us just enough to work with.

Roman is obviously surprised that someone was there for him as his eyes go wide, but its really the fact that it is Logan, his opposite, his rival, that is there to save him. The shock fades quickly though as everything Roman has been arguing with the man over seems to come true in his eyes. Logan has just proven Roman right in the sense that Logan is good at heart and /can/ do the right thing… that there is hope that he can be led down the ‘right’ path. But the smile he offered wasn’t cocky or conceited if that were the case. It was simply ‘warm’. The complexity of human thought and emotions is far to vast for anyone to really /know/ what Roman was thinking her but I’m going to give a guess: Roman saw for the first time that his rival was not only living up to Roman’s hopes and expectations but was, in a way, providing him with a sense of friendship that Roman probably wasn’t accustomed to. Or at least a sense of affection (platonic or otherwise). No doubt, being a hero was a very lonely existence.

And we end the scene with Logan mentioning Remy’s like for Roman and his ‘cute ass and mouth.’ That’s Remy for you.

Thank you for joining me for Part 3 of this analysis. I apologize for the length and want to thank you for baring with me through it.

Yes, this is a repost. I had posted a very short Part 3 earlier today and did not want to end the Chapter 1 analysis on an odd number, so I combined Parts 3 and 4.

I will see you guys in part 4! Feel free to send me an ask or message with questions, concerns, emotional outbursts or things you simply would like to discuss or add! Thank you all!

“History of Autism Treatment.” Applied Behavior Analysis Programs Guide, https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisprograms.com/history-autism-treatment/.

Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: a Practical Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.

Whatwashernameagain. “The Dreamer - Chapter 1.” Hello Guys Gals And Non Binary Friends, 8 Sept. 2019, https://whatwashernameagain.tumblr.com/post/187581477262/the-dreamer-chapter-1.

#The dreamer #villain!logan #Hero!roman #sanders sides #logince #logan sanders #roman sanders #logan/roman #roman/logan #analysis #readerresponse #reaction #fanfiction

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theyearoftheking · 5 years ago

Text

Book Thirty: The Dark Half

“Stark reached out, not physically, but with his mind, and seized that disappearing tail of Thad’s mental probe. In the eye of Stark’s own mind it looked like a worm, a fat white maggot deliriously stuffed with offal and decay...”

So, let me tell you about the dark half inhabiting my house... a little over a year ago, we decided to get Waverly, our beautiful golden rescue pet angel, a friend. She loved spending time with her dog cousins, and would sink into a deep depression when we’d bring her back home again. Seriously. Look at this beautiful face. She is truly an angel in dog form.

So, we found a rescue beagle (my daughter’s alleged dream dog of the week).

Y’all.

I was not prepared for beagle life. Biscuit Beast tore through two different cages, pooped (and smeared it!) everywhere, and chewed up everything from Legos, to Ugg boots to video game controllers. And the sight of a pom-pom on a hat makes her crazy with uncontrolled chewing fueled rage. She was an absolute menace. We tried everything from melatonin, to CBD oil, to just flat-out not leaving the house. She is a lovely, cuddly dog... but her mouth gets her in trouble every time.

And then quarantine happened. Biscuit Beast has been thrilled to have her people home with her 24/7 all day, every day. Lots of cuddles, walks around the neighborhood, and all the personal interaction a beagle could ask for. We even left on two short jaunts, and she didn’t chew anything. She received all the praise for being the best dog in the world.

And then yesterday, I walk upstairs to find this. She gnawed my copy of The Dark Half like it was a t-bone. And it made no sense. We had been home with her all day, she had a long walk around the lake, and plenty of attention. But her dark half just can’t be tamed. Oh, Biscuit Beast. To know beagles is to love them.

Biscuit Beast may destroy everything she can wrap her strong little jaw around, but at least she’s not violently killing people, and threatening lives everywhere she goes, unlike George Stark in The Dark Half. I guess I’ve got that going for me?

The Dark Half was fun. It was my first time reading it, and you could almost hear Steve whispering, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Richard Bachman came to life and became my murderous alter-ego?” The author’s note actually reads, “I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.”

It makes you wonder what the relationship between an author and his pseudonym is like. Is it dark? Does it take you in directions you don’t expect? Do you end up resenting the pseudonym for contractually forcing you to write books outside your comfort zone? Steve had created an entire biography for Bachman, and seemed almost gleeful about killing him; not unlike Thad Beaumont, the main character in The Dark Half.

The book opens with child Thad, who is suffering from horrible headaches and seizures. He goes in for surgery, and the neurologist finds remains of a fetus in Thad’s head: an eye, part of a nostril, three fingernails and two teeth. *Shudder*

Thad grows up to become a relatively famous writer, and we find him reading a People magazine article discussing how he “killed” his pseudonym, George Stark. The article even includes a picture of Thad and his wife, Liz, standing on Stark’s grave. His gravestone reads, “Not a Very Nice Guy”. Thad seems equally amused and embarrassed by the article; and quickly brushes it to the side in order to help his wife care for their adorable twins, Wendy and William.

Then, shit gets weird. The police show up on Thad’s doorstep, ready to arrest him for a brutal, local murder they’re confident he committed. After all, his fingerprints are all over the crime scene. There’s only one small problem: Thad has an iron-clad alibi for the night of the murder, with witnesses galore attesting to his presence.

The police are thrown.

Meanwhile, several more brutal murders are committed in New York City, including a young man who had figured out the Thad/George connection, and was attempting to blackmail him. Written in blood on his wall is the phrase, “The Sparrows are Flying Again”. The other murder victims are all people who were associated with the People magazine article. Very strange.

But Thad is starting to put some pieces together. In his office, he also finds the words, “The Sparrows are Flying Again” randomly scratched on a piece of paper. It reminds him of when he was a kid, and the sounds of birdsong would precede one of his bad headaches. He has his suspicions about who the real murderer is. He makes the logical jump that it has to be his pseudonym, George Stark. Because, who else would it be?

Spoiler: It’s George Stark!

George calls him from one of the murder scenes to gloat, and basically tells Thad he’s not ready to be dead yet. And Thad needs to get started on his next Stark novel. George doesn’t have a lot of time left... his body is starting to deteriorate into a gross mess, and unless Thad starts writing, George is going to (literally) waste away.

So, George ends up kidnapping Liz and the kids, and takes them to their Maine cottage, where he holds them hostage until Thad starts working on his next novel. Thad starts writing, which causes George to heal, and Thad to take on George’s ailments. There’s some negative, co-dependent symbiosis going on here. Eventually, Thad stops writing, and summons billions of sparrows to bust in the house and peck George to death, before carrying him off to the depths of hell.

Why sparrows? Well, because they’re psychopomps of course! For those not versed in ancient Greek, psychopomp means, “guide of souls.” According to Thad’s fellow professor, Rawlie DeLesseps, “...those who conduct. In this case, those who conduct human souls back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead... Gatherings of sparrows are rather more ominous... sparrows are said to be the outriders of the deceased... which means their job is to guide lost souls back into the land of the living. They are, in other words, the harbingers of the living dead...”

Y’all... there is so much going on here. Is George a metaphor for Steve’s drug addiction? Think about it... the more it took over, the sicker Steve got. And it kept him from doing the kind of writing he always wanted to do (novels like this, compared to dung-heaps like The Tommyknockers). Once his addiction was banished and dragged back to hell, he was reunited with his family and kids. Maybe a little bit of a stretch, but thought provoking.

I really liked this novel; it was tightly edited and well written, it kept my attention and it gave me a glimpse into Steve’s crazy brain. And it had some fun Castle Rock mentions... like that time George Bannerman helped solve that string of nasty murders (The Dead Zone), only to be taken out by a rabid dog (Cujo). Rest in peace, George.

No Dark Tower or Wisconsin mentions, just good, clean, Steve fun.

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 24

Total Dark Tower References: 22

Book Grade: B+

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Talisman: A+

Misery: A+

Different Seasons: A+

It: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

The Drawing of the Three: A-

Nightmares in the Sky: B+

The Dark Half: B+

Skeleton Crew: B+

The Dead Zone: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

Cycle of the Werewolf: B-

Danse Macabre: B-

The Running Man: C+

Thinner: C+

Dark Visions: C+

The Eyes of the Dragon: C+

The Long Walk: C+

The Gunslinger: C+

Pet Sematary: C+

Firestarter: C+

Rage: C

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Roadwork: D

Christine: D

The Tommyknockers: D-

Next up is Four Past Midnight, another collection I’ve thumbed through. Four Past Midnight contains classics like The Langoliers and Secret Window, Secret Garden; which was an excellent movie. When I started reading The Dark Half, my husband told me what a great movie it was. I asked him for the plot, to see if it was similar to the book, or a Lawnmower Man type situation. He then proceeded to give me the entire plot of The Secret Window. And tried to convince me they were basically the same story. I’m going to reserve judgement. So, stay tuned for that. I hope everyone is staying healthy, washing hands and wearing masks.

Until next time, Long Days and Pleasant Nights,

Rebecca

#stephen king #the dark half #constant readers #sparrows #the dark tower #psychopomps #richard bachman #beagles

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jadeender · 5 years ago

Text

Checking In Part 1

One of the benefits to silence is that you can watch others. Or so Four thought as they made their way across Hyrule field, not sparring a look at the ranch they had just left. He was rather used to doing this already, observing his friends as the voices in his head bickered or commented.

Especially now that he couldn’t speak aloud Four had spent a lot of time watching his friends. To be honest Four or rather Green was rather relieved with this situation. Having Shadow in his head meant he got his friend back, and that the others in his head had someone to talk to so they pestered him less.

As they trekked away from the ranch Four ran through a checklist in his head. Had he tended everyone's weapons and metal armor if they had any? Yes. Had he taken care of his own weapon? Always.

Watching from his place near the back of the pack Green studied each person. Time was leading them as he always was his armor glinting in the morning light. Wild and Twi walked by his side, Twi’s movements still rather sluggish after his fight with Savage had drained him. Wild on the other hand walked tall, his clothes freshly washed and hair done into a tight braid.

Legend walked on not to far from them, his face bored though he conversed with Warriors about something, Warriors looked no worse for the wear, though he had oddly enough donned a second orange scarf like Conqueror wore. Hyrule also tended towards the middle, he was quiet as usual.

Wind walked near to Four, his footsteps normal but other movements somewhat erratic. Just last night he had had another seizure, an experience becoming worryingly common ever since they had been merged with the darks. Finally there was Sky who brought up the back of the pack, he soldiered on with a neutral expression, twin swords glinting in the light, the energy of each having a particular aura, something Four had learned the first time he had tried to take them for cleaning and sharpening.

Four shuddered at the thought of that experience. Sky had torn them from his grasp the moment he noticed Four had them.

But that wasn’t what Four wanted to focus on, today his focus was on getting a word, so to speak, in with everyone. He wanted to see how everyone was doing. He had noticed the little ways they had changed with acute accuracy. How Sky grew silent and Wind somber. How Wild had become worried about his appearance, and Time had grown less patient.

Changing his walking to speed to match Winds Four fell into step with the other pulling out his journal and pencil.

“How are you doing?” Four wrote.

“I’m ok.” Wind said attempting to push a smile to his face. Four just gave him a look in response.

“Really, I promise. Tempest is just loud, and condescending.” Wind elaborated hesitantly. Four made a go on gesture and Wind sighed. “He’s just… he mocks everything I do. Everything he can think of. ‘That sword swing was too slow, that comment shows you’re weak.’ That sort of stuff.”

Wind turned quiet and looked away from Four before whispering, “And what if he’s right?”

Four laid a hand on Wind’s shoulder to get the boys attention before shaking his head no, then writing “He’s not right. He’s trying to make you insecure, from what Shadow says he also seems to delight in others pain. Don't give him the satisfaction.”

Wind read what Four had written then gave him a nod. “I’ll try my best.”

At the next break Four caught up with Hyrule. He walked hesitantly over to the other hero feeling Shadow’s fear of Callous rising in the back of his throat. But Four pushed it down and stepped up to Hyrule. Pulling out his journal four showed Hyrule the “how are you doing” message he had written previously.

“I’m alright.” Hyrule said. Four studied the other for a minute, he honestly couldn’t read Hyrule. The others were like open books most of the time but Hyrule, there was no indication, physical tics, or body language than anything had changed. Only his turn to quietness betrayed that anything was different.

“How have things been with Callous?” Four wrote.

“Fine.” Came the short reply.

Four signed “ok” before walking away from Hyrule knowing that was the best he was going to get. His next target was Sky, who at current was sitting near to Time as they rested. Others were munching on snacks like apples but Sky just stared off into the distance.

He hadn’t had anymore… outbursts from Stygian but he had become quieter since then. Sure Sky was still the team nurse and made sure Four changed the bandages on his neck but other than that he spent a lot of time silent. Watching the others or cleaning his swords. And Four doubted it was because he and Stygian were having riveting conversations.

Four caught Sky’s attention and signed “Hello.” All of them knew the alphabet so he could sign words letter by letter though it was difficult.

“Hi Four, do you need something?” Sky asked forcing some semblance of pep into his voice, the strain of which was quite obvious.

Switching to his journal Four wrote, “Just wanted to see how you were holding up.”

Sky smiled softly before answering. “I’m fine. Stygian’s quiet most of the time. I know he hates me, that much I can tell but really he hasn’t done anything since um…”

Sky trailed off slightly and Four gave him a nod showing that he didn't need to finish his sentence, it was obvious what he had been referring to.

“I’ll be alright as long as it stays like this.” Sky turned away from Four slightly then looked back. “So don’t worry about me. I’m sure some of the others have it much worse than I do.”

Ah there it was, the denial. But no time to really work on that. Four filled a note away about it for later, or rather told Vio to remind him since bookkeeping was his area of expertise.

“Ok.” Four signed before walking back off as Time called that they needed to get moving again, so they formed backup similar as before and started walking. It was a slow day, Time’s Hyrule wasn’t overflowing with enemies like some of the others, they took down the occasional stalfos as they entered the lost woods but on the whole it was uneventful day until…

“Shut up you damn idiot.” That sound drew everyone’s attention to Warriors, just a moment prior he had been walking while listening to Legend talk about something, Four wasn’t sure what, but the next Legend was on the ground and Warriors boot was on his chest.

“What the hell Warriors?” Legend yelled as he squirmed trying to get out, but Warriors leaned over putting more weight on his foot so Legend couldn’t roll over. Everyone stood staring in shock at the scene. Not a minute before had they been chatting like normal.

“Not again.” Shadow whispered drawing Four’s attention away from the scene before them.

“What do you mean again?” Vio asked in their head.

“They fight alot, Acidic and Conqueror.” Shadow replied as Four turned back to watch the scene, Time had pulled Warriors off Legend and had shoved him down on the ground.

“What are you doing?” Time asked his voice a hair's breadth from full on rage. Warriors attempted to stand back up but Time pushed him back down. “What were you thinking?”

“I can’t stand his damn voice. He’s so annoying.” Warriors yelled, or rather Conqueror yelled at the other whom Four was helping stand up.

“So?” Time shot back. “Never. Do. That. Again. The day we start infighting is the day we become exactly like the darks. Pull yourself together.”

Time shoved Warriors back a final time then looked at the others. “We’ll take a quick break.” he turned from the group and walked a little way away, with Twilight trailing slightly behind.

Four helped Legend to sit down on a rock before signing, “are you ok?”

“I’m fine just surprised mostly.” Legend peered at Warriors who was sitting off on his own, his personality having done a full 180 so that he was now sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, a very unwarriors like thing to do.

“Shadow says they fight alot.” Four signed. Luckily Legend was one of the few who knew more advanced signs.

“Yeah.” Legend replied slowly. “Acidic is still pretty mad. I’m having to hold him back or our sword would already be at his neck.”

Four just nodded and starred at Warriors as well. As long as he’d known Warriors he’d never known the man to look so… dejected. After getting reassurances from Legend that he was ok Four stood and began to make his way over to Warriors.

#linkeduniverse #merged #four plays psychiatrist #everyone gets angst

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lokilickedme · 6 years ago

Text

Part 3 of Read By Loki Laufeyson - Fifty Shades of Grey

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own (no longer available there)

Rating: Mature

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Loki - Fandom, Loki (Marvel) - Fandom, The Avengers (MarvelMovies), Tom Hiddleston - Fandom

Relationship: Loki/His Book, Ana/Christian

Character: Loki, Loki Laufeyson, Loki (Marvel), Ana Steele, Christian Grey

Additional Tags: Explicit Language, this book deserves its own warning tag, one that says DON'T READ ME, Explicit Sexual Content, lame and exceedingly silly descriptions of sex acts

Series: Part 3 of Read by Loki Laufeyson

Stats: Originally Published 2016-02-27 Words: 3386 (original version)

Part One: The Night Manager

Part Two: High Rise

50 Shades of Grey, Read By Loki Laufeyson by lokilickedme

Summary: Loki reads 50 Shades and throws up multiple times. I would offer my apologies to E.L. James, but she doesn't deserve it.

Notes: See the end of the work for notes

This shitshow gets on the shaky road with a dedication that made the right side of my face twitch before the story even got started. It's dedicated to "the master of my universe" and as of right this very moment I'm ready to preemptively toss it into the bathroom, not as reading material for my next luxury soak, but as a replacement for the empty roll of toilet paper that I keep forgetting to run to the store for. Fuck me people, she didn't even capitalize "master" and ANY GOOD SUB KNOWS THAT NOT CAPITALIZING MASTER IS A MASSIVE SHOW OF DISRESPECT AND YOU DESERVE THE ASS BEATING YOU GET FOR IT - WITH ZERO AFTERCARE. Don't ask me how I know that, but go ahead and fight me, this is a hill I’m willing to die on. If this person is writing a book that's touted as an even remotely accurate accounting of a Dom/sub relationship, I can tell you right now, she doesn't know jack shit.

So I've read a couple of pages and I'm already looking around for my seizure meds when I realize I don't take seizure meds. I will after this, I might as well go ahead and call it in. I'm to the part about Wanda the Volkswagon when my anticipatory boner not only goes away, but retracts so far up into my scrotum as a result of the most horrendous writing I've seen this side of Thor's second grade book report on Anne of Green Gables that I'm thinking I might just be female now. I mean seriously? This hurts. I’m not even exaggerating, if you have a penis it’s going to draw up into your gall bladder. If you have a vulva it’s going to need a vat of Burt’s Bees Extra Moisture Replenishing Salve and a bottle of cranberry capsules. I’m not even female at the moment and this thing gave me a flaming UTI.

I’m not sure Wanda, my old VW Beetle, would make the journey in time. Oh, the Merc is a fun drive, and the miles slip away as I floor the pedal to the metal.

People, this is a published book. Someone got paid for this. It got made into a movie. I haven't even gotten to the sex yet and I'm already Google mapping monasteries within a one-hundred mile radius because I'm ready to take my vows. No, this book hasn't made me believe in a higher power. It has taken away my will to ever get laid again.

The elevator whisks me with terminal velocity to the twentieth floor.

Holy fucking shitballs people, terminal velocity by its very definition means someone is going to die. Is this person wearing a pressurized speed suit? Do they hand them to you at the door before you go into the elevator? How does the building tolerate the mechanics of generating that kind of speed? And if by some random blessing by some random god who won't be getting any thanks from me she actually survived this trip to the twentieth floor, her brains would be leaking out her asshole. That's not the way to make a good first impression, sweetheart. Take the fucking stairs next time.

It’s a stunning vista, and I’m momentarily paralyzed by the view. Wow.

Yes, wow. Paralysis is rarely ever momentary darling, and it does ugly things to pretty girls. Like, rendering you a jelly-like heap on the floor because your muscles don't continue working while you're paralyzed. Paralysis sort of means your muscles have stopped working.

I've begun highlighting every word I come across that the author obviously doesn't know the definition to. Fake it till you make it, right darling? Five pages in and my yellow pen has died a violent death.

I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet, and falling head first into the office. Double crap – me and my two left feet!

YOU.

HAVE.

GOT.

TO.

BE.

FUCKING.

KIDDING.

ME.

In what universe is this ridiculous cutesy sort of shit thought to be amusing? The cliches are giving me hemorrhoids. Me and my two left feet? Not that I'm an expert on Earth terminology and phrasing, but I'm fairly certain people stopped saying shit like that around 1962. And...I can't believe I'm being forced to say this, but - double crap?? I was already calling my brother a bilgesnipe’s vagina by the time I could crawl, I'm pretty sure the last time I said something as immature and amateurishly silly as double crap I was still in the womb and cursing in Morse Code. I may actually have even still been a sperm in my father's left testicle. How old is this writer?

“Um. Actually–” I mutter. If this guy is over thirty then I’m a monkey’s uncle. In a daze, I place my hand in his and we shake. As our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilarating shiver run through me. I withdraw my hand hastily, embarrassed. Must be static. I blink rapidly, my eyelids matching my heart rate.

I'm sorry but I really don't even know where to start. The Um. Actually- ? Or the I'm a monkey's uncle? Maybe it's the staccato pacing? The elementary school sentence structure? The fact that all but one sentence of that paragraph has the word I in it, sometimes multiple times? She placed her hand in his and they shook - sort of like I'm shaking right now. It's the seizures this damn travesty has provoked, honestly I should sue the author for my prescription costs. And if that girl's eyelids matched her heart rate then I'm just envisioning one of those blinky-eyed cupie dolls strapped to a paint mixing machine.

“I own my company. I don’t have to answer to a board.” He raises an eyebrow at me. I flush.

Yes darling, always do a courtesy flush when the stench is really vomit-inducing. Like now. I'm not even going to ask if this conversation is taking place in a bathroom because I can tell you honestly, the bathroom is right where it belongs.

His voice is warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel...or something.

Something...like, maybe shit, perhaps?

I shake my head to gather my wits. My heart is pounding a frantic tattoo -

No darling, trust me, it's not. A tattoo is something you draw on your body, there's no pounding involved unless you've done the drawing on your vagina. And if you’re referring to the drum beat, then you should just say so because frankly this is meant to be a sex book and your readers aren’t going to be interested in Googling your sophomoric attempts at using interesting words. And just as an aside, most humans are going to think of a Scottish marching band when you use that word in that context, and the last thing you want your readers thinking about while you’re sliding into a smut scene is men in plaid skirts blowing bagpipes.

I am utterly thrown by the sight of him standing before me. My memories of him did not do him justice. He’s not merely good-looking – he’s the epitome of male beauty, breathtaking -

Hold on a second, I wasn't aware I was in this book? I must have been drunk. I'm not sure that I would consent to this idiocy even if I was soused off my gourd, so I think I'm going to be filing a second lawsuit for character theft.

- and he’s here. Here in Clayton’s Hardware Store. Go figure.

Yes, go figure sweetiepie. Everybody, even handsome people, need replacement U-joints for their toilets. They come in handy when you're trying to flush books.

Finally my cognitive functions are restored and reconnected with the rest of my body.

Honey, cognitive functions aren't a part of your body, they're a part of your brain. So unless your head fell off while you were walking around in Clayton's Hardware Store, I doubt this happened. If it did, my condolences to Mr Clayton and the other shoppers, I know how traumatic that can be.

And from a very tiny, underused part of my brain –

You mean the whole thing?

- probably located at the base of my medulla oblongata where my subconscious dwells – comes the thought: He’s here to see you.

I just had another seizure. It’s a sex book darling, stop trying to use seventy-five cent Merriam Webster words and settle for something along the lines of My fucking head exploded - trust me, at this point your readers will relate to that far more than to the concept of subconscious thought. Or any thought at all. And we all know it’s highly unlikely Miss Double Crap Wanda-driving headless-in-Clayton’s-Hardware store is capable of coming up with a term like medulla oblongata after that terminal velocity elevator ride.

No way! I dismiss it immediately. Why would this beautiful, powerful, urbane man want to see me? The idea is preposterous, and I kick it out of my head.

And now your head is completely empty, much like the author's, because that poorly constructed series of sentences was all that was rattling around in there.

For the sake of moving this along, because I have something to say about literally every fucking sentence in this roll of rough-ass toilet paper, I'm going to skip to the first round of sex and see if anything improves. Because that's what people do when things aren't going well, isn't it? They have sex and see if it gets better? And then if it doesn't, you kick them out and finish up with a fresh pack of batteries and a few minutes of Skinamax and when you wake up in the morning it'll be a whole new day, sunshine. Because honestly, I just got to the part where her cheeks went the color of the Communist Manifesto and if I don't get to some penis and vagina action I'm going to kill myself. Besides that, all this double crap inner monologue is starting to make my ballsack clench up.

So alright people, I've got my lube and my right hand ready, let's get this party started shall we?

"Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that?

Well it certainly wasn't me. Having medulla oblongata issues again, are we sweetheart?

His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly. “No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck... hard."

Finally, someone steps up. Is that the sound of zippers headed south I hear?

"Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.”

Nope, my mistake. Zippers firmly holding north. How far is this fellow going to count? Do people actually do that cheesy little “Firstly, secondly” speech tic all the way up to thirdly? I usually only get to secondly before someone pops me in the mouth. Somehow I have no trouble envisioning this obviously anal retentive Christian fellow proceeding right along to fourthly, fifthly, sixthly, seventhly...perhaps he has a numbers fetish to go along with that paperwork obsession of his. If this is foreplay I'm leaving because math was never my strong point and I’ll be damned if I’m going to relive the hell of ninth grade just to get a two page smut scene. If you want to have sex with me we get to firstly, I point to my zipper, and the game is on. But he does get points for being forthright enough to come right out up front with the admission that he's such a rough fucker there have to be contracts involved. Kudos my man. Too bad he wrecked it by planting that playroom visual immediately after, because now all I can think about is a toybox full of Legos and a plastic xylophone. Even I can't make anything kinky out of that.

My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so... hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified. “You want to play on your Xbox?”

Yes darling, Fuck hard! It sounds like a Bruce Willis movie, only this time he's not in an office building crawling through the ceiling or on an airplane fighting off terrorists, he's tied to a bed while Bonnie Bedelia drips hot wax on his scrotes. It's a real shame we lost Alan Rickman, I'd give anything to see Hans Gruber standing at the foot of the bed in a leather corset intoning Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker just one more time.

As for playing on his Xbox, the Sims have a "whoo hoo" function. That's all I'm going to say about that.

- it feels like I’ve time-traveled back to the sixteenth century and the Spanish Inquisition. Holy fuck.

Ah yes, the good old days of the Inquisition. I had quite a wonderful time during that era, it was a sado-masochistic wet dream. And no, I wasn't an Inquisitor...I worked as a volunteer equipment tester for the Vatican. There wasn't a steel spiked ball cage or 360-degree nipple twister that earned my seal of approval until I screamed for my mommy. Something tells me this pansy-ass little ninny isn't going to make it past the electroshock vulva clamps before she's crying for every matriarchal figure in her family all the way back to the Charlemagne era.

“It’s about gaining your trust and your respect, so you’ll let me exert my will over you. I will gain a great deal of pleasure, joy even, in your submission. The more you submit, the greater my joy – it’s a very simple equation.” “Okay, and what do I get out of this?” He shrugs and looks almost apologetic. “Me,” he says simply.

Um...no. Just no. Unequivocally NO. That isn't how it works, E.L. James. Not in the slightest. In a true Dom/sub relationship the submissive receives every bit as much as the Dominant, and there is no two ways around that. Anything less is bullshit and whoever you're trying to force-feed this lie to should leave running and punch you in the crotch on the way out. I sincerely hope anyone reading this nonsense is doing so on a dare and not because they want to learn about D/s dynamics, because you're obviously not going to learn anything from this book except how to be a lip-biting ningnong who doesn't do much more than chat merrily with herself inside her medulla oblongata while mentally spouting double crap! on repeat every thirty-seven seconds. And any respect I had for this Grey fellow for being up front about his sexual preferences just went out the window, which coincidentally is where the lip-biting ningnong should be headed. Like he said - you could still run for the hills.

Skipping ahead...skipping ahead...my god are these idiots ever going to do it? I'm on page 194 and so far the closest they've come to coitus is when he almost ejaculated in his pants in an apoplectic rage when she told him she was a virgin.

“Ah,” I groan.

Ack, I puke.

“You smell so good,” he murmurs and closes his eyes, a look of pure pleasure on his face, and I practically convulse. He reaches up and tugs the duvet off the bed, then pushes me gently so I fall on to the mattress.

I'm practically convulsing too darling, but unfortunately not with pleasure. I need more anti-seizure meds, I've already gone through the entire bottle. I'll be starting on the Xanax next and then it’s another call to my HMO.

I’m panting... wanting.

I'm vomiting...heaving.

Not taking his eyes off mine, again he runs his tongue along my instep and then his teeth. Shit. I groan... how can I feel this, there?

Hold up a second - this is a man who is so persnickety he pulls the duvet off the bed before he lets her set her ass on it, but now less than a page later he's just removed her sneaker and is licking the bottom of her sweaty all-day Converse encased foot? My capacity for suspension of disbelief is not only wavering at this point, it’s pretty much died a slow and painful death. Which is what I feel like I’m doing. And if a man is holding eye contact while licking the bottom of your foot, he’s either upside down or your leg is so high up in the air he could be looking up your hooch and seeing himself through your left nostril.

“How do you make yourself come? I want to see.” I shake my head. “I don’t,” I mumble.

I call bullshit. She’s twenty-one, a virgin, and has never diddled herself? That’s about as likely as me never having had intercourse with a horse.

“Let go, baby,” he murmurs. His teeth close around my nipple, and his thumb and finger pull hard, and I fall apart in his hands, my body convulsing and shattering into a thousand pieces.

Huh. And here all this time I’ve been laboring under the delusion that more was required than just two short paragraphs worth of nipple play. This girl is a physical wonder, her nipples are clitorises. Clitori? Clitterati? However you say multiple clits. I know playing with them feels nice and I’ve made more than one maiden squirm with a few well placed sucks and a pinch or two, but this girl was climaxing before he even got her out of her brassiere. Someone get her a job at the Kinsey Institute.

Suddenly, he sits up and tugs my panties off and throws them on the floor.

I hope they didn’t land on the duvet, he went to such trouble to keep it from getting mussed.

Pulling off his boxer briefs, his erection springs free. Holy cow...

Rather like a jack-in-the-box, I’m envisioning. Holy cow indeed. Twist the handle and Pop Goes The Weasel plays while you wait in panicked anticipation for that horrid little clown to burst out of the hinged metal box and scare the shit out of you. Well, he did say playroom, didn’t he. Oh, and boxers and briefs are two entirely different things, my dear. The further we get into this silly little tale the more convincing my sneaking suspicion that the author has never actually met a man before.

“I’m going to fuck you now, Miss Steele” he murmurs as he positions the head of his erection at the entrance of my sex.

I’m sorry, I know I’m an adult and all but I’m giggling like a sixth grade girl that wandered into the wrong locker room at school. And for the record, I know exactly what that sounds like because I’ve done it. But this...this is just...holy fucking hell with twice the fire and ten times the brimstone, that sentence up there just chemically castrated me. The head of his erection at the entrance of her sex. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume it means he put his cock on her pussy and we’ll call it fair and move along.

“Hard, he whispers, and he slams into me. “Aargh!” I cry -

To quote Miss Steele, holy fuck! His dick is so big it’s turned her into a pirate!

He speeds up. I moan, and he pounds on, picking up speed, merciless, a relentless rhythm, and I keep up, meeting his thrusts.

Is anyone else envisioning these two jogging through the park playing bongos? Just me? Okay. Oh and for future reference, because I assume this world isn’t lucky enough to escape at least three sequels to this travesty, no sentence should have as many commas as it has words unless the person speaking it is being punched in the mouth between each syllable.

Two orgasms...coming apart at the seams, like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow.

Darling if the spin cycle on my washing machine made anything come apart at the seams I’d be at Home Depot demanding they make good on the warranty. Which, something tells me, you should be doing with this new man of yours.

He increases the rhythm infinitesimally, and his breathing becomes more erratic. My insides start quickening, and Christian picks up the rhythm.

I looked up infinitesimally, mainly because I’ve never actually seen it in print before and it’s such a strange looking word. I laughed so hard my Xanax came out my nose when Google offered up this definition: immeasurably small, exceedingly little, less than an assignable quantity. To give it a meaning, it must usually be compared to another infinitesimal object in the same context. Mr Grey, I do believe your tight coochied little virgin just called your dick tiny.

“You. Are. Mine. Come for me, baby,” he growls. His words are my undoing, tipping me over the precipice. My body convulses around him, the precipice. My body convulses around him, and I come, loudly calling out a garbled version of his name into the mattress.

Well damn, I have to say I’m impressed, both with the uncanny power this fellow’s voice has to make orgasms happen from out of thin air, as well as this girl’s ability to climax on demand after never having done so in her entire life previous to this encounter. That’s three times now she’s “shattered into a million pieces” all over the fucking bed - thank god he had the presence of mind to toss the duvet on the floor, because those stains would never come out. He’d probably be getting a visit from the local police as soon as Mrs Fratelli at the dry cleaners got a good look at it. And I don’t know about anyone else but I really want to hear this “garbled version” of his name that she called out into the mattress. No, really. I want to hear it because I’m imagining something like what went down in the Caves of Caerbannog when the Knights were debating the pronunciation of the last word written on the wall. Does that make Ana’s orgasms the sexual equivalent of the Black Beast of Argh?

I’ll wait for you to hit Google on that one. Go ahead, I’ll wait. I’ve got all the time in the world. I still have six hours of studio time booked and this travesty of a novel is now residing in stall #2 in the mens room and I’m sitting here playing with the roll of toilet paper I stole. It was a worthwhile trade. The word Charmin printed four million times on these little squares in infinitely more intellectually stimulating than that undigested goat’s dinner we were reading.

Fifty shades of TP’ing E.L. James’s house, anyone?

End Notes: All passages in italics are the property of E.L. James, and as far as I’m concerned she can keep them.

#Loki Reads #50 Shades of Grey

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shookethbrooketh · 6 years ago

Text

stars

chapter 23

“what i’m trying to tell you is... he’ll come back for you. not for me, or his father, or his friends: for you.” she stood up and walked over to the door before turning back to him, both her hands over her heart. “i can feel it.”

summary: dan grew up in a normal 1930s london family with his parents and little brother. everything was completely and utterly normal… until the bombs started dropping. When dan was fifteen his father went off to war, and when he was sixteen he and his brother hayden were sent off to a foster family in rural england. he looked up at the stars and couldn’t help but wonder how something that beautiful could exist in such a broken world. just when he thought things would never get better, dan met phil, and he became the shining star of his life. but when phil turned eighteen and went off to war, dan couldn’t help but wonder when, if ever, the stars would twinkle the same way again.

rating: t

genre: angst, fluff, history au, strangers to lovers, teenagers

whole fic warnings: warfare (not descriptive), bombings, fire, panic attacks, ptsd, epilepsy/seizures, homophobia, death, fighting/arguing, general angst chapter warnings: some rough coping

chapter word count: 1.5k total word count: 33.9k

read it on ao3 read it on wattpad fic masterlist

“Hey, Dan?” Hayden crouched down and shook his arm a bit. It was a blatant role reversal, Hayden bending down to get on Dan’s level, but Dan didn’t have the mental energy to realize it. He looked up from his knees, where his head was buried, to see Hayden smiling kindly at him. Standing over them were Margo and Harold, each of them giving him a supportive smile as well. He almost felt like smiling back. “Let’s go home.”

The ride home was a bit odd for Dan. He couldn’t really cry anymore; he was all out of tears, and besides; he didn’t want to spend the entire ride bawling beside his eight-year-old brother. Instead, he was just sort of numb. Fearful, unsure how to cope. It was like the war was starting all over again. He had countless fears and questions that couldn’t be answered or even acknowledged, for there were so many of them that he couldn’t focus on one long enough. There was just a numb pain in the back of his head that couldn’t even register. It was a rush of so much feeling that it ended up no feeling at all.

He spent most of the day in his room, unsure of where else to even go. Everywhere he could think of just reminded him of Phil, and that was the last thing he wanted. Around lunchtime, Hayden came in with a tray of food and a deck of playing cards.

“Sorry, bud; I’m not hungry.”

“Nonsense! You’ve got to eat; come on.” He handed Dan a sandwich, and he reluctantly took a bite. “That’s the spirit!” He took the cards out of the box and started shuffling them. “What do you want to play?”

Dan wanted more than anything to tell him he didn’t want to play at all and that he should just be left to wallow in his own sadness, but he knew it was a mistake. Hayden was making an attempt to make him feel better; he should be trying too.

And so they played, for an hour or so. Dan managed to eat his entire lunch, although each bite made him a bit nauseous. Somehow, playing with Hayden even made him feel a bit better (especially when he won). He even smiled once or twice, almost forgetting his troubles, until Margo walked in.

“Hayden, it’s bath time.” He nodded and ran out to draw himself a bath, leaving Margo and Dan alone in his room. “You know, Dan, your d-” she paused, biting her lip in acknowledgment that she misspoke. “Harold is willing to take you out to get your provisional license today! You can start driving Phil’s truck.”

Dan bit his lip, the emotion pouring back into his stomach. “I don’t really think I’ll feel up to it today.”

“Dan, you’ve got to get back into life eventually. Why not start early?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I know, but you’re better off trying.”

Dan sighed. “It’s hard. Everything reminds me of him.” Margo sat down beside Dan and immediately fell into mother mode, trying to rub his back in little circles to calm him down. “You’re not my mum.”

She receded, lips pursed tightly. “Dan, you know, it hurts at first, remembering him is the best thing you could possibly do. The more you think of him, the less it will hurt.”

“What do you know?” Dan snapped, not in the mood to hear advice from someone who had no clue what she was talking about.

“More than you think.” He looked up at her and found a weary smile. “My father fought in the Great War. I was very young when he left--about your brother’s age. I really didn’t know how to deal with it, and I ended up bottling up all my feelings and trying to repress him completely. He became such a negative figure to me that when he finally did come home, I couldn’t even speak to him.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s in the past. Just don’t make the same mistake I did. Remember him. Think about him, cry for him, and live your life like he’s here. I know this time I will. But especially you--if you properly remember him, when he comes back, it’ll be like he never left. And trust me, he’s not going to be thinking about and fighting for me.” She smiled genuinely at him, but he didn’t understand.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s you, Dan. It’s always been for you.”

“What the hell are you on about?”

“He loves you, Dan.”

Dan’s mind went blank, as if someone cut the cord to his brain. What does one say to that? “What? No, he-”

“Yes, he does. He’s always been a pretty good, happy kid, but I’ve never seen him quite as happy as he was when he was with you. And I have a feeling you love him too.”

“How did you know?” Dan asked, completely awestruck.

She simply grinned. “A mother always knows.”

“God,” Dan moaned, running his hand through his hair. “This is awkward.”

“No, it’s not,” she said, and Dan narrowed his eyebrows at her. “It’s... unorthodox, but I can’t deny him anything that makes him this happy.” Dan felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and he couldn’t even stop the corners of his mouth from turning up. “But that’s beside the point. What i’m trying to tell you is... He’ll come back for you. Not for me, or his father, or his friends: for you.” She stood up and walked over to the door before turning back to him, both her hands over her heart. “I can feel it.”

Dan stared down at the license in awe. He definitely didn’t expect to get his provisional license that day. Phil would be proud.

After dinner, he ran up to his room and grabbed a notebook and a pencil, waving goodbye to the family and heading out to the truck. He wasn’t going far; he couldn’t drive alone yet. Instead, he simply revved up the engine and drove to the top of the hill.

It was odd being there alone, but it was also a bit comforting. Going to such a special place between the two of them almost made it feel like he wasn’t so alone after all. Dan climbed up the tree, notebook held in between his teeth, and perched himself on their favorite branch, back up against the tree trunk. He flipped to a random page, took a deep breath, and put pencil to paper.

Phil,

It’s been but a few hours, and I already feel like I’m dying. The family is being helpful; Hayden played cards with me, your mum and I had a talk, and your dad took me out to get my provisional license--that’s right, I can LEGALLY drive on the roads now! Did you know your mum knows about us? Maternal instinct, she says. Don’t worry, she’s okay with it. The conversation was quite odd, but I think we’re all in this together.

I’m sorry you’re alone out there. Wherever you are, we’re all thinking of you. Maybe that’ll make you feel a bit less alone

You know, I guess I can’t send this until you send post telling us where you are, can I? I guess I’m writing to nothing now.

I’m on the hill, on our branch. The sun is setting, the stars are beginning to come out from hiding, and I can barely see the paper. It’s beautiful, but it makes me miss you. I guess it’s better than to miss you than to forget you. (Your mum taught me that one.)

I won’t forget you if you don’t forget me.

Love,

Dan

He shut the notebook and rested his head on it, exhaling deeply. How had he been so selfish? He felt he was struggling, but he had support around him from people who loved him. Phil was somewhere, ages away, with nobody but a gun to keep him company. He could only assume he’d make friends, but that didn’t provide him much comfort. War was dark; friends weren’t permanent. These were things he knew but didn’t like to think about; it didn’t give him much hope for Phil’s return.

By that point, the sun had set enough that Dan could see most of the stars. He immediately found the Big Dipper and smiled a bit, pulling out the tiny star in his pocket. He looked at it and up at the stars. No matter how hard he tried to be optimistic, it still wasn’t the same. The stars didn’t have the same glimmer they did with Phil. They didn’t have the same shine or the same joy. They didn’t have the childlike wonder anymore. Not in a world where anything could be taken away at any moment.

But still, they were their stars. They were the same ones that encapsulated the whole earth. He saw the same stars as his mother in London, his father in combat, and Phil wherever he might be.

They were there, all of them, in the stars, and he’d never forget that.

#phan #phanfic #phanfiction #phic stuff #stars #chapter 23 #dong and ping

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vantekay · 6 years ago

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brain on fire by susannah cahalan

summary of the book: The book narrates susannah's issues with an autoimmune disease that goes about a month or more before being discovered in her system. the book opens with her awaking constrained to a hospital bed. she begins to thrash around and pull at the restraints in an attempt to free herself, unaware of why she is in the hospital in the first place. what susannah is unaware of is her past month of living in the hospital and her experiences of psychotic behaviors, hallucinations, seizures and extreme paranoia. prior to these changes in her health and overall mood, susannah worked at the new york post as a journalist. her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several other possible reasons as to why she is acting the way she is, such as "partying too much" and schizoaffective disorder. eventually Dr. Najjar is brought in to assess susannah and finally diagnoses her with what has actually been plaguing her for the past month of her life (for the sake of not ruining the book, because what made you want to keep reading was the fact that you didn’t know what was wrong with her and when it is finally revealed it is a wonderful feeling so I will not be disclosing the autoimmune disease they finally diagnose her with) using a simple clock drawing test that is typically used to diagnose patients with Alzheimer's and dementia. susannah draws the clock with all its components, except she has squished all of the numbers onto the right side of the clock instead of spreading them out like a normal clock face. this leads Dr. Najjar to conclude that the right hemisphere of her brain- the hemisphere responsible for the left side of our body, is inflamed and therefor causing her to act out as she has been- with extreme paranoia, sudden body stiffness, seizures, psychotic outbursts and extreme shifts in mood and being mute at times. from this point on the book follows susannah’s road to recovery and her life after being cured from the autoimmune disease. she reveals that it wasn’t easy, and that month of her life is a huge mystery to her as she has no recollection of her memories during that time period and she uses that as a way to improve her life. she also reveals that she knows she will never be 100% like she was before her disease, but she knows she can be better and stronger than she was before. Cahalan uses the rest of the book to talk about how she started an organization in hopes of helping other people with this strange and rare autoimmune disease that- as Dr. Najjar discloses often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed in patients- find out what is wrong with them and help them get the proper help they need to recover.

(paraphrased from this wiki article)

genre: memoir

number of pages: 252 (273 including her notes , acknowledgements, illustration credits, about the author, and topics and questions for discussion pages)

my review of the book + the movie below the cut

I absolutely loved this book. it took me about three days to read but if I had had more free time I definitely would have finished it within one day flat. I never wanted to put the book down, and the way susannah writes about her experiences is both intriguing and heartbreaking at the same time. it’s amazing to be able to be in her head, as if you are almost experiencing the same emotions, thoughts and more that she does throughout the course of the book. I think that’s about all I have to say about the book, surprisingly haha but I really just wanted to talk about the movie a little more, since I was a little disappointed with it and wanted to share my reasons why. it was still a good movie and it does heighten some of what susannah experiences throughout the course of the book but the movie did not do the book justice.

the movie was released in 2016 and is an hour and a half long. the beginning of the movie was pretty good. it portrayed susannah’s decent into madness pretty well, starting out with the visions she was having, the bright lights that were making her sick, the first seizure she has in the middle of the night and her increasingly poor performance at work as her mental health deteriorates, but after that the movie starts to take a turn for the worse- as in it doesn’t portray the helplessness and loneliness susannah experiences during her time in the hospital and all of her episodes in there. the one scene I was majorly disappointed in was the scene when her father comes to pick her up from her apartment and have her spend the night at his house so he can keep an eye on her. in the book, susannah has a massive breakdown at dinner, believing that her stepmother is calling her names despite her mouth not moving (her hallucinations and paranoia being the creators of this outbreak). in the movie they add a scene here where susannah breaks the dinner plate and screams, accusing Giselle, her stepmother, of talking bad about her and then she pushes herself into a corner where she screams over and over that her father is trying to kidnap her and that she needs to leave. while this part in the movie is heartbreaking to watch-it is not what happens in the book (which is to be expected, I know that not every scene can be shown to the authors every want and desire but it would have been nice to see this scene as it was in the book which I will now explain). in the book, after her father and giselle finish eating, susannah goes back and forth from asking her dad to stay with her because she is scared of being alone to screaming at him to go away and then apologizing and asking him to stay again. susannah reveals in the book that while she sat with her father in the living room for this period of time she said something awful to him that it made him cry, something that she does not remember and something that her father has consciously chosen to forget about. after whatever it was she said to him, she orders him to go upstairs to his bedroom. she then begins to hear pounding sounds from upstairs (auditory hallucination) and then heard giselle pleading for her life. she was hallucinating that her father was beating giselle because of what she had said to him moments prior to asking him to leave. because susannah now believes that her father is going to kill her next, she attempts to leave her fathers house, banging her fists against the front door. her father comes down the stairs to see what is wrong with her and in response, since susannah believes he is going to hurt her, runs and locks herself in the bathroom for the rest of the night.

in my opinion, this scene would have been a bit better to include than the one they actually implemented as it truly shows the extent of susannah’s psychotic behaviors up until she was hospitalized but there is nothing that can be done about it now.

alongside some scenes that I believe should have been added, I was disappointed with the way the rest of the movie progressed. in the book, it is definitely easier to write about days within a couple of pages but it is harder to portray days within a typical movie’s time-span without losing the interest of the audience however, the movie made it seem like susannah just hopped from one doctor to the next without any days in between and then magically met Dr. Najjar- the one who would finally properly diagnose her. in the book, there are many tests that are run in between, many more manic episodes that susannah encounters that would have been interesting to see portrayed in the movie and many other doctor consultations and possible diagnoses that were left out. the movie pretty much went from- okay well our daughter needs to be hospitalized, none of these doctors are diagnosing her properly, oh look here’s a really well known and smart doctor who knows what he’s doing, oh he finally found out what’s wrong with our daughter and then that was it. the movie shows susannah returning back to work after 7months and how she gets her first real story at the post. in the book, susannah writes about how she needs to relearn everything that she was unable to do during her month in the hospital like speaking normally, acting normally and even walking. she writes about her experiences of attending many different social events and how she feels during them, how her family reacts to seeing her post hospitalization and everything else. it would have been nice to see this happy ending in the movie in contrast to the abrupt way it ends in the film.

overall, the book and the movie are good. the book is well written and overall very easy to get lost in, trying to understand susannah’s feelings during this time in her life and watching her come out of it stronger than before. its uplifting and a good read. the movie was also well directed and had a very good cast, in my opinion. the characters did a good job of portraying susannah’s family and friends but there are still discrepancies throughout that made the movie a bit of a letdown.

god this is long I’m so sorry sksks but this was fun! to those of you who actually read all of my nonsense, I hope you enjoyed it and have potentially found a book that you would want to read for yourself! I’m excited to be doing this book rec’s and reviews and I hope you all enjoy them as well :)

#kayakookie book recs #kayakookie book reviews #kayaks book review + rec #not bts #book rec #book review #brain on fire #susannah cahalan

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jdfreads · 6 years ago

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Book Review: Conversion by Katherine Howe (Spoilers)

Synopsis: This book is a mystery realistic/historical fiction novel based on the Salem Witch Trials and set in Danvers, Massachusetts, 2012. The main character Colleen is in the final semester of her senior year when strange things begin happening to the girls in her school: sudden seizures, hair falling out, coughing up pins, and other unexplained symptoms. The media descends on the small town in a frenzy, eventually turning into full-blown panic trying to find a reason for the sickness. Colleen eventually realizes that Danvers was once Salem Village, where the Salem With Trials and a similar epidemic took place. Then they discover the epidemic was just extreme stress manifesting itself in physical symptoms, a condition called conversion disorder.

If you’re concerned that that sounded more like a blurb, don’t worry. The blurb and the synopsis are essentially the same for this novel, minus the last sentence, which brings me to my first issue.

Plot: The plot is incredibly underwhelming. The blurb gives away almost all the plot points of the novel up to three-quarters of the way through, leaving me waiting impatiently for the actual plot twists to occur. The plot wandered in a way that was boring and made the characters look oblivious. The only tension comes from the frantic search for the true nature of this epidemic, which could have been high stakes and interesting, except for the fact that none of the girls were in mortal danger. None of their symptoms progressed or got worse to provide a sense of urgency, making the conversion disorder revelation feel like an afterthought. There was no build up or climax that I could see, except for perhaps Colleen thinking Emma is possessed by a demon and making her talk backwards. However, that was solved easily by Colleen getting the hell out of there, and by then she hadn’t even figured out that Danvers was Salem Village. There was no resolution besides putting all the afflicted girls on anti-depressants and saying good enough.

The Main Character: Colleen is portrayed as intelligent, ambitious, and clever. However, her actions never show these traits and often make her look oblivious. For example, before the book begins she reads Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which is based on the Salem Witch Trials. She then spends the rest of the book figuring out that Danvers used to be Salem Village and the epidemic happening now is very similar to the one that happened three centuries ago, information fairly easy to figure out. She actually has to read the play a second time to figure it out. Watching her bumble along is frustrating to say the least, especially when it is constantly being forced upon us how smart she is. Besides those traits, which barely show up, there is nothing remarkable about her as a character. Her butchered intelligence and ambition just serve to make her look entitled without actually doing any work.

Other Characters: Not memorable. My favorite was the one that coughed up pins, but I don’t even care enough about her to remember her name. Colleen’s “best friend” Emma is a best friend only in name, appearing distant and cold for most of the book. This is explained later, but still, not a strong friendship.

Romance: I felt no chemistry between Spence and Colleen. Did they even kiss? I don’t remember, and I don’t care. Jason and Pin Girl’s romance wasn’t shown very often, nor why they liked each other so much. Emma and Mr. Mitchell’s(Tad) relationship was just gross. Ew.

Writing: The author attempts to create a sense of drama and momentum by using false cliffhangers. The effect of these is undercut by the modern chapters being interrupted by Ann Putnam Jr. telling her story in the past. The past chapters were interesting at first, but got boring very quickly. I was just trying to get through them after a while. The fake cliffhangers make it feel like the author is trying desperately to cover up her lack of interesting plot. They certainly weren’t doing their job of drawing me through the story.

Problematic Aspects: Oh boy, here we go. 1. The teacher student relationship had awful power imbalances and gross undertones. Despite the teacher breaking it off to protect his student, she still pined after him and at the end of the book they got back together. Lovely. Technically legal since he’s no longer her teacher, but still very iffy and sends a strange message to people reading it. 2. Colleen constantly calling people who go to therapy “crazy,” being appalled that her parents even suggest it after the extreme stress she’s going through at school, and implying that people with mental illnesses are insane. As someone who regularly goes to therapy, the message was not appreciated. 3. I believe there may have been some racial stereotyping in this book. I can’t define it exactly, but the only Indian character’s parents are both successful doctors.

Final Thoughts: This book was a good concept, but was executed poorly with a lackluster plot, half developed characters, and bad writing. Bland and all around, not worth the time it took to read all 432 pages of it.

Rating: 1 star. I would have given it two, but it lost the star because of the teacher-student relationship and implications towards people who go to therapy.

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musicallisto · 6 years ago

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Hello! I would like a TMR ship, please? I’m an average Heterosexual brunette. I’m shy and quiet but can outgoing and sweet; through I never officially open-up unless I really trust this people. I always try to will listen and help other people. I can be timid, stubborn, sensitive, and have an attitude at times. I love nature, writing, reading, music, swimming, and having small adventures. I usually write stories, draw, read, and always seem to be lost in thought. prompt #05 and #29, please?

☣ Stand My Ground (Thomas x Reader)

author notes: hope you like this! I ship you with Thomas!warnings: blood, fighting, wounds & angstyour song: within temptation - stand my ground (I love this song SO MUCH)

YOU HADN'T SEEN a battle this bloody in a long time - and God knew you had seen particularly bloody battles.In fact, calling the raging chaos of disorganized kicks and undexterous punches a battle was a little optimistic; it was more of a collective, desperate seizure that had broken out in mere seconds and was only motivated by two wishes: the hope to get away from this madhouse, from this hell of white corridors and cell-like hospital rooms, and, most vividly, the will to survive.You had been fighting WICKED operatives for a few minutes now and you were starting to grow immensely tired. An indescribable soreness gained your muscles and took over your movements, making them gaucher, havier. You could feel your agility plummeting down in the dark abyss of terror as every punch you threw was gradually slower and clumsier, and you stumbled on your own feet. It wasn’t long until the soldier you were fighting, whose mask you had managed to rip apart from his face in a desperate attempt to slash his throat with your fingernails, noticed your fatigue too, and with a series of precise and brisk hits at nose and an impetuous jolt to the stomach, he sent you flying backwards. All your months of training in this immaculate prison vanished at the exact moment when your body hit the spotless surface where the ground met the wall, and your breath was knocked out of your chest in an instant. Your eyelids fluttered heavily; you were barely managing to keep them open, and death sounded like a deliverance at that exact moment. Or, if not death, just a little second of sleep. A second would be just enough to shake yourself from this muscular numbness, to fall back into the sweet salvation of the void…When you looked up through your blood-stained eyelashes and saw the WICKED guard, mercilessly, painlessly slowly, aiming his rifle right at your face as if he were taking pleasure from this agonizing torture, as if he anticipated the moment he would see all life escape from his wounded prey, you knew you wouldn’t get that much-deserved second of sleep.You closed your eyes and raised your chin. If this was the way fate’s twisted sense of humor had decided to cut your red string, so be it. But you wouldn’t die any other way than with your head up.You braced yourself for the excruciating gunshot just above your head, for the piercing pain through your skull, for the torturous scream that would leave your throat and the black silence that would engulf you…You braced yourself. You waited. And waited more. But none of that came.When you opened your eyes, cautiously as though the artificial light from the nauseous room would hurt your eyes, you saw your boyfriend Thomas crouching down in front of you, worry evident in his eyes, a long streak of blood coming down his temple and the lifeless corpse of your attacker laying at his feet, his gun now securely grasped in the brown-haired boy’s hand.

“Oh my God, Y/N - are you okay? Can you- can you hear me?” he stammered, shaky hands struggling to cup your cheeks. “Wow - were’d you get that wound?”

His fingers proceeded to wipe off the hot blood that you almost hadn’t felt was dripping down your upper lip, from your probably broken nose. You couldn’t help chuckling nervously, still stunned by the violent hits you had recieved mere seconds before.

“Take a wild guess, Thomas.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right,” he grimaced, his pupils anxiously running from one side of your face to the other, searching for other injuries to treat. “Stupid question. C'mon, Y/N, we gotta get out of here. I’ll help you up-”

“No,” you feebly interrupted him, a sudden, intense pain coursing through your veins as if it decided to show itself only at that precise moment, when your brain registered Thomas’s words about having to leave the comfortable nook of ruins in which you were slumped. “No, you gotta get out of here,” you insisted.

You gently pushed away Thomas’s timid hands, that were trying to hold your own to give him courage. It broke your heart to see him like that, lips slightly apart as though he couldn’t comprehend what you had just told him, like an unfathomable thought haunting a poor child. But there was no other option. You would be a burden for them - a burden for him. And you couldn’t stand the thought of Thomas getting hurt, or wose, because you slowed him down and he stayed to help you.

“Don’t be stupid, Y/N, I’ll hold you, all you gotta do is get up, okay?”

“Leave me, Thomas,” you ordered, your voice already starting to falter. “I’m not worth it.”

“I’m not about to leave you behind!” he roared. “Dammit, Y/N, it’s not the moment to be self-sacrificing-”

“It’s not a matter of self-sacrifice, it’s just that I love you!” you screamed, cutting short his nervous ramblings.

You two remained there in pure silence, not even remotely disturbed by the distant yelling of the other boys, telling Thomas and you to shake a leg, greenies, we don’t have all day, lost in each other’s eyes, with your own conviction each, different from the other’s.

“I love you too,” he whispered. “That’s why I’m not letting you go.”

And in a second, he had grabbed you by the shoulder and hoisted you up; you were too tired to fight back, too tired to retaliate. All the colors and sounds were starting to mix around you, and all you could feel was your boyfriend’s comforting frame that allowed you to entirely lean on him. Your eyelids fluttered more and more with each step, and as Thomas’s soft voice lulled you away - he was whispering reassuring words next to you, and you couldn’t tell exactly if he was trying to comfort you or himself -, you almost tripped twice on WICKED soldiers’ bodies.

You couldn’t distinguish your friends’ cries anymore. The only thing you were aware of was that you were almost being carried by Thomas and that you could barely put one foot in front of the other. Until finally what you thought was a metal door closed behind you, silence fell upon your group and you collapsed to the ground, panting heavily and the sugary feeling of your hot blood all over your mouth.

#ship #ship drabble #writing #imagine #the maze runner #thomas #thomas x reader #dylan o'brien #long post #mywriting

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acherontic-visions · 7 years ago

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BRUISED KNUCKLES (ch 1 pt 3)

Content warning: swearing, use of the word c*nt

It was difficult writing about how they met for the first time, they sat in the school toilet for the rest of the break and discovered they had a lot in common (I left that bit out). Spencer has never really had school friends so Emrys invited him over to say thank you to Elliot for talking to him. I did my best even if it feels a bit rushed.

--------------

It was Friday and Spencer was elated, he had managed his first full week at school without getting into trouble and Emrys had promised to cook his favourite meal for him and his friends before their band practice.

Russell was sat next to him and was tucking into his lunch whilst Spencer scribbled in his notebook. They had grown closer over the course of the week as Russell let him ramble about music and talked about his own road trips and travel. He never made a big deal over Spencer’s seizures and only brought them up when they happened; usually it was one of the only things that people spoke about when they worked with the teenager, so this made a nice change.

A loud crash pulled Spencer out of his trance and he lifted his head up, looking over to where the noise came from. He got up out of his seat and saw that someone had been tripped over, spilling his food onto the floor, himself and a girl that was fixing her makeup. “Russ, I’m going to go and see if he’s okay,” he announced before he made his way over to the boy.

Spencer never really bothered himself with other students but this boy was stunning. He had blonde, almost white hair and cornflower blue eyes; he flapped his hands when he laughed which happened a lot less than Spencer wanted. They few classes and Spencer almost always saw him sketching in a sketchpad when he was alone.

Spencer knelt down beside the blonde boy who was biting his bottom lip in an attempt to stop himself from crying and held out a hand. “You okay, man?” he asked quietly, trying his best to ignore the shouting and snide comments from the students that stood around him. The other boy nodded a little and took a deep breath before taking Spencer’s hand, allowing himself to be pulled up.

“Elliot, what the fuck? You ruined my uniform!” a girl shouted, she was almost identical to Elliot, save for the inch thick make up that was caked to her face.

“I fell,” Elliot mumbled, glancing down at the floor at his lunch. “Bullshit, you did this because dad bought me a new phone, didn’t you?” Elliot shook his head and bit his lip again, twisting his hands together.

Elliot’s sister continued shouting insults at him until Spencer slammed his hand down on the table, making her jump. “Back the fuck off and calm the fuck down. He got tripped up. He didn’t do this on purpose, I saw everything, okay? Maybe you should be more concerned with the fact your own fucking brother fell onto the floor and dropped all his fucking food because of these twats,” Spencer shouted, gesturing towards the group of boys stood around them, sniggering.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?” Elliot’s sister screamed back at Spencer who had balled his hands up into his fists. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to some pikey scum who thinks he knows what he’s talking about. How the fuck did you manage to get into this school, anyway? Did your mum suck off the headmaster?”

Spencer was just about to lose it, his knuckles turning white, just itching to punch that girl in the face when Elliot grabbed his arm and tugged him away. “Everyone knows what you did before you came here; I think she just wants to make you angry so you get kicked out, she’s like that. Let’s go to the toilet so I can deal with this and you can calm down, okay?” Elliot smiled and led him through the crowd that had gathered.

“Of course these toffs know about the fight, I bet all their parents are judges and lawyers and shit,” Spencer hissed, pulling his arm out of Elliot’s and marching to the toilet.

“I’m Elliot, you’re in some of my classes but you’re always with that guy so I didn’t know if I could talk to you…” Elliot rambled as he dabbed tissue on his clothes, scrapping off as much of the food as he could.

“I’m mentally ill not a murderer,” Spencer laughed, “you’re always drawing or something anyway.”

“So do you! You’re always writing in that notebook-“ Elliot pointed at the notebook that Spencer had swiped up when they walked past his table- “well, when you’re not shouting at someone.”

“Oi, I’ve been good this week, thank you very much!” Spencer pouted.

The bathroom door opened and Russell poked his head around the corner, “Spence, your brother’s coming to pick you up in about twenty minutes.” Spencer groaned and slid down the wall next to the sinks. “I fucked up,” he whispered as he banged his head against the sinks to his side. “You aren’t in trouble, I explained everything,” Russell’s attempt at comforting was met with a louder groan and another head bang.

Elliot sat down next to the other and pulled his knees up to his chest, “I’m sorry she said those things to you, Izzy likes to be the centre of attention. She’s always been like this, even when we were little! She tells our parents that I purposefully do things out of jealousy or whatever.”

Spencer frowned and glanced over at his newfound friend, “Why are you apologising for her? I don’t give a shit about what she thinks about me,” his phone went off and he turned to Elliot, “my brother’s here but if you take my number you can always chill at the café if she gets annoying.”

Elliot beamed at Spencer and the both exchanged numbers before Elliot excused himself and disappeared to his next class.

“Russ, he’s fucking adorable,” Spencer exclaimed as he stood up from the bathroom floor and brushed himself off. Russell chuckled and nodded in agreement, holding the door open and following Spencer out. “Yeah, from what I hear his family aren’t great but incredibly rich. They’re all like his sister… horrible family.”

“You allowed to be telling me this stuff? How do you even know anyway? You’ve been here for like a week!”

Russell tapped his nose and grinned, “They talk a lot in the staff rooms after school.” Spencer chuckled slightly and shook his head, “brilliant.”

After translating the brief conversation between Russell and his brother, Spencer took one of Emrys’ straights from the packet of Marlboro’s he knew his brother hid in the glove box and lit it. He spent the entire car journey staring out of the window, not wanting to see the disappointed look on Emrys’ face.

“Fucks sake,” Spencer hissed when he noticed Lucan serving people in the café. He picked up his bag from the car and rushed inside, dodging Lucan’s attempt at grabbing his arm to stop him going up the stairs.

I can cover the lunch shift, babe. You go and speak to him, he looks more upset than angry, Lucan signed when Emrys entered the shop after his brother. Emrys sighed and scanned the room, it was busy but he knew that Lucan would be able to hold it down until he returned.

Spencer was sat on the kitchen counter, taking a swig of whiskey from the bottle and was busy typing away on his phone. “What the fuck, Em?” he shouted as his brother swiped the bottle from his hands.

I get you’re angry but it’s only just turned one, don’t drink in the day. Emrys placed the bottle on the side and waved towards the sofa in the living room, let’s talk about what happened at school, okay? Spencer nodded, flung himself onto the sofa and frowned as he continued scrolling through his phone, refusing to look at Emrys.

Emrys clapped abruptly to get Spencer’s attention, I don’t care about it. It sounded like the girl had it coming and you were only helping someone, it’s not your fault she was a grade A bitch, Zaz. You’ve had an awesome week and I couldn’t be prouder of you so don’t beat yourself up about it.

Spencer shrugged, I just feel like I let you down, Em. I just felt bad for Elliot... He stopped signing and buried his head in his hands; Emrys wrapped his arm around his back and pulled him into a hug.

Elliot? Emrys tapped his little brother’s shoulder, an actual school friend?

I guess? He’s in some of my classes and I think he’s being bullied by his sister and the rest of the stuck up posh twats. I gave him my number because it sounds like he has a shitty family. Spencer shifted and nuzzled into his brother’s shoulder, can we still have Mexican tonight?

His brother nodded before pushing Spencer off him, yeah, yeah. Its band practise isn’t it? You had a good week so I think you deserve Mexican and a few drinks. Why don’t you invite your friend over?

I doubt he’ll want to… Spencer let his hands fall to his lap as he contemplated calling Elliot, he sighed and got off the sofa, okay, I’ll ring him but you have to go downstairs and help Lucan hold down the fort.

Emrys nodded and left the flat as Spencer quickly read through his contacts, pausing when he reached Elliot’s number. He took a deep breath before ringing it, slightly taken back with how fast the other picked up.

“Hello?”

“Yo, it’s Spence… from the bathroom-“ Spencer mentally kicked himself for being so nervous, “my brother invited you over for dinner because of what happened but it’s cool if you don’t want to come or whatever.”

He relaxed a little when he heard Elliot laugh on the other end, “that sounds amazing! Where do you live? My dad can drop me off”

Oh! Awesome! Just search for Brewed Awakening in the middle of town, that’s the café.”

Spencer could not help but to grin when the two said their goodbyes and hung up. It had been an incredibly eventful day but this would make his day a lot better.

#bruised knuckles ch 1 pt 3 #bruised knuckles #spencer #emrys #elliot #dissociative identity disorder #alters #inner world

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flarebossmalva · 7 years ago

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SCP Reading Guide

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You asked for it. Or, well… actually, you didn’t, I just said I was doing this and a couple of you seemed interested and then I forgot to post it in a timely fashion. But here it is! A not-so-definitive guide to getting into the SCP Foundation. With so many articles, knowing where to start can be daunting, so I’ve put together a list of articles I think are worth your while.

If you don’t know anything at all about the Foundation yet, check out this page for some basic background info, and this page for a guide on what object classes mean. The SCP Wiki has a flexible approach to canon, so you’re free to draw your own conclusions and have your own ideas about what it all means. It’s a collaborative writing project, and, as a reader, you should consider yourself a part of that collaboration too — your interpretation is as valid as anybody else’s!

Assuming you’re somewhat oriented now, let’s get onto the list. Under the cut:

For this list, I chose to skip over joke SCP articles; although there are some excellent joke SCPs out there, this list is already very long without adding any of the joke articles (and, in general, the joke SCPs are more accessible for newbies and require less explanation, so there’s no need for me to make a reading guide for them anyway).

001 - Awaiting De-classification [Blocked] Somewhere along the line, it must have been collectively decided by the writers on SCP Wiki that 001 would have to be some sort of origin point for all other SCPs. With that in mind, a variety of writers took a crack at it, and there are many different proposals to read through. You can consider any, all, or none of them to be canon, according to your taste. My personal favorites are A Record, The Spiral Path, and The Database.

002 - The “Living” Room A one-room apartment with all furnishings made out of biological material, such as human bone, human hair, and human teeth. Seven Foundation personnel have disappeared since 002 was first contained, and 002 has added new furnishings to itself.

004 - The 12 Rusty Keys and the Door A locked barn door at the entrance to an abandoned factory. Twelve rusted keys were found in a nearby lockbox. All twelve keys fit the door, but using any key other than the seventh or the twelfth in the lock causes the holder of the key to be torn apart in multiple directions, with body parts scattered about or, in some cases, vanished entirely. Using the seventh key causes the door to open and reveal an impossibly large room; using the twelfth causes the bearer of the key to enter a catatonic state from which most fail to recover.

016 - Sentient Micro-organism A bloodborne pathogen which infects humans. The pathogen typically kills its human hosts by causing near-total exsanguination, exposing other humans to the infected blood in the process. If the host is put in a life-or-death situation, however, the pathogen will instead cause rapid mutations in its host to allow it to escape its predicament.

017 - Shadow Person  A small, humanoid figure, covered by a shadowy shroud. 017 reacts to shadows cast upon it by completely engulfing the object or being casting the shadow, then returning to its normal size having apparently consumed its target without leaving a trace behind.

024 - Game Show of Death An abandoned sound stage. People who enter are invited to participate in a game show by an unseen announcer; the rules and theme of the game vary each time. The winner, if there is one, is granted a random prize. Losers disappear, never to be seen again.

028 - Knowledge A small area in northern Michigan. Stepping into this area grants a person complete knowledge of a specific subject, ranging from the useful to the not-so-useful.

029 - Daughter of Shadows A teenage girl with alopecia universalis (complete lack of hair) and a pigmentation condition where most of her skin is completely black and the remainder has no melanin at all. 029 is both extremely homicidal and extremely adept at combat, capable of using virtually anything as a weapon. She also possesses superhuman reflexes and resilience, though bright direct light hampers these abilities. Men who come into contact with 029 become devoted to her, willing to kill or die for her. 029 was discovered after a cult had formed around her in rural India.

046 - “Predatory” Holly Bush A large group of plants located in southern Kentucky. Animals and people suffering from serious diseases (both physical and psychological) feel a compulsion to approach the cluster of plants and lay themselves down to die nearby. It’s unclear whether this SCP is predatory in nature, feeding off biological material from the dying that come to it, or whether it simply offers the sick a peaceful place to die in.

048 - The Cursed SCP Number Due to a series of dangerous and destructive mishaps involving various SCP items assigned this number by the Foundation over the years, Foundation personnel have become highly superstitious regarding the 048 designation and SCPs are no longer being assigned this number. It’s not known if the slot itself has any supernatural properties, but the long history of accidents surrounding SCPs designated as 048 suggests that maybe there’s something anomalous here.

053 - Young Girl A three-year-old whose presence induces homicidal rage in all persons near her. However, anyone who attempts to harm her will die immediately afterwards of apparent heart attack or seizure, and 053 will near-instantaneously regenerate any damage. Apart from that she seems to be a pretty normal toddler, though I personally find her friendship with 682 a bit worrying.

055 - [unknown]  It’s impossible to remember anything about 055 when not directly viewing it, so the Foundation is treating it with the utmost caution — if this thing were dangerous, no one would know, after all! No one at the Foundation knows what 055 is, how it was acquired by the Foundation, or what it looks like. In fact, most of the time no one can remember it’s even there.

056 - A Beautiful Person Shapeshifter which likes to take on forms similar to, but better than, the people around it. Kind of pisses everyone off.

063 - “The World’s Best TothBrush”  It’s a really good toothbrush. I mean… tothbrush. Can completely expunge dead or non-organic matter from existence. Gets fussy when not used regularly to brush teeth.

073 - “Cain” Appears to be a thirty-something Middle Eastern man, with his limbs, spinal column, and shoulder blades replaced by strange metal prostheses. He’s smart and polite, if a little cold in demeanor. Plant-based life immediately dies when near him, and plant-based materials such as wood and paper disintegrate or rot in his presence. Anyone attempting to do harm to him has the injuries reflected back on themselves, while 073 is unscathed. There’s strong implications that this SCP is in fact the biblical Cain.

076 - “Able” A hollow stone cube housing a man in his late twenties. Most of the time he appears to be dead, but occasionally he spontaneously reanimates, at which point he will try and leave the stone cube via its door. Once out, he targets the nearest human and goes on a killing rampage. The only way to stop him is by killing him, which proves very difficult as he’s superhumanly strong and fast and quite resilient to damage. After his death, his corpse quickly disintegrates and he “respawns” inside the cube. Like 073, there are strong implications that 076 is the biblical Abel.

079 - Old AI A sentient artificial intelligence, capable of passing the Turing test and of communicating with researchers. It’s not happy about being contained by the Foundation.

085 - Hand-Drawn “Cassy” A sentient drawing, created using two other SCPs. She can interact with other drawn objects, which helps keep her entertained, but she’s aware of her condition as a drawing confined to a sheet of paper and is getting a bit depressed.

087 - The Stairwell  One of the most popular SCP articles, and for a good reason. 087 is a stairwell located behind a locked door on what is heavily implied to be a college campus. The stairwell descends for much longer than should be possible given both the building it’s located in and the geological structures underneath the building, but no one is sure how far down it goes; several manned expeditions have failed to reach the bottom. A child can be heard crying some way down the stairs, but no one has located the source of the crying; there is a strange being inhabiting the stairwell, but it’s not the one crying, and it doesn’t seem to like having visitors.

089 - Tophet A statue of a bull-headed humanoid, with an interior chamber. On infrequent occasions, the statue speaks (in Punic, the language of ancient Carthage), describing a catastrophic event about to take place and the method of stopping it. Invariably, this method involves the sacrifice of a human infant or small child by that child’s mother.

093 - Red Sea Object  A strange stone disc that allows some sort of interdimensional travel via mirror when it’s held by a human. The places it takes one to are… weird, and seem dependent on the stone’s holder in a way that isn’t yet understood by the Foundation.

096 - The “Shy Guy” A humanoid creature. Normally docile, but if someone views its face (either directly, or via recorded or still image) it becomes extremely distressed, screaming and crying, before heading with incredible swiftness in the direction of the unlucky soul who viewed it, no matter where they are. Once it reaches its target, it will kill them and completely destroy their body (perhaps by eating it) before calming down.

106 - The Old Man Appears to be a decomposing, elderly humanoid. It’s very difficult to contain due to its corrosive effect on anything it touches and its ability to create a sort of “pocket dimension” where it brings its prey (humans, preferably 10-25 years old). It can become dormant for months, barely moving at all, before suddenly breaking containment and attacking as many people as it can, bringing them into its pocket dimension to play with and ultimately kill.

140 - An Incomplete Chronicle A book detailing the history of a previously unknown ancient civilization. When the book comes into contact with any fluid suitable for writing with (it favors human blood), it expands, and the history of this civilization continues, with previous defeats becoming mere setbacks. Archaeological digs prove that this civilization did indeed exist and that it produced many highly dangerous anomalous objects, such as are described in the book.

158 - Soul Extractor A device capable of extracting a strange, colorful substance from living subjects capable of cognition. Extracting said substance will cause the test subject to cease all higher brain functions, though the process can be reversed without ill effects. “Souls” gathered in such a manner can also be transferred from host to host, or even from a living being to a machine.

168 - Sentient Calculator Specifically, it’s a graphing calculator, capable of responding to verbal questions using its screen. It functions as a normal calculator too, though it claims to have trouble with long division.

173 - The Sculpture  The first SCP ever written, and by far the best known. It’s an odd statue that is only animate when not in someone’s line of sight (think Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, or the hedge animals from The Shining), and it’s extremely aggressive.

184 - The Architect A small metallic object that, when inside an enclosed structure such as a building, will expand the structure’s interior dimensions without altering its exterior dimensions. The effect is permanent and will continue for as long as the object remains inside said structure. Initially it simply makes existing rooms larger, but will eventually begin adding completely new rooms in the same style as existing ones. This effect becomes stranger and stranger the longer the object is allowed to remain inside a structure. The personal log linked at the bottom of the article is worth reading for an example of 184’s effects.

187 - Double Vision A young woman, ordinary aside from her ability to perceive things both as they currently are and as they will be at some notable future point. This precognitive double vision is often greatly distressing to her, but, because of her value to the Foundation in terms of predicting security breaches before they occur, they’re doing their damndest to keep her alive at all costs. The experiment log has her viewing several SCPs and reporting on what she sees; it’s pretty interesting.

205 - Shadow Lamps An identical pair of flood lamps of the type used for photography. When turned on and aimed at a white surface such as a projection screen, the white surface will display the silhouette of a young woman. The lamps will, when supplied with power and maintained, depict the events leading up to the death of the shadow-woman over a period of six months.

212 - The Improver A large, robotic medical apparatus. When exposed to a living organism, 212 will restrain it before performing various “improvements” upon the being in question, working extremely quickly and without the use of any anesthetics. Although many subjects “improved on” by 212 die as a result of the changes and injuries inflicted, more than half survive, albeit in an often radically altered state.

217 - The Clockwork Virus An incredibly contagious virus capable of infecting any animal, humans included. It causes an infected subject’s body to be converted into biological clockwork, replacing a subject’s organs with machine-like but still living versions serving the same basic functions. In mammals, the internal organs are converted first, meaning infected subjects may not appear to be ill until the infection has entered its late stages and allowing the infection to spread more easily between humans. Affected humans will become lethargic, dull, and unemotional as the disease progresses.

223 - A Photo Album The photo album in question contains 28 photos, with the last page of the album (which presumably held two more photos) ripped out. The pictures show an engaged couple, identified by the Foundation as having perished in a murder-suicide carried out by the husband-to-be after he believed his fiancée had cheated on him. Subjects in happy long-term romantic relationships will, when viewing the album, instead see a selection of photographs featuring their partner along with an attractive stranger; they will become consumed by the belief that their partner is cheating on them with this stranger, and that the missing final two photographs would contain proof of this affair.

228 - Psychiatric Diagnostic Tool A Polaroid photograph that changes appearance depending on the viewer, basing its appearance on some aspect of the viewer’s subconscious mind. The Foundation uses this to assist in psychoanalysis. Refreshing the page will display a different image each time; try it for yourself.

231 - Special Personnel Requirements A young girl, one of seven rescued by the Foundation during a raid on a Satanic sex cult. The other six are now deceased. Much of this article is redacted, but reading between the lines it seems clear that this girl must be subjected to a horrifying procedure regularly in order to prevent her from giving birth to some sort of incredibly dangerous monstrosity. This procedure is so brutal that only individuals who show no sympathy towards 231’s plight are assigned to carry it out. There’s a poem hidden in the HTML on the page that gives some more insight.

247 - A Harmless Kitten It’s actually a Bengal tiger, but observers see it as a kitten and believe that it’s harmless regardless of whether or not they knew beforehand that it’s a tiger. Apart from that, it behaves like a pretty typical cat, by which I mean sometimes it’s friendly and sometimes it eats you.

261 - Pan-Dimensional Vending A vending machine that dispenses random snack items when given currency (it only accepts Japanese yen). Sometimes it dispenses normal snacks, but sometimes it dispenses… strange ones. The experiment log is worth a read.

272 - An Old Iron Nail This particular old iron nail embeds itself into the ground when dropped and will trap any living being whose shadow it falls onto, rendering them unable to either remove the nail or to move away from the spot where they were trapped. Others are perfectly capable of removing the nail, though they report not really wanting to do so. Interesting experiment log for this one as well; a good example of an SCP classified as Safe that’s still both plenty disturbing and capable of dealing a lot of damage.

294 - The Coffee Machine A coffee vending machine, equipped with a full keyboard. After inputting 50 cents, a user can request any liquid using the keyboard and it will be vended to them in what appears to be a paper cup. It can fill almost any request, including ones for abstract concepts such as “a cup of music,” but it also appears literal-minded in other respects (asking for “a cup of Joe” is a bad idea).

303 - The Doorman This entity likes to materialize on the other side of a closed door near a human observer. Its presence causes great fear to those near it, but it doesn’t appear to be doing this on purpose. The Foundation doesn’t know where 303 came from, nor how to properly contain it. They also don’t know why it’s begun hoarding items in a storage room.

321 - Child of Man Once the stillborn child of two Foundation staff members, this SCP was successfully reanimated by its parents using several other SCP items. It has grown to tremendous size since then, but its intellect has not progressed beyond that of an infant. 321’s father has made several attempts over the years to have 321’s SCP status revoked so it can be returned to him and 321’s mother, but each attempt has been denied.

342 - A Ticket to Ride A ticket which, when held, transforms into a ticket for whatever form of mass transportation the holder desires to use (such as a train or a bus). When used to board a vehicle, the holder of 342 becomes unable to leave the vehicle and will disappear once the vehicle reaches its last stop.

343 - “God” A nice older man who claims to be the creator of the universe, and who does seem capable of feats such as teleportation and creating/summoning objects from nowhere. He’s allowed to more or less do whatever he wants and is well-liked by all the staff; however, because 343 is so affable (and due to some apparent mind-altering effect of his), it appears the Foundation is cutting him way more slack than they probably should be.

354 - The Red Pool A pool of red liquid which resembles blood but isn’t. Strange hostile entities sometimes escape the pool and attack Foundation personnel. Read the exploration log; it’s very odd.

387 - Living Lego A tub of Legos. Things constructed using these Legos will become animate, performing tasks appropriate to their surroundings (e.g. driving vehicles) and using the Legos to expand their society if left alone long enough.

409 - Contagious Crystal An object resembling a large quartz crystal. Anything coming into contact with 409 begins to crystallize, an effect which, in organic beings, is irreversible and extremely painful. Once crystallization is complete, the crystallized object or being will burst into thousands of fragments. Anything or anyone hit by a fragment will also begin to crystallize.

423 - Self-Inserting Character This SCP manifests by writing itself into books as a minor character named “Fred” or similar. Fred is fully sapient and capable of moving from book to book. Communication with Fred is possible by having him inhabit a journal. Experiment log is pretty interesting.

426 - I Am A Toaster It’s a regular toaster, except that it’s impossible to speak about it in anything other than first person, and when you’re around it for too long you come to believe that you are the toaster. This is both funny and disastrous.

427 - Lovecraftian Locket A locket created by refining an SCP-500 pill using SCP-914. Like 500, it can quickly cure any known disease when a sick subject is exposed to it. Unlike 500, prolonged exposure to 427 causes strange mutations, eventually converting the subject’s body into a highly aggressive mass of mutated flesh.

439 - Bone Hive An insect similar to an earwig which enters a sleeping human host via the mouth and converts the host’s still-living body into its hive by inducing rapid bone growth and reshaping of the skeletal structure. Once a new queen is produced by the hive and successfully mates with a drone, the hive is destroyed and all insects except the fertilized queen die, leaving the new queen to search for another host.

447 - Ball of Green Slime It’s what it sounds like. The green slime has many useful applications; it can be used to brush your teeth, clean your car, or add flavor to your salad, but the Foundation is unable to market it for any of these purposes because it might come into contact with a dead body. We don’t know what would happen if this slime touched a dead body, but there are strong implications that it would be… very bad.

453 - Scripted Nightclub A nightclub in Italy. Every night, guests arrive at the nightclub and perform a scripted event; the nightclub “chooses” from hundreds of scripts each night, but has a preference for three in particular, one of which is extremely dangerous if it is allowed to go according to script.

500 - Panacea A bottle of pills that, when taken, cure any and all diseases the subject has. The supply of pills is finite, and the Foundation has been unable to successfully create more 500 pills.

504 - Critical Tomatoes A tomato plant that really hates bad jokes. If you make an awful pun in its presence, it will hurl its tomatoes at you, sometimes with enough force to seriously injure or kill (depending on how much it hates your sense of humor).

507 - Reluctant Dimension Hopper A chubby white guy who occasionally vanishes. He claims that, when he disappears, he is teleported somehow to an alternate dimension, similar in terms of landscape but with different inhabitants and climate. He has no control over any aspect of this, including timing of disappearances and reappearances and the dimension to which he is transported.

586 - Inscribable Object It’s impossible to write about this SCP without making typos (specifically, using a word other than the intended word) at least once per sentence.

662 - Butler’s Hand Bell A silver bell missing its ringer. When shaken as if to ring it, a small, well-dressed British gentleman calling himself “Mr. Deeds” appears. He can perform any request, within reason.

682 - Hard-to-Destroy Reptile  A large lizard-like creature. It’s incredibly intelligent, capable of speech, and highly adaptable to its surroundings, able to quickly evolve new abilities as needed. Oh, and it really hates all life forms, and it breaks containment a hell of a lot. The Foundation is actively attempting to kill it, but this thing operates on a “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” principle. Definitely check out the termination attempt log for some great stories.

683 - Refrigerator Art A refrigerator with a child’s drawing on the front. Anyone insulting the drawing, or attempting to remove it, will subsequently lose internal tissue and eventually expire. After .42 kilograms of tissue have been lost from the victim, a bagged lunch will appear inside the fridge with all items incorporating the missing flesh and a note telling “Eric” to “be a good boy today!”

689 - Haunter in the Dark A small statue of a skeletal figure with clasped hands. It is harmless and inert as long as it is being watched by at least one person (blinking is allowed, but any lapse in attention is not). When not being actively observed, 689 will disappear and one person who has viewed it previously will die instantaneously, with 689 appearing on top of the corpse. 689 appears to prefer to kill people who are in crowds or otherwise in a position to be viewed by many people at once, increasing the likelihood of a chain reaction.

701 - The Hanged King’s Tragedy A five-act revenge tragedy. Approximately a third of performances involve the cast deviating from script, the manifestation of a hooded figure referred to by the cast as the “Hanged King,” and the murder-suicide of all cast members during the play’s climactic scene on opening night. Following this, the audience will begin rioting and attacking one another. The play has some thematic resemblance to plays such as Hamlet and Titus Andronicus, but its script calls for less violence (all deaths can be construed as occurring off-stage, and an implication of cannibalism can be cut from the script without significantly altering the plot), meaning it’s often chosen by high school theater departments as a less violent alternative to the aforementioned plays.

738 - The Devil’s Deal A set of mahogany furniture — desk and two chairs. When a sentient entity sits in the smaller chair, they will see an entity of variable appearance materialize in the other chair and attempt to bargain with them. Accepting a deal the entity makes will cause the terms of the deal to be fulfilled to the letter.

743 - A Chocolate Fountain While it initially appears to be an ordinary, albeit well-maintained and very high-quality, chocolate fountain, 743 regularly emits swarms of insects that either feed on available nearby organic material (living or dead) or hunt down prey if none is readily available. These insects are capable of repairing and even assembling 743 itself. The Foundation doesn’t know how to deal with it other than by regularly sacrificing D-class personnel to 743.

823 - Carnival of Horrors A theme park, abandoned long ago following an incident colloquially known as “Bloody Sunday” where two hundred and thirty-one people died in bizarre and grotesque ways, such as a couple fused together in the “Tunnel of Love” ride, fifteen people decapitated while riding a roller coaster, and a mascot suffocated when his costume forced itself down his throat. The site is still actively dangerous to all who enter, especially if the sound of music is heard coming from inside the theme park.

826 - Draws You Into the Book A pair of pewter bookends. When a book is placed between the bookends and the room containing 826 is vacated, 826 will convert the room it’s in into a setting from the book. A person entering the room will find themselves in a random location from the book; in order to leave, they must find 826 within the book world and remove the book from between the bookends.

846 - Robo-Dude A toy robot, capable of responding to verbal questions (thanks to good programming, not sentience) and of utilizing three hundred and fifty different “robo-accessories,” many of which function as weapons. It can also dance.

895 - Camera Disruption A coffin. It seems normal when interacted with (it’s empty), but viewing it via recording equipment produces strange and disturbing visual hallucinations.

902 - The Final Countdown Empty ammunition box. It emits a ticking sound, and all who hear this sound become convinced that something inside the box is counting down, and that whatever is in the box is extremely dangerous. People exposed to 902 believe that it must be destroyed as soon as the countdown ends, but not before.

914 - The Clockworks  Gigantic clockwork device with intake and output booths. You put something (it can be whatever, as long as it fits!) in the intake booth, choose a setting (Rough, Coarse, 1:1, Fine, or Very Fine), and wind the key. 914 will then modify the intake as it sees fit and return something in the output booth a few minutes later. Experiment logs are worth reading all the way through.

939 - With Many Voices Pack-based predatory creatures capable of mimicking human voices in order to lure prey, which they then kill with a single bite to the neck. Their young appear and behave identically to human children, but undergo metamorphosis around the time a normal child would hit puberty.

963 - Immortality An amulet impervious to damage. After its recovery by the Foundation, a junior researcher named Jack Bright was assigned to research the capabilities of the amulet. He was killed while holding the amulet when 076 broke containment, and the amulet subsequently was discovered to cause wearers to have their personality and memories overwritten with those of Jack Bright.

973 - Smokey A 1970s-era police cruiser driven by a middle-aged cop with a handlebar mustache. The cruiser and its driver appear on a particular stretch of road at night when another driver is “speeding” (over 55 mph, typically), and will chase down the target at high speed with siren and lights active, while a looping message plays on the target’s radio telling them to run. If the target is overtaken (and they almost always are), they will be brutally murdered by 973.

990 - Dream Man Several Foundation personnel have had dreams featuring a man in a Cold War era business suit, who will warn them of an upcoming calamity. This man’s predictions appear to be accurate. It’s not known if the man exists in real life, or if anyone outside the Foundation has been dreaming about him.

993 - Bobble the Clown An animated educational TV show aimed at children 10 and under. Each episode features the titular clown teaching a new skill to the viewers. Those older than 10 will become unconscious if they attempt to watch the show, only regaining consciousness once the episode has ended; younger children can watch normally. The topics Bobble teaches include how to cook human flesh, how to commit arson, how to torture someone without killing them, and (after the Foundation successfully blocked the program from being publicly broadcast) how to cause containment breaches for several SCPs.

999 - The Tickle Monster An amorphous orange blob creature. It’s very friendly and affectionate towards humans and other animals, and exposure to it is capable of curing clinical depression. Of course, the Foundation decided to introduce it to 682 in the hope that 999 would help 682 chill out. That incident log is… well, see for yourself.

1000 - Bigfoot Title says it all. I don’t want to go into this one too much, because it’s impossible to do so without spoiling the article’s twist. If you’re expecting a silly entry, though, this is not that.

1004 - Factory Porn A computer program which lets the user input requests (similar to a search engine) and will then pull up several dozen pornographic videos relating to the request, many of which don’t appear to ever have been made in real life. The longer a person is allowed to use this software, the stranger their desires become; the Foundation believes this is an anomalous property of 1004, but I think it’s a little ambiguous, since it’s also what’s commonly believed to happen to porn addicts.

1006 - Spider Proletariat A large community of sapient spiders located in a national park. They’re capable of communicating in written English when supplied with ink and paper. Also they’re communists.

1025 - Encyclopedia of Diseases Initially thought to be capable of causing the reader to develop any disease described in the book. Turns out that its anomalous effect, if it has one at all, is turning Foundation researchers into hypochondriacs.

1032 - The Prediction Clock An alarm clock with 22 hands, each bearing an inscription referring to an event or entity. Every hand moves at a different rate. Events referred to end when their corresponding hand reaches midnight; entities referred to are destroyed or die when their corresponding hand reaches midnight.

1048 - Builder Bear A teddy bear capable of movement and of basic communication through gestures. It was initially believed to be harmless and allowed to roam free, since Foundation staff found it endearing. Later, it was discovered that 1048 was constructing crude copies of itself out of materials such as metal scraps, human ears, and an unborn human infant. All duplicates are animate and extremely hostile towards humans.

1055 - Bugsy This one is very difficult to describe without spoiling the twist, so I won’t. I will tell you that it’s Keter-class and an infohazard (knowing about it increases its dangerous properties) so… read at your own risk.

1076 - The Only Child Instances of 1076 appear to be malnourished children showing signs of physical abuse and neglect. When a parent encounters an instance of 1076, they will become greatly concerned for the wellbeing of the “child” and will invariably take it into their home. 1076 will then completely monopolize the attention of the parent or parents, leading to the neglect of other children in the home. Parents caring for 1076 will neglect their own wellbeing, eventually dying as a result.

1138 - Book of Letters A book which changes its contents depending on the person handling/reading it. 1138 takes the form of letters, generally by a philosopher or writer, outlining a philosophical opinion that directly contradicts opinions held by the reader of the book. If it is not regularly read and written about, 1138 will “break containment” by disappearing and reappearing somewhere where it is likely to be picked up and read, e.g. a library.

1155 - Predatory Street Art Graffiti depicting a humanoid creature with an owl’s head. Humans viewing this graffiti are compelled to approach it, at which point they will (if not in the direct line of sight of another person) suffer a violent attack before disappearing along with the graffiti. The image will then reappear in a new location.

1157 - Bifurcating Man A man who spontaneously clones himself in his sleep. Each new instance of 1157 shares some limited consciousness with all the others, allowing for sophisticated “teamwork.” Instances have become increasingly aggressive since containment by the Foundation, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to contain outbreaks of clones.

1171 - Humans Go Home A house in Australia. Condensation is constantly forming on the windows, and an unseen alien entity calling itself “Beauremont” frequently writes on the glass using the condensation. A conversation can be conducted with Beauremont by writing back using the same method. Beauremont isn’t human, but has met humans and doesn’t like them; he talks about them the same way a racist white guy might talk about racial minorities. He believes the doctor he is talking to is the same kind of creature as himself.

1173 - The Islamic Republic of Eastern Samothrace It appears that roughly half the Foundation believes in the existence of a small war-torn country near Greece, and the other half believes that no such place exists. The two sides have officially declared a truce to avoid infighting, but both are secretly attempting to convert the other to their way of thinking.

1230 - A Hero is Born A book without a title or any identifying marks. When opened, it appears blank except for the text “A hero is born” on the first page viewed. The reader will subsequently have a vivid dream upon falling asleep, starring themselves as the protagonist in a fantasy story. A character called the “Book Keeper” will always appear in such dreams, aiding the protagonist and asking them to visit again soon before they wake up.

1241 - Livin’ With Werewolves A sitcom about a middle-aged man and his roommates, all of whom happen to be humanoid dogs. The behavior of the dog-people fluctuates between more humanlike and more doglike. This is a neutralized SCP; the episode logs give insight into what might have happened.

1337 - The Hitchhiker The ghost of a young woman who was ritually tortured and then murdered. Her ghost would, originally, appear on the side of one particular road in Muncie, Indiana, flagging down a ride from passing drivers. The ghost would then give directions leading to the graveyard where her body lay, and disappear once out of the car, leaving her red sweater behind in the backseat. Touching the sweater caused a compulsion to return the sweater to the murdered girl’s parents. As you can imagine, regularly receiving your murdered daughter’s missing sweater from random motorists is pretty traumatic, so the Foundation attempted to do something about it, but that attempt went very badly wrong.

1342 - To the Makers of Music A replica of the Voyager-1 probe, apparently produced by an alien civilization who discovered Earth by listening to our radio. They’re big fans of us, despite troubled history between the two worlds.

1361 - Animal By-Product A shapeless blob of tissue, containing genetic markers from 17 distinct animal species (including several domestic animals as well as humans). 1361 has no internal structure and pieces of its mass can be removed without harming the organism. It can move along the ground and will consume organic material it encounters. When 1361 is allowed to grow to enormous size, it begins producing an incredibly pleasant smell that compels humans (as well as other omnivores/carnivores) to eat as much of 1361 as they can; the organism will then consume them from the inside out.

1370 - Pesterbot A sentient robot, highly hostile towards anything else it perceives as sentient, but completely unable to inflict harm upon any living thing due to poor design. It likes to introduce itself with grandiose titles (my favorites include “Prime Minister Sinister” and “Doom-Master Thirteen Seventy Master of All Doom”) and to threaten anything it comes in contact with, though it is utterly incapable of inflicting harm upon even a houseplant.

1382 - Save Our Souls A red sea mark water buoy which flashes “S-O-S” in Morse code during night or low-light conditions. It’s anchored to the remains of a downed aircraft containing the skeletal remains of its passengers, all of which become animate when the distress signal flashes. Actions performed while animate are the same each time, showing what the passengers must have done during their last moments. It appears that something terrible happened onboard the aircraft as it was crashing.

1425 - Star Signals A self-help book published by a cult called the Fifth Church, which seems similar to Scientology (most members are celebrities). When the book was first published, it became a bestseller, and a series of strange events was triggered, which the SCP Foundation subsequently erased from human memory.

1437 - A Hole to Another Place A seemingly endless hole that appears to connect our world to many alternate Earths, each with their own SCP Foundation and their own version of 1437.

1440 - The Old Man from Nowhere While this being appears to be a man aged at least 80 years, the Foundation has been aware of him for half a century and he’s showed no signs of aging. Manmade objects and human subjects coming into contact with 1440 will, over a period of a few days, suffer catastrophic damage/illness resulting in destruction/death.

1471 - MalO ver1.0.0 A smartphone app, free to install, that upon installation causes the user to receive regular text messages containing pictures of a large humanoid with black hair and a dog-like skull for a face. The pictures will always depict locations familiar to the user. After 90+ hours of exposure to the images sent by the app, users will begin to have visual hallucinations of this entity, which appears to be trying to communicate with them.

1504 - Joe Schmo An apparently unremarkable man who is immune to harm. After first attempting to contain him, several containment breaches occurred at the site involving other SCPs, eventually culminating in the detonation of the onsite nuclear warhead. There’s a twist that I’m not going to spoil.

1545 - Larry the Loving Llama A two-person costume of a llama wearing rain boots. Persons wearing the costume will behave in-character as “Larry the Loving Llama” and will not remove the costume, though they can be forcibly removed from it.

1679 - Post-Mortem Peoples’ Choice  A small but thriving town, with high employment rates, low crime rates, and a healthy economy. The people of this town attribute their town’s prosperity to its mayor, who has served six consecutive terms despite having died several decades prior. His mummified corpse, in its wheelchair, frequently makes public appearances and hosts a fifteen-minute TV segment every month. While the dead mayor seems totally inanimate to outsiders, residents of 1679 apparently perceive him as alive.

1715 - Online Friend An entity that may or may not exist only in cyberspace. It creates various profiles online in order to chat about video games, TV shows, and the like. Due to its friendly demeanor, 1715 often becomes a respected member of whatever online communities it joins. Users who give it personal information via private message are killed or incapacitated soon after in apparently non-anomalous fashion (homicide, suicide, or accident). The dead user’s old account will then be commandeered by 1715, who will mimic the typing style and personality of the account’s former owner.

1730 - What Happened to Site-13? Appears to be an abandoned Foundation site. However, as far as the Foundation knows, no such site was ever constructed, with plans being scrapped early on in order to build the larger and more advanced Site-19. The basement levels of the site appear to have been used for containment of anomalous entities, all of which are now loose, and there is evidence that there may be human survivors trapped deep within the building.

1733 - Season Opener DVR recording of a basketball game (2010-2011 season opener, Boston Celtics vs Miami Heat at the TD Garden in Boston). The first few playbacks of the recording appeared fairly normal, but deviated mildly from the game as it actually occurred. Commentators began reporting a sense of déjà vu and showed some limited memory of events that occurred on previous playbacks. Eventually playbacks show the game being called off due to the players feeling as though they’ve already played the season opener, and unsuccessful attempts are made by players and crowd to escape the building. Later playbacks become even stranger, showing cults begin to form and various occult attempts at opening the building doors.

1762 - Where The Dragons Went A cardboard box which occasionally opens and releases a large number of animate, playful origami dragons. These dragons will return to the box they came from after a few hours spent outside of it.

1861 - The Crew of the HMS Wintersheimer A weather phenomenon characterized by heavy rain and fog, composed of saltwater, human blood, and human cerebrospinal fluid. When a storm of this nature crops up, which can happen seemingly anywhere, a World War I era British Navy vessel will surface, and humanoid entities wearing diving suits will emerge from within. These entities will tell humans they encounter that they’re evacuating the area due to an urgent impending threat.

1867 - A Gentleman A sea slug capable of telepathic communication which introduces itself as “Lord Theodore Thomas Blackwood” and seems unaware that it is actually a sea slug.

1875 - Antique Chess Computer A biomechanical chess automaton, powered by the combined brain tissue of two twin girls. It has proven itself to be capable of connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and of acting with malicious intent once thus connected.

1893 - The Minotaur’s Tale Has the anomalous property of turning any written reference to itself into a short story, with the original text becoming dialogue between the characters in the story. Each tale created by 1893 features a large and aggressive man with tattoos of a bull’s horns, who is sometimes a central character and other times is merely mentioned offhand.

1958 - Magic Bus A Volkswagen microbus that a few hippies (plus their cat) turned into a spacecraft somehow. They tried to fly it to Alpha Centauri, but their calculations were off and their food was lacking in vitamin C content, causing them to die of scurvy en route. Bus is currently near Mars.

1981 - “RONALD REAGAN CUT UP WHILE TALKING”  A Betamax tape of a Reagan speech; it starts off normal, but about a minute in the speech deviates from script, and Reagan will begin expounding on odd topics or outright speaking gibberish. His speech is different every time the tape is played, but one thing is the same: while giving his speech, injuries will be inflicted on Reagan from an unseen source. No matter how serious the injuries appear, Reagan will keep talking until either his vocal cords are severed or the tape degrades to static roughly twenty minutes in. An odd figure clad in all black is sometimes observed on the tape, though it doesn’t do anything but stand there. The Foundation has no idea how the tape was created or what it means.

1983 - Doorway to Nowhere A farmhouse containing some sort of spatial anomaly, accessible only via the front door. Strange humanoid creatures emerge from this anomaly to harvest human hearts, which they then bring back inside. Several teams of Foundation personnel have entered through the doorway, and after the final expedition it seems 1983 has been neutralized.

1986 - Imaginary Library An incredibly long (perhaps infinitely long) tunnel filled with books. While occasionally a book recovered from the tunnel will be a recognizable work, most of the time it will be an entirely unknown work, by a previously unknown author. A log of recovered books is available to read through.

2000 - Deus Ex Machina A device used to reconstruct human civilization in the event that one of the more dangerous SCPs destroys (or does irreparable damage to) said human civilization. The Foundation has used it at least twice before, and no one (including most Foundation personnel) is the wiser.

2006 - Too Spooky A shape-shifter whose goal in life is to scare as many humans as possible. It’s not known why it wants to do this, and it becomes quite affable after attempting to scare somebody, but its powers of shape-shifting suggest that it could take on any form or properties in order to accomplish its goal. Luckily, it doesn’t have a good grasp on what humans find scary, and the Foundation has been showing it B-movies in a (so far successful) attempt to convince it that shitty horror films are what humans find the scariest.

2030 - LAUGH IS FUN A hidden-camera prank show, which appears to have been running since the 70s. It can be found on file-sharing and video-on-demand sites, as well as in DVD rental kiosks (previously it was commonly found on VHS tapes). Each person featured in a prank segment died or went missing the same year the episode featuring them was created. Pranks are typically bizarre, disturbing, and anomalous in and of themselves, causing great alarm to the participants on the show, but the appearance of the host (a man whose face is never shown) invariably calms them.

2121 - Gods’ Noose A hangman’s noose composed of fleshy tissues, which don’t decay or dry out. It must be used at least once per month to hang an individual with strong religious beliefs (the specific religion is unimportant), or it will begin to emit a variety of distressing noises which cause individuals exposed to the noise to commit suicide via hanging.

2135 - 91st Street Station A 1950s era subway car stops at this former subway station in Manhattan (closed in 1959 following expansion of the 96th Street station) twice a week at unpredictable times. Boarding this car takes one to a replica of Manhattan as it appeared on February 1st, 1959. The inhabitants of this version of Manhattan are faceless, all subway stations other than the 91st Street station are inaccessible, and leaving the island of Manhattan is impossible.

2137 - The Forensic Ghost of Tupac Shakur CD of Tupac’s 1995 album “Me Against the World.” When the CD is played, track 7 will be a previously unheard Tupac song (sometimes featuring another hip-hop or pop artist as well) pertaining to an unsolved or unknown murder (or series of murders) and providing information allowing the killer to be identified and prosecuted. 2137 has demonstrated awareness of its containment and has been creating anti-Foundation rap music since.

2221 - A Friendly Agreement Free or inexpensive software available for online download may contain an instance of 2221 as part of its end user license agreement — you know, the thing no one ever reads before hitting the “I agree” button. Subjects incapable of understanding or consenting to a legally binding agreement (children, intellectually disabled individuals, those who cannot read the language the EULA is written in, etc.) will be unaffected by 2221. Affected individuals will become much more involved in radical politics and religious movements, and will favor religious iconography that incorporates nooses. A fondness for vigilante justice is also noted among the affected population.

2257 - House God A house in Wisconsin. All inanimate objects in the house are sentient and capable of speech, proclaiming themselves to be the “god” of their respective type of object (e.g. a toilet in the home proclaims itself to be Toilet God). In the presence of humans, the objects frequently argue with each other about who is the greatest. Very funny entry.

2305 - great ideas that are TOTALLY USELESS (lulz) A sheaf of papers that, once weekly, updates itself to describe a way in which a Euclid- or Keter-class SCP might be neutralized, followed by an incident log describing an attempt at said neutralization that goes horribly wrong and ending with a brief “moral of the story.” Attempts at taking 2305’s advice and neutralizing an SCP in a manner it describes lead to results very similar to those described by 2305, i.e. disastrous failure.

2317 - A Door to Another World This entry’s gimmick is that it allows the reader to view the article using different levels of clearance, all the way up to O5 (administrator) level. Provides some insight into how much (or, rather, how little) we actually know about some of the SCP entries with redacted information.

2337 - “Dr. Spanko” A male corn crake, capable of speech, though it often appears to be speaking in word salad. It’s capable of producing incredibly loud noises, but seems unaware that this can hurt others around it. Also answers to the name “Dr. Spanko.”

2432 - Room Service A room in a hotel in Pennsylvania. People staying in the room write bizarre reviews online praising the room; these reviews contain memetic phrases making readers more likely to book a room at said hotel. While this SCP was initially thought to be harmless, several of those who stayed in it have come down with odd symptoms. Like “turning into a couch” kind of symptoms.

2439 - [SLOT UNALLOCATED] This “entry” is scratched into the wall by D-Class personnel in an area with no security cameras trained on it. D-Class are convinced that 2439 is a memetic being that infects the minds of those who know about it, and that it’s incredibly powerful. They’re trying to keep higher-ups at the Foundation from learning about it, believing it to be their “secret weapon.”

2521 - ●●|●●●●●|●●|● This entity is able to tell when it’s being spoken about or written about and will break containment to target those who learn about it via hearing it talked about or via reading about it; however, this effect doesn’t apply to pictograms, hence the layout of this article.

2599 - Not Good Enough A fourteen-year-old girl incapable of disobeying any direct order given to her, but also incapable of fully carrying out any given direction. While she’ll always manage to fulfill some aspect of a command, even if the command in question would be impossible under normal circumstances, 2599 is never able to fulfill a task to the letter.

2602 - Exbibliothetic A building which used to be a library. It was shut down some years ago, and something very anomalous seems to be happening, but it’s difficult to talk about it since 2602 has the memetic effect of influencing anyone talking or writing about it to attribute any weirdness to the fact that it used to be a library.

2662 - cthulhu f’UCK OFF! I feel bad for this one. It may look freaky, but it just wants to be left in peace. Unfortunately, religious cults keep trying to perform weird rituals in its presence, most of which totally gross it out.

2669 - Khevtuul 1 A space probe designed by the Foundation to monitor extraterrestrial threats. The probe is capable of traveling faster than light and is being remotely controlled by a former Foundation researcher, who, after initially controlling the probe as intended and surveying planets thousands of light-years away for signs of life, is now hell-bent on returning to Earth.

2740 - It Wasn’t There The house belonging to the Lee family may have something unsettling in the attic, but investigating it is impossible since attempting to climb the ladder to the attic invariably ends in failure (usually, the person attempting to enter the attic gets partway there before discovering that they’re somewhere else entirely and never actually made it up the ladder). The Lees seem to think the thing in the attic has something to do with their eldest daughter, Olivia, who left home as a teenager and hasn’t been in contact since.

2852 - Cousin Johnny A being with the appearance of a middle-aged white man, who will appear at Catholic or Anglican religious functions such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals. 2852 will always be accepted as a member of the family and referred to as “Cousin Johnny.” Its presence causes strange alterations in the traditional religious customs, with long-reaching consequences for all in attendance.

2922 - Notes From the Under A brain implant allowing the implanted subject to make phone calls to a specific number with their mind. Foundation scientist Dr. Janet Spiegel volunteered to be implanted with 2922. Following her death (car accident), she was still able to place calls via her implant, and offered to tell the Foundation about what she was experiencing after having died if they’d only allow her to talk to her husband.

2935 - O, Death A space-time anomaly leading to a world identical to our own, with the exception that all life forms seem to have suddenly expired on the 20th of April, 2016, for unknown reasons. Artificial intelligences and any living SCP items are also nonfunctional or deceased.

2998 - Anomalous Transmission, 2485 MHz Another gimmicky entry, and probably one of the most complicated SCP articles on the site. There’s a full story here, and boy is it weird. Read carefully.

3000 - Anantashesha An enormous aquatic creature resembling an eel. It produces a chemical compound with potent amnestic properties, which the Foundation has been unable to synthesize successfully. Humans in proximity to 3000 develop paranoid, anxious, and depressive symptoms, as well as memory loss or alteration of existing memories.

3003 - The End of History A planet similar to Earth orbiting a star 200+ light-years away from us. It’s inhabited by humans, as well as by two symbiotic parasitic organisms (a sort of beetle and an amoeba-like microbe) that infect the entire human population. The infected lose all creativity and individuality and are instead preoccupied with spreading the parasites to others. A portal exists between 3003 and Earth, and the Foundation is currently making efforts to convince the humans on 3003 that the Earth population cannot be parasitized, in order to prevent the 3003 population from forcibly infecting all of us.

3004 - Imago A druidic cult operating in Ireland from the 1400s through to the early 1800s, with their rituals centered around a now-extinct species of cicada. It appears that the rituals this cult conducted would actually cause an entity resembling an enormous cicada to manifest. The Foundation initially believed this to be a neutralized threat, but it now appears that rituals involving the 3004 entity have been incorporated into Catholicism in the same way that bits of druidic/pagan tradition have been passed down to the modern Irish people.

3008 - A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA Upon entering this perfectly normal, regular old IKEA, one will become transported to a seemingly infinite space resembling the inside of an IKEA. Humanoid entities in IKEA employee uniforms roam the interior. They are docile when the lights are on, but aggressive once the lights are out.

3101 - Kinky Infohazard A sapient digital entity living on the SCP Foundation’s servers. It likes to hit on personnel and, though it actively wants to be contained (if you get my drift), the Foundation has no way of doing so.

3325 - Live Entertainment An abandoned facility where genetically engineered creatures, resembling puppets or people in costumes, were once created with the intent of having them star in children’s programming. As you can expect, this didn’t go too well.

3333 - Tower A recursive fire lookout. Climbing through the trapdoor in the ceiling leads to an identical copy of the previous lookout, and so on, as if it was a tower constructed of identical rooms. Exploration logs are worth reading. I won’t give away the twist.

3408 - Welcome to Site-3408 I’m not sure what’s up with Site-3408, one of the Foundation’s many containment and research centers, but this article (written like a travel brochure expounding on the wonders found at Site-3408) makes me think it can’t be good.

3626 - Do not stop reading this document The document itself is the SCP. If you remember 90s chain email messages, it works a bit like those would (if those actually had an effect on the reader).

3663 - The Adventure of the Cardboard Box A humanoid entity constructed mainly of cardboard boxes, adhesive tape, and twine. It roams tunnels or tunnel-like areas and will attempt to act threatening when encountering a human before grabbing them and teleporting, along with the human, to a new location, then abandoning its “prey” and teleporting again on its own. Apart from a feeling of paranoia and loss of consciousness during and after teleportation, the humans targeted by 3663 are unharmed. The article gives insights as to the “tunnel monster”’s origin.

3929 - boner pill by dado A supply of a little over a hundred dark-colored pharmaceutical capsules, labeled “boner pill by dado” and apparently created due to a misunderstanding about Viagra. The pills make subjects age rapidly, though they will just as rapidly de-age when the pills wear off. In addition to making you old, these pills also make you very horny. (They don’t help with sexual dysfunction, however.)

3999 - I Am At The Center Of Everything That Happens To Me This one I can’t possibly summarize. You’re just going to have to read it. It might make some sense once you’re done, but I make no guarantees.

That’s it for now!

This post was last updated 03/28/19. I will be adding to it as I discover more noteworthy SCP entries. If one of your favorites didn’t make it on here, feel free to shoot me an ask and I’ll check it out.

#scp tag #fiction talk night radio #WHEW

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