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evarcana · 3 years

Text

I See the Moon

Oh when you are looking at the sun

Ev wears some very impractical shoes and learns that she does not know the city quite as well as she thought.

characters: the usual cast of Ev and consul Valerius

words: 2,4k

warnings: none!

notes: I wanted to write something short and sweet to act as a placeholder between the previous part and what is coming next, but I think I got a bit too emotionally attached in the process. The title is from “Be the One” by Dua Lipa and I will leave it open for interpretations.

Darkness strikes Ev’s eyes as she steps out of the theatre doors and for a moment she is completely lost in time and space, staring at her surroundings as if seeing everything for the first time - the disorientation which comes with returning to reality after the magic of the theatre wears off.

A few myopic street lanterns glimmer faintly and the moon, pitched extraordinarily high, is covered by the ragged organza of thin clouds and barely available to light the streets below. Passing groups of people turn into clusters of dark silhouettes, and Ev watches the collars being lifted and scarfs wrapped tighter, as the theatregoers hide themselves from the wind moist with the cool evening dew and disappear into the shadows, leaving only trails of soft footsteps and animated chatter behind them. It is this time of the year when night falls suddenly and way quicker than anyone anticipates.

The impatient tug on Ev’s arm cuts through the hazy darkness. “Are you going to let me leave or what?!” Valerius sounds desperate in his exasperation.

“Just a moment and you are free.” Still watching the dark street, Ev reaches for her bag and throws a pair of flat pointy mules decorated with golden beads and tassels on the ground in front of her. Using Valerius’s arm for support, she lifts one leg to untie the ribbons on her ankle. Somebody behind them helpfully holds the theatre door open, letting the light out, and they both stare at Ev’s bright red toenails as she steps out of her shoes. Ev frowns to herself and curls her toes - it is hard to be an intimidating opponent when you wear a cute sparkly little ring on your fourth toe, when she feels another tug and catches her breath in surprise, losing her balance. The arm slips from under her hand causing her to immediately crash into Valerius. Well, no chance of looking like a menace now. At least Valerius can’t run away, she thinks, because her entire face is smashed into his chest. “So impatient,” Ev rolls her eyes and tucks her heels in the bag.

Valerius hurries to brush off something invisible from his coat and then looks down at Ev’s feet with cynical interest, “Going on a hike?”

She contemplates telling that it took her a very detoured walk from the palace and four nervous circles around the Town Square to finally burn all that destructive energy her body generated in their morning argument, and that right now she is dying to rub her sore ankles, but decides against it. After all, wounded animals are easy prey. “Looks like it,” Ev says, shifting her weight from one foot to another. She scans the road once again and clicks her tongue. There is a carriage pulling away, two people inside, and another one rolling on towards the theatre, the coachman already waving to somebody, but most of the theatre crowd chooses to walk. They all must be locals, or heading to the closest tavern, Ev realises.

“Don’t tell me, -” Valerius’s voice says and Ev looks up, surprised that he is still standing there, “you don’t have a carriage because you were hoping to find a date to continue the night. You shall forgive me for ruining this little plan of yours.” His words are dripping with distaste.

She realises that Valerius must have been following her eyeline. The nervous lough blasts out of her but she manages to catch it and it turns to sound like a cough. A lucky guess on his part? Or did he take inspiration from his own plans? Ev refuses to think about the whole theatre fiasco. The sinking feeling in her chest has started and she puts her hands on her hips in annoyance. “I thought there would be carriages waiting,” she manages to say.

Valerius arches his brow in response, “...how pathetic.” Ev gives him her best withering look and turns away.

The last carriage departs with the din of wheels hitting the worn edges of the stones. Valerius’s eyes are still set on Ev’s face and his brow begins to crease slowly. He is clearly deliberating something but Ev cannot see it. She is watching clouds moving slowly across the moon. “Where do you live?”, he finally asks.

“By the Town Square,” Ev responds automatically, squinting at the sky above her.

“Not in the Heart District?” It sounds like a genuine question at first but the edge of his mouth lifts in a wry grin. “Didn’t you say I wasn’t the only one with the money here?”

“Too close to you,” she smirks back, “the urge of leaving a dead fish by your gate at least weekly would be -,” she leans in closer, turning her voice into syrupy sweet hush, “- irresistible”. This is getting weird. “Anyway,” Ev hurriedly looks behind her shoulder at the theatre doors, “I think it is going to rain later. Have a good night,” the words come in a flat orderly row, she is already concerned with something else, “I will see whether the theatre director can fetch me a carriage.”

“My carriage is waiting down the road.”

“Mm good,” Ev mutters to herself but then the realisation hits and she turns to the consul, eyes wide. “Are you offering me a lift home?” A ‘thank you’ sign lights inside her head but she crashes it with a wave of suspicion. It’s Valerius out of all people. He has no reason to offer her a ride in his carriage besides plotting to murder her and then ditch the body somewhere in the forest. Ev gives him a hard stare.

Valerius breaks the staring game first - his eyes flash with the new unidentified emotion before he regains his usual dismissive look. “Not home,” he snorts, “to the Town Square,this should suffice for a favour.”

“No no, hold on,” Ev raises her hand in protest. “I haven’t asked you anything yet, and hospitality is not a favour.”

“What hospitality are you talking about?”

“You repeat that it is your city all the time! Technically, I am still a guest.” Inside her head Ev is thanking all the available gods for her ability to just keep talking, regardless of whether it makes sense or not, because she definitely has not processed what happened yet.

“Yes, well, just keep your mouth shut,” Valerius says and walks off without a backward glance, his back soon disappearing in the darkness of the narrow lane.

Ev’s eyes follow his path and then she throws another look at the theatre building. The light in one of its rounded windows goes down. She watches the emptying street and feels the goose bumps scatter her forearms. The air is beginning to chill. She looks down at her feet. Ev decides that the consul is the kind of man who would rather pay somebody if he wanted to get rid of her than being involved himself and for the second time this evening she rushes after Valerius. This is so weird.

She is about to call him out to slow down because the sound of duck feet that her ‘emergency’ shoes make is getting on her nerves when she hears a loud thud and a curse. In the darkness of the path Ev is not sure how close Valerius is to her but she knows that he stumbled and it makes her giggle in delight. She stretches her hand out glancing at the strips of warm candlelight coming from the gaps in the window shutters and the ivory glare of the moon. A small globe of light, the size of a plum, forms above her hand. Its light is delicate and warm, as if filtered through the frosted glass, but bright enough to fill the space between the two of them.

The consul straightens up quickly, “Why -”

“I don’t know about you but I like my toes all intact,” Ev walks over to him. “It’s only a small trick, here,” she raises her hand and the light gets brighter, “you can touch it, it’s not hot.”

Valerius takes a step back, looking at the ball of light suspiciously. “You are full of tricks, aren’t you?” he says.

“Don't even make me start on what you are full of.” She bunches her hand in a fist and the light sphere drops down but, before hitting the ground, it bounces back in the air like a small ball and splits into a dozen of smaller lights, startling Valerius. They hover in the air along the path similar to a garland of lanterns as they walk in silence until the lane ends, opening to the canal, and Ev asks, “Is it your carriage there?”

***

The servant opens the carriage door and much to Ev’s astonishment, Valerius waits for her to get in first. She gives him a confused look but complies. There is no evening chill inside and the cushioned seats are invitingly soft, so Ev’s immediately decides that regardless of what is going to happen it was a good idea not to walk home. Valerius takes a seat opposite her and reaches to unbutton his coat and pull his long loose braid from under the collar. His head rolls gently to the side and Ev sees a couple of inches of the neck, soft lines and the glowing skin. She feels her cheeks beginning to heat, suddenly remembering the warmth and the bitter almond fragrance she breathed in every time she got too close to the man, and gods did she get too close tonight.

This is about as far from the real world as Ev can imagine. The carriage is small and the little triangle of her beaded slipper somehow ended up between the consul’s leather boots. If she was to stretch her leg, the bareskin on the side her foot would brush along his shin. They have never sat this close together. Ev thinks about the old lady from the theatre. How would she feel if she knew that she was the only thin barrier stopping them from recognising each other and fully succumbing to the mutual hostility, claiming at least half of the theatre as casualties in the process. This could have been a disaster.

Ev looks at Valerius again and tries to understand how could she not recognise these features straight away. The signature crease between the dark brows and the sulky mouth. Valerius sits in silence, and his eyes are definitely not the ones she knows. They are so wistful and lonely, and so golden under the lamp light, Ev has to look away.

She puts a hand under her chin and leans to the window. A fine mist of rain has started to grit on the glass, and behind the sparks of its tiny drops - a bridge arches over the canal’s silver curve, both ends of which are clipped by infinity, which, in the dim light of the early night, is only ten feet away. The backdrop is all in flashes of the lit windows and the black outlines of pointed rooftops, round cupolas and slender towers, all together resembling a crown adorned by a single grand jewel of the moon, burning bright white. Then, the skyline and even the moon gets momentarily obscured by the huge wall, deprived of any lights, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom.

“That massive rounded building, what is it?” Ev is surprised with herself for striking a conversation.

“Have you not seen it before?”

“No, I have not really been to this part of the city,” she says, turning to Valerius, “What is it? A hippodrome?”

“It's the coliseum. The count’s favourite place,” he gives a chuckle which sounds bitter. “The man loved... performances.”

“What kind of performances?” Ev asks, watching his mouth twisting in distaste. Something about his look makes her frown.

“Gladiators. Bloodshed which lacked any order or purpose besides the count’s own entertainment,” Valerius rubs the bridge of his nose and glances to the window. Ev cannot tell whether he is looking at the moon or the looming coliseum, considering something. “But it’s not what this place was intended for,” he pauses. He turns back to Ev and the expression in his eyes is softer. “It was built before Lucio became a count, although it was slightly less grand back then. The rituals and ceremonies were conducted there during the festivities and the previous count used to reenact scenes of the famous battles there, using the actors. It brought the whole city together. Nobody wants to remember those days anymore.”

Ev feels a weird tremble inside and she is not sure what has caused it until she realises that it is a strange, unusual affection in his voice. She crosses her arms and seats back to contain the feeling. It’s so freaking strange to talk to him when his face is not a mask of boredom. “Did you use to come to watch?” she asks.

“Only when I had to. As if I would mix myself with the roaring crowd of plebeians. Besides, it was terribly distatestful and the smell inside was disgusting.” His mouth tightens, and a strange shadow clouds his expression this time. “Pointless waste of human life.”

“Oh,” is all Ev can manage. She cannot stop staring at Valerius. There is some kindness beneath this asshole facade, human decency, fairness even. It is not the perspective that she has been prepared for. “I meant before that,” she adds faintly.

“Yes I did, when I was much younger.”

“I cannot believe I have never heard of it.”

“Did you do any research before you came here?” The consul is back to his dismissive tone.

“Honestly? I had other things to worry about.” Ev turns back to the window, suddenly unable to look at him anymore.

She hears an irritated snort from Valerius but then, after a brief silence, he starts talking again, and it is not about Ev’s inadequacy. He talks about the canals named after constellations, traditions which Vesuvia used to have, and what you could find in the city before the plague. His voice is calm and steady, and has this velvet quality to it, which fits the night perfectly. Ev closes her eyes and thinks that maybe if she asked Valerius, as that favour she got from him, to continue his stories sitting by her bedside, she would finally be able to fall asleep before the sunrise.

#omg if there is such a thing as MY writing style it is writing things where nothing is happening #but I promise they will kiss..maybe…eventually #I wrote something chronological do I need like a master list now #the arcana #consul valerius #the arcana Valerius #evpanopolis #ev x valerius #the arcana fanfiction #writing #valerius x mc #the arcana fanfic #the arcana fic

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fursasaida · 3 years

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do you have sources or opinions about the uh. development of the idea of the 'veil between the worlds' stuff and how it relates to how we understand ... space and place? question brought to you by "i just read some fantasy fiction that royally hacked me off"

lmao did you know one of my big “i don’t work on this but i lowkey develop expertise in it as a hobby” things is fairy tales and folklore

Anyway, I don’t know very much about the history of the “veil” thing, but I am given to understand it originated with the Victorians. Google Scholar has been unforthcoming on this point, so while I do not have sources, I do have opinions! My opinions are these:

As previously discussed, most people in most places were not, until recently, of the opinion that the world is made of space and space is the universal extensive backdrop, the dimension in which things happen. Moreover, even if we more or less think the world is made of space semiconsciously and in our uses of language, it's not really how most people think most of the time, even in contexts where space in this sense (as opposed to "room") has been invented/internalized. Instead, the knowledge of the world was and is structured much more around places, routes, and regions (which are just a kind of place distinguished by being part of a larger whole). Places have insides and outsides. They are distinct from one another. (Although, as with regions, they can also nest or overlap; this isn't state territory or administrative boundaries we're talking about. Those are spatial artifacts.) Therefore, in a spaceless world, there is nothing contradictory about believing that there are, simply, places where magic is stronger or where the gods dwell or where time behaves differently, and so forth. Just because things aren't like that here means nothing about whether they're like that there. To be clear: I am not saying people in the past (or who practice such traditions today) had or have no sense of a visible/invisible, mundane/extraordinary, or material/immaterial divide. That, I think, is pretty truly universal, and simply a product of human cognition. We have myths in many cultures about a deep past when knowledge (or ignorance) was perfect and the world was immediate, young, more alive, partly because, for whatever reason, the way we experience reality includes the sense that there are some gaps in it, or a little too much room. ("A mystical experience" is basically--and across many traditions--an experience of the full immediacy we normally don't have.) However, places like Olympus or Tir-na-Nog or the realm of Ereshkigal are, still, places. You may not think you will find yourself in Hades or the land of the ancestors if you fall down a well,* but you can still think it is possible for someone to go there in a non-metaphorical sense. They may need extra steps or divine/magical assistance, but going is still going. You know, like people do in the stories. And at the same time you can very easily accept that some extraordinary kinds of creatures or spirits really are here in this realm, and that their personalities and behaviors differ from place to place (animism, genius loci, some types of ancestor-honoring practices, etc).

(*Or in other words: to think you will end up in Hades if you fall down a well is actually to think about it spatially, or indeed geologically, as simply being what is found at a certain distance down. Why should Hades/Hell/etc, as a place, be under this well, all wells, any wells, just because it's under the Earth? These places have defined entrances, in the same way that you can walk up to a city wall as much as you like and this means nothing about whether you’ll get in if there’s no gate there.)

So I do think plenty of archaeologists, anthropologists, folklorists, etc. who study this kind of thing and look at the iconography or narratives as "obviously" portraying distinct realms in the sense of dimensions are unwittingly applying their commonsense, spatial sensibility to something that is much more ambiguous--because almost none of them have thought seriously about place as anything other than a location in space. They see a line or a boundary drawn and assume this means two existential dimensions, rather than two places. What now follows is basically the speculative explanation for how we got into this situation. It is based on a lot of things I know for sure, insofar as "for sure" can be known re: intellectual history; but I have not demonstrated a direct link, only surmised it. In Europe--more particularly, to my knowledge, in England, France, and Germany--space in our current sense really starts to get cemented in the 17th century. Notably, at the same time, people suddenly get interested in the scientific question of "the figure of the earth." It had long been known the Earth was round, of course, but suddenly it mattered to people what its precise shape could be. Is it a perfect sphere? An ellipsoid? What kind? What is the precise length of a degree of longitude? Is the Earth longer than it is wide or vice versa? This was the first time that intellectuals in these countries started seriously trying to reconcile the Biblical narrative of the Earth's formation with ~Science. They cared about this for some obvious reasons, like figuring out whether Newton or Descartes was right about the physics of motion, and testing Newton's gravitational theory; and there were practical reasons as well (the modern science of geodesy, which is what you need to make "accurate" maps for consolidating your state and conquering places, and to, say, build a railway, gets born as part of this). But they cared about it for another reason too. Namely: after the Thirty Years' War, there was a real sense of dislocation in Western Europe. This dislocation was religious, political, and social all at once. There was thus a serious need to realign political and social order with the cosmic order, and the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are significantly responses to this. Empirical knowledge (especially math) was to be the universal language that would allow people to communicate across differences rather than engaging in bloody warfare (they were quite explicit about this, especially Leibnitz, but if you know to look for it you can read it in Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Descartes...there was a reason they all suddenly got obsessed with reason), and the "Quest for the Figure of the Earth" was part of that. So was the emergence of geology a bit later, as the history of the earth becomes increasingly scientific rather than Biblical; the questions that created geology came out of these initial struggles to conceive of the Earth as a "natural" artifact to be known by science. This matters here because it means a redefinition of what the Earth is and what can happen there that is not just a matter of scientific debate but is fundamentally connected to social and political understandings of the world. In other words, it redefines what “the Earth” is as a place and in its cosmic place. One consequence of the new rational empiricism as a reaction to a war understood as being caused by religious ontological commitments and enthusiasms was a transformation in what counted as real. On the one hand, things that under the old Aristotelian paradigm were treated as real but imperceptible and therefore impossible to study (like magnetism) became newly study-able. In the Newtonian, empirical paradigm, you don't have to be able to say what something is or even what physical qualities it has; only to demonstrate its reliable and reproducible effects. On the other, things not observable in these terms become defined as unreal. At the same time, the shift from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian science is itself, precisely, a shift from a world explained by regions to a world explained by space. "Regions" here means places, but it also means directions like up and down. Aristotelian physics held that substances behaved in certain ways (like smoke rising and rocks falling) because it was in their essential nature to belong in different places. In other words, different areas of the world, as well as different substances, were ontologically different in real ways that had real effects. In modern empiricism, this is not at all the case. The laws of how things behave are universal laws. They are not about belonging, difference, and places/directions that have their own meanings and hierarchy; they are about forces interacting contingently. It's exactly Newton who formulates the idea of "absolute space" as an infinite and homogeneous, but insensible (like magnetism) extent over which things are distributed. Forces’ specific interactions may be locally different, but the forces are translocal and indeed universal, because they happen in the single homogeneous substrate that is space. So all of this percolates through various levels of society and fields of knowledge through the 18th century and into the 19th (and up to today). One effect is the redefinition of ghosts, fairies, elves, and so on as not real. It takes a very long time for this news to really reach everybody, though; I've read accounts of rural peasants in the British Isles and Ireland who still fully believed and practiced fairy lore into the 20th century. You also see some wobbles, like the famous hoax involving fairies and Yeats, in part because new technologies are making new things observable and therefore potentially “real” in the Newtonian terms. Thus Spiritualism, for example, was in many ways a practice of reliably producing observable effects of things that are not themselves observable; its attempt at credibility was pursued in Newtonian terms.

At the same time, after initial big achievements in geodesy, the figure of the earth keeps getting refined, details filled in, and so on. The same thing happens to the underground with geology. It similarly takes a while for this to really settle in; you have older formats like isolaria and cosmographic maps overlapping with properly spatial, cartographic mapping. (An isolarium is a world atlas that doesn't try to put all the pieces together but treats every landmass individually as an island. The islands tend to get filled in with what we would now consider fantastical stuff because the mapping enterprise, with isolaria, was all about places and their different characters; things did not have to be consistent, there was no homogeneous substrate. That fantastical stuff is part of what's called "cosmography.") So by the time you have people studying folklore in the 19th century, in these same countries and others, as part of nationalist projects and what have you, these educated elite types are likely to have accepted the following. 1) We know the shape and nature of the earth--not in every particular, but we know that physical conditions are basically the same everywhere--and 2) what is empirically unobservable is not real; and 3) space is a dimension, it is homogeneous, it is the dimension in which things that exist exist. (Plato is howling somewhere.) To be clear, #1 especially matters here because it means the idea that there might be places where things behave/occur abnormally gets ruled out. Long before the maps had actually been filled in, there were "no blank spaces" on them anymore. (Insofar as they ever did get filled in, that still hadn't happened by the turn of the 20th century. I actually have a personal theory about where the blanks are now, but that's a whole other digression.) Therefore, if you want to collect and make a fuss over stories about unreal beings and events occurring in places where the universal laws of physics and histories of geology do not seem to obtain, you cannot fit these beings, events, and settings into the world in which you understand yourself to live. There is quite literally nowhere to put them. They cannot exist in a physical, geodetic, geologic world of space; they cannot coexist with its elements. Let us now note that in the 19th century we also get the Spiritualist movement, which conjures up lots of ghosts and puts them behind a Veil. Ghosts in this framework are real, but they cannot be here. They can visit, but only by "piercing the veil." I therefore further surmise that, likely without being fully conscious or intentional about it, these folklorists and such had to assume that when people talk about a fairy court, etc., they are talking about another dimension, one different from the spatial dimension that we live in. (This is the same assumption the experts I was dumping on at the beginning make; this is what I mean about a commonsense spatial sensibility.) The language of "the veil" may well be influenced by Spiritualism, or may not; I think the "thin places" and "times when the veil is thinnest" stuff is even more recent than the Victorians, like mid-20th century. But what matters more IMO is that the two moves--what happens to ghosts in Spiritualism and what happens to fairies etc. in folklore--are parallel. They both get kicked out of here, they get made not part of "the world." The world is one place, and what is "not real" has no place in it. So in order to talk about interacting with those things that have no place here in the world, it becomes natural, maybe inevitable, to talk about what separates them from us. You need a barrier to explain why something that exists (if you believe it does) is not visible and testable all the time and everywhere, or to make sense of how other people could believe such a thing exists.

There is a very deep irony to all this, though. In making the world a single place with a single set of conditions and a single set of possibilities for what can happen and what can exist, right, we end up creating this “other realm” where all the other stuff is. In physics there is talk of a “quantum realm” exactly because the conditions, behaviors, objects, and so forth found there seem to behave differently from the “classical realm” of our experience. But "realm” is a very unstable and ambiguous word, not clearly spatial or placial. The irony is that what we have here is, still, in fact a discourse about two places. We just don’t even know that, because our formal thinking has become so spatialized. Thus the nature of the barrier between the two or how it could be possible for conditions to be so different in the “other realm” remains fundamentally mysterious--let alone what “crossing over” could possibly entail. Hence a metaphor like “the veil” becomes important and necessary not just to generate another place to put these unreal things, and not just to explain why these unreal things are not here in the real world/place, but also to paper over the basic absurdity of the whole premise. We have come full circle in that we are still basically talking about there being other places where things are different, but we have made it much more mysterious and confusing than it was (I believe) when it was just accepted that the world contains many places where things may be different.

#dieinct #space and place #waiting at the threshold #in this context i should note that this tag refers not to the threshold between two realms in the sense discussed #but to liminality in human life #but that is the fairies/folklore/etc tag

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wychive · 4 years

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𝙨𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖 𝙙𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 ─ 𝙠. 𝙮𝙨.

pairing(s) // yeosang x fem!reader

genre(s) // fluff, a little angst, royal!au, childhood!au

word count // 2.9k

author's note // this is my debut story on tumblr so it might not be up to standard but nonetheless i hope you all like it <3 this if for @noya-sannnn whom i love so much. p. s. listen to calming guitar melodies while reading this!

The night was cold but the fireplace was warm enough for the both of you. You and Yeosang sat in front of the crackling fire, playing around with the toys you bought together that cold afternoon.

“I’ll save you princess!”

“Oh yay! Captain Bright is-”

Yeosang groaned and rolled his eyes at you, putting down his toy hero. “It’s Captain Light, Y/N. How many times have I told you?”

“It’s the same thing, like potato potato,” You crossed your arms and placed it against your chest, huffing out. “Whatever..”

It was the first night of December. Yeosang’s mother and yours were in the kitchen preparing the presents. You could hear them struggling with some of the gift wrap and almost took the chance to see what your presents were but then a little speck of white caught your eye from outside the window.

The six-year-old you together with the superhero, ran to the window as the first snow of the season fell. Your dark spheres became stars, looking in awe at the pretty snowflakes. In the distance, you could see the spectacular castle as snow covered its tall towers. You frowned, turning away from the sight. Yeosang noticed your moody attitude and proceeded with a sigh.

“Hey, Y/N..” He stood in front of you and tilted his head to the side. “What’s wrong?”

“I want to know how it feels like to be an actual princess,” You prance around the living room, as if you were in one of those barbie movies. “To wear dresses, to have a big ballroom, and to meet cool princes,” You stopped and sighed. You proceeded to sit on one of the velvet sofas, dangling your feet.

Yeosang shook his head and sat beside you. “You don’t need those things to live, though,” he says, swinging his legs back and forth. “You have me and your parents, aren’t you happy with us-”

You cut him off. “Yea but still.. Yeosang, don’t you want to know how it feels like to live the life of a prince?” The boy thought about the idea for a short while and nodded to himself thinking about the fancy meals and the amount of toys he’d have if he was a young royal.

The boy leaped from the couch and went to the middle of the room. He extended his hand towards you, signaling for you to grab it. “Wanna see what my parents taught me? It’s a dance, but more fancy than what we usually do”

You exhaled the cold air and smiled before going up to him. “Show me, kind sir.”

“Um- but before we dance, we have to do this,” he blushed a light pink tint and proceeded to bow in front of you, pretending to take off a hat. “May I have this dance, m’lady?”

You tried so hard not to laugh at the sight but then answered with a giggly yes. He could see you almost bursting out one of the biggest laughs ever and playfully slapped the side of your shoulder.

“Okay, first we put our hands on each other’s shoulders,” He placed his hands on your shoulders, as you did the same. An awkward silence filled the air but that didn’t bother the both of you.

“Now, we just swing side to side,” He moved, swaying both of you together. You let out a little giggle.

“This is ridiculous! Did your parents make up this dance?”

“They said this is what they do at the festivals up there in the castle so..”

“Well, it’s still stupid,” You pouted jokingly. You both swayed to nothing but just the crackling fire and the voices of both of your mothers echoing from the kitchen. Suddenly, a light bulb appeared on the top of your head. You took control and spinned the heck out of you both, earning a little warm laugh from the boy in front of you. Getting more and more dizzy with every round, you stopped and collapsed to the ground, followed by the male which collapsed beside you.

Both of you continued laughing as if the only care in the world was if you got on the nice list for Christmas. Your soft smiles were illuminated by the fire that was starting to burn out.

“Y/N, promise me something..” He said, facing the ceiling with his hands on his stomach.

“Hm?”

“When we grow up, promise me we will do that again,” He said, followed by his classic warm smile.

“Princess Y/N,” your head perked up to see one of your royal maids calling out your name from the end of the hallway.

“Your dress is ready for the autumn festival!”

You groaned, not wanting to get out of your comfortable pajamas any sooner. This princess life was not what you had in mind. Now that you were eighteen, everything magical about being a princess faded away. The princes were not more than riches, the dresses so tight they didn't care about your respiratory tract and the dances to be filled with people that you didn't even know existed. Ten years ago, when your mother was revealed to be a distant relative to the royal family, they had asked her to take over the throne as they had no one left to count on. You ought to think that this was going to be just like Sofia The First. The hardest thing was to leave your life behind, including Yeosang. Seeing him act tough when you left made your heart flutter a little, of course, you didn’t - hadn’t - told him yet. Ever since you got here, every little thing that brings you joy would remind yourself of him. The same question would always repeat, “What was he doing now?”

With the help of your maid, you put your blue dress on that had streak marks of gold foil. It was a little tight around your waist, but you managed to get comfortable. Thank God, people don't use corsets anymore because that would've been such a nightmare. You really didn't like the fancy ballroom dances but admired the musical art behind it. Honestly, you would rather just stay in your room reading a good book instead of facing the thousands of fakes that were there to either take over your kingdom or ask for your hand in marriage.

Dusk arrived sooner than expected and the guests filled the castle ballroom in no time. At these events, you always stuck around with your parents. The awkwardness of being around people that want to kiss you was always a problem. You kept a smile on your face not caring if you were genuine about it or not. Your answers to the questions they asked would be answered with a “Dad, how about you answer first. I’m getting a little thirsty.” and followed by you excusing yourself to get some refreshments. This time you did it again and actually got some water as you felt a small headache was coming your way.

As you took a sip of your drink, a figure from the crowd stood out to you. The mystery person was wearing a classic white uniform suit jacket with gold and black lining and a buttoned up white shirt. The chest area of the suit was filled with medals, some of which of the highest levels of honor. One little accessory that stood out was the little pink butterfly on the collar of the shirt that reminded you of the one that you gave him when he was younger.

“Yeosang!” you called out, to see if it was actually him. If he was here after all those years of not being in touch with each other. The now grown male turned to your direction and flashed the same smile he did, all those years ago.

“Y/N!” He called your name. His voice, now mature and filled with nothing but sweet honey made your heart flip. He willingly ditched the conversation he just now had and opened his arms wide as you both ran towards each other, not wanting to stop any sooner. The crowd opened up into a big area as everyone saw you both heading towards the middle of the room. He caught you as soon as you were held by him and lifted you from the ground. He twirled you around with your hands on his shoulders as you both laughed together. Is this what complete bliss felt like?

He finally placed you back on the marble floor and gave you a proper hug. You heard people clapping but that didn’t matter to you. You just found your best friend. After so many years of living without him. Your tears almost puddled but you decided that the meet-up was too public for crying and you weren't that sensitive. You pulled away and looked at him, scanning his now tall figure.

He certainly had been working out and gotten slightly cuter. This was a whole different Yeosang. You looked back at him and he cocked his head to the side with the familiar ‘wtf-are-you-doing’ face. Nevermind, still the perfect him you knew of. You finally realised what you were doing and a blush blossomed onto your cheeks.

“Sorry-” you said, as your hand covered the bottom half of your face. Since when did you get so flustered around him?

“It’s okay, Y/N/N,” He chuckled softly and looked at how much you’ve grown. You went from the mud-covered fairy to the most beautiful princess ever. However, you blushed a little harder than before when he said your old nickname and took a deep breath to let out the icky feelings. Smiling softly at the male, you initiated an actual conversation.

“I didn’t know you were a knight-” you said, grabbing his medals and looking at them one by one. “How come you’ve never told me?” you crossed your arms with a pout, cheekily.

“Well, first of all, I wanted to make it a surprise. Second, I trained for three years and couldn’t contact you at all,” he stopped for a bit and looked at your face once again. “And lastly, when did you become this pretty?” he said, with a smirk on his face.

You let out a light laugh trying not to let out a big laugh in this type of crowd. “Oh, good one,” you said, wheezing and holding his shoulder before you realised that he meant the unusual compliment. “You- you’re not kidding?” you asked, with an ‘are-you-serious-rn’ face. He nodded.

“Since when did you become such a flirt?” you asked, with a worried look on your face.

He shrugged and chuckled once again. “Don’t be alarmed though, I was just seeing if you would blush again”

“Well no- you flirting seems weird enough already. You flirting with me would be triple the weird. Therefore, no, I would not blush if you were to flirt with me,” you said sophisticatedly. There’s no way you would fall for this wimp.…. right?

Him flirting didn’t stop you both from talking to each other though. You both continued to talk and catch up with everything that happened in the past years. You were very interested in his adventures when he was a knight in training as equally as invested of he was in the stupid mistakes you’ve done during major public events. You decided to show him the castle gardens as they were the best shown at night with mini fairy lights wrapped around the bushes and in the middle of the garden was a circle of just grass that you could lay on that was surrounded by various types of flowers.

As you both got into the circle, the mini orchestra from the main ballroom was on their fifth song that night. You yawned as you were tired from the chit chat and the walking. You really needed some sleep after finishing that one book the night before.

“Hey, I think I should go- my parents are probably looking for me,” you said, not really wanting to leave.

“Not yet,” the handsome male said, extending his hand out to you. ‘This looked familiar’ you thought to yourself as a memory from the depths of your brain came to the surface. Ah, yes. The blurred music would make this hopefully not as awkward as before. “Did you save that dance for me after all this time, princess?”

“Yes, of course,” you said, baffled at the fact that he still remembers it as well.

“Let’s do it the right way this time. Shall we?” Yeosang chuckled before he bowing in front of you. “May I have this dance, Y/N?”

You smacked his head playfully and earned a slight yelp from him. He rubbed the place where you hit the poor fella and asked why.

“It’s Princess Y/N to you,” you said with a humph and placed your palm on top of his. “But yes, you may have this dance, Sir Yeosang.”

He flashed his warm sunny smile like he once did and pulled you in. You both looked into each other’s galaxy filled eyes and stayed in that position for a few seconds before actually moving. His other hand slipped down to your waist as yours held onto his shoulder. Both of you stayed silent during the dance as the atmosphere was already filled with beautiful gold coloured music notes and the faded sound of the crickets in the distance.

The memories of you both start to come back. The summers, autumns, winters, and springs you lived through. The secrets and laughs you shared. The fun play dates you spent together. You’re surprised at how much he matured but one thing you noticed that didn’t change was the smile that he always gave you. The sweet smile that looked like it was going to taste like cotton candy. The sweet smile that would always reassure you that it was going to be okay. The sweet smile that would make you feel as if you just witnessed the full bloom of the first flower in spring,

The music was about to end and you were feeling somber because of it but that didn’t stop you from slow dancing with the brave knight. A little towards the end, he pulled you in closer than ever before but stopped right before touching your lips. He could feel your breath as you did with his. You closed your eyes thinking he would actually do it but as soon as you leaned in, he pulled away. You opened your eyes to see that he bit his bottom lip and red tint spread across his face.

You blushed as well, this time harder than ever before. No boy has made you feel like this - even a prince - and somehow the boy who stood in front of you, the one who would always smother you in mud, the one that would steal your candy, the one that broke your favourite toy made you crazy out of your mind. After just one night with him?

Suddenly, he placed his right hand on your cheek and brushed his thumb over your soft skin. There it is again. That stupid smile. The one that started everything. He kissed your forehead softly before pulling you in for a tight hug that felt more different than the one in the ballroom. You hugged him back, wrapping your hands over his torso.

“I missed you,” he whispered into your ear. “so, so much.”

You wanted to stay in that moment forever. Him being close to you and his arms around you as if you were the most important thing to him. The fairy lights joined the bright stars, twinkling above you both as you shared the best hug. He finally pulled away after a few minutes that felt like nanoseconds to you. You bit your gums, wanting him to do that again. Wanting him to stay for a few more minutes if not hours. Wanting him to realise that you wanted to say something so vulnerable that you don’t just say to anyone else.

But alas, everything comes to an end.

You walked together to the entrance of the castle. Seeing the guests leave was always something so melancholy but now that your childhood best friend is leaving, it made you feel a slight something inside.

Deep inside, Yeosang didn’t want to leave either. He wanted you to tell him to stay. He wanted you to pull him back into the hugged you shared. He wanted you to hold you again and twirl you into the air. He wanted you to realise he still had those feelings for you. He wanted you to finally call him ‘yours’.

“I’ll see you soon?” he asked, in a soft voice.

“Yea, definitely,” you answered, trying not to spare another word.

“Well. Goodbye, princess,” he said. The male waved to you, as you did to him before getting into his car. A giddy smile appeared on his face as he thought of something that would tease you.

“Hey Y/N!” he called out, from the backseat of his car. You looked at him with a confused face from a distance.

“Je t'aime.”

With that his car exited the main gates and the thought of you filling his mind. He let out a little laugh, positive that you didn’t know what the phrase meant.

But you have learned about the foreign language over the years. Enough to know that it meant, “I love you.”

#ateez #ateez oneshots #ateez fluff #ateez edits #ateez au #ateez yeosang #yeosang au #yeosang #yeosang fluff #yeosang angst #yeosang edits #yeosang x reader #ateez x reader #yeosang x you #ateez x you #this is bad ik pls don't come for me #alachi mind puke

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ladynightmare913 · 4 years

Text

Secrets of the Darkened Seas

Welcome to Chapter 2! I would like to say thank you to Olivia (@asunshinepuff), for inviting me to work on this story with her.

As always there is mermaid lore hidden with in the story. The included lore on different types of merfolk will be taken from the book “The Secret World of Mermaids” by Francine Rose. We are taking no credit for her work.

Now without further ado,

Chapter 2: The Dragon’s Pearl

The man and the young boy made their way to the far side of the docks, the sun was beginning to make it’s descent to the sea. The water rippled below the hull of ships, anchors being lowered or weighing anchors to begin their sails back at sea. Some of the townspeople were making their trek home. Quinn and Remus approach the ship that Remus had seen earlier in the day from a distance. But up close, it was truly a sight to behold. The masts that were open, were a starking white, wooden haul, a rich brown mahogany, spotless with not a barnacle in sight. The railings were painted gold like the sun, freshly polished and not a splinter out of place. The bow had a golden nautical figurehead of a creature that Remus had never seen before. With a long serpentine body fully covered in scaled, and large horns protruding from it’s head. A white spherical object clutched in one of it’s clawed hands. It’s jaws open as if to strike.

Remus’ eyes widened as he gazed upon the ship he had studied earlier. Glancing to Quinn, he couldn’t help but ask, “How has no one tried to steal this ship?”

Quinn chuckles, “Oh they’ve tried, but never got very far. My brother, the captain, is a force of his own that is not to be reckoned with.” He says with a smile. At Remus’ growing concerned face he quickly adds on, “Don’t worry. He might seem a bit… well, rather cold at first. To put it lightly. But he’s not a bad man.”

“How far have they gotten?”

Quinn muses for a moment in silence, as they make their way up the loading dock to the ship’s deck, thinking of the many times pirates - including the Blacks - have tried to take over the ship. “Never past deck.” He smiles at the crewmen preparing to sail as he stands in the middle of all their work. “Anyone seen the Captain?”

“Last we saw him, he threw Ethan overboard.” A sailor responded courtly. He was dressed in black pants and boots, a white shirt and a gold sash around his waist.

Quinn looks to the sailor in bewilderment, “Again? What is that, the fifth time now?”

“Seventh actually, Ethan told the joke about the donkey.”

“I told him not to do that.” He shakes his head with an exasperated sigh. “Never learns does he?”

A young man with short curly dark brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin was soaked to the bone in water as he marched back up to the ship. He looks to Quinn.

“Don’t look at me like that, I told you not to tell that joke. You’ve brought this upon yourself.” The young man rubs his necks as he walks below deck to change. Quinn shakes his head before he turns to Remus as he claps his hands and rubs them together. “It’s harmless really.” The man groans in pain, as if to contradict Quinn. “Eh, mostly.”

Remus watches the man in pain walk below the deck with widened eyes. He looks back to Quinn and the sailor, “Does that happen often?”

Quinn tilts his head back and forth with his arms crossed, “I’d like to tell you no, to ease you, but that’d be a lie. It happens on more than one occasion, though less often than you’d think.” He chuckles under his breath, “Now come along. I think it’s time to introduce you.” He then turns behind him and just smiles. “Hello Min-Jun.”

Remus turns to follow, and nearly jumps in surprise. Lo and behold, said Captain was standing right behind them. The Captain was a tall young asian man, around the age of twenty-one, with an expressionless face, he had short straight black hair with part bangs, fair skin, and dark eyes. He was dressed in a well-tailored black coat with a dark forest green vest on top of a white shirt, black pants and boots. At his hip was a wide sword with a dark forest green sheath with gold accents. But no captain’s hat was anywhere in sight.

“Quinn.” He says in a deep monotone. His posture was as straight at a board, his hand at his side, his left hand on the hilt of his sword. His gaze lowers to the boy beside Quinn, narrowing a fraction before he looks to Quinn. “You were at the Taverns again weren’t you?”

“I will neither confirm or deny.”

“So that’s a yes.” A brow rises ever so slightly before it’s gone in the blink of an eye. The captain turned his head lightly to look over the boy. “Apologies for any idotic schemes my First mate may have dragged you into. He is not the brightest, but his heart is in the right place. Usually. He has the unfortunate ailment of defying gravity. I once caught him upside down on the masts so there’s that.”

“And who put me there Min-Jun? Cause it certainly wasn’t me. I may do many schemes you might consider idiotic-”

“Because they are.” His head leans to look at Quinn in a bored expression but his eyes held amusement.

Quinn raises his eyebrows, giving a pointed look before continuing, “But I wouldn’t do that out of my own volition!’

The captain simply looks away, fully content to ignore the auburn haired man. “I am Min-Jun Hua. The crew call me Captain Hua. What is your name?” He looks back towards Remus.

Remus was silent during the whole exchange, internally studying the interaction closely. He was uncertain whether the Captain and First Mate actually got along or if they hated each other, however, he caught the amusement in his eyes within their banter. They did get along. It was as if they were teasing each other. Maybe they actually consider each other siblings. He noted with his own amusement now that his initial caution has about this new Captain has diminished. They’re so very different. How did they become companions?

“My name is Remus Lupin, Captain.” Remus replies with a curt nod, as he was trying to contain his nerves and seem content in the situation. He was uncertain if it was effective or not, but he seemed to take comfort in the fact that Quinn was so relaxed with the man.

Captain Hua says nothing for a long while as he stares silently at Remus. Completely motionless for what seemed to Remus, eternity, before the asian finally looked like he took a breath. The Captain turned his gaze to his First mate. “He’ll be under your care for the meantime. Have him bathed, dressed, and fed before you send him to bed for the night. Tomorrow he can begin.” The captain says nothing more before he looks to Remus once again. “Welcome aboard the Dragon’s Pearl.” He gives a curt nod to Remus before he walks away to resume his duties.

Remus lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding before looking to Quinn in surprise, “Why didn’t he ask any questions? Wouldn’t he want to know more about me before deciding to let me aboard?”

Quinn merely shakes his head before looking to Remus, “The Captain is an incredibly loyal soul, he respects privacy. If you wish to talk about your past then he will listen, and he will never mention it again without your approval.” He says with a smile. “He cares, deeply. He’d rather have you upon this ship then let you be on your own. That’s what happened to Ethan as well, he’s actually not that much older than you, Remus. He’s turning seventeen next moon.” Looking to the ship, he runs a hand upon the railing gently before continuing. “This old vessel has seen many stray boys board her, and she’s seen many of them become family. The captain only asks for loyalty, truthfulness, bravery, and devotion to family.”

Remus smiles, comforted by his words. There was always more than meets the eye. He looks around the ship in surprise, “This ship looks brand new. How long has it been sailing waters?”

“Quite a long time. Practically hundreds of years. It’s been passed down through the generations of his family.”

“That’s incredible.”

“It is.” Quinn remarks with a nod in agreement, before looking back to the boy, “Now, we’ll be embarking at dusk. You want to watch the ship be put to sea?”

The two got situated at a good viewing point for the departure after taking care of duties below deck. It felt rather strange, yet refreshing to Remus to dawn a new set of clothes. Yet his scarf stayed tied around his waist as usual, at least he could take some part of familiarity with him. The Captain began to call out orders to the crew before he took his place behind the keel, the crew lowered the masts, catching the wind. The colors were hanged, where Remus could see the emblem on the masts and flag of the ship. A gold circle and in the center was the same creature that Remus had seen on the bow of the ship, but from the side. Only without the sphere.

What sort of creature was that? Remus couldn’t help but wonder in curiosity as he watched the emblem upon the masts and flag of the ship.

“It’s a dragon. An eastern dragon.” Quinn says in reply, with a smirk upon his face as he looked to the boy. It seems Remus accidentally spoke aloud, and for once, he was alright with that.

A loud shout echoed from a grumbling man who was making his way to The Dragon’s Pearl loading dock. Remus flinched as he recognized the voice of the drunken man from earlier, while Quinn moved defensively to shield the fourteen year old from sight.

“I know he’s up there! Where is he?!” The slurred words from the drunk captain all but screech out. The hooked nose man stumbled his way on board, his eyes locked onto the auburn haired man who stood defensively in front of the former deck boy. “You!”

“Me.” Quinn answered easily with a faint smirk.

“Where’s that deck boy!?” The drunk captain practically roared into Quinn’s face. To which Quinn’s nose simply twitched at the smell of alcohol that reeked off the man. “Behind me, though I doubt you’d be able to grab him.”

“Where’s your captin’, I ought to have a word with him. You goin’ ‘round stealin’ deck boys, ought to be ‘shamed of yeself.” The man nearly tumbled over.

“Not stealing when he willingly came aboard. If anyone’s to be ashamed it’s you for your actions.” He retorts with a roll of his eyes then simply tilts his head, “ You sure you want to have a word with my captain? You can hardly hold a proper conversation in your state. He won’t take too kindly to that factor.”

“I wan’ see yer captin!”

Quinn doesn’t respond for a moment, only looks behind the drunken captain with a bored look upon his face. “Turn around mate.”

“Wha’?” The drunk captain frowns with his mouth hanging open before he turns, nearly falling down when he sees someone standing behind him. Remus couldn’t help but hold a snicker back from behind Quinn as the drunk man flinched at the mere sight of the tall and sober captain.

Captain Hua looked down at the drunk captain with an emotionless stare but his eyes held a look that screamed ‘How dare you bring your dunken arse onto my pristine and clean ship.’

“You wished to speak to me?” Was the leveled voice of Captain Hua.

“A-aye.”

“You are not qualified to speak to me.”

The drunk captain staggered at the impassive tone. His face grew red. “Ye think you’re bet’er than me?”

“To ask that question offends me.” Captain Hua raised a brow.

“Where’s ye captin’s hat?”

“I don’t need one, I do not need to parade my status on my own ship, nor to ensure the respect of my own crew. They know who I am.” The Captain looked to his First mate. “Please escort this, man back to his ship.” Calling the drunk captain a man was incredibly respectful. Remus thought, truly Captain Hua had class that was unfortunately being wasted upon this drunkard. But then again, Captain Hua didn’t acknowledge him as a Captain either.

“That’d be Captain Barclay ta ye.” He shrugs the hand that grips his arm.

“No. I think the Captain is right. Mr. Barclay.” Quinn contradicts with a smile, “Now, allow me to escort you back to your ship. I’m sure you embark soon.”

“Not without that boy.” The drunk captain glared at the boy.

Captain Hua looked at the drunkard, then at the boy. “First Mate Sandoval, please step aside.” The drunk captain’s eyes widen at the title.

Quinn ignores the surprised look upon the drunkard’s face and instead looks to Remus. Giving him a small smile of comfort and a look that says Trust us. You’ll be alright. Then looks back to his Captain, and with a nod, he steps aside.

Captain Hua looked to the drunk man. “You can take this child to your ship, if you answer one question. If you answer correctly, you’re free to take him. If not,” His dark eyes narrowed, his left hand gripped the hilt of his sword, this sword was red compared to the first one Remus had seen. It was sheathed in a red case with gold accents. A strong pulse emitted from the sword as the pulse rippled through the ship. The ropes freed themselves from their knots, moving very much like serpents slithering up trees. The crew have stopped working and watched openly. “I will throw you overboard.”

The drunk man didn’t notice the pulse of gold energy, nor did he notice the ropes begin to move on their own. Remus’ young eyes watched in amazement at Captain Hua, who’s sheer presence became overpowering, his aura seeming to infect the ship. Stupidly, the drunkard agreed.

“What is the child’s name?”

“...” The drunkard frowned, Remus could practically see the mental strain on the man’s face. His brain was too far gone from the rum. “... Bernard.”

Captain Hua did not look impressed. Not at all. He simply raised a brow before he looked to Remus to correct the man’s answer.

Remus simply smiles and shakes his head. “Wrong.”

What happened next happened rather quickly, it was really a blur to be completely honest. Captain Hua wordlessly grabbed the drunkard by the collar of his shirt, lifted him off the ground and proceeded to walk, not in any hurry, effortlessly to the side of the ship, and threw the man overboard with ease. Remus’ jaw dropped a bit.

“Why didn’t you just use the ropes?” Remus couldn’t help but ask in curiosity.

Captain Hua merrily gazed down at the swimming crew members from the drunk captain’s ship who threw themselves overboard to ensure the man didn’t drown. “And deprive myself of the pleasure of doing it myself? Never.” Captain Hua’s stoic face gave a smirk in delight. “I would never disgrace The Dragon’s Pearl to so much as even touch that drunk. It was painful to watch an alcoholic parade around with a captain’s hat and acting like a child throwing a temper tantrum.”

“... How did you know he didn’t know my name?”

Captain Hua looked down to Remus. “I have two answers. One; most people who make port hardly ever ask for a deck-boys name.” The captain began to walk away from the railing, Remus followed. “Two; even if by the off chance he did know your name, he would not have the sentimentality, nor the intellectual capacity to remember your name, especially while drunk.” He turned to look at Remus. “I would not have made that wager had I believed for a second he would be able to say your name. Not when he preferred to think with an organ that he did not have instead of his brain. Not to mention your name is unusual. I am not one to gamble. Especially with someone’s life.”

Remus pauses for a moment taking in the Captain’s words, before asking the question he was truly reluctant to hear. “... What if he did say my name?”

Captain Hua looked at Remus for a long time before he looked away to the setting sun. “Then he would have won.” Captain Hua looked back to Remus. “It may seem cruel, but I will not lie to you Remus. I do not break my word.” Captain Hua looked to the sunset once more. “I would have just challenged him to a duel if that was the case. The man couldn’t even walk straight let alone hold a sword.” Without another word, he walked away.

Remus stood silently as he watched the Captain walk away, and looked out to the sunset once he was out of view. There was no relief of tension like he had initially anticipated when he first heard the words of the wager, as if he already knew he was safe. How exactly he determined that conclusion, he had no clue. But in his heart he knew that was the case. He watched the shore line of the port town he had always known, grow smaller and smaller with every glide of the ship, until it vanished from view- it was the start of a new life. A new chapter. Like each morning rise and evening set of the sun upon the sea.

#wolfstar #remus lupin #sirius black #remus x sirius #quinn sandoval #asunshinepuff oc #min-jun Hua #captain Hua #pirate captain #pirate and mermaid au #cw drunken #ladynightmare ocs

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mondaysnoon · 4 years

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10/(25-27) - The Investigator

I don’t know at what point specifically in my life did I start to question things - the world, society, myself - but I do know that it’s been that way for most of my adolescence and beyond. Perhaps it was that day when I first started writing in this place more than five years ago. No, it had to have been earlier than that...it was only then that I chose to say something about it. It’s not something we can return to to do anything about. All that I remember is the eventual setting of the haze, gradually, incrementally, until I was right in the thick of it. I had to make sense of things somehow, because simply living wasn’t enough anymore. I won’t go so far as to say that me but more mentally stable and secure would never have turned the dagger on everything I saw wrong with the world, but perhaps that criticism wouldn’t have been set against a backdrop of pure dissatisfaction. Well, not perhaps. It just wouldn’t have been. It really is more interesting to think about whether or not I would’ve followed the path of least resistance instead had the circumstances been different. Again, not something that we can change.

I would characterize that three year arc from the beginning of my writing to the end of high school as a period of time in which I was rooting around in the dark for questions to ask, throwing whatever at the wall hoping something would stick. And of course, some things did. Things that I’d eventually produce answers for. But for some reason, I don’t know if I’d think of myself in that period as particularly inquisitive...maybe because the questions I’m looking at now are far less answerable than the ones I had arrived at in that period. They were relatively easy to answer; questions like who am I, how do I feel about certain people, how do I feel about this world...things of that nature. I’m sorry if you haven’t found those answers yet, as I just realized that it may be insensitive to speak as if it was at all an easy process on the whole. But at least when I got to them, it felt right in my mind. So when I arrived at them at the very end, it felt rather...empty...to keep going forward in time. The story had an end, I accomplished what I set out to do, I spoke to all the people I wanted to speak to, I asked some questions and received some answers...what more could I possibly get out of continuing? This isn’t a feeling that I’m backwards projecting, like I might sometimes do whenever I’m writing about events that transpired years ago. I remember very distinctly a feeling of epilogue in that summer before coming here, dreading the idea that I had to live beyond a completed story in a world that I wouldn’t be able to write myself into. And I had all the reason to feel like I had peaked, knowing what people had said to me about the things I had achieved, knowing that I was entering a program that I secretly feared and despised. So the stage was set for me to enter the unknown once again, resetting the cycle and sending my back to beginning of the inquisitive arc in which I yet again would know nothing.

The self-granted title of Investigator is somewhat of a recent phenomenon, though the feeling is something I can say goes back to the very beginning of my time here, captured very well by the above photo. The night, where no one else lives save for a few symbolic creatures, familiar settings with layers of mystery, false senses of illumination...this is the image that lies in my mind when looking for something, knowing that I could very well not find it. That’s what it means for me to be an Investigator; it’s not characterized by my ability to find things out, but by my abundance of questions that I can’t seem to find answers for. Perhaps the most omnipresent of them all being what I’m here for. Like I had previously stated, there was a loss of purpose I felt when I came here. It was as if I expired some day during the summer of 2017 and the time spent beyond that was never meant to have occurred. Though I must say that there were periods of time that that sense of purpose came back, whenever I was helping people I cared about, offering them something that others couldn’t or wouldn’t give them. It’s something that I still feel today, maybe even more frequently than before. Still, it pulls at me, making me want to do more. But not out of penance, like you might expect. No, this is because deep down, somewhere inside me, I have always wanted to be the granter of wishes. Someone who could make things happen. Make people happy. There is something more, though, that I feel that is missing from this picture. It doesn’t seem like it’s the last answer, or even the last question. Which is why I’m still investigating. And even if the account I’ve given above would paint a pessimistic picture, that would be far from the truth. I’ve not gone looking around with the belief that I would never find anything. In every turn of the cycle, no matter how bad things were, I believed that I would find my way out. After all, I wouldn’t exactly be here if that weren’t true.

The Unbounded Room

In my searches for mysterious objects and presences within this world, occasionally I find something much more interesting than I would ever anticipate. Sometimes these occurrences leave my mind rather swiftly, so I am forced to record them here should I wish to preserve my observations.

I was making the rounds at the nearest train station, looking for abnormal darkwells at the ends of the platform that often made it more difficult to see things at night than normal. Such darkwells are spontaneously and randomly generated in spaces like train platforms, due to the overall structuring and architecture, but they are quite easy to detect and remove. However, when I had arrived at the edge of the platform to inspect for one’s presence, I observed a strange door on the wall that went down from the staircase leading up to surface level. I call it “strange” because such a door was not present during my last visit to this location, it was not made of material typical of doors one might see in train stations, and on the center of the door was a curious marking that I recalled seeing somewhere before in the city once during an investigation. It was made of some type of gray marble, very close in color to the tiling of the wall, though different enough to clearly outline itself. It was cool to the touch, and so was the handle on it made of the same material. The marking itself was a series of interlocking curved lines, somehow both ornate and primitive at the same time, conferring a sense of old, yet powerful magics inhabiting whatever lied behind it. There was a dull, almost imperceptible yellow glow to it, something I was only able to notice due to the lack of light on that part of the platform. Naturally, I opened it to inspect what was inside.

Upon entering, I noticed that the space was dimly lit with the same color as what I had seen on the marking, bright enough to view the floor(made of the same material as the door, though paler) and about five feet above that, but not enough to view how high the ceiling might be, if there was one. That was precisely the most curious part of the room-the fact that it was impossible for such a large space to exist in a fifteen-foot wide column in a train station. To me, the room appeared to be at least three hundred feet on each side, with no telling if it reached the same height. So in order to ascertain that, I produced from my backpack a small device specifically for that purpose. The Gadfly was a small sphere of copper that had a rotor that would let it fly and a display of dials that would tell you how far it flew up in feet. Of course, it was automated with some simple magics so that it would never fly higher than you needed it to. It was not a device I had used in quite some time, so it was odd that I had felt the need to put it in my backpack a week ago on a hunch. Have you ever stepped into a room and forgotten why you were there in the first place? I would venture to say that the exact opposite had happened to me here. Once I had launched the Gadfly into the air and waited a few minutes for it to come back down, my suspicions were confirmed; three hundred feet. Equally as nonsensical as the length and width, because this station couldn’t have been no more than fifty feet below surface level. I had come upon a space that defied Euclidean Geometry. It was not something I believed possible through magic before, as it was always considered notoriously difficult to manipulate space in such a way.

The space appeared to be entirely empty, though I did happen to observe what appeared to be a dust outline of a rectangle located directly adjacent to the center of the right wall. At some point, something was there, though it was entirely unclear what. I went to the side of the room opposite the one I entered through, which had a door that was the exact same as the other one, with the same marking. As I neglected to bring my usual instruments of observation, I decided it best to leave through that door, somehow knowing that it would take me out the same way I came in. Once I exited and closed the door behind me, the glow on the marking seemed to fade even more until it stopped, but the door itself did not disappear, like one might expect it too. I had a feeling that it would be necessary for me to return here at some point, and that I would see the same marking again somewhere else. Maybe not soon, but eventually. I left the station with more questions and answers than I had hoped I’d find on a routine visit.

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ansgar-martinsson · 4 years

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Fair Winds and a Following Sky - Part Two

Seat 7A, Business Class, United Airlines Flight 3300 - Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

Ten years. Ten years, two months and fifteen days. That was how long it had been since Anna Fair Sky had been aboard a plane. As she sat in seat 7A, she felt like a child of that very age. Scared, out of place, downright fearful.

I want my mama....

Last time she’d flown was with her then newlywed husband, heading out of the Will Rogers Airport on a tiny jet to a small, semi-private island in the Caribbean. That flight was torturous - full of turbulence, hard banks, and ultimately a not so soft landing on the impossibly short landing strip. Anna nearly kissed the ground when they’d lit from the jet - and had taken a double dose of Xanax, bought over the counter on the island - for the way home.

But she had no Xanax now, nothing to chemically calm her except the cold glass of Business Class whisky on the tray in front of her. It was her second, no... third drink of that flight, served in a thick-bottomed tumbler, rounded spheres of ice, and just a splash of Evian water to open out the flavor. She wondered, momentarily, just how many swigs of the Scottish elixir she could down before she could pass into a joyful unconsciousness.

As many as it took, and all on the credit card. Not as if I’m going to be home to get the bill, she thought. American Express can go fuck itself for all I care right now. Let Mamma Travidge handle it. Main account’s still in her name, anyway. She can go fuck herself too.

“Nervous?”

“Huh?”

“I asked you, dear, are you nervous?” Anna let out a shaky breath and turned to the voice. In the seat beside her was an older woman, white of hair and wizened of feature, yet she seemed to carry herself with a youthful strength, brought through in her voice as well - high-timbred and powerful. The woman set her book down across her lap and turned slightly in the seat to face Anna.

“A little, I... I suppose,” Anna answered honestly.

The woman shifted her hand, resting her curved fingers on Anna’s forearm. “First time?”

“No,” Anna replied, “I... I’ve been nervous before.”

The woman’s eyes went wide, head cocked and lips pursed in a confused moue, but only for a moment, just for a moment before she burst out in a bark of laughter. “Oh,” she chortled. “Oh, no, dear. No, dear. I meant...,” she covered her mouth, and with her other hand squeezed Anna’s arm gently. “I meant... is it your first time flying?��

“Oh, God, no. No... not my first time flying,” Anna laughed, and the laughter morphed into a moment of half-buzzed realization. “I think I might have made a joke, there.”

“Either that,” the woman grinned and took a sip of her tomato juice, “or you’ve seen the movie Airplane a far few too many times.” She patted Anna on the shoulder, turning back in her seat and lifting her book once again. “Flight’s about half over, I think,” she said, “and it seems you’ve got yourself occupied anyway.” Her eyes flicked between the drink on the table and Anna’s computer screen.

“Oh, that,” Anna replied. “Supposing I do.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” the woman continued, turning a page of her book, “but I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve been looking rather moonily at pictures of the same man nearly the entire flight.” She pointed toward the image, a black and white headshot of Anna’s quarry nearly filling the screen.

“I’m...,” Anna clipped. “I’m trying... trying to find him. I mean,” she corrected, “I will be trying to find him once I get to Stockholm.” She narrowed her eyes and closed her computer with a deliberate click. “But, I’m not sure what business it is of yours.”

“None. None at all my dear,” the woman replied factually, book still open.

“Correct. None.”

Anna opened her computer again, re-connected to the in-flight wifi, and re-opened the search page. She skimmed through a few articles, using Google to translate those that were written in eye-crossing Swedish.

“Do you even know who that is?” The woman had set her book back down on her lap and crossed her hands over it.

“Him? His name is... is Ansgar Martinsson,” Anna replied.

“No,” she said, “I mean, do you know who that is?”

Anna groaned inwardly, and once again closed her computer. “I guess not. I suppose you’ll tell me.”

The woman continued, unfazed by Anna’s display of irritation. “Not a man to trifle with, I tell you,” she bent toward Anna, her words sotto voce, a whisper, barely heard over the thrum of the engines. “He’s a bit of a shark if you ask me.”

“How... how do you know this?”

“That’s why I asked you if you knew who he was. He’s famous, you know, in Sweden, in Europe. Gossip column fodder. Shows up on the pages of those crap rags now and then, and sometimes on the cover of business magazines.”

“So, he’s a businessman. I kind of got that from the....” she pointed vaguely at the computer, “the articles, and stuff.... what I was able to read, at least.”

“My son works for his company,” the woman said. “We’re from Missouri, St. Louis, you see, but my son moved to Ostermalm, that’s in Sweden too, you know,” she interjected. “Anyway, he moved there to take a job with Martinsson Construction as an architect. I’m going there to visit David... David is his name... I’m going to visit David and his family for the summer.”

“So,” Anna intoned, “Ansgar Martinsson is famous because he owns a construction company?”

“Not just a construction company,” the woman’s chest puffed up a bit, “the construction company - this huge international conglomerate thing. He builds opera houses and civic buildings and universities, just about everything -- he even designed and built almost all of the newer IKEA stores. He’s like... he’s like the Elon Musk of construction, only better looking and less... well, weird.”

“Hm,” Anna said. “I suppose I still don’t understand why he....”

“Come on, my dear,” the woman’s lips curled in a wry, crooked, tight-lipped grin. “Just look at the man,” she said, gesturing toward the screen. “He’s quite charming. Gets out in society, goes to all of the best parties, even throws some himself now and then. He rubs elbows with the rich and famous, knows everyone... and I hear,” she added, “he’s newly single and ready to mingle.”

“S-single?”

“Yes, this is the sad bit, though, this bit here...” the woman gosspied, “his wife... she left him, some sort of traumatic, terrible thing... at least that’s what I heard. And when she did, he went missing. Missing, I tell you! Gone! Poof!” she splayed her fingers, demonstrating. “Gone for about a year and a half, maybe longer, I can’t remember. No one knows where he was or who he was with or what the hell happened to him.”

“Oh?”

“Of course his family wouldn’t talk, and his company people, well... they were tight lipped as ever, don’t you know. My son was worried for his job nearly that whole time! It was in all the papers, all the online blogs -- so much speculation, so many conspiracy theories.... Where is Ansgar Martinsson?” She made little ersatz quotes in the air. “One paper even reported that he’d been kidnapped and tortured by terrorists. Another said he’d been taken by aliens, but I doubt that very much.”

Anna shook her head. “Oh, I doubt that too. The... the alien bit.” She inhaled sharply, ground her teeth together and looked away - collecting her thoughts, her fears, and the increasing, swirling maelstrom of confusion and... and...

...and regret.

I know where he was....

And maybe I don’t belong where he currently is.

Wnat the hell am I getting myself into?

Words like “society” and “famous” and “businessman” and “traumatic” clanged around in Anna’s head. The walls of the plane squeezed inward confining her, the seat a great bear trap, cramping her in place, teeth digging deeply into her flesh, tearing at her spirit. No turning back now. She snatched at her glass of whiskey and downed it, immediately raising the empty in indication to the passing air steward.

The storm in her spirit and the deluge of spirits in her blood made her head ache, made her dizzy, even a bit sick. Thoughts of the Travidges invaded, clouding those of Alan... Ansgar. Was he really like them? Would he treat her the same way? Was she on a thousand-dollar one-way debt-shattering flight halfway around the world only to be dragged into the same feelings of disassociation, of abandonment, of lonliness?

Of... rejection?

“You said you’d be looking for him? When you get there, is that right? Like, physically trying to find him?”

“What?” Anna blinked, the woman’s question drawing her out of her reverie. “What did you say?”

“I asked,” the woman said patiently, “you’re going to be looking for him... in Stockholm, yes?”

“Well,” she sighed, shrugging, “that was sort of the plan.”

But now I’m not so sure....

The woman nodded sagely. “I won’t ask you why, dear. I’ve stuck my nose into your beeswax enough for one flight, but I can tell you what I know. Maybe... where to find him.”

Anna shrugged. “His office, right? He’s probably there all the time. I could just go there and talk to him.”

She shook her head emphatically. “Oh, no,” she said, “they have security in that place tighter than Fort Knox. No way in hell you just sidle up into his office.”

“Then... then where?”

“My son told me... David, he told me that Martinsson is kind of an odd duck you know... has his ways about doing things,” she said, “but I suppose a lot of Swedes are like that. Really private and all. Don’t even really like to talk to their neighbors. Can’t even talk to one of them on a flight... but they do like one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Swedish folks... they love their fika.”

“Fika?” Anna squinted, nonplussed. “What’s that?”

“Coffee break. I suppose that’s the best thing to call it,” the woman said. “It’s... it’s something the Swedish just... do. It’s pretty important to them... and I hear... my son tells me that he... that your Martinsson fellow there... he takes his coffee break, his fika, at the same coffee shop and at the same time every day when he’s in Stockholm.”

“He goes to a... a coffee shop?”

“Sure,” the woman said. “No one bothers him, apparently. Like I said, the Swedish don’t molest each other overmuch. They don’t like all that chit chat... that small talk with strangers don’t you know, and if someone is sitting at a table alone they’ll just.... you know leave them be. I mean, Brad Pitt or that hunky George Clooney could be sitting in a Swedish coffee shop and no one would even think of approaching them, taking their picture or otherwise.”

“Do you...” Anna blinked, smiling blithely at the woman beside her, “happen to know where that is? That coffee shop where Martinsson takes... takes his fika?”

The woman smiled back. “Would I mention it if I didn’t know?”

#fair winds and a folloiwng sky

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sonicasura · 5 years

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Sonic May Cry

Today is Groundhog Day and the entire internet is going into a huge 'Into the ___Verse!' shtick. Basically an Into the Spiderverse based trope where alternate universes cross into one another specifically the characters. This story came from a recent What If situation involving Sonic the Hedgehog that was stewing in my brain yesterday.

And taking alternate universes thing, I delved in deeper with an another alternate universe involving the original Devil May Cry. Mix them both together and I got this.

Time is a very fragile thing and the wrong move can break it. Or: Classic Sonic/Kid Sonic gets blasted into the Devil May Cry universe and causes some big changes.

"Sonic! Run! The rift is closing! If you don't get out of there, you'll be lost in time and space forever! No! Don't do it! Don't leave me! Please! Sonic!!!"

Time was a very precious thing to have. It should never be taken for granted and should never be toyed with. The mechanized menace called the Time Eater had done more damage than either Robotniks could've estimated. The rifts were closing even faster than they should. Someone was going to be left behind with no choice. His best friend Tails wasn't going to be that person if he could help it. His best buddy would be fine without him. For this was his end not Tails. The end of Sonic The Hedgehog. And he welcomed it with open arms.

Great sacrifice comes with a greater reward. Fix their broken hearts, brave little warrior. Heal the wounded hearts of the Sons of Sparda, Sonic the Hedgehog. Right now, they need you the most.

Mitis Forest on the outskirts of Fortuna, a light shone brightly in an open flowerbed. The soft daffodils, petunias and dandelions were greeted by the weight of a small light blue furred hedgehog. The little beast barely reaching 2 ft in height with both face and stomach round with baby fat showing he was quite young. White gloves and red running shoes were the only clothing worn. His muzzle was light peach along with the center of his stomach.

Quills slightly long just like the ones on his back and stubby little tail. Black pupil like eyes slowly opened to be greeted with a vast starry night sky. 'Huh?' Thought Sonic the Hedgehog as he took in his surroundings. He was alive yet… 'What happened? I should be dead.' Sonic thought for a moment. 'This isn't my world that's for sure. And why does my back feel stiff?' The hedgehog then he picked himself off the ground and looked at what he was previously lying on.

Shock became evident as eyes widened when they laid on 7 gray lifeless stones amongst the grass. They looked to be cut into perfect diamond shapes but to Sonic these gemstones were far more precious. 'The Chaos Emeralds?! Why are the Chaos Emeralds here? No better question, why do they look so dead?' He thought picking up one of the lifeless emeralds. It felt really cold to the touch but the hedgehog could feel a tiny bit of energy in the stone.

'Could the emeralds have saved me? No… It did something else. Before I blacked out I thought I heard something. I also feel different too. I feel the same but I can't shake the nagging feeling that something about my body had changed.' He thought before looking at the lights coming from up ahead. He picked up the stones before hiding them in his quills. It was sorta weird on how the Emeralds could hide themselves in his fur like they weren't there but he never bothered about the details.

Sonic walked a bit closer up the hill to see the lights were coming from a large city. What struck him as odd were the large demon statues scattered about the whole place. 'Ain't getting any answers standing here. That city looks like a good place to find out where I am.' With a goal set in mind, he disappeared into a streak of blue as he ran over to the city at supersonic speed.

This city was very odd and quite creepy to the blue blur. Everyone was wearing hoods over their heads, there were armed soldiers about and the place seemed...tense almost ominous. It was the kind of feeling he got running into Robotnik's base or places like Chemical Plant Zone. That something nasty was brewing on the surface. A feeling that no town or city should have.

Speeding past everyone had earned a very unexpected cry of sorts. "Demon! There's a demon!" Demons? This was even stranger to him than meeting his older counterpart that could TALK. His voice box was stunted so he couldn't actually talk but the problem would resolve himself once he turned 10 years old. A few years didn't look so bad though it'll suck if no one can read his charades well.

A tiny hand grabbed his nose surprising the little hedgehog that he nearly crashed into a dumpster when he skidded to a halt. Plucking the nose grabber wasn't as shocking as finding out who had done the deed. A little human baby with white hair and blue eyes had managed to hitch a ride on him. A baby boy in a blue onesie had hitchhiked a ride on the FASTEST thing alive.

'#$#!@ How the heck did you get on me?! You must have insane reflexes to grab me in mid-run!' Sonic thought looking at the baby. His brain halted upon spotting what was really odd about the infant. His right arm was blue with little red scales and had tiny blue claws! It was even glowing light blue through the cracks of each scale! 'Nevermind. You ain't no normal baby because human babies don't have an arm like that.' He thought with a deadpanned expression.

The baby merely babbling as he tried to grab Sonic's nose again though Sonic pulling the baby away from his prize. The child was giggling and all happy before he immediately began to cry strangely. The hedgehog easily catching onto the sound of what he could guess were soldiers behind him yet they were talking about a 'project Nero'. Sonic immediately looking at the baby or Nero in his hands and couldn't help the rage bubbling inside him. He pushed it down before cradling the child in his arms and breaking into a sprint.

'No way those jerks are getting ya little buddy! They're insane to think babies are some kind of science fair project! Time to ditch this crazy island!' Sonic thought as he began to steadily speed up. He needed enough speed to run across ocean surface and he didn't want to accelerate too quickly or he would end up hurting Nero. It was a good thing to know that city was an actual island so he had many places to go from there.

The hedgehog glimpsing a map about a port town that was the closest to Fortuna or the island he was on. A smile grew on his face as he saw what looked like a pier leading straight towards the wide open blue. Without hesitation, Sonic sped up further before using the pier as a ramp. Both hedgehog and baby flying high into the air as a blue streak of light amongst the starry sky.

Nero giggling happily at the sight before him and the rush of wind going by his form. 'Glad you like the wind as much as I do. Have zero clue on caring for a baby but I could find some way to take care of ya.' He thought with a smile before looking down to see they were getting closer to the water. Being quick he immediately began to run after touching the top gliding across the dark blue surface.

Finding land once more was a good feeling considering he had been running for quite a bit. Truth was that the hedgehog wasn't fully recovered after waking up in this new world. The effects were beginning to show as fatigue was starting to slowly wash over him. He rather not drown with a baby in his arms. Sonic sped up a bit more so he can at least reach the beach.

He could rest there with Nero for the night before picking up his search for answers tomorrow. The hedgehog quickly slowed down as he skidded off the water and into the soft beach sand though not without tumbling up a bit at the end. Seaweed had gotten tangled around his legs leading the blue blur to take a header though taking the brunt of the impact so Nero wouldn't.

Something hard hitting his head was the last thing he felt before falling to his side and vision going black. Yet for a short second, he felt saw something red and blue coming closer to him. Everything was whispers leading to silence.

"Are you sure that woman wasn't hallucinating on what she saw? Humans tend to easily be mislead." A cold male voice said with irritation. Two twin males with snow white hair and pale skin walked across the beach shores sand. One whose hair was slicked back, eyes verdant, dressed in black shirt, long blue coat embroidered in gold and blue katana being the only difference to his twin.

The other had his hair down, bright blue eyes and wore no shirt but a black shirt, red coat, and had a giant black broadsword on his back yet walked easily as if the blade weighed nothing. "Lady swore on her own mother about what she saw Verge. Something was travelling across the ocean. A blue blur faster than even you! She said it was heading towards this very beach." The male in red fired back.

"My name is Vergil. You know that so use it foolish brother. I don't know why you took her words or judgment to account so quickly Dante." Vergil growled back at his twin. "Says the guy who raised a giant tower in the middle of the city." Vergil was ready to stab his twin when a streak of blue grabbed their attention. It was coming from over the distance as it glided upon the watery surface.

It slowed down enough for both twins to see what it actually was: a small blue hedgehog in red running shoes. They didn't question the absurdity upon noticing the little guy tripping before rolling into a rock head first knocking the fella unconscious. The brothers running to inspect the injured animal who was nearly balled up into a perfect sphere.

"A demon nestling? No, the little guy doesn't feel like it yet he does have some odd energy. Yet there's something demonic on him." Dante spoke loosening the hedgehog's balled up form to uncover a sleeping Nero cuddled into the hedgehog's fur and stomach. Vergil's eyes widened upon the baby's demonic arm and the energy flowing from it.

Dante quickly catching onto who the baby actually was. An amused yet heartfelt grin growing on his face at the very conclusion he came to on Nero's identity. "Holy shit. The little fuzzball must have took all the impact so this little fella wouldn't. Never suspected ya to be the first to get laid without protection." Dante quipped only to earn a snarl from his brother.

Verdant eyes soften upon the sight of the infant before looking at the hedgehog that shielded his child from harm. 'The little furball is a mere nestling in age yet it's unfathomable for him to have that type of speed. If trained properly, this young creature will be a powerful force to be reckoned with. A worthy comrade and general." Vergil's devil hissed within the depths of his mind. Neither of them weren't blind to the massive potential the little hedgehog had.

"Vergil! Earth to Vergil!" Had snapped the young man out of his thoughts. He realized that he was cradling both his child AND the hedgehog in his arms. "Looks like someone's demonic maternal instincts decided to kick in. You snatched both the tykes and growled at me." Dante joked with a mischievous grin on his face. Vergil secured the two children into his left arm before pulling out his sword, the Yamato.

He brought the blade slicing a rift in the center of time and space revealing the interior of a shabby shop. He sheathed his sword while a blue spectral one stabbed into his laughing brother's chest. Dante recoiled from the sudden weight yet was still laughing as he followed his brother into the rift. He'll clean up the blood later. Teasing 'Mama Vergil' was more important.

After all, it isn't everyday that a little hedgehog who can run at supersonic speed across the ocean before crashing onto the beach with your older twin brother's baby with him. Or said brother instantly going into papa devil mode and growling at you for even trying to help take care of the unconscious tykes.

It was hilarious on how quick Vergil's personality just swapped because of his primal maternal instincts. The little hedgehog had a nasty bruise and cut on his head from hitting stone at how fast he was going earlier. Vergil threatening to stab his brother if Dante didn't get any bandages to wrap around the injury or any baby products for his son Nero which was the name on the tyke's onesie.

Yet, when Dante came back to seven lifeless stones on the counter of his desk as Vergil sat on the couch with a sleeping Nero nestled into a long silver black tail fast asleep coming from said brother's spine. The little hedgehog was on Vergil's lap while the older brother applied some ointment to the little guy's injury. The hedgehog wincing from the sting but not fighting back or even screaming in pain. "Looks like Sonic is quite the trooper. Despite being conked out, he ain't even letting out a whimper." Vergil gave his brother an odd look.

"Sonic?" The oldest asked in pure confusion. "Got to call him something until he wakes up. Since he was running across the ocean at Mach 1 speed, I thought the name Sonic suited the little guy. He must have some insane pain tolerance though. A bump to the head with your crappy homemade medicine would have me howling." Dante quipped as he handed the medical tape and bandages to his now growling brother.

"By the way, why are there a hunk of rocks on my desk?" The younger male pointed out casually picking up one of the stones. His eyes widened a bit upon detecting the small bit of peculiar energy hidden deep inside the stone. "It was on 'Sonic'. Hidden amongst his fur and quills when I went to inspect for any other injuries despite the absurdity. There is or was some intense power within all 7 of the stones. Something must have drained them dry except for a miniscule amount." Vergil explained giving his brother a serious look.

"Another mystery added about our fuzzy little guest until he wakes up. Glad you still follow the rules that I've set up after the 'recent' incident. 'No hoarding or using any items of potential magic or otherworldly power without Dante's knowledge.'" Dante joked before getting stabbed with another spectral sword in the stomach. The youngest twin had locked the jewels into a lockbox before stuffing them away. After treating both children, Vergil retired to his room upstairs.

Laid both Nero and Sonic down onto his bed before curling his warm body around them followed by his blanket. His demonic nature giving him the incentive to have both in his 'nest' and to keep watch of his 'young'. The thought had him let out an amused snort. Vergil rested his eyes and arms holding both kids near his chest before drifting off to sleep. It was the first night in years that his dreams weren't plagued by gruesome nightmares.

That's it! Kid Sonic basically babynapped Nero from Fortuna, ran across the ocean all the way over to the beach in Capulet before accidentally knocking himself out.

Sonic is like 5 years at the time during the events of Generations. This takes place after the events of Devil May Cry 3 but Dante didn't let Vergil fall into hell. Vergil is under 'Dante' arrest hence that rule until he can be trusted.

He isn't as distant since the events in later games didn't happen so expect this Vergil be a bit softer.

Plus neither of the brothers are blind to the potential our blue blur has and Vergil is going to take the initiative quicker than Dante. This Sonic is going to be OP as hell.

Until next time folks! Jambuhbye!

#sonicasura #crossover #devil may cry #sonic the hedgehog #sonic generations #devil may cry 3 #classic sonic #kid sonic #vergil #dante #vergil sparda #dante sparda #nero #nero angelo #nero sparda #baby nero #dmc #au #sons of sparda adopted sonic

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thelazeenthusiast · 4 years

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I absolutely loved @thefirstmillionwords story blurb 'A Dewdrop In Time' and ugh, it was so difficult to accept that there was no complete novel behind it. Their writing's so good, I wish they could have written it. I was trying to sleep the day before and a random dialogue kept popping up in head related to it since i couldn't stop thinking about it, so i went and wrote this short story :')

She ran and ran and ran. Convinced she was being followed, but refusing to stop and look back. Her mind was blank, had been so for a while now. There should be fear, and panic, but there was nothing. She ran aimlessly, her bare, round feet starting to bleed green, she was panting heavily, as if she had been running her whole life. She could feel her heartbeat everywhere, her whole body was thrumming with it.

She should probably stop, she knew, but she felt like she couldn't. Suddenly, her foot hit something hard enough to bruise and she stumbled, falling face first to the ground. She heard herself whimper as she pulled herself to her elbows, wincing from where she had skinned her palms and the corner of her eye. There was a warm, rotting body beside her. It looked like a young man. She stared, hardly blinking, for a few slowed down seconds, then jerked, as if pulled out of a trance and crawled backwards frantically until she hit a wall. She recognised the blown apart structure of the Production Center, her Center, the place she had worked at for the last five years of her life. It was no more than a pile of rubble, a skeleton, with just the outer walls of the dome-shaped building typical of Corbulon architecture standing erect. Shuddering, she rubbed her hands over her face and allowed her body to wind down from the run.

She heard explosions, screaming, crying, in the distance. There was an enemy aircraft with it's strange flat design hovering overhead, blinking red and blaring an ear splitting horn as some sort of warning signal. A Sphere, looking formidable with all its weapons cocked, flew close, within sight of the enemy aircraft then made a quick u-turn, going back the way it came from, as if baiting the aircraft away from the main city. Sure enough, the strange looking, foreign ship followed.

She let her eyes wander towards blue clad Planetary Defense soldiers, shouting orders, urging civilians to take cover and firing Fission Guns at advancing enemy troops. She spotted several Planetary Defenses' manned CamouPods lurking behind the destruction, lying in wait for the enemy's almost emotionless troopers to cross another line of defense. They had come further than anyone had thought possible. The PD had clearly made a mistake in underestimating the Humans and their Androids.

Her jaw locked itself and she closed her eyes. It was all so loud. Her city, her world had never been this loud. Corbulo was being ravaged around her.

Her mind remained blank still.

When no one came looking for her for the next few minutes, she opened her tired eyes, wishing she had died in the initial attack so she could have been kept from seeing everything she loved be destroyed.

She was reminded of the bouquet. With trembling hands, she pulled it out of her pouch. The once lovely Morning Dewdrops were now nothing more than charred, black stalks crumpling under her grip. She sucked in a sharp breath at their sight, opening her fingers to minimise further damage. And suddenly, just like that, a tidal wave of emotion flooded her whole being and tears fell from her eyes like rain drops, one after another, too fast to count. For some reason, the most dominant emotion was that of guilt at being more upset over the fate of a few flowers than that of a real person lying dead not so far away. She wept and wept, shedding silent tears as she carefully, so as not to turn them to dust, hugged the remaining bouquet close to her chest.

"Andrea." A familiar voice croaked after an infinite amount of time.

With a jolt, she shoved the burnt flowers back in her pouch, wiped frantic hands at her face and stood up to face him.

Styrin looked awful. His pure white Corbulon skin was flushed blue-green with fatigue, he was bleeding almost everywhere, the green of the blood in stark, unnerving contrast with the rest of his skin, his clothes were blackened and torn, he stood leaning too much on his right leg and he was layered in dust and grime. Yet, to Andrea's bemusement, he took a step forward and gave her a wide, relieved smile.

"I've been looking for you for ages. I–" he swallowed, "–I'm glad you're okay."

Entirely without her consent, tears began to fall anew upon hearing the sincerity and affection in his words.

"I'm sorry," she choked. "I'm so sorry."

His smile vanished. "Andrea–"

"The Morning Dewdrops… the bouquet. It's gone. They burned it." She cried, bringing her hands up to cover her face, unable to continue looking at him.

"Oh." She heard him say softly. Biting her lips, she tried to keep herself from losing all control. That would be worse. She would prove herself weak, she would prove to him that she was indeed not worthy of the greatest gift anyone had ever received. That she was not worthy of his loyalty and love. She knew why that stoic, remorseless Human had destroyed the flowers and let her go. It knew how valuables the flowers were, knew that they were a symbol and in the right hands, could rally ordinary people into an invincible force it was smart enough to fear. But it also knew those right hands were not hers. It had seen her worth in her own eyes.

She felt a cool hand on her arm, and then another, and she knew he was just inches away. She could hear his heartbeat.

"Andrea, look at me." Styrin coaxed, his voice smooth and confident and strong. How was he always so strong?

Swallowing down against a lump of emotion, Andrea slid her hands down and away from her face. His round, orange-gold eyes bright with earnestness were the first things she saw.

"They were flowers, Andrea. They were bound to wilt and die sooner than later."

She noticed how often he said her name, as if reassuring himself she's actually there. She chose to ignore the way her heart constricted and then swelled. Her stomach dropped and then flipped.

"You are the one who matters. You are the one we need."

Andrea choked back a sob at the words. He was murmuring so soft, it was almost a whisper.

Styrin shuffled closer still and bent his head, leaning his forehead gently against hers. She forgot to breathe.

"Also, say the word and I'll travel through history all over again to make you another bouquet." He grinned.

Oh, Styrin. Andrea pulled back her head and stepped out of his grasp, her heart, her stomach, her mind wreaking havoc inside her. Trembling slightly, she shook her head.

"I can't. I can't do it, Styrin. It's too much. All this… this expectation, it's all for nothing. I can't do it. It's too much responsibility. I'm just– just an ordinary woman. I can't do it, I can't. I can't–" she rambled mindlessly, willing her tears to stay in.

Styrin stepped close again but didn't touch her.

"It's okay, Andrea. It's okay. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. I just thought…" he bit his lip, obviously trying his best to sound comforting. "I just thought my men could learn from you. You give and give, Andrea. You have so much to give. But it's okay. We can– I can go back in time and do it so all this never happened. You were never involved. Or I can take you to a safe house. I know of a few these quasi-intelligent Humans and their freaky androids can never breach. It's your choice."

It sounded so simple. She could sit out the whole war in a safe house or just have him reset everything by going back in time. But then she won't remember him. She won't remember his shy smiles, his unrelenting resolve, his brilliantly expressive orange-gold eyes and his unwavering affection. She won't remember him. She shuddered involuntarily.

"But you said the parallel universe you landed yourself in was a utopia because of me. Because I stood up and rallied people." Andrea frowned, at a loss as to what to do.

"That's the thing," Styrin smiled, "I only saw the one parallel universe. There are innumerable more that I didn’t see. It means there are innumerable possibilities for the future. Maybe there is one where someone else stood up, or where you didn't exist at all. Or," he snorted derisively, "where I didn’t meddle with time and none of this happened. There's a fifty fifty probability of things turning out okay in each of those universes. Just because I saw a particular one doesn’t mean what happened in that has to be some kind of prophecy. What I'm trying to say Andrea, is that we have a fifty fifty chance of winning too, with or without you." His smile grew wider, the kind that told he knew he should be guilty but he really wasn't.

Andrea peered at his beaming, ragged face.

"Do you feel guilty, Styrin?" She asked curiously as she took an uncharacteristically bold step closer to him. The rest of the world seemed to go out of focus.

His smile turned sad and he sighed. "If I hadn't poked my nose in places it wasn't wanted, the Humans would never have spread as far as they have. They're desperate in their search for a new planet after destroying their own and I practically handed our home to them in silver platter. "

And just like that, all her fears retreated. She realised, the head researcher of the Explore unit of the Planetary Defense and the Commander of Defense Troop Tech, the man who seldom, if ever, displayed pessimism, who seemed to be afraid of nothing and unable to make any mistakes, who'd led battles to victory, who's leadership had saved countless lives, had his insecurities too. Rather unfounded, but still. She realised, as much as he tried to appear strong, he was really just like her, just like everyone else. And if he could work despite his fears, so could she.

She smiled with watery eyes as the world around her started to register once again and leaned forward to brush her lips gently against the side of his face. "It seems, you really can learn a lot from me." She whispered.

Before he could react, she sidled away, pleased beyond expectation at the confounded look on his face. She slowly sauntered backwards without breaking eye contact and stopped just at the edge of their cover. She reached out a hand towards him, palm up. "Lesson one, Styrin Valzhine, always refrain from piling up unnecessary blame where it is not needed."

As if in a daze, Styrin trudged forward and clasped her hand. When he squeezed it, she felt as if they could do anything, as long as they were together.

#thefirstmillionwords #short story #A Dewdrop In Time #based on story blurb A Dewdrop In Time

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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(Sierra battle fic written to explore one of the different ways Sierra ‘programs’ the Matriatrix with the many different powers at her disposal; the intent is that she has a lot of options but can’t switch powers on the fly)

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Sierra did not cry out as the combat cake hit her and pushed through a mountain and out the other side; her endowments gave her a bit of cushioning, she had enough sub-dermal armor plating to shrug off a tank round while naked, and she’d produced enough beings to populate a moderately small planet. All that essence generated from gestating and refining a sapient mind and then popping it out, by the thousands, gave a big power boost.

She was, simply, too strong to be more than inconvenienced by a hit like that. It still hurt, though.

In the rubble, she groaned and got up, her foe darting around. It would be too obvious to go right through the hole the attack had made, just too much of a massive ‘HIT ME’ opening. She’d be going around the mountain, but with the power she’d been tossing around during the whole fight, it would be fast. Sierra had a few seconds. At best.

Better think, quick!

Sierra stood up to her full height; about forty feet. She considered growing bigger, letting more power loose, and immediately shuddered. Nuh uh, no way! Sure, she’d have a lot more power and she might have some fun going all geography-sized (she could probably win the fight by sitting down, and let her hyper-sized butt do all the work), but a long history of being on the bad side of fights where she had bet it all on brute force had taught her something: commitment won fights, and overwhelming size and power didn’t always translate into a force multiplier.

Sierra wiped the cake off her; a lot of it had fallen between her boobs, a sticky landslide with a lot more weight than it should have had, pressing her bustline slightly lower. That was impressive; Sierra had, at her bigger power displays, an absurdly massive rack for a human. Even holding herself back, her curves were wildly plush; her breasts as large as giantess-scale beach balls, her hips slightly wider than that, with huge thighs to match, and a backside even more enormous than her breasts. To top it all off, every movement sloshed with heavy milk stores that she was periodically using for raw materials, for organic creations.

She had a sweet tooth, and was running pretty low on her current power set anyway. Her Rubber Woman power load-out (a combination of hyper flexibility, total body reconstruction into a single stretchy mass, mass redistribution, elongation/compression options, and finally multiple stocks of shock absorbing for a defensive option) wasn’t doing her too good. She might as well have a bit of fun with it, and she put some of her extra mass into her tongue. It lolled out past enormous lips swelling to latex-swollen extremes by this particular power set, rolling into a huge fat tendril thicker around than her whole torso. She slurped up the whole cake between her breasts and swallowed it whole.

She immediately blanched. “Ew! It’s so bitter…!” She rolled her tongue back in her mouth, reabsorbing the excess mass.

SHe stood up, trying to work out a game plan.

A soft noise nearby informed her that this was unlikely to be an option. “Leave that sweet garbage to lovey-dovey do-gooders like you, breeder,” sneered the exceptionally feminine figure perched atop the building.

Sierra looked up, and realized it was the first time her foe had actually stood still for more than a few moments at a time. Mobility seemed important to her enemy. Maybe she should remember that? Close up, she needed a moment to identify her foe; she was a giant, close to Sierra’s height but with unusual proportions from the waist up. She was as curvy as you would expect of someone capable of fighting her one on one with no gimmicks or tricks (boobs about as big as Sierra’s, hips not as wide and the backside rather slimmer, but so heavy segmented in natural armor that it was hard to notice that), and while her heavy legs were long, her torso was unusually short. From the waist up, she looked like a shortstack, but with how long her legs were, the different was jarring.

Her foe grinned; a feline/avian face, eyes set deep above insectoid mandibles, and a short spiky creast. Hers had been modified to flow and grow, almost like mammal hair, and plush lips were filled up the space between her mandibles. Sierra figured her for a member of the New Decepticon Empire, led by the famous warlord Emperor Starscream of the ten thousand titles; the ‘Cons of old had exterminated non-robots, but these conquerers vassalized those they defeated, and many turian worlds had fallen into their domain; the military outlook of the turian people was probably familiar to the Decepticons.

There were other clues, of course; the heavy amounts of cybernetics that were reward for service to the conquering Decepticons (‘growing closer to the robot idea’, they called it), the distinctive chip architecture on the forehead that contained all public information and tier information, the slightly weasel-y attitude… and of course, the big Decepticon symbol branded right onto her face.

Sierra blinked slowly. Her own eyes, fully cybernetic optics, contracted and widened as she did relevant scans, trying to find some advantage. She was having a hard time overlooking the fact that as fearsome and battle-worn as her foe looked, most of her body was covered in… not to put too fine a point on it, cake.

Possibly made of cake. Or transmuted into it. Some kind of confectionary-based power. It was silly enough to be an Endowed Fleet original, and it probably was. It was no joke, either; ridiculous as it was to be under attack by someone who was weaponizing the ability to generate cake from their body, the resulintg attacks had just knocked her through a mountain, and the sugarly bullets had felt like getting shot by anti-tank rounds.

And, as Sierra recalled, it was making pretty good armor. Her Rubber Woman power set excelled at mobility and turning that very mobiltiy into raw attack power, but it had done absolutely nothing to her foe. She’d cracked it, maybe. But those armor breakages had already healed.

Feeling the last vestiges of her rubber body powers beginning to fade away, Sierra tried to act nonchalant. Even as the latex texture of her skin started to fade beneath her fur longcoat and harness into her usual flesh and cybernetics, she tried to act like it wasn’t happening. “That power set up you have is pretty good. Who’d you get it from?”

The chocolate turian woman chuckled darkly. “Sorry, barbarian. That’s propritary information. Not like you free love addicts would know anything about propriety.”

Sierra tilted her head. A massive chunk of violet hair significantly larger than she was hit the ground like a blob of soft plastic. “Don’t be mean! And anyway, those two things you mentioned are completely different ideas? They don’t have anything to do with each other.”

Birdlike eyes rolled, with little crumbs falling down. “I know. I was doing some wordplay. Maximo above, but you fleet scum are so dense-”

Her enemy’s indulgence in cultural posturing gave Sierra enough time to pump the rapidly draining power into her leg. Not the whole leg, just her thigh, and she was best at kicks anyway. IT swelled, rather like a rubber balloon pumped to max capacity, turning almost spherical and a twin to the buttock above it. THe weight imbalance toppled Sierra over, but in the right position to swipe the appropriate foot up and release all that pumped up force from her thigh, right into a single massive kick, right to a chocolate-coated abdomen.

The explosion removed what was left of the mountain. The turian flew through it, wailing and shedding exactly one piece of armor.

Sierra sat back as she reverted to her baseline state; her hair become regular hair (if very poofy), her thighs reverted to equal hugeness, and her skin became faux-organic mass once more, with many implants here and there. The last dregs of Rubber Woman went up.

She needed a counter, and fast!

Sierra put a hand to her cleavage, and her skin turned black, and where it turned black, a slab emerged from her body, and into her hand popped what looked like a small board. It was old, pitted with so many scars that the various writings on it were incomprehensible, but the symbol of Venus (a circle with a small plus sign below) was visible, and leading into that was a rather blocky DNA strange design.

Sierra gripped it. The Matriatrix; the source of her power, wielded by Neophyte Redglare before it, and the mutagenic source of the entire Fleet’s fertility and voracity-based powers.

It still contained every single power it had fed on; those were all in it, impregnating it in some way, awaiting the right circumstances to access or combine them, but you had to give it something to work with first.

It wanted to breed, but first it had to feed.

Sierra went to the opening near the base, that looked like the Venus symbol. There was a glowing sphere there and when she pulled it out, it materialized into a small totem that was perhaps crystalline, a small creature of molded latex and hard plastic, a physical embodiment of her Rubber Woman powers. She pulled this to her belt, and put it away. On her belt were various other totems, of a similar nature.

The logic was simple. They couldn’t access the Matriatrix’s powers on demand. Redglare had, inconsistently, but she never knew how, and she was no longer in a condition to explain it in any case. They could draw upon those powers to impregnate others and eventually mold offshoots of those powers into a workable form, but that was just how the strange artifact worked; it had little capability on its own, but by absorbing objects, it could take on their forms and natures, and develop capabilities based on those forms.

And if you fed one of the powers they had made into it, you could amplify that power, use it directly, even if it wasn’t the ‘permanent until switched out’ ability Sierra normally employed. A lot of potential utility, but not something you could do freely.

So Sierra had devised the totem system; she refined various powers she was comfortable with, combining different minor abilities and junctioning them to stronger ones, making a stronger theme to work with, and shaping it into a physical form she could absorb into the Matriatrix as needed.

Now, if only she had a way to actually do something similar with different weapon form possibilities, instead of just giving her new powers.

Well, that was a later problem!

Sierra considered her options, even as the distinctive sounds of her enemy came closer. Sierra fancied herself something of a gourmand when it came to powers, and she had already worked out how the turian could ‘fly’; generate choclate armor around the limbs, otrso and back, pump a large amount of power into them, and deonate solely outward; keep it consistent, and do it really fast, and you could fly! She appreciated the creativity, even it if was mainly being used to beat her up.

Oh, right. She was supposed to be thinking of fight ideas!

Sierra hovered over some of her favorites. “Let’s see,” She said aloud. Her hand touched a fierce-looking mass of gears and metal bits. Machine Generation? (Assilimation of technology + cybernetic integration + creation of inner machines. Amplify them many times with uploaded schematics and produce virtually any weapon or tool you can design, become your own mech! Add in Factory Womb to create minions to fight for you or produce additional weaponry. Good for making giant guns out of your arms. Great for offense, but it needed time and creativity to pull off.)

A flame-colored mass of stone, black at the core but sparking into harmless liquid fire at her touch. Elemental Lava? (A tricky one to pull off. Combine transformation into a lava form with elemental projection abilities; throw lava and magma after turning INTO it! Various elemental control powers to enable multiple techniques, like creating and controlling constructs, and reshaping the transformed parts of your body. Her very best combat monster load out, but who knew how the lava would interact with chocolate? You’d think it would melt, but it didn’t always work out that way. She would still need to eat raw materials for the lava, or risk draining her power reserves.)

A chunk of black material, shaped into a crude and pointy-looking shape. (Carbon Mastery; also called Black Crystal Body. Combining a transformation from Gem Diamond-caste magical form and Crystalsapien construction, and mixing it with additional eating/absorbing powers to merge carbon in the organic body along with anything eaten to produce carbon-based materials. Grows out from the body in huge crystals, and additional shaping/reforging powers allow them to be freely reshaped into anything imaginable. Perfect for melee, or for firing them from long range, or producing short-term constructs. Can also be converted into a liquid form, such as petroleum, and still be controlled. The carbon can be made impossibly strong, and for full body coverage, the absolute best defensive option imaginable. Ideal for wearing her down, but if its overcome, resource requirements will rapidly exceed body’s ability to replenish them.)

Those three, Sierra reasoned, seemed her best bet. She had others, but she wasn’t sure if they were situationally relevant. ...Oh, why did she even bring Concrete Control to an exploration mission on a wasteland planet?!

Which one to use? Sierra thought hard.

SHe would need to pick one that was strategic and… wait.

“COME HERE AND FIGHT ME, BREEDER!” Screamed the Turian, flying at her and so heavily choco-armored up that she looked like… well, an actual rocket made of cake. “LET ME FIGHT YOU ALREADY! OR BEAT ME, AND MAKE A BILLION BABIES FROM MY POWERS! I DARE YOU, FIGHT ME FIGHT FIGHT MEEEE!”

...Or perhaps, Sierra mused, she was overthinking how strategic her foe was. She shrugged and just hammed all three totems into the Matriatrix, and as it morphed into a new configuation, plunged it into her body.

The turian soldier landed, cake of dubious taste blasting all over the place. “WHERE ARE YOU? LET’S FINISH THIS, FLEET SCUM! Or do your people think a champion is just the craziest person they can get ahold of!?”

“Well, you’re not wrong!” Sierra said, a short distance away. Her voice sounded… different.

Approaching the turian, and giving her pause, was a figure that was on fire. No, wait. Not on fire, but made of it. A body of magma, turning blue-purple around the head. Her flesh was magma, her breasts volcanic swells, her body swelling slightly larger as additional mass built up, and the ground burned beneath her.

But the shape of her body was mechanical. No, her body had become a machine, not cybernetics but transformed into a full conversion gynoid form. Her arms were clunky and powerful power fists, her legs enormously bulky struts, and her eyes were bright sensory optics.

And over this? Black liquid flowed, like oil, until it coated her entire body. It rippled and spiked up, forming extremely large and lustrous black crystals, the largest arcing on her back like a castle’s towers, the smallest studding her arms and legs by the dozens. But it all looked still liquid, just held in place, and constantly shifting.

No longer even remotely human in basic form or design, Sierra transformed one arm. It swelled out, fist disappearing into the barrels of many guns. They became larger than she was, multiple braces appearing just to support an arm that was bigger than her, and more guns appeared! Blades, capture nets, quad-barrel rocket lanchers, ammunition blocks; all materialized instantly from her adaptable machine body, around the bulk of a shocking 22-count rotary cannon assemblage, each cannon sporting seven guns for individual barrels, and each with a bore the turian could have stuck her hand into. Each gun was baroque in shape, a snarling monster, and huge crystals extended outwards as fully prehensile blade-whips.

She fired a round. The sky briefly turned into bullets… each of the eleven thousand-round shots was a blast of solid, magically-charged magma. Laced with hardened carbon crystals capable of punching through a city in one shot. Finally, a huge shield materialized behind all those guns, so that any attack from that angle would be useless.

Her other arm became a coiled whip mechanism, with a range of several thousand feet or so from their perspective; studded with pods that would burst into sticky masses when hit, and the coil itself wasn’t hard but squishy, neatly sucked anything it hit into itself. And, oh yes, a number of fully operational sentry turrets had materialized around it’s base, running up her shoulders to shoot down any projectiles.

The spikes on her body grew bigger, hardening into ridiculously strong armor proof against all offenses, and put a mechanic spin on them; the largest spikes, atop her shoulders, became rocket lancher pods, with payloads that probably included magma in it somewhere.

Her thighs grew even bigger, armoring up more, and with such huge flamign spikes that a single kick would be devastating. And her strut-heels… had become rollarblades. With tiny rockets on the back. It looked goofy, but she had the balance, the agility, to keep mobile and move fast.

Sierra grinned, her teeth lustrous knives. “Can I take the first shot? I promise, it’ll be over in a single hit!”

The turian gaped. Then, she grinned. “Be my guest!”

She leaped, and Sierra swung her restraining whip, flung herself into a mighty kick, and let loose all her ordnance at once.

There was a mighty blast.

And, some time later, Sierra walked back out. She was apparently human once more, her powers now back on her belt, but to the trained eye, her skin was growing some rather turian-like plates.

Her belly was very big. Gravid, you might say, already swelled with the weight of a couple hundred turian offspring, gestated from the devoured essence of a foe (who was presently yelling a lot at Sierra for cheating, though eventually the pleasure of digestion would quickly make her very swooning).

Sierra held up her arm, admiring the way the chocolate her arm turned into looked harder than steel, and she tried making a few sword shapes with it, and fired off a choco-mortar just for fun. Not a cake style power up; it seemed her mutagenic powers couldn’t resist tweaking it a little.

She had won, she had earned a new power for all her friends, and as she digested her foe and all her knowledge, she was learning a few interesting things.

She radioed the nearest Fleet ship. “Guys? I don’t wanna give any bad news but we miiight have a bit of a potential problem.”

“What sort of a problem?” said the on-duty psyker. Oh no, it was Kumatora. Sierra liked her; she didn’t want to worry that big sweetie. Hopefully her sidekick/bondmate Lucas would be on hand to calm her down.

“We… might have someone stealing our powers and making new ones from them. I just beat a Decepticon vassal and her powers worked exactly like ours do, down to the essence modulation strains.”

#queued #my writing #fics #crossthicc AU #twitchy!sierra #twitchy!total drama

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naturepointstheway · 6 years

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“Adventure”

Another (well...the same day, as this is the second one I’ve done today), another prompt response for the #BATB14fics challenge by @tinydooms!

@sweetfayetanner @lumiereswig @rose-of-the-underworld @batbobsession @astudyinchocolate @morgaine2005 @luna-and-mars

One wet afternoon, Chip stops Adam in one of the many hallways of the castle, his face lit up with the expression only a child with a possibly mischievous idea can.

“Prince Adam!” he shouts up, bouncing on his heels, overcome with the excitement of whatever idea was circulating in his head, “Do you think it can take people to the moon?’

“Huh?” Adam asks, befuddled, “Can what take people to the moon?”

“Your book! The magic one!”

Huh...that is a good question.

“To be honest, Chip, I really don’t know.”

“You didn’t try to?” Chip looks disappointed. “Why?”

“Guess it never crossed my mind,” Adam shrugged, but now the wheels are turning in his head. Funny how once an idea never considered gets stuck in one’s head, it never really goes away.

Chip grabs one of his hands and tried to tug him in the direction of the library.

“I always wanted to see the moon! We can try to go there!”

“Uh, you sure that’s a good idea? The moon looks very cold up there.”

“We can wear coats and scarfs.”

A fair, sensible solution.

“That’s what mama would say, anyway.” Chip tugged again on Adam’s arm, still eager to try out the magic atlas. “Haven’t you ever wanted to see the moon? For real?”

“You really want to go, huh?” Adam couldn’t help but laugh, good-natured, at the pure enthusiasm of a little boy intent on adventures.

But then...well, why not?

After all, Adam had just finished up important paperwork, and Belle had gone to Villeneuve for a few days to be with her father. The other servants were off doing their own things, Chapeau cleaning out some cabinets in a study, Mrs Potts down in the kitchen rostering the next kitchen shifts, and Lumiere was last seen sneaking macaroons out of the castle with Plumette at his side.

Adam let Chip pull him to the library, where he made a beeline, the prince in willing tow, to the Atlas that still stood on the desk that it called home. He wondered now how it had never occurred to him to try going to the moon as a Beast, where there would be no living thing but himself. He would’ve done that as a child too, but more out of the sense of fun and adventure, rather than a conviction that no one would care where he went.

He shook himself mentally out of these dangerously spiraling thoughts and forcibly cast it back to the present. Chip had let go of his hand and was leaning over the table to take a closer look at the magic atlas.

“Let’s go!”

“Wait, wait,” Adam cautioned, “What about our scarves and coats?”

“We’ll just get blankets from over in that corner,” Chip pointed to where a few blankets were folded away on an armchair. “I’ll get two.”

Adam waited as Chip ran to fetch two of the heavy woollen blankets, and came back with them dragging on the floor. Adam gratefully took one blanket, putting it around his own shoulders. Chip tugged his one over his head like a hood and clutched it tight around himself.

“I’m ready to go to the moon, are you?”

Adam took one of Chip’s hands and placed it gently on the Atlas.

“Alright, Chip, think very, very hard about the Moon, and it’ll take us there.”

“Got it!”

Chip squeezed his eyes shut as tight as he could, his face screwed up with the act of intense concentration, and suddenly--

The library turned dark as night, and Adam felt a soft wooshing followed by dead quiet that sent a great shiver up his spine. It wasn’t the same sort of dead silence of three in the morning with only Belle’s soft sighs in her slumber to break the quietude. No, this was absolute, so absolute that Adam wondered if this is what it was to be deaf. It was no wonder, then, that he jumped in fright when he heard Chip’s voice again.

“Is this the moon yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Adam whispered, “I feel like we’re nearly there though.”

“Maybe I didn’t think hard eno--whoa.”

There. There was the lunar landscape, not the perfect marble and grey sphere he had envisioned it to be. He’d grown up his whole life learning how the Moon was a perfect sphere, only to be corrected by Belle who had read in one of his books that some Florentine man named Galileo saw valleys and mountains through his telescope. But he wasn’t seeing this lunar geography through a telescope, he was right there.

“Prince Adam! Look at all the stars!” Chip pointed straight up, and Adam craned his neck back to see thousands upon thousands of stars littered in every direction he looked--up, to the horizons, and he wouldn’t be surprised if there were more out of sight under his feet. “I think we’re in a hole.”

Adam realised they had, in fact, ended up inside a vast canyon with stepped walls and a mound of rock in the middle that was taller than he.

“A crater, Chip, I think we’re in a crater.”

And what was that stunning round blue marble hanging in the sky, a gibbous shape?

“Chip,” he pointed now at the strangely familiar orb still in the sky, “See that? What do you think that is?”

The boy turned to look at it too, his mouth dropping open in fascinated awe.

“That’s more beautiful than even your castle.”

Adam, to his credit, privately admitted that Chip was right on that count. There was so much bright blue, like the wide Pacific Ocean he’d seen on many maps, and a hint of South America starting to wheel into view. Wisps and flourishes of clouds curled around the globe, and he was sure he saw the hint of Antarctica. Which could only mean one thing...

“Chip...that’s Earth. Do you see that?”

“It’s Earth?”

“Doesn’t it look exactly like the globes in my library? See, that’s the Pacific Ocean! And South America!” Adam paused, catching his breath, trying very hard not to tear up in front of the boy. “And yes, it’s far more beautiful than my castle, isn’t it?”

“I want to go back and show mama and Plumette and Lumiere and Belle the Earth and moon too.”

Adam smiled down at the boy, his heart full of the sight of the Earth spinning glorious and magnificent above the moon’s horizon.

“Nothing stopping us, is there?”

“Let’s do that.”

Adam took one last look at that beautiful, fragile world, and for the first time in his life, wondered how he could ever think all his riches so priceless when he was standing on the moon, gazing upon the world everyone called home.

Author’s note: I like to think that the Atlas magically protected them from the extremely hostile environment of the moon, which, because it has no atmosphere, means nothing to breathe there either. Also, that Agathe made sure that as long as he was under the curse, he would be unable to fling himself to the moon forever either.

#LET'S GO TO THE MOON PEOPLE #Beauty and the Beast #batb14fics

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nitewrighter · 6 years

Text

Of Blades and Broomsticks Pt. XIII

*heelies in four months late with starbucks and an update/conclusion to the current story arc* ‘Sup. Got sidetracked. Let’s do this.

Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12

Witch AU on AO3

---

The witch hunter awoke in a cavernous hall, with the soft sound of lapping water. He wasn’t sure if he could call it waking up. He felt no sensation of his eyelids sliding open, rather, his vision seemed to clarify itself as his consciousness sharpened. His body felt a constant push and pull of interior warmth against exterior cold. He could feel something like a flame flickering in his chest, blazing against a wet, sinking cold that soaked in from the outside. The strength not quite in his muscles yet, he gave a glance down to the soft material he was laying on. He seemed to be on a mattress of soft damp dead leaves, set upon a high dais of petrified wood. He moved to get up.

His body got up, his head did not.

“What—-“ the word fell out of him, soft and horrified. It didn’t sound like his own voice, but deeper, wetter, more raking. His body swiveled around to look at his head, but since a headless corpse had no eyes, all Gabriel could see was the bloody stump of his own neck looming down on him.

“No—No….” more words escaped him. He had to get his head back on. Simple enough. His body seemed to respond to his will, mostly. Head back on. Pick up the head and put it back on, he thought. His body lurched forward but only managed to knock him (the head) rolling toward the edge of the dais. “No—Catch me—Catch me!” he said as the body lurched again and clumsily knocked him off and sent him bouncing and rolling painfully along the floor.

“I realize this must be very jarring,” a voice, feminine, clear, and deep cut across the still air of the hall, “But you’ll only make things worse by panicking.”

“What is this—!?” Gabriel managed to say before a clumsy foot from his own body sent his head rolling across the floor again, only to be stopped under another foot.

“Is that any way to talk to your old friends, Gabriel?” A tall woman with short-cropped red hair stooped into his view. She picked up his head and held him at eye level smiling at him.

“You…” Gabriel started.

“My dear Witch Hunter,” she said, tilting her head, “Gotten ourselves into quite the mess now, haven’t we?”

“What have you done to me?” he demanded.

“What have I done to you? I wasn’t the one who beheaded you, and it’s not my magic flowing through your veins binding you to this… form. I just…” she gestured, “Cleaned some things up. You’d probably be some horrible amalgam of man and gourd unable to even walk if it weren’t for my intercession.”

“Man and gourd…?” Gabriel said quietly as his body finally managed to make its way to the red hared woman and his hands flailed out.

His head was not his head.

It was rounder, smoother, warm to the touch. The redheaded woman managed to push past his clumsily grabbing arms and set his not-head on his neck stump, where it stuck with a sick wet “shluck” sound and swiveled as he took in more of his surroundings. The whole hall seemed to be made of the same petrified wood as his dais, and there was a throne at the head of it, flanked on either side by an intricately carved fresco of the Green Man with water pouring out of both of their gaping open mouths. Well there was the source of the sound of lapping water, at least. Gabriel’s hands went up to feel at his not-head again.

“Mirror,” he said.

“Come,” the red-headed woman hooked her arm in his and lead him over to one of the fountain frescoes, which, it turned out, were pouring out into two unsettlingly still dark pools on either side of the throne. She motioned to look into the pools of water, and he got down on one knee to look at his own reflection.

His head was not his head.

His head was a pumpkin. A pumpkin carved with cruel eyes and a wide, sharp and mocking grin.

“I did the best with what I had on hand,” said the redheaded woman and Gabriel suddenly sprang up and picked her up by the front of her loose linen tunic.

“What have you done to me!?” He roared.

“You’ve already asked that, and I’ve already said,” the woman remained perfectly calm with her feet about two inches off the ground, “You were beheaded in a field, but somehow you perished with the flame of creation on your person. This would bind your life to your corpse, so I made sure your corpse was actually…. viable.”

“Beheaded in a….” the memories came rushing back to Gabriel. The witch at the stake. The column of fire in the square. The green vortex and the nightmarish mass of black tentacles that emerged from it. The blazing-winged figure and the green dragon tumbling from the sky. The witch, still with those blazing wings, staring him down, and the bite of the demon’s steel, cold and sharp and deep.

“The witch and her demon…” Gabriel said softly.

“A true witch?” the woman suddenly snickered and Gabriel shot her a glare, “Forgive me, but I was wondering when you’d stop burning hapless hags for brewing pennyroyal tea and actually go toe to toe against a right and proper sorcerer. Now if you don’t mind—-“ she swatted his hands off of her tunic and landed neatly on the floor, “I’m willing to ignore that slight because I know humans to be unfathomably stupid when they’re emotional. You would do well to remember that I am not your enemy, and that you would be very, very foolish to make me an enemy.”

“Why keep me alive?” said Gabriel, looking at his hands.

“I’m not the one keeping you alive,” said the woman, walking away from him and alighting a golden sphere on the tips of her long fingernails, “You are enthralled to whomever is bearing the flame of creation.”

“The witch,” said Gabriel.

“Until she dies or releases you, you cannot die, Gabriel,” said the woman, “And if your supposed ‘mistress’ is not even aware you’re alive… I’d consider that very useful, wouldn’t you?”

“So I need to kill her,” said Gabriel.

“Not a very creative type, are you?” said the woman, “You can’t die, Gabriel. Think of what you could do with that.”

“This existence is cursed. I will not suffer any second more of it than I must,” said Gabriel, “Do not think I will have any more dealings with you, either. Our…”

“Partnership?” the woman suggested.

“Our briefly mutual interests were long ago, and when I was younger and more desperate.”

“Yet they served you very well, as far as I recall,” said the woman.

“Just get me out of here and I will find my own way,” said Gabriel, now angrily pacing around the hall, looking for an exit.

The redheaded woman sighed in exasperation. “You continue to be a killjoy,” she muttered, then stepped up next to him and put a calm hand on his shoulder, “You’re alone in this world now, Gabriel. You’ve seen your reflection. You’ve seen what you’ve become. If you truly intend on destroying this witch, do you think you can do it walking the earth as a man?”

The pumpkin head swiveled toward her, those glowing yellow eyes boring into her.

“What do you get out of this?” asked Gabriel.

“Same as always—-I don’t like competition,” she said, smiling, “And if there’s someone bearing the flame of creation walking the earth… well, I find that very interesting.”

“This isn’t a game, Moira,” Gabriel snarled.

“That’s what people say when they don’t know how to play,” said Moira with a smile, “I look forward to working with you again, Gabriel.” “Hmph,” Gabriel glanced off, “‘Working with me again.’ All you ever did was give me a rock.”

“And what a useful rock it was,” said Moira, “Now tell me, where is my adder stone now?”

———

On the ramparts of the city walls, Pharah tossed the rock with a hole in it up and down in her palm restlessly, looking out over the tops of the pines and having half a mind to see how far she could throw it. It didn’t feel exactly right to hang onto it, but somehow she felt like leaving it or throwing it away would be worse. Four days had passed since the Witch and her demon had made their escape and while the slightly burning sulfurous smell still hung in the air, most of the town was forced to return to its work. In spite of all the horror and reality seemingly uprooting itself in the span of the few days of the Witch’s capture and escape, there were still fields to till, still forge fires in the smithing district to keep, still guard rounds that needed posting, and a whole lot of rebuilding that had to be done. Several days of searching the surrounding areas of Adlersbrunn for the Witch Hunter had only yielded a bloody spot in a pumpkin patch. There was no body. Pharah wondered if seeing the body would improve the situation by at least giving the townspeople some closure over the Witch Hunter’s fate, or if it would stamp out whatever last few embers of hope remained.

Pharah had her hands full just keeping the townspeople calm—-nerves were frayed, an anger and a fear hung in the air. The sense of helplessness was collective and inescapable, and it stung her all the more deeply since she was guard captain—-it was her job to keep the city feeling safe, and she couldn’t do that. Half of her guardsmen were pushed far past the point of exhaustion with their numbers depleted by the attacks on the town, and her fatigue had ebbed only a little as time passed on from the whole incident. Lord Von Adlersbrunn was hardly being a help at all—-with the involvement of Junkenstein, a craftsman under his own commission, the people’s faith in Von Adlersbrunn’s judgment had all but dried up and he could hardly take counsel with his circle of the town’s nobles and clergy without everyone shouting over him. A great many people left the town, heading west for warmer weather and hopefully fewer witches and demons—away from the shadows of the Black Forest, but for many, there was no where else they could go.

“You are the guard captain, correct?” a weathered voice spoke and Pharah caught the adder stone and quickly pocketed it.

“Can I hel—-Your grace!” Pharah turned her head and then quickly bowed it as Bishop Petras walked toward her, “I—Yes. I am the Captain. I am at your disposal, your Grace—”

“You need not worry with such formalities,” said the Bishop.

Pharah cleared her throat and raised her head. “To what do I owe this audience?”

“I take it you already know of Sir Gabriel?” said the Bishop.

“I was the first one they reported to,” said Pharah, “I’ve sent out one last search party in case there was anything more, but with my guard stretched out as thin as it is…”

“Of course,” said the bishop, softly, “He spoke rather highly of you in his reports to me.”

“I abandoned him,” Pharah said, looking down, “I couldn’t—-“

“I know,” said the Bishop, “There was no abandonment—-you are a guard captain before you are a Witch Hunter. I understand that much.” He looked out over the surrounding farmland and forest past Adlersbrunn’s walls, “We set out to destroy evil and alleviate everyone’s fears, and yet we feel more helpless and surrounded by evil than ever thought possible.”

“So what do we do about it?” said Pharah.

“I’m afraid protocol demands that I go to the Vatican to report this incident and pray I don’t get laughed out as a madman and pray the people here won’t think God abandoned them in my absence,” said the Bishop, “As far as your path… this city will always have need of a guard captain, but I feel it is worth asking ourselves if we will ever truly feel safe knowing what’s out there now.”

“Your Grace?” Pharah said his title in question.

“There were very few people in Sir Gabriel’s line of work that I felt I could trust….I feel whatever path you choose, though, I can trust you. Take care, Guard Captain,” said the Bishop, walking off. Pharah watched the bishop disappear down the stairs to the city gate where a party of several guardsmen awaited him along with his own horse. Pharah watched as the Bishop and his contingent rode off away from the city, then pulled the Adder stone back out from the interior of her doublet.

“What’s out there…” she said quietly closing her fingers around the stone.

The prison cells within the castle were all but unguarded with how stretched thin the city guard was now. She grabbed a torch and walked by the one guard posted, heading down several stone steps into the dark. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find in here—all she knew was that in the span of 2 nights in this prison, the Witch had gone from paltry fireballs to massive columns of demon-summoning flame. Holding up her torch aloft, she looked into the now-empty Witch’s cell—-Small, depressing, with naught but a pile of hay for a bed and a bucket for a chamberpot. She looked down at the floor—there were a few drops of blood next to the iron bars of the cell, but nothing else. No sigils drawn out or anything. Pharah felt the weight of the adder stone in her pocket, then slowly pulled it out and held it to her eye and gasped softly. Through the little hole in the stone, all sorts of burning symbols and writing in a language Pharah could not understand glittered like embers on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cell. The script didn’t look like it was written out in a human hand, but rather it burned itself into being. Unthinkingly, Pharah pulled open the door to the cell and stepped in for a closer look. As she drew closer, she squinted at the script and wondered if her senses or her belief in the adder stone were betraying her, or if the cuneiform-like symbols on the wall really were reforming themselves into words. She brought the adder stone down from her eye, but the writing was still there. The Witch Hunter used the stone to train himself to see what others could not, Pharah thought to herself, Could I do the same?

Seek me if you have the sight, they read. Seek who? The Witch? The Witch seemed hardly eager to have anyone follow her out of Adlersbrunn, riding off on a dragon and everything. Pharah remembered a steady gaze of two amber-colored eyes with slitted pupils. Not the Witch. The Woman. The Dragon. Neither and both. Pharah’s head fogged briefly—-a mess of panic-distorted memories rushing around her yet coming to a head a the same time, but in all that mess the image of those eyes burned into her mind and kept her fixed in place. The rush of memories seemed to fade itself out to a thrumming, hissing whisper.

What’s out there? her own voice whispered in her head.

Seek me if you have the sight, the writing on the wall answered.

Pharah extended a hand toward the writings on the wall and felt a heat coming off of them, still the extension of her hand pressed steadily onward, she wasn’t sure if she would even notice if it burned her—-

“Y’know, you shouldn’t just go walking into cells,” a deep but warm voice spoke behind her and snapped her out of her haze.

“What—What?” her head jerked up and she turned on her heel to see a tall man with shoulder-length brown hair in a black hat, arms folded and leaning one shoulder against the cell bars.

“I said ‘You shouldn’t just go walking into cells’—‘specially with your guard spread thin as it is. Some miscreant could waltz in and then just up and shut the bars on you, then wouldn’t you feel a damn fool?”

“I—I’m guard captain. I’m investigating,” said Pharah, turning her attention back to the writing, but finding it wasn’t there anymore.

“So I heard—-the guard captain part, not the investigatin’ part,” said the man.

Pharah narrowed her eyes at the man. “Who are you?” she said, stepping out of the cell to look at him in the torchlight.

“You heard tell of the Witch Hunter’s apprentice, haven’t you?”

“Gabriel said he had an apprentice, yes,” said Pharah.

“…Just the apprentice part? No… ‘failed apprentice’ or ‘disgraced apprentice’ or ‘excommunicated apprentice?’”

“You’re excommunicated!?” Pharah took a step back, realized she was stepping back into the cell, then sidestepped and grabbed her torch from its sconce.

“Only officially,” said the man with a shrug, “In terms of purity of soul and intention, why, I would rank myself among the most—-“

Pharah held out the torch warningly to maintain a distance between the two of them.

“…pious,” the man finished, looking at the crackling torch.

“I think you should leave,” Pharah said, furrowing her brows.

“Look, I’m investigatin’, same as you,” said the man, “Let’s start over.” He extended a hand, “Name’s Jehoshaphat Maccrea of Helsing. Folk who find that a bit of a mouthful call me ‘Jesse.’”

Pharah remained holding the torch between them rather than extending her hand.

“I know what happened to Gabriel,” said Jesse.

Pharah looked down.

“Well, I mean I heard. Doesn’t seem like anyone can say for sure what happened to him, but we can all agree it was nothin’ pleasant. Now, we didn’t part on the best of terms, and I’ve been hunting a quarry of my own, but I owe it to him to see closure on all of this.”

Pharah broke her sight away from the cold stones of the floor to look at him.

“You’ve seen some shit too, huh?”

Pharah pursed her lips. “Depends. Would you call a terrible red demon ‘Some shit?’ Would you call a dragon woman in a column of fire ‘some shit?’ Would you call a horrible purple creature with--with---with a face that looks like a mass of slugs ‘some shit?’”

“I’d categorize it under a ‘helluva lot of shit,’ rather than ‘some shit,’” said Jesse, “It was a lot for me to take in at first, too. But you get better at it. And you---man, steady as a rock. Lot better than me when I was starting out, too--”

“Wait---Starting out---No. I’m not ‘starting out’ on anything---” Pharah started.

“I mean--you don’t have to,” said Jesse, “But I know there’s two kinds of people who come out of a mess like this: There are those that stick their heads in the sand and pray for their lives to go back to normal, and there are those who know it’s never going to be normal again, and choose not to be helpless.”

“I’m not choosing to be helpless, my city needs me!” snapped Pharah.

“...So you still feel helpless,” said Jesse.

“Just because I---!” Pharah started but then caught herself and fumed, “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

“Not suggesting, offering,” said Jesse, “I think you want to see whatever evil that attacked your town brought to justice. You want closure. You want to see your people safe. I think the best way you can do that is by coming with me and hunting these demons down.”

“So I should just drop everything and tag along with an excommunicated witch hunter,” said Pharah flatly.

“Just ‘hunter’ is fine. Turns out there’s a whole lot more scary things than witches in this world,” said Jesse.

Pharah maintained a steady glare.

“You want me to be more honest?” said Jesse.

“Usually the preference is that people be as honest as they can with each other,” said Pharah, frowning.

McCree snorted. “Trust me, Miss Guard Captain, people do not prefer that,” he said with a smirk before catching himself, “I mean--” he stopped and cleared his throat, “To be frank,” he said, pressing his hands together in front of himself, “I know if I go up against any of these things alone, I will die. If you go up against any of these things alone, you will die. You knew when to call it so that the whole town didn’t go down in flames. These things we’re going to fight? This isn’t a battle you rush into. You gotta play the long game and you gotta learn. I need someone who knows when to call it. All you need is someone to show you how to flick holy water, and you’re gonna get that down real quick from the looks of you.”

“You don’t want a student, you need a partner,” said Pharah, looking off.

Jesse made a finger gun at her in confirmation. “Or.. y’know you could organize guard timetables for the rest of your life and pray this magic shit does’t drop itself on your head again. Your choice,” he said with a shrug.

Pharah quietly set the torch back on its sconce.

“I’ll give you a night to think about it--I’m staying at the least-burned Inn in town and leaving at dawn. Meet me at the city gates if you’re in,” he said, turning on his heel and heading out of the castle prison.

Pharah frowned as he walked off, but she felt her fingers nervously running across the adder stone in her hand.

What’s out there? it seemed to ask in her mind, What’s out there?

---

For Mercy, seven days among the cultists passed in the blink of an eye. Rather, it was 2 days spent more or less sleeping the whole time, making up for the exhaustion of prison and near-execution and near-death and using far more magic than she had ever used in her entire life. After 2 days of sleeping, the third day was spent eating---The cultists’ food was salty, yet comforting, favoring snails and mushrooms. The fourth day was spent getting over the sickness of eating so much so fast on the third day, which proved a severe shock to her system. The fifth and six days were spent more or less getting acclimated to Zenyatta’s temple, which, she learned, was a fortress carved into the stone of a mountain with a hidden entrance. They had to earn their keep, to an extent. It turned out the stab-happiness of the cultist made her work as a healer invaluable. She was able to get clothes as well, purple robes, like the other cultists, which were surprisingly comfortable, and the temple to Zenyatta was a very safe fortress in and of itself---dark, certainly, but safe.

Genji had told her that the cultists were very dangerous and quote ‘stabby’ but Zenyatta had assured them all that the schism had finally ended, and furthermore the cultists all struck her as very polite. Certainly very.... fixated on Genji’s master, but perfectly polite. It was surreal for her, not having children throw rotten vegetables at her, not feeling a glare at the back of her head, having people make eye contact with her and speak with her eagerly and interestedly in her studies and observations, being able to read and practice her magic as if it were as perfectly normal as hanging laundry on a line. She was accepted as perfectly normal among the blood cultists, and made a point of enjoying herself so long as she had the chance to.

Still, Genji was... protective.

“You don’t have to be here, you know,” she said, as she stood waist-deep in the temple baths.

“You didn’t see these cultists before,” said Genji, sitting cross-legged with his back to her, “They’ll tear you apart as soon as look at you. Don’t have your firstborn with any of them, they’ll probably eat it.”

“Don’t have my what?” said Mercy running a sea-salt smelling soap bar along her skin and attempting to scrub the smoky smell from her skin.

“Your firstborn?” said Genji, “You know---our contract?”

“Ooohhh that firstborn. No, certainly not going to have it with any of them,” said Mercy.

“Good to know you have standards,” said Genji, folding his arms.

“Mm-hmm,” Mercy said mindlessly, dipping her head beneath the water and running her own fingernails along her scalp as the soap foamed off her skin and floated on the surface of the water.

“So you’re keeping watch?” she said, looking over her shoulder.

“Clearly,” said Genji.

“And it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m naked?”

“I’m a demon,” said Genji with an eye roll, “You could be naked every waking moment of every day and it would hardly make a difference to me.”

That earned him a splash of water at his back.

“Hey!” he turned around to snap at her, caught sight of her sweeping her wet hair off the back of her neck and then quickly turned around again, his face burning, “I mean I don’t see things through human eyes. Magic colors my vision. Shifts what I see---you remember what happened with that sigil back when the city guards were chasing you.”

“Ah, so what does the great demon Genji see when he looks at me?” said Mercy, wringing out her hair.

“A light---or maybe a flame?” Genji said, leaning back and relaxing a little where he sat, his back still to her, “Something like one of those...Flame, probably, but a little one... Small, yes, but bright and flickering and steady. At once illuminating and causing night-blindness with its own radiance.”

Mercy had stopped scrubbing this point and drew a string of wet hair back from her face, staring at Genji in silence.

“Also magnificent breasts. But that goes without---” that last comment earned Genji another, harder splash which left him completely drenched.

“All right. That, is a slight I cannot permit, Witch,” said Genji, getting to his feet and turning around.

Mercy splashed him again.

“Do you want to start this?” he said, taking off his mask and revealing his scarred face, “I told you, I was born---”

“’In storm and lightning and water,’” Mercy said, mocking his whispery gravitas, “Yes you like bragging about that very often.”

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up,” said Genji, putting his hands on his hips.

“So back it up, Genji, Demon of the North Wind,” said Mercy, flicking droplets of water against his face.

“You back it up, Witch Mercy, Bearer of the Flame of Creation,”

Mercy calmly took ahold of the front of his black tunic.

“...you wouldn’t,” said Genji.

“Witch,” said Mercy with a smirk, before yanking him into the bath with her.

#gency #Witch Mercy AU

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helbo32bond-blog · 6 years

Text

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"CYL" (cylindrical). The correction for an Astigmatism. "AXIS" The axis that the correction for the Astigmatism demands to be established at. Often an Include or Addition, often "+" benefit is included for us to decipher your reading through prescription, but only if you require eyeglasses for the two length and for reading. In some rarer cases Prism and Base is used for the correction of double eyesight. On our site and most of the other folks out there you can decide on your prescription from drop down packing containers so that you can merely copy the information you have on your prepared prescription. *Very Important - Do not slide for the most frequent error!* The one most widespread mistake when entering prescriptions on the web is choosing a " +"worth rather of a "-" worth or vice versa. Your prescription may consist of the two "+" AND "-" Values. For illustration:- SPH (Spherical) will consist of a + or - energy (except if .00) in .twenty five methods. EG, -.twenty five, -.50, -.seventy five, -one.00, -one.25 and so on.. CYL (cylindrical) might consist of a + or - power in .25 methods. EG, -.25, -.fifty, -.seventy five, -one.00, -1.twenty five and so on.. Axis will consist of a numerical value from to 180, BUT, only when you have a CYL benefit. Be aware: Generally opticians will publish the "-" and "+" indicators over the benefit. Include / Addition Will only consist of a + benefit as is it is what it suggests on the tin, an "addition". We incorporate this value to your length prescription if you require looking through glasses as well as distance or for bifocals. Note: Some opticians will create out your comprehensive close to prescription underneath your complete distance prescription. In this circumstance you will require to call us to notify you what the "add" is.

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gamearamamegathons · 6 years

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Dragon Warrior III: I Retroactively Get Credit For This Peace Also

Circe here! So, now we come to the end of Dragon Warrior III. All that's left to do is to storm Baramos's castle and beat the shit out of him. At this point, how much I retain from particular dungeons is starting to lessen as I just follow a guide instead of mapping them myself. But Baramos's castle is pretty much as you expect, a big mean dungeon with monsters who are obnoxiously strong. Naturally, I spent most of this dungeon just fleeing over and over again and hoping I make it to Baramos in roughly one piece. Baramos himself is this angry crocodile face guy, and he's pretty tough, but with sufficient levels, the standard boss fight approach works pretty well for this guy, bolstered by the fact that we now have an array of support spells like Barrier (magical protection), Increase (defense boost) and Bikill (attack boost). After a couple tries, he goes down, and I head back to Aliahan to celebrate that the world has been saved.

The end.

...

Okay, just kidding.

Actually, once we enter the throne room, a voice echoes in the room, telling us that he is the true archfiend Zoma, and he's going to take over the world anyway. The king laments that he doesn't know how to break the news to his subjects, so he orders us not to tell anyone. What a leader. I guess we're gonna have to figure this out by ourselves. But we've pretty much explored every corner of the world. What's left? Well, there's two important places we need to go. First is the Castle of the Dragon Queen, a location tucked in a little ring of mountains that can only be reached by phoenix. There, if we poke around a bit, we can meet the Dragon Queen herself, who gives us a Sphere of Light. Hmmm. Anyway, the second place is the Great Pit of Giaga, a location near Baramos's Castle that previously just had a big pit with a wall around it. Well, now the pit has cracked open and split the walls apart, so we can just hop in, something which is clearly a very good idea.

In the pit, we find ourselves in a new land, where we immediately find a boat. Traveling a bit east, we come across a familiar town...it's Tantagel! That's right. The world of darkness beneath the earth was Alefgard all along. Now, this is cool and all, but it might raise a more pragmatic question: where does this leave our EXP curve for this new leg of our adventure? Glad you asked! The answer is that we're fucked for the rest of the game, basically. We'll be able to level up and ease things a bit, but basically the overworld has endgame-tier monsters, the ocean has endgame-tier monsters, the dungeons have endgame-tier monsters, everywhere we go for the rest of the game we're not going to want to spend too long in combat because almost every encounter has the chance to inflict massive damage to the party.

But leaving that aside for now, what do we need to do next? Well, you may remember that in the original Dragon Warrior, we had to get together the items to acquire a rainbow drop, so we could summon the Rainbow Bridge leading to the Dragonlord's castle. Here, the quest is roughly the same. Unlike in Dragon Warrior II, Alefgard isn't just a cameo, we are in fact re-enacting the quest of the first game in compressed time. And as much as I'd love to recount every quest item in detail, the effect of compressing and simplifying the entire original Dragon Warrior quest is that it's all just kind of a mush of poking around Alefgard in my head. I will say, despite the overly strong monsters, it's decently fun to go around and see what Alefgard is like and accumulate quest items like magical barnacles. There are a lot of important differences, though. The landscape is very different. Hauksness, the ruined desert town, is prospering. Garinham is just a single house, and Garin is alive. A lot of little details suggest not-so-subtly that we might just be, in fact, in Alefgard's past rather than its future. And that might lead you to a suspicion of who our hero is supposed to be.

But let's not worry about that for now. Aside from poking around the towns and collecting quest items and trying not to die a lot from every single monster, the only noteworthy dungeon before Zoma's castle is a tower west of Kol. It's absolutely brutal too, full of ruinously powerful monsters who can take out one or two party members very rapidly. It does have a very important monster in it, though. This tower is one place among many in Alefgard where you can find Metal Babbles, which are stronger, meltier versions of Metal Slimes. These things are EXP pinatas just like Metal Slimes, but they actually give an order of magnitude more EXP, in the neighborhood of almost 15K. The catch is that they're very, very difficult to kill. One good way of killing them off is a hilarious wizard spell called BeDragon, which...does what it says on the tin, I guess. Your spellcaster becomes a dragon and starts breathing fire everywhere. This attack ignores all defenses, so it's a guaranteed kill for all Metal Babbles on the battlefield. That requires them to sit still for two entire turns though, which is...not terribly likely, unfortunately. Still, it's worth it, even if it does make the experience of grinding fantastically tedious. Grinding is unfortunately not optional, though, as you need to get to around level 40 at least, before you really have a chance of taking on Zoma. And I kinda suspect that I was underleveled even by the time I got sick of this process.

So, as before, we get together the Staff of Rain and the Stones of Sunlight, and we scrounge together a sacred amulet or something to satisfy the mean old guy, who is weirdly not that mean this time, and finally, if we do all that, he will give us a Rainbow Drop. This lets us access Zoma's castle. Once again, this is kind of a retread of the same kind of constantly-running-away experience that characterizes late game Dragon Warrior dungeons. Along the way, though, we actually encounter...plot! Remember our dad, Ortega? He fell into a volcano fighting a dragon? No? Well he's here. Turns out that he didn't die, he just fell into Alefgard, and now he's fighting a monstrous hydra! Ortega's doomed battle plays out in real time as a non-interactive fight, which I feel is a...questionable design choice, seeing as this battle goes on for quite a while. Unfortunately, he dies, which seems like...I dunno, kind of an unceramonious way for things to go after the game strings out the chance that he might've been alive all this time. With his dying breath, Ortega, not recognizing you, instructs you to tell his daughter what happened to him. And then he's gone, leaving me with the impression that...not...much has changed, actually. I mean, it's not like we were questing to find our dad. We just thought he was dead, and just kind of incidentally found out he wasn't, except now he really is, actually, dead. Shrug? Okay.

Further into Zoma's castle is an important item that actually changes a lot about how we can approach the dungeon. It's a Sage's Stone. This item, when used in battle, casts a free healing spell that recovers a lot of HP to the whole party, and it can be used repeatably. This single object instantly obsoletes a huge swath of our Pilgrim's spells, which is hilarious. It also means that, since it can only be used in battle, there's actually a good reason to stick around in battles, since recovering HP faster than we can take damage will leave us in a place to spend less MP than if we tried to run and came out of it all beat up. But it reveals another problem, which is that this approach to the dungeon slows things down quite a lot. It is, objectively, the better strategic choice, and in theory, it's closer to the intended way to play the game than to run away from every single battle no matter what. But it makes the game seriously drag, which I think is honestly kind of telling. It's also still possible for your characters to get wiped out even though we're healing back ~100 HP per character per turn, which I think is *also* telling. You wouldn't think the boss would be takeable in this state, but don't be so sure. After crawling our way through the dungeon, surviving with minimal MP use by constantly waving a rock around, we finally get to Zoma. He's kinda huge, like, he's actually four times bigger on the map than a regular character, and of course he has a big dramatic speech about taking over the world, pretty conventional evil overlord stuff. He throws three bosses at us before we even get to fight him, but that's not a big deal, because the Sage's Stone is seriously just that powerful.

Zoma himself is brutal. He has a wide array of heavily damaging spells, does a ton of physical damage, and takes two turns per round. My first attempt at killing him went miserably. But then I remembered something I totally forgot about: you're actually supposed to *use* the Sphere of Light on him. Doing this causes the screen to flash and turn Zoma rainbow colors...for a while...but after that, he turns blue, which of course is the universally understood color of weakness. He's a lot easier now, especially since we're able to build up a ton of buffs like before, letting us deal tons of damage while my Pilgrim keeps furiously waving that rock to keep everyone alive. Zoma does have the ability to dispel all buffs, which sucks, but with perseverence, we pull it off, and Zoma falls dead.

Zoma's castle dramatically crumbles apart, as they do. We escape through a...hole that spits us out the bottom of a different dungeon...okay, I guess? Then we leave and go back to Tantagel to celebrate. This time, really for real, the evil is defeated. The way back to the surface is sealed off, though, so it looks like we're going to be here forevermore. The king of Tantagel bestows us with a title, though -- he names us the Hero of Erdrick. Yes, that's right! Erdrick is a title, not a name, and it's the moniker our hero will be remembered by for generations into the future. So...that's the big twist! This is the story that precedes everything that happened in the first two games. Admittedly, I was kinda semi-aware of that from the start, because it's hard to browse a wiki without accidentally stumbling upon this sort of information. But it's kinda neat regardless, and it makes for a nice way to tie up the Erdrick Trilogy. Even though the storytelling of these games are very simple, I can appreciate that, within its own context, it's built up a little mythology that's meaningful within its world.

So how does Dragon Warrior III stack up? Well...as I've said, it's very similar to Dragon Warrior II. Admittedly, a lot of my experience was eased by the fact that I moved to digital mapping, which means that it wasn't quite so slow and laborious mapping out things as I went. But putting that aside and focusing just on the experience of the gameplay...well, it's pretty clear that the game repeats its predecessor just a bit too much. The moment of getting boat in Dragon Warrior II was huge, but it really only takes one repetition for it to feel formulaic. Dragon Warrior II is a game that's being pulled in two directions. It still has a lot of the puzzle box design of Dragon Warrior, but it's also just way too big and way too open. Much like the search for the five crests, the search for the six orbs is something of a midgame slump where the devs clearly want you to see this big wide open world they've created, but it's so huge and meandering that trying to find and navigate the threads of half a dozen different mini-quests is overwhelming.

As much as I got excited about the new class system at first, it runs counter to a lot of the game's design. The game is so demanding in terms of grinding that taking a huge risk like starting a brand new character, or starting a character over to move them to a new class, feels ridiculous. As much as the game might suggest that you want to change your party over time to adapt and grow, you don't *have* to, and the game never gave me a compelling reason to try. At the very least, it's good that it lays the groundwork for future class systems in later Dragon Quest games, but here, it feels almost superfluous. I had my four party members and that was it, pretty much.

That said, I think I was too hard on this game's combat when I described it early on. Over time, you get a pretty expansive range of combat options...or at least, enough to feel like a standard RPG. By the end, the combat didn't feel quite so one-dimensional, although that isn't to say it wasn't still pretty simple. This game's repertoire of spells is pretty expansive as well, with at least a vague gesture at an elemental system, an actual multi-target healing spell, solid and useful support buffs, and a couple actually usable oddball spells like BeDragon. As a system, what really holds it back more than anything is all the cruft it still has to clear away from the NES era of RPG design.

And that's it for Dragon Warrior III. I think I want to do a post after this, taking a moment to look back on the Erdrick Trilogy as a whole. After that, we'll be moving on to Dragon Quest IV, the final game on the NES. And boy, you'd better believe I'm not going to miss the NES era once we're good and properly out of here.

#circe #marathon #dragon warrior iii #dragon quest

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canadian-buckbeaver · 7 years

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Speech of a Demon - Ch. 2

Frisk has returned to Underswap and, though she has not yet caused the death of Berry, she seems to be setting something up for the monsters of Underswap, in particularly that for Berry. TRIGGER WARNING: Stretch implies that he rather Frisk die by their own hand and reset the timeline

Red felt is socket’s dim slightly. Frisk… A name that could bring either joy or hell to any monster. While Frisk was the friend of all monsters in both his universe and UnderTale, in Swap she was the demon, the destroyer…

The seventh soul that was destined to empty the Underground. The angel of death.

If she has appeared… his pupils instinctively glanced down at Stretch’s vertebrae and at his hands before breathing a small sigh of relief. No blue bandanna. So Blue, at least for the moment, was still alive. That was good news… for now.

Red grabbed hold of Stretch’s shoulders and shook him gently. “Ok. Snap out of it. Blue isn’t gone, and I’m not a fucking mind reader after all.” He gently wiped the tears from Stretch’s cheeks, repeating the motion that he had seen Stretch use many times with Blue. Some sort of brotherly thing he supposed. He had last done it to Boss as a baby bones. Just another difference between the worlds of Swap and Fell. “From the top and tell me everything… what happened?” he asked.

Stretch’s irises focused on him, registering him as if for the first time before they returned to that dull, almost lifeless look. They looked like dusty oranges, lifeless spheres. “Frisk…” he sighed. “It was a couple days ago. Frisk fell to the Underground. I was watching out for her or Chara as per normal, at my sentry station. When she walked out of the Ruins, there was the look and smell of dust covered them. Their clothes were completely grey… they killed Asgore and all the creatures in the ruins… again.” he sighed. It was so much unnecessary death. Where Chara was more than happy to make friends with almost every monster (she always had some difficulty with Captain Alphys), Frisk seemed to take delight in slaughtering them all. What would it take to sate the devil herself? Not even the total genocide of UnderSwap kept her happy for long.

Red could only nod encouragingly to him. If he spoke now, he might scare off any words that Stretch dared say. Better to keep quiet and listen first… But seeing the beginning of a true genocide run… no matter Stretch was behaving such a way.

“But this wasn’t like any of the other genocide runs. She killed Asgore, the countless monsters in the ruins, the dogs and all of the monsters that were beside Blue’s puzzles. But she became friends with Blue.” Stretch rubbed his cheek. “She cooked tacos with him, watched NTT, helped him with his word search… she was exactly like Chara of the pacifist route…”

“She’s trying to put his guard down. Probably has something ‘extra special’ planned, just for him.” Red immediately said, clenching his teeth. Blue held a special place in both he and his brother’s souls. Just the thought of a genocide run involving the sweet monster, it was almost enough for him to enter his own judge mode.

“That’s what I first thought too.” Stretch sighed. “I always watched them, somewhere not too far away from where I could teleport in at a moment’s notice. Yet, she did nothing. Nothing to Blue. If she was alone and ran into another monster she killed them.” He sighed. “This was against everything that I thought I knew about them. I’ve never known her to toy with her prey before.”

Red nodded, thinking to his own. No, his Chara had never done anything of the sort. She had come in, annihilated everyone, and then left and reset for the next round. “So then what happened?” he asked.

“They had just killed Alphys…. I… I couldn’t stop it in time. When I walked around the corner she was already melting. It was… it was horrid….” He shuddered. “I had seen her die before, this isn’t anything new to me but… they, the kid, had this sick, twisted face on them. Empty, bleeding eyes, and a dark jagged mouth. That’s perhaps when I realized just how sick, how twisted, how… deranged the child actually is. Who can get pleasure off of killing someone?” he asked out loud, his body shaking.

This perhaps wasn’t a good time to mention which universe he was in. Though Fells tended to kill to survive or for power, for fun was also an option.

“I… I lost it. I just can’t take it. The constant cycle of resets and death and Surface and…” he was hyperventilating again, probably thinking of a lost blue bandana. “I came up to them. They were kicking Alphys’ dust this way and that, probably trying to hide the evidence of their crime. They weren’t surprised to see me…”

He shuddered, watching Frisk kick Alphys’ dust around, spreading it so it could be carried by the wind easier. Already Alphys was being blown away, like she never existed. Like it didn’t matter, like she didn’t matter. How many times had he watched everyone die? How many times was he going to let this happen? He was supposed to be judge and guardian of UnderSwap, yet, here he was. Watching his friends be murdered and picked off. One by one. If anything, he was the true monster here. “FRISK.” He yelled, coming over to her. He no longer cared about the consequences or the quality of her little ‘game’. His friends… they deserved better than him.

To the demon’s credit, she didn’t even look fazed. Like she had known that he had been there the whole time, like she was expecting him. She looked up at them, those closed eyes seeming to see everything and all. He tried to hide a shiver. No matter how many times he had seen those cursed eyes, they always reminded him of a snake’s. “I’ve been expecting you to show up,” Frisk said, their eyes fading to dim. The demon’s characteristics were gone. All that was left was the faint remains of Chara…

Of human.

He decided to cut straight to the point. “How many times do you intend to toy with us?” he demanded.

Frisk blinked at him. “I’m sorry?” she asked him.

“You fucking heard me!” Stretch seized the front of her dust coated shirt and pulling her close to him, giving her a close up of his judgement eye. “Don’t play stupid or dumb. You know exactly what I said, and know exactly what I mean? What are we to you? I know that Chara is deep inside of you, so let me direct that question to her. She called us friends, called us family, yet she continues to reset and put us through the same torture that she has numerous times before? What do you, the both of you get out of it?”

Frisk trembled in his arms. “Papyrus….” she whispered to him in Chara’s voice. “Papyrus you’re scaring me… I’m sorry… for anything I may have done to anger you…”

“MAY HAVE DONE?” he shook her a little, the little body jerking under his motions. It reminded him of their bouts in the Judgement Hall. Her body slamming this way and that, being punctured by bones, her soul shattering time and time again. A savage glee ran through his body. The demon deserved to die, die painfully. For his friends and all the timelines before. They were never satisfied, were they? “You know exactly what you have done. Time and time again. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the games, I’m sick of the knives, and I’m sick of the nightmares. I don’t know who you think you are, and what gives you the right to dictate our future, to dictate who lives and dies. Who are you?” Stretch shook her again, snarling.

“Frisk… come on Papyrus… you know who I am…” the human whimpered slightly, hands coming up to grasp at his.

“I do. You’re nothing but a pathetic human, one who has to fulfil the empty void in your heart with death and destruction. Does that validate you? Make you feel important?” His voice took on an angry hiss. “How small and worthless does one need to be to have to play God to feel anything? Do you really think that you deserve this power? That you are something special because of it? Because of the relationship that you have with the other monsters? You are nothing. Not even your title means anything to you. It just went straight to your head, to overfill that obnoxious ego of yours. How PATHETIC. You are nothing here. NOTHING. You just happened to be the seventh human, with a soul intact, to make it to the Underground. Surprise, you have luck! Lucky number seven…” he spat out. All his pent-up anger, words he had been holding reset, after reset, they were rolling so easily off of his tongue now.

“How many times have you died trying to make your way through the Underground? Not even the monsters want you alive or here anymore. And you know what? I think that you should cut yourself some mercy. Take your knife and slit your-”

“PAPYRUS!” a familiar, high voice came behind him. The voice shook slightly, wavered a little bit as if disbelieving all the terrible things that were spewing from his mouth.

Stretch turned around. Blue…. hands clasped over his mouth, his eyes wide and the eye lights trembling slightly. His bones shook, from cold, dreaded fear… of his beloved brother.

He had heard the entire thing… of what Frisk wanted him to hear.

#honeymustard #frans #underfell #underswap #us!papyrus #uf!sans #us!sans #uf!papyrus #fontcest #underswap papyrus #underfell sans #underswap sans #underfell papyrus #frisk (undertale)#threats of violence #monster dust #character death #mentions of suicide #us!alphys

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monstersdownthepath · 7 years

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End-Bringer Finale: Pandorym, the God-Slayer

CR 25

Lawful Evil Huge Outsider

Elder Evils, pg. 83~84

Malefic Properties: Anathematic Secrecy, Divine Enervation. 1,000 miles.

Sinister Signs: Seal of Binding. The gods, sensing Pandorym’s imminent repair, begin preparing by effectively closing the borders to the Prime Material Plane. A faint, magical sigil can be seen in the night sky, easily mistakable for a constellation or nebula at first, and its presence causes... problems. Conjuration spells that teleport, summon, or call other beings, as well as Divination magic, become impeded; there is a flat 20% chance of any spell being cast to simply fizzle out uselessly. In addition, any magical attempts to banish an extraplanar creature to its home plane (such as Banishment or Dismissal) fail entirely.

As their fears become more and more realized, the gods take more steps to impede Pandorym’s march, sealing doorway after doorway leading into and out of the Material Plane as the seal in the sky goes from ‘subtle’ to ‘neon sign saying Something Is Wrong.’ As the seal grows stronger, summoned creatures and items no longer return from whence they came when the binding spell wears out, rather, they become free-willed. The connections to the Positive and Negative Energy Planes become strained, and deities become less and less willing to speak with their mortal believers, the channels between them much stricter and preventing them from sending too much power, imposing increasingly hefty restrictions on what divine casters can and can’t do. Their caster level lowers by 1, then by 2, and then 4, and it becomes more and more difficult to Turn, Rebuke, or Command undead (up to a full -10 penalty).

Teleportation becomes dangerous to perform, carrying a high chance of a mishap occurring and damaging the teleported object or person... And then, finally, when Pandorym’s prison is breached, the gods condemn their subjects by completely preventing Conjuration effects, any Divination, and any form of teleportation or extraplanar travel. Divine casters have a 20% chance per spell slot to simply fail to recover the spell each time they rest, their gods hesitant to leave any connection that Pandorym could use open, even for their most faithful.

Everything they do to seal their doom away is for naught. Nothing can stop Pandorym when it finally rises.

The fools who first summoned it got lucky, catching it unaware while it was curious, a mistake it will not make again. Pandorym was summoned by a cabal of casters who sought ever greater power over the universe; a creature from beyond the Great Wheel, far removed from the chaos of the Far Realms, Pandorym was a creature of law and rules. It agreed to a bargain with these strange creatures that summoned it, only for them to cleave its body from its mind and trap the two halves.

The cabal had no intention of actually wielding Pandorym, as they had claimed, but rather used the being’s immense might as something of a deterrent against the gods who would otherwise have stood against them. A gun leveled at the gods to keep them from meddling with the casters even as the cabal tinkered with the forces of the multiverse. Unfortunately, they made the idiotic mistake of having no way to release Pandorym quickly enough to mount a resistance if the gods did lash out against them, and thus their entire cabal was eradicated, their deeds and names blotted from history.

... Unfortunately, they DID strike a bargain with the God-Slayer, and Pandorym was a being of Law. Despite their betrayal, it is driven to complete its mission, and this drive causes its mind to thunder outwards from its prison every second of every hour of every day, waiting for the second a vulnerable mind presents itself before latching on. While most minds simply snap under the strain of trying to contain Pandorym’s will, over time, it has manages to piece together something truly terrifying: a case debating the legality of its own imprisonment, which the mechanical, Law-aligned Inevitables have reviewed. The sample adventure presented follows the party’s repeated clashes against Obligatum VII, a powerful (CR 20) Inevitable who has been tasked with tracking down Pandorym and releasing it from its “unlawful imprisonment.”

And it’s quite the prison, let me tell you! The massive, hidden complex has choice bits from the Tomb of Horrors contained inside, complete with a curse that causes anyone who dies inside to rise in service of the dungeon, defending it from further intruders. Instead of going over all the dungeon’s features, though, we’ll go over the important bit: Pandorym’s crystal holding cell. A 15 foot tall, 8 foot wide crystal with 300 HP, 30 hardness, Spell Resistance 40, with immunity to cold, fire, acid, and electricity damage... And it’s made of the first six layers of a Prismatic Wall, damaging or displacing everything making contact with it.

Dealing at least 100 points of damage to the prison creates a nasty crack, through which a piece of Pandorym’s mind can leak through. This tiny Shard is the equivalent of a finger or toe, and is a CR 25 horror with all the terrifying power of a 20th level Telepath.

I cannot even begin to pretend I know everything about D&D’s psionics system, but a lot of these I recognize from their trip over to Pathfinder, or at least know by heart. Reality Revision is the Psion equivalent of Wish or Miracle, while Urge Extermination is akin to Power Word Kill, but Pandorym can throw 25 extra power points into it to affect any creature with up to 340 hit points, instantly slaying it without offering a saving throw. With its Twin Powers feat, it can manifest two powers a round by expending its psionic focus, which it can regain up to three times per day as a single swift action rather than leaving itself open as it concentrates (not that it can really fail a Concentration check on anything but a 1 anyway, considering its +58 bonus).

“Why would it use so much PP in one attack?” It wouldn’t need to. But it could, because it’s got a few ways to get them back. Psionic Draw allows it to passively leech PP from other psions attempting to manifest their powers, forcing them to spend double the PP to use any of their powers and soaking up the excess. Every 1d4 rounds as a swift action, it can also use Vampiric Ego Whip, dealing 1d4 Charisma damage to a target while regaining 2 PP per damage dealt. It’s not much at a time, but while it’s waiting for its reserves to recharge, Pandorym has a few more tricks to buy it time.

One of its most dangerous abilities is Divinity Siphon, an ability the Shard can affix to any creature capable of using Divine magic (whether through caster levels or spell-like abilities) as a standard action. Anyone slimed by this has a painful connection opened up between themselves and Pandorym, gaining 1d4 negative levels each round and restoring 20 HP to the Shard per level drained. It automatically establishes if the target fails the initial saving throw and offers no way to break the bond once it’s made, essentially making it a death sentence without some way to cancel out the negative levels. While the Shard can only maintain a single Siphon at a time, it requires no effort to keep the bond going, and thus it can focus on other matters as its Siphon goes to work.

All this combat ability is rendered moot, though, if the party doesn’t have blanket immunity to mind-affecting effects. A Mind Shard of Pandorym is surrounded by a 30-foot Mental Subjugation aura, and everyone that begins their turn inside the aura must make a DC 48 Will save every single round or become permanently Dominated by Pandorym. There’s no “if you succeed, you’re immune for 24 hours” clause, and even if you do make the throw, you still take 1 point of Wisdom damage. While being in melee range of, say, the Hulks of Zoretha or the Aspect of Atropus is deadly, being in melee range of the Mind Shard is even worse than death.

And remember that this is a mere piece of Pandorym. Killing the Shard restores 30 HP to the crystal prison, but so long as it still has 100 or more damage on it--which it might, given that Obligatum VII will relentlessly hack at it unless stopped--another one will come out 1d4 rounds later, with full PP and all of its per-day abilities refreshed. And if Pandorym is sealed away and Obligatum VII destroyed? In 2d4 months, Obligatum VIII will be churned out in the forges of Mechanus to begin the whole process all over again, being presented at another possible questline not fully detailed in the book.

By the by, the crystal contains Pandorym’s mind, so you may be wondering where its body is. That’s sealed in a pocket dimension rendered almost completely inaccessible, though this is no impediment for the God-Slayer itself. The body possesses only minor statistics, detailing how to contain it if it breaks out, but it cannot be harmed... Because it’s a 30-foot-wide Sphere of Annihilation. And the normal methods of destroying a Sphere do not work on the body, serving as little more than a roadbump as it inexorably moves towards the mind if it’s freed. It can be distracted and even lured back into its prison, but such an action will cause the irreversible death of the one doing the luring, even their soul being utterly destroyed when they finally make contact with the hole in reality.

The body relentlessly moves towards the mind, and vice versa. In either case, it’s possible for the gods to be convinced to stop the convergence from happening (though it’s hard to get a message through the Seal of Binding). But if they don’t, the book rather chillingly explains that “a reunited Pandorym should lead to the end of the campaign world.”

Doomsday Scale: 1/10. The sheer irony is that Pandorym’s immense danger means that its sign is the most blatant, obvious, and harmless. It only truly inconveniences Conjurers and, while divine casters are also hampered, there’s still six other schools of magic that work more or less perfectly. If anything else, the widespread public panic at the seal suddenly appearing in the sky is more dangerous than the seal itself, and the panic that would occur if the truth got out about why the seal is there would be even worse.

The fact that the binding seal is the most blatantly obvious Sign Of The End while also being the most (relatively) harmless is hysterical to me, though if either half of Pandorym is freed, the scale moves up to 5/10, and then to 10/10 if both halves get free. If they’re reunited? That’s it. Pandorym first wastes time by killing everyone descended from the cabal that initially summoned, tricked, and trapped it, and then easily removes the Seal of Binding as if it wasn’t even there and begins ripping apart every god, in every plane.

#End of the World Week #Monster Spotlight #CR 21 to 25 #dungeons and dragons #Pathfinder

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